As I have pointed out humans’ achievements have depended more on sociality than intelligence. Social interactions have mostly been and still are mediated through love, joy, pleasure, respect, empathy, hope, serenity, gratitude, pride, envy, jealousy, fear, greed, hurt, anger or loathing. We are deeply emotional beings. Rationality has never been our strong suit. The advertising industry knows this. Although some philosophers have argued that emotions are in fact rational ways of dealing with the perceived reality of the subjective world. Meanwhile, evolutionary psychologists assert their role in solving specific adaptive problems. The latter approach is easy to understand – fear makes you fight or flee and disgust prevents you from eating rotten food. In affairs of the heart, I quite like the convoluted justification of jealousy as being a truthful demonstration of relational commitment.[6] The former approach is less easily summarised.
Feelings can easily get hurt. In small groups when interpersonal issues fester and rankle for too long, irritation can become a flying object which, if reciprocated, turns into mutual violence. According to the recalibration theory, “…anger is triggered when we detect evidence that another individual is placing insufficient value on my welfare.”[7] Why would there be any need, given that hunter gatherers had already evolved the full suite of emotions we have today, to differentiate between 30,000 years ago and today with regard to our propensity to anger. When powerful individuals in larger groups say, the early Akkadian cities, experienced similar feelings towards a neighbouring city then the escalation to violence is going to be far more consequential than animus between a couple of neighbouring bands in the Neolithic.
The first city state of Uruk expanded passively until sometime after 3500 BCE when it violently invaded Tell Harmoukar. This was the earliest noted occurrence of organised warfare. Ever since then just about everyone everywhere has lived under the control of an empire or within the penumbra of one. Whether an empire is expanding or contracting, a major component of either process was and remains violence or the threat of violence. So how did humans who were good at adapting to changing climates, expressing awe and wander at the cosmos, protecting and nurturing our families, and who produced the most poignant, intimate and erotic sculpture of all time– the Ain Sakhri Lovers–[8] become capable of such horrendous cruelty?
To answer this question, I will explore the pacific and bellicose heritage of hunter-gatherer societies. Then I will outline changing material conditions and our responses to them. I will also show how those responses contributed to phenotypes in the brain which amplified nasty traits. To address this neurological process, I will focus on the period which sees the transition from sedentism to the first cities. Once it becomes possible to identify rulers–Enmerkar in 3400 BCE Late Uruk– the first fully fledged militarized agrarian kingdoms have been established. Thus, the reasons for social stratification and the consequent disregard for the other are easy to identify. This is why I want to focus on that slow incremental shift away from egalitarianism during the pre-Pottery Neolithic to try to understand how this shift prepared us for the acceptance of the suffering of socially distant others. The strands of that process I will concentrate on include nature and belief, gender and specialization.
Did our circle of empathy close down post agriculture or were we always only concerned with the welfare of our immediate family? The answer to the first question would appear to be yes but, given the evidence for cooperation in trans egalitarian hunter gatherer bands, the answer to the second would be no.
There appears to be enough evidence of cranial trauma and other signs of a violent end in human skeletons predating settled agriculture, to surmise that aggressive behaviour has always been a part of the human repertoire. As G&W point out archaeological sites in Northern Russia reveal burials with masses of jewellery and royal regalia dating to 34-26 KYA (1000 years ago) which indicate persons of high status, specialist craftspeople and extensive trade. Also, the monumental mammoth bone structures around Krakow and Kiev from 25-12 KYA would have required the coordination of a sizable workforce. However, the sporadic occurrence in time and location of these sites indicates those hunter-gatherer societies were not proto top-down hierarchical city states. What G&W are keen to point out is that there never was anything ‘primitive’ about how hunter-gatherers choose to organise politically.
If contemporary Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies can legitimately reflect their forebears from prehistory it seems aggressive behaviour would have been the exception rather than the rule. The whole tribe accepted the role of women in lowering the level of aggression displayed my males. For example, according to a British anthropologist, Chris Knight,[9] women of the Mbendjele (pronounced benjelly)[10] in Central Africa use derisive laughter as a deliberate strategy to bring badly behaved males into line.
A research psychologist specialising in the role of play in education, Peter Gray, details how play is the underlying philosophy guiding every aspect of hunter-gatherer society.[11] Cultural insights were gained from anthropologists who lived amongst various hunter-gatherer bands and directly observed the practices they wrote about. While there were some minor differences due to differing physical environments the essence of their ethos was remarkably similar given the variety of locales. From the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert in parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, the Hazda of the Tanzanian rainforest to the Nayaka in Southern India, the Arché in East Paraguay and the Yiwara of the Gibson Desert in Western Australia, the emphasis on social play as societal governance was observed.
Gray’s paper is structured around his 5 defining characteristics of play, being: participation is voluntary; participants exercise autonomy; equality between players; consensual decision making and sharing. I’m sure hunter-gatherers never sat down and agreed to a ludic system of governance. Along with most other cultural behaviours it evolved because it worked well. It just so happens that their system is best understood through our contemporary criteria for games. No matter what aspect of play, as defined by Gray, is examined with regard to hunter-gatherer societies, each one results in a non-competitive, non-aggressive egalitarian society whose primary collective goal is sharing. Illustrative of how they achieve such enviable cooperation is their approach to work and education. If you didn’t feel like hunting or foraging after a heavy night on the mushrooms you didn’t have to call in sick. Therefore, your freedom of choice gave you individual autonomy which led to connections to others rather than dependencies. ‘Work’ which has been estimated to occupy only 20 hours per week was voluntary thus meeting the first criteria for play.
Children’s ‘education’ grew organically out of their social environment. First, due to the necessity of women spacing out the number of children they had, toddlers mixed with early teenagers and all ages in between. This meant that the games they played which were based on observing what adults did in the camp, were non-competitive so that cooperation was built in to this natural heutagogy. (Contemporary term for self-directed learning.) Parents never monitored a child’s skills acquisition or even worried about what they did all day totally unsupervised. Parents trust that when the child is confident in their own competence at whatever game they play, the child will decide when they are ready to participate in actual foraging or hunting.
Here’s one last tactic that shows how social levelling was achieved– it’s called ‘insulting the meat.’ If a hunter returns and proudly off loads a freshly slaughtered large animal the assembled company will joke about how worthless his catch was. Humility was highly valued – not flaunting your hunting prowess. So, they deliberately took him down a peg but in a joking way with indirect criticism so when the returned hunter joins in the fun no feelings are hurt. Harmony and a level playing field restored. The ‘tall poppy’ syndrome in Australia could well have been influenced by Aboriginal culture.
To conclude, Gray points out that hunter-gatherers were aware that their precious egalitarian, non-competitive, non-autocratic, non-hierarchical society had to be consciously protected. Just because the myriad subtle strands of play woven into the social governance structure evolved does not mean their choices about applying rules of social interaction were not deliberate. Play structured their society because it was based on sensitivity to the other. G&W add another dimension to “…that zone of ritual play…” which they conclude “…acted as a site of social experimentation.”[12]
It doesn’t matter how egalitarian and cooperative hunter-gatherer societies were, they did resort to violence when rapid climate change effected their food supplies. A 2021 paper entitled New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene based on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba, claims to show a reassessment of the archaeological data revealing evidence for “…supporting sporadic and recurrent episodes of inter-personal violence, probably triggered by major climatic and environmental changes.”[13] Evidence for this particular climate event whose date coincides with the traumatised skeletons at Jebel Sahaba, was found by analysing lower slopes of the Nile deposits between Shuwikhat and Sheik Hussein.[14] The author claims “ the Wild Nile floods…were the most important catastrophic event in the late Pleistocene history of the Nile.”[15] Although there appears to be evidence for inter band violence resulting from extreme competition for resources that is not the same as a toleration of, and indifference to the suffering of others which emerges 7 or 8 thousand years later.
It’s hard to imagine the women in hunter-gatherer societies allowing indifference to suffering to emerge. So, the question becomes, was that play aspect of society along with the ethos of egalitarianism and the necessity of being generalists lost to the emergence of hierarchy, specialisation, competition and dominance? And did tolerance to suffering emerge out of the post farming package? Clearly the answer to both questions is yes. Before we try to contextualise that transition to the absence of empathy, I will briefly traverse the infanticide controversy during the Pleistocene.
Sadly, Peter Gray’s account of hunter-gatherer society based around the rubric of play may not have been the full story. I don’t really want to revisit aspects of ‘domestication syndrome’ in hominid evolution but if we’re to examine infanticide during the Pleistocene then it seems we must. A bunch of research tells us band members conspired to kill the offspring of aggressive dominant males when humans had sufficient rudimentary language to cooperate and commit such infanticide early in the Pleistocene.[16] To put it in anthropological language, “…late human evolution was dominated by selection for intragroup pro-sociality over aggression.”[17] Thus, in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene band elders practised an early form of eugenics. This presupposes late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers understood “…the epistemic regulation of four genes… (including for aggression)”[18] which is a bit of a stretch. Besides, some aggression was needed to defend territory and offspring in times of resource scarcity occasionally over the entirety of human evolution. Just as neurological evolution created pleasure centres for sex so it did for aggression.[19] Violence triggers dopamine which is a chemical of pleasure in the brain. So, you can feel less guilty unless you’re a Protestant, for enjoying Vikings on Netflix.
There are a couple of other arguments for hunter-gatherers to necessitate infanticide. The chief one being the need to control population size. According to Kimbrough and Meyers the major methods of birth control “would have been (my emphasis) culturally demanded abstinence, disruption of the menstrual cycle through extended years of breastfeeding, unsafe abortion, direct and indirect infanticide and direct indirect and child homicide.” I would agree only that the second “method” occurred but not as deliberate population control. The other argument is even flakier that foraging women couldn’t carry offspring while they were foraging.
To refute the need for demographic control argument one need, look no further than estimations of human population size during the Pleistocene. Mind you, finding agreement between archaeology, genetics and molecular biology and palaeodemography based on climate and ecosystems is not easy. I was keen to have new genetic ways of calculating ancient population numbers explained. The introduction by John Hawks et al flagged a genetically rigorous read. Before getting to grips with variation in mtDNA, Y Chromosomes, -globin, HLA Alleles, microsatellites, single-nucleotide polymorphisms and human-specific Alu insertions you have to accept the idea that “population geneticists replace census population with a surrogate they can calculate called ‘effective population size’ or Ne”.[20] This represents the number of fit reproducing males and females. This number is usually less than the straight census number. However, as stated by Hawks et al “In practice the long-term average Ne for human species, even if it could be validly determined, cannot be taken as an estimate of actual past population sizes.”
Far be it from me to critique the efficacy of mapping genetic variation onto palaeodemography but suffice to say the conclusions of J. Hawks et al were “…unable to detect population expansion via allele size variance during Pleistocene.” Doubt about the accuracy of palaeolithic population size estimates based on mtDNA mutation rates was also expressed by Harpending et al.[21]
A method that overcomes the sparse archaeological record and the complexity of the genetic evidence are estimates based on population dynamics and climate envelopes. Essentially, how humans thrived, survived or not according to the effects of climate on fauna and flora. It seems obvious that dwindling prey numbers due to climate cooling will result in famines.
As usual, maths is the crucial method used to interpret statistics. For example, “The mean temperature of the coldest month…over Europe …during the period 30–13 KYA ago…was computed as:
TC(x,y,t)=TA(x,y,t)+[TCp(x,y)−TAp(x,y)]×[1−∣∣TEAp−TEA(t)∣∣TEAp−TEAL]+[TCL(x,y)−TAL(x,y)]×[∣∣TEAp−TEA(t)∣∣TEAp−TEAL]!”[22]
(The exclamation is mine.) Using this and many other simulated variables, Miikka Tallavaara and four other Finns from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, estimated a population decline in Europe from 330,000 – 30,000BP (Before present) to 130,000 – 23,000 BP. These figures are much higher than some of the genetic estimates which claim population crashes down to 8,000, 200,000 BP. Essentially, pre-farming, populations in Europe remained at low densities so that infanticide for birth control was not necessary. Even without all this esoteric data a paper from nearly 50 years ago argued persuasively that despite gradual population expansion during the Pleistocene the size of each hunter-gatherer group “…would be reduced sharply by some external factor…”[23] In addition to famines caused by rapid cooling mentioned earlier, high infant mortality rates would have been enough to obviate the need for infanticide.
Finally, to deal with women being unable to carry offspring while foraging, Denham cites a detailed study of the Alyawarra tribe of Central Australia. Counting all the available women for child carrying “…it was calculated that there was a mean of 1.7 carriers per infant.”[24]
To conclude, infanticide may have been practised in early Pleistocene to limit progeny of aggressive males but there was certainly no need of it because of population pressures in the later palaeolithic. A survey of the history of child abuse stated that Pleistocene infanticide occurred but was “atypical”.[25] So, we’ll have to investigate other instances of how indifference to the suffering of others manifested itself during our hunter-gatherer days.
In pre-farming evolutionary behaviours there appears to have been a symbiosis between cooperation and hostility. The former necessitating a bit of the latter. Evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, deductive reasoning and comparisons with our primate cousins can be marshalled to emphasise our cooperative tendencies or ‘our’ (mostly male) violent behaviours. A well respected professor of neurobiology and behaviour, Christopher Boehm, was keen to bolster his argument that blood revenge and feuding between different tribes based on ethnocentrism was universal by presenting many instances of observed violence spread across 200 hunter-gatherer societies.[26] To illustrate his view that from the earliest hominin 6 million years ago we have been “prone to violence” he showed an image of a spear that dated back to 300,000 BP which was long and well balanced so could be used to attack at a distance a human foe or prey. He backed up his assertion that inter human conflict existed by showing cave drawings of fighting scenes and a human on the ground with multiple arrows sticking out of it. This latter image might relate to a group sanctioned execution of a perpetrator whose behaviour was not ameliorated by “coercion, mockery or persuasion”.[27] So paradoxically this last instance of violence could actually be the result of hunter-gatherer society’s intolerance of violent alpha-male behaviour.
Richard Wrangham, on the other hand, is more interested in how humans compare favourably with other primates as far as displays of aggression are concerned. While we share deep evolutionary roots of tribalism with chimpanzees and monkeys, we differ radically in the amount we fight– at a rate 1/1000th of chimpanzees. It is this lack of aggression added to the absence of physically fighting to achieve alpha status and social conformism which contributed to our intense cooperation within groups. [28] However, an aspect of the human tendency to conformism often results in polarized viewpoints such that unnecessary tribal identities can exacerbate the desire to demonise the ‘other’. A human trait easily recognised today.
Wrangham differentiates between reactive and proactive aggression. The former, being emotionally driven of the moment, has been bred out of us for 300,000 years evidenced by physical changes such as reduced brow ridge, shorter face and smaller teeth.[29] The latter relates to a culturally evolved behaviour which he labels ‘selective coalitionary proactive aggression’. Here, as implied, the group gets together to decide to administer lethal punishment. For hunter-gatherers this final sanction was only executed after cajoling, ostracism, ridicule and separation had not worked.[30]
Before leaving my enquiry into our hunter-gatherer legacy I would like to leave the last word to Robert Kelly, professor of Anthropology at Wyoming university, speaking at the Centre for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny Public Symposium in 2014. He bravely downplayed the efficacy of what hunter-gatherers from 30,000 years ago could tell us about the title of the symposium– Violence in Evolution– by advising his listeners not to worry about ‘human nature’ but instead focus on material conditions that contribute to violence. He noted imbalances in wealth and power, isolation and client-patron relationships far more worthy of examination for seeking causes of violence.[31] I agree.
Now, to return to my attempt to contextualise the transition to the absence of empathy, a look at the shifting material conditions might help.
Material conditions certainly got more complicated post sedentism and then farming. As populations and socio-political complexity increase, social distance between people also increases. That distance allows more indifference to the plight of others. Then, when differences are exaggerated by powerful elites for political purposes, the hapless masses, especially before education, could be manipulated into hatred of the other. As true as that might be it doesn’t seem logical for a mere 7000 or so years to expunge 300,000 years of cultural evolution where egalitarianism prevailed. Though G&W assert that some hunter-gatherer societies in the North West of America were based on slave owning aristocracies. Thus, my inference that pre settled agricultural societies were less ‘socio-politically complex’ is incorrect.
Throughout history, so Wikipedia tells us, oppressed classes have, despite a lack of access to knowledge, understood the nature of their oppression and rebelled– roughly 908 times since 2730 BCE. “I’m Spartacus!” Although, as the late David Graeber pointed out in his book on debt, there were hardly any instances of rebellion against the institution of slavery.[32] The idea of egalitarianism did not just manifest through rebellion, early Sumerian culture found a way to make sense of elemental mayhem by inventing gods that “…conferred equality and confirmed equality among equals.”[33] At least that was the effect of one particular goddess. Although the naming and allocating powers to the gods must have been an elite process. Veneration of the gods and their behaviour led to assemblies where discussion was had and decisions made. 2000 years later that idea morphed into a ‘people who rule’ or ‘democracy.’
Thank goodness something remained of our collective egalitarian impulse. It’s only been 9000 years since humans first used ideographic symbols to help organise the administration of the world’s first city– Catalhoyuk –so we haven’t had much practice at civilisation. A concept famously derided by Gandhi who said it “would be a good idea” in answer to a question about Western civilisation. Our brains and physiology reflected 300,000 years of cooperative, non-hierarchical hunter-gatherer societies. Unfortunately, as a paper by Paul Gilbert shows, it didn’t take long for our brains to reflect an entirely different orientation to the use and distribution of resources. His 95-page document with roughly 300 references in Frontiers in Psychology provides valuable insights into connections between behaviour and brain chemistry. His analysis is built from the notion that the hunter-gatherer mentality of ‘care and share’ became superseded by ‘control and hold’ post farming.[34]
From early upright hominid onwards nurturing our children with care and compassion was evolutionary necessary for the propagation of our species. This behaviour had epigenetic– non-genetic influences on gene expression– effects. These effects manifested physiologically in “…the autonomic nervous system, the immune and cardiovascular system, and the neurophysiological or brain circuits that play fundamental roles in self-identity, self-experience, emotion regulation and (importantly, for my thesis) pro-social or anti-social behaviour.”[35]
To complete the relationship between the social and physical environment and the brain’s maturation we need to understand what a phenotype is. A decent dictionary states it is “…the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment.” (Presumably the socio-cultural environment as well) Thus, watching a baby sibling being held gently and soothed to ease its discomfort will, over time increase oxytocin and vasopressin in the brain of the child which plays a crucial role in the formation of caring phenotypes. So far so good regarding our biological disposition to give and receive care. Unfortunately, those same hormones can also “…make mothers aggressive to potential threats to their offspring and can power outgroup (defensive) aggression too.”[36] Caring for non-kin has less phenotypic origins. This flipside to the hormonal benefit of oxytocin might help explain how we developed phenotypes that made us more “… vengeful to those who have harmed our group and group vengeance is responsible for considerable violence.” Opportunities for the development of cruel and callous phenotypes were dramatically boosted with the enclosure of, and competition for, resources.
To summarise, epigenetic changes resulting from “…the re-emergence of aggressive dominant male hierarchies…” in ancient civilisations “…can be inherited and passed [down] the generations.”[37] To put it another way, human populations have become infected by phenotypes associated with a social ecology that encouraged cruel behaviour so that gentler people were slaughtered by invading armies. In addition to the immediate misfortune of being cut down in your prime, you would, if you survived, become a slave. The important neurological point here is that poverty and neglect resulting from slavery alter brain chemistry negatively which enters the genome and gets passed down. However, it’s encouraging to note that those epigenetic changes can be reversed. That could be a subject for another chapter on how to reassert caring and sharing without foregoing technological advances. That sounds suspiciously like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it utopia.
According to Gilbert the phenotypes of ancient civilisations, shaped by a ‘control and hold’ mentality, were different to those of today. But why were the phenotypes different given underlying societal mentality hasn’t changed? The features of ‘control and hold’ include: humans become resources; the drive to produce and acquire more; aggressive behaviour equated with success; and slavery, have not changed fundamentally in 5500 years. Well, perhaps the extent of suffering, wholesale slaughter of enemies and indifference to the plight of distant others has declined over 4000 years but I’d say ownership and hierarchy still shape today’s phenotypes. It’s just that the elites of today have more sophisticated means to deploy the same ancient Roman policy of ‘bread and circuses’ to deflect attention away from inequality. Besides, when you Google the question ‘When was the longest period of peace in history?’ Pax Romana comes up in many different results.
What I would like to investigate is not violence and its consequences per se but how our tolerance or acceptance of violence to others be they criminals, heretics, ‘witches’, slaves, children or any other powerless persons, evolved. Apart from children, all those categories of powerless persons did not exist in hunter-gatherer societies, they gradually appeared in response to changing material and sociological conditions.
For that reason, I want to piece together significant milestones in human behaviour from Natufians’ first permanent dwellings and crop cultivation around 10,800 BCE to the first recorded instance of organised warfare in 3500 BCE. I will attempt to detail some of the complexity that led to state formation in order to understand how that process contributed to the social distance between people. More specifically, the components of that complexity I want to focus on include nature and the evolution of beliefs about it; changing gender roles and specialization. It was the incremental progression of that complexity that hid from our consciousness the creation of subordinates and our unempathetic treatment of them. Needless to say, G&W have plenty to say about the unidirectional assumption implicit in the word ‘progression’. They offer several examples of societies rejecting top-down elite governance. For example, the very stratified city of Taosi in Jinnan Basin abandoned all divisions based on class from 2300-1800 BC. Traditional archaeologists call the period ‘anarchy and collapse’; G&W call it “…an age of widespread prosperity…” Similarly in the other side of the world in Mexico the social housing project of the Teothuacan from 200 CE rejected “…human sacrifice and aggrandizement…” Instead “…they embarked on urban renewal, supplying high-quality apartments for nearly all the city’s population regardless of wealth or status.”[38]
7500 years between early sedentism and the first violent interstate confrontation in physiological evolutionary terms is very short but in cultural evolution it is not. At first blush it looks like over seven millennia of passivity. However, if you combine the changing material conditions with phenotypic changes it is possible to identify the incremental shift towards indifference to others. Changing material conditions for 7500 years caused the gradual neuronal and psycho-biological evolution necessary for the acceptance of disregard for the other. The effects of changing material conditions on us have been well researched by historians since classical Greece and by archaeologists and anthropologists since the 19th century. More recently a raft of specialist disciplines has entered the fray, including: evolutionary psychology, archaeobotany, paleoclimatology, paleoepidemiology, linguistics and ancient genomics adding much controversy. Political scientists and sociologists have dipped their toes into all of the above to try to tie it all together into a fresh insightful whole, as have I, although I do not claim to any disciplinary expertise. Despite all the rich new scientistic methods brought to bear on the distant past you still have to speculate and imagine how you would feel in those very different circumstances. For example, did the undoubted harshness of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle prepare us for the depredations, plagues, famines and exploitations to come with the emergence of cities and their states? I imagine coping with infant mortality and death in child birth would make you more emotionally resilient rather than brutal and callous. Also, killing, skinning, cooking and eating one animal occasionally would not have inured us to violence especially, as we have learned the hunter-gatherer belief system had total respect for every feature of the biosphere. So, no, I would contend that our propensity for callous indifference to others started when our relationship to the land shifted to a control and hold mentality, as pointed earlier out by Paul Gilbert.
That shift was 11,000 years in the making. Analysis of the Ohalo II site on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in 2015, revealed evidence for seed collection and cultivation 23,000 years ago.[39] This was 9000 years before the end of the last Ice age which is why there is the earliest evidence for bedding in human pre-history. G&W note that to domesticate wheat it could be easily achieved in 30 years.[40] The fact it took 3000 years reflects well on Neolithic agency regarding the deliberate placing of cultivated products within a rich array of shifting resource availability. The authors emphasise the ritual social importance of the community coming together to perform tasks associated with cultivation rather than augmenting calories.[41] 13,000 years later women were grinding grain on a quern. We know this because female skeletons dug up from Abu Hureyra in the Upper Euphrates dated to the early Neolithic in Syria show abnormalities caused by hard repetitive work. This knowledge allows us to interpret the spatial separation between flint knapping and food preparation at Ohalo along gendered lines.[42]
With regard to the division of labour by sex, an American anthropologist writing in 1970 very politely, in my view, dismissed the blatant sexism of Durkheim and more recent ideas about physiological and psychological gender differences. There appear to be many instances in the ethnographic literature of women hunting or herding but not usually if they have infants to breast feed. You don’t need a patriarchy to explain why women invented string in the late Palaeolithic and by the Neolithic were spinning, weaving and sewing. Hunter-gatherer women spent 2-3 years breastfeeding so any activity they undertook had to be compatible with child minding. Judith Brown spelled out the criteria for the type of activity that is compatible with child minding. Activities for women contributing to the collective subsistence must: “not require rapt attention; be dull and repetitive; be easily interruptible and be easily resumed after interruption; not place child in danger and do not require the woman to range very far from home.”[43] I mentioned string simply to highlight the innate sexism of solid tool naming for archaeological periods. Sadly, in a pre-metal age stone was the only tool on the planet which was durable enough for future archaeologists to dig up.
While men were sitting around doing blokey things like flint knapping the women were twisting handfuls of weak plant fibres from “…nettle, hemp, flax, jute, sisal, esparto, maguey, yucca elm, or willow…”[44] into strong thread. The string they fashioned was a major contribution to economies of humans living 30-2000 years ago. Apart from gathering berries in baskets, netting fish, tying up bundles of wood for fuel and hafting stone onto timber string became the raw material for weaving cloth. Apart from crediting women for propelling humans out of the stone age, the point is all the stages of cloth production fit the criteria for child rearing compatibility.
For women and hence human populations sedentism provided two important catalysts for having and feeding babies. I now turn to the work of Dr. Sophia Stefanovic from Belgrade University to explain. Together with weaving and sewing for bags and clothes these same skills were harnessed by women to fashion mattresses. While the fellows took care of stone foundations and timber enclosures the women solved the problem of neo-natal thermoregulation. Keeping the foetus warm reduces risk of morbidity and mortality in new-borns. So, warm houses, catalyst one. Catalyst two– regular supply of milk and cereal I have already covered in chapter one[45]. This significantly shortened the length of time breast feeding by up to one year from the 3-4 years in the Mesolithic. Less breast feeding led to sooner ovulation which led to more pregnancies.[46]
As anyone who has fed an infant solids knows it sometimes helps to pretend the spoon is an aeroplane flying around looking for a mouth to land on. As babies’ mouths are not large, the flatter the spoon the better, to afford more unit food per object. Now, the Neolithic people knew this. Archaeologists have discovered evidence for thousands of spoons crafted from bone all dated to the Neolithic. Only being male archaeologists, these finds were dismissed as “objects of unknown purpose”. To female archaeologists the purpose of these elegantly shaped and smooth bone artefacts was obvious. Their conjectures were confirmed by the identification of milk teeth markings on the spoons. These Neolithic spoons would fit very nicely into a contemporary Danish designer’s cutlery drawer. It has been calculated that 25 hours would have been needed to achieve this kind of technical excellence. (That equates to $1000 per spoon at $40 per hour!) We can’t know for sure whether men of women crafted them but the activity would certainly fit the criteria for the sort of work compatible with child rearing. According to Sofija this new simple but significant piece of technology enabled baby-care to involve the extended family and hence be more successful. My point in telling this story is to infer a high degree of gender equality. First, let’s assume I’m correct to suggest women were the skilled craftspeople responsible for the spoons’ manufacture. By the Neolithic, women’s work with the needle and string had for many thousands of years been crucial to the economic survival of the
hunter-gatherer band. Throughout that time men would have appreciated and respected women’s productivity. The significance of this latest innovation at the time was probably not understood but men would have had no difficulty empathizing with the long hours necessary to smooth and shape a bone into an aesthetically pleasing implement.
Of course, the other activity that early Neolithic women had the misfortune to do was food preparation. As I mentioned above the skeletal remains of 162 individuals from Abu Hureyra were examined to learn about the daily life of the Neolithic. Most of the worst deformities were on female spinal, knee and toe joints which were all sheeted home to shifting back and forth while kneeling at a saddle shaped quern on the floor with both hands grinding the grain. This repetitive arduous work created severe cartilage damage so that bone rubbed on bone, collapsed vertebrae and grossly arthritic big toes. As Thea Molleson pointed out “There is no need to assume that this division of roles implies any inequality between the sexes…”[47] The point for my purposes is that the totality of all these skeletal deformities must have caused excruciating pain. There is no evidence for women uniting and demanding less onerous work – they carried on for 3000 years at that site albeit with some improvements like weaving a sieve to protect teeth from damage caused by all the grit in the flour. I can’t imagine a bloke getting back home exhausted after a few gruelling days away, fruitlessly chasing the diminishing Gazelle and saying to the womenfolk: “Here, have a rest, let me do some grinding for you.” Therefore, there must have been a large degree of acceptance of suffering as a natural part of surviving in the early days of farming.
When global temperatures warmed after the ice sheets finally retreated north, from 12,000 BCE, resources became so plentiful that the Natufians were able to become sedentary. They built the first permanent houses with dry stone foundations and cultivated more plants. They couldn’t get too comfortable because only 2000 years later the Younger Dryas drastically lowered temperatures in the northern hemisphere. It was perhaps in response to that climate shock that propelled humans to
“…to engage communally in activities that were sacred in nature… […] … to galvanize sacred beliefs thought to bring sense and order back into [the] world…”[48] This idea is based on an interpretation of the archaeological site at Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey where large T shaped pillars are arranged in a circle dated to 9000 BCE.
This period coincided with the ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic A’ in Upper Mesopotamia even though the Japanese started using pots 200 years earlier. The significance of pottery here is not for the ability to store produce but for its role in the earliest use of ideographic and mnemonic symbols around 7000 BCE. Presumably, only a select cast of people would have possessed the knowledge necessary to record the nature and quantity of produce. Later, in Sumerian cities the position of scribe was at the apex of the bureaucracy and worked closely with the king. Hence, I will show that writing is an important step, but not the first, in the direction towards the creation of a hierarchy and thus social distance between groups.
Archaeological Human epochs are categorized in terms of what we used for tools. The increasing complexity of those tools reflect an analogous process in society. It would be a challenge to name epochs based on how we treated each other such that the bulk of human pre-history could be called Palaeosotimostic. The second part of the word derived from the Greek isotimos meaning egalitarian. Then, the 7500 years before the first recorded violence while we learnt about power and hierarchy, could be called the Mathiexousistic from mathisi to learn and exousia for power. Recorded history would provide no evidence to change this hubristic turn until the late 19th century when some aspects of the Enlightenment might have influenced the abolition of slavery. We could characterise this period in which we are still situated as learning about empathy– obviously we have a long way to go! The Anglicised Greek could be something like Mathiensynasistic from mathisi and ensynaisthisi for empathy.
For the period we are interested in, we’ll stick with the conventional classificatory material which in this case is copper. The earliest natural or un-smelted copper objects have been dated to 6700BCE in Turkey although the Chalcolithic Culture (Copper Age– 5500-2900 BCE) is dated from 1200 years later. So far, the examples of material cultural change have centred on Mesopotamia so to rectify my Mesocentrism I will refer to a massive 500-page UNESCO publication from 1991 involving 23 authors from all over Asia as well as a few from Europe and US. Capaciously entitled Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume 1: The dawn of civilization: earliest times to 700 BC. It purports to enhance the ability of populations “…to have a keener sense of their collective destiny by highlighting their individual contributions to the history of humanity.”[49] Or, to put it another way, to redress the lack of scholarship attached to central Asia’s early development compared to that of Mesopotamia.
As far as I can make out the same sequence from Neolithic hunter-gatherer via sedentism, domestication of plants and animals to formation of cities and then proto-states occurred a little later than the Fertile Crescent but independently in Central Asia.[50] Crucially, small scale trade in jade and shells would have opened up and established connections between the Indus Valley, Maghreb (Pakistan) southern Iran and Mesopotamia. Female figurines found in Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in Pakistan, dated to 7000BCE are identical to those found in the Near East. In addition to trade in turquoise and copper, “…lapis lazuli may have been traded as early as the sixth millennium.”[51] This early form of ‘…small scale trade in precious stones such as jade, shells and other sundries…”[52]did not require the enslavement of the masses. Hence, the conditions for the total indifference to others, necessary for subjugation and conquest had not been met yet. However, they were the trade links upon which later, much more exploitative, trade practices built on.
Later, around 5500 BCE, after the discovery of copper, metallurgical industries contributed to much larger scale trade that did rely on slaves to mine the ore. The major differentiating factor in ‘civilizational’ development between the Central Asia and Mesopotamia was the bifurcation of the former into settled agriculture in the south and nomadic pastoralists of the steppes. The story of one such culture, the Yanmaya, shows how their expansions radically altered settled Late Neolithic agricultural societies which added more opportunities for social exclusion and exploitation. This late Chalcolithic to early Bronze Age (3300-2600 BCE) archaeological culture ranged from the Southern Bug between the Dniester and Ural rivers in Ukraine and southern Russia through Kazakhstan to Mongolia. As usual it was climate change that provided the impetus to move beyond their local herding ground.
This second interruption to a gradual warming since the end of the last ice age is known as the Piora Oscillation, 3200-2900 BCE, when temperatures dropped and vegetation became more arid. However, before it became more arid it caused flooding in the Nile and Mesopotamia which catalysed the development of hierarchies based around centrally planned irrigation in the alluvial plains in southern Mesopotamia. This traditional view regarding the necessity of elites to organise the construction of irrigation channels which led to city states has been challenged by access to new paleoclimate and other technologies. Meanwhile, the pastoralists needed to move their herds more frequently to feed them enough. Horses were able to take advantage of the colder climate because “… since it [the horse] was so adept at foraging with snow on the ground, tended to replace cattle and sheep.”[53] Then, with the invention of the wheeled wagon, supplies could be carried to sustain much further expansions.
In order to analyse how the Yamnaya and other steppe cultures catalysed social stratification we need to tease out the processes hidden in that convenient descriptor: ‘expansions’. Here the concept of translocality which un-bounds a distinct people or culture from a physical space, may be helpful. It has recently been used to “deconstruct essentialism” by problematizing Colonialism’s legacy of exaggerating differences between cultures.[54] Translocality is also used with the same aim in mind by Martin Furholt[55] with regard to the re-conceptualising Steppe Migrations. His is a non-monothetic thesis which contain some useful insights into what goes on when people move about. What is opened up when you apply translocality to Steppe migrations of the early 4th to mid 2nd Millennium BCE is a recognition that descriptors like ‘replaced’, ‘absorbed by’ or ‘invaded’ are inadequate. Cultural influence works both ways. An illustration of the complexity of influence can be found by looking at the burial practices of the Yamnaya. The contents of their large burial mounds known as kurgans, clearly indicate the aggrandizement of the individual with all the trappings of warriorhood and an emphasis on the male gender.[56] Over time these burial mounds became smaller and more numerous which, according to Furholt, indicate “…bottom-up resistance against a mechanism that supports social stratification.”[57]
Be that as it may, the Yanmaya and other Steppe herders, as I noted, did introduce individual aggrandizement, institutionalised warriorhood and marked gender differences to the Neolithic farmers of Europe and debt slavery to the civilizations of Mesopotamia, China and the Indus Valley. Debt slavery was very much tied in with the emergence of patriarchy which led “…powerful individuals… to establish a rule of the fist instead of what had until then mostly been social interactions structured around kinship…”[58]. However, those “social interactions” included violent clan rivalry. So that by the time the young male, armed horse riders, ventured west from the Pontic Steppe, they were well able to subdue static and physically inferior neolithic farmers. As an encyclopaedic entry on pastoralism stated “…competition between nomadic groups for scarce resources made low-level warfare endemic between them: they were inured to warfare in a way that farmers were not.’’[59] The steppe herder pastoralists from the Yamnaya, Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, Maikop, Andronovo, to the very short lived, but immensely consequential Sintashta, were genetically very successful. A piece from Science Daily titled Steppe migrant thugs pacified by stone age farming women, is clearly indicating a negative bias towards highly skilled young male warriors on horseback. Warrior-like they probably were but being young men with no intension of returning to their traditional steppes they naturally wanted to have sex. As rape and pillage began to pall, these “…young males who did not have any inheritance to look forward to…. were probably more willing to make a career as migrating war bands.”[60]
A part of “making a career’ must have included making a family. The new society they created to usher in the Bronze Age “…was organized around small monogamous families with individual ownership of animals and land.”[61]
Archaeology interprets ancient artifacts which can be accurately carbon dated but the discipline still involves a lot of inferences about how societies organised themselves pre the written record. However, the new genomic revolution can tell us definitively when groups of people moved around. Such that, due to modern science’s ability to identify the whole genome of ancient skeletons, it can be stated unequivocally that the Yamnaya replaced 90% of Britain’s Neolithic population around 2500BCE.[62] Building the monumental Stone Henge was their last gasp. More accurately it was the Bell Beaker culture who had Yamnaya ancestry who did the replacing. 500 years earlier a ‘culture’ in the area of modern-day Ukraine, Moldova and Romania ended. This ‘culture’, known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia, honoured women and was egalitarian. Judging by their buried goods such as female figurines, bracelets, hooks and rings they celebrated art and peace. A marked difference to maces, battle axes and daggers buried in the kurgans. In terms of the number and large size of settlements– some settlements with 3000 structures were inhabited by 20,000-46,000 people–[63] I’d class them as proto urban. However, you’re not allowed to call them a ‘civilization’ because they didn’t have labour specialization, social stratification, religion and government and all the other instruments of exploitation. A 300-hectare mega settlement called Taljanky thrived for 800 years (4100-3300 BC) without a central government, administration or ruling class and little evidence for warfare.[64] Here we have a society doing everything a later Mesopotamian city achieved like producing surpluses, trading, metallurgy and a potting industry but without a top-down hierarchy. So how did such a large urban population manage to collectively take advantage of the rich black soils, open prairie and woodland of Ukraine without enclosure and elite creation?
Mathematics can again explain. More precisely, ‘ethnomathematics’. The numbers of concern here relate to: households and their size; people required to carry out a task; reciprocal arrangements; frequency of exchange; and the circular shape of the settlement. How it all comes together can be understood by looking at contemporary Basque villages. The process of baking and sharing bread is illustrative of their conscious desire to maintain an egalitarian social system. “Each Sunday, one household will bless to loaves at the local church, eat one, then present the other to its first neighbour (the house to the right); the next week that Neighbour will do the same to the next house to its right and so on in a clockwise direction, so that in a community of 100 households it would take about two years to complete a full cycle.”[65] This socio-economic activity accommodates temporary inability to participate by a mutually observed “…careful system of substitution…” Sharing and cooperating this way enables the completion of tasks that need more than the occupants of one household. Thus, inter-household obligations have to be committed to for this kind of self-governance to work.
The demise of the Cucuteni-Trypillia’s female-figurine-producing society has a 300-year overlap with Yamnaya’s expansion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to surmise the latter had some bearing on the former. A couple of other factors may have contributed to the abandonment of 600-700 neolithic settlements in the Don-Volga-Ural steppes: one, climate change and two, herders brought a pneumonic plague to which they had built up immunity. A pre-echo of future European populations moving to the Americas.
At about the same time steppe herders also made it into the Indian subcontinent as proven by the same genomic foot prints. So, Hitler was right! Much of their success was not only about wagons, equine ability and copper weapons but also their extensive mutually wealth creating trading practices. The early pastoralists established the trade and cultural underpinnings of the Silk Roads.[66] According to David Christian, “By 2000 BCE… languages, genes, technologies, styles and lifeways were being exchanged through the steps of Inner Eurasia with an intensity unmatched in less mobile communities of Eurasian agrarian civilisations.”
Despite domesticating the horse, inventing the chariot, developing sophisticated metallurgical industries and possessing mercantile acumen, the Indus Valley Civilization they encountered were not happy. The Harappans were already responding to a global climate change which led to a decline in summer monsoons which they relied upon for flooding the alluvial plains. Over an extended period Harappans made their way east towards the Ganges basin where monsoon rains remained reliable. With the dispersal of the population there was no longer a “…concentration of a workforce to support urbanism.”[67] The archaeological record does not indicate any cataclysmic invasion event as there are no layers of ash indicating burnt out buildings from the period. Counter factually, one is tempted to speculate how the planet’s only egalitarian civilization might have developed without the 4.2KYA event which also precipitated the demise of the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. We do not know the exact circumstances that led to the population of India today showing a strong male link via Y chromosomes to Europeans, central Asians and Near Easterners but genetics does tell us when this mixture occurred.
In his chapter– Ancestry, Power, and Sexual Dominance– Reich explains the origins of the caste system in India thousands of years before the British. (Which is not to say the British did not exploit differences for the administration of their own rule.) Suffice to say the timing of these young male warriors claiming local women and out competing local males coincided with the ending of the Indus Valley civilization. Culturally the herders put great store by keeping their blood lines pure by instituting endogamous (only bonking within your group) relations. Another corroborating cultural event was the Rig Veda. Now, if the Sanskrit text written down between 1500 and 500 BCE is an accurate transcription of the oral tradition that goes back 2000 years it certainly is ‘…an extraordinary window into the past…”[68] It talks about a warrior god Indra riding horse drawn chariots to conquer fortresses. Given that there are no archaeological records of the Indus Valley Civilization using horses or chariots the Rig Veda seems to be a slam-dunk for Yamnaya warriors migrating into northern India at the time of the genesis of the oral tradition.
As already noted, steppe herding hierarchies were based on warrior chieftains amassing wealth for their clan. After a couple of thousand years that patriarchy was turbo charged into a strict and complex system of social roles including who to marry and the privileges attained therefrom. Known as the Caste system, it had far more layers of hierarchy than the four from Brahmin to Sadu. A minimum of four thousand six hundred more! [69] When you’ve got each of these groups passively obeying the don’t bonk outside your group rule (endogamy) for three thousand years then the current genomes of Indians will reflect this, which they do. However, a word of caution here is necessary regarding the contribution of the Hindu Caste system to inegalitarianism. This extreme social stratification allowed economic cooperation between heterogenous groups within the same geographic area. According to Jared Diamond “…members of the same caste know that they can only count on a circumscribed resource base but they expect to pass that on to their children.” [70] Furthermore, “…this detailed proscriptive system ensures resources are exploited sustainably.” In terms of producing a highly productive civilization it must have functioned well because 3000 years later, by 1700 CE, India’s share of the world economy was a whopping 27%.[71] It’s manufacturing output was greater than any European or Asian country at that time. Mind you a lot of that productive output relied on the many skilled dasa (slaves)– a class of servitude which was well integrated into the Caste system despite being ruled by the Caste-free Islamic Moghul emperors.[72]
It’s interesting to note here that current archaeologists and geneticists in India are not happy with Reich’s conclusions about recent Indian ancestry deriving from violent steppe herders from the north. They do not like the implication the newcomers were superior because they replaced the locals. To my reading of Harappan culture there was nothing inferior about them. They were simply victims of climate change and having a non-violent ethos. Importantly, it seems the Indus Valley Civilization demonstrated that it was possible to organise a complex, economically successful and socially egalitarian society without stratification.[73]
Studies of ancient and contemporary genomes can not only prove that whole cultures moved in all directions and when but also how those cultures created inequality. In summary then, as far as stratification of society is concerned, the Steppe pastoralists influence on Western Europe’s neolithic farming communities was less negatively consequential than on the Indus Valley Civilization. So, to conclude, pastoralist herders in three theatres of expansion certainly laid down aggressive male dominated phenotypes that cascaded down through the centuries.
Before Steppe pastoralists made their presence felt, settled farmers drawn to the fecund soils of the Tigris and Euphrates flood plain, prospered and multiplied. The downside of all that fertility was periodic flooding. The organisation to build flood retaining walls and irrigation trenches is said to have commenced the process of a hierarchy long thought to be necessary for complex urban societies to develop. However, Adam Green argues that heterarchy (unranked social classes) “…[was] often as essential to, or perhaps even the causal driver of, many social transformations.”[74] He uses the first states in Mespotamia as an example “…[where] the outcome of social and economic processes were far removed from the establishment of political hierarchies.” There is plenty of archaeological evidence for markets and trade especially copper implements from Iran in the mid Chalcolithic (4000 BCE) before the establishment of elites. G&W concur with this assessment of Uruk culture. All aspects of civic life pertained well before the Early Dynastic period which ushered in rule of kings.
Building public works in 3500 BC did not depend on slaves or forced labour of any kind. All able-bodied people were brought together willingly on a seasonal basis.[75] G&W claim that even after the establishment of monarchy “…these seasonal projects were undertaken in a festive spirit. Distinction between citizens dissolved away and the governor cancelled the debts of the citizenry.”
I would say that elites did not become fully operational, vis-a-vis exploiting the peasantry until belief in the necessity to placate vengeful gods had been established by a priest class. Therefore, it is probably not controversial to state that where you find obvious temples in the centre of ancient archaeological sites it is fair to assume religion and its intermediaries’ power over the labour force has been established. Unfortunately, there is a glaring anomaly in the archaeological record in the shape of a small ‘temple’ in southern Turkey close to the Syrian border at Gobleki Tepe. The site is far too old to be an early trading hub with farmers creating a surplus to pay for the infrastructure of power. The site has been dated to 9,000 BCE, that’s 5000 years before the earliest temple in Ubaid period in southern Mesopotamia. The massive number of bones of gazelles, boar, wild sheep, red deer, vultures, cranes, ducks and geese dated to 9000 BCE found at the site clearly indicate the builders were hunter-gatherers.[76]
For forty thousand years before this round-bellied human-made hill at Gobleki Tepe, various Palaeolithic and Neolithic cultures had been expressing their intimate relationship with the environment and hinted at what was important to them. I guess we would always have wanted to invent stories to account for unanswerable ontological questions. Lacking any hard evidence to the contrary one could say all members of hunter-gatherer bands would have happily believed in the myths of creation and the cosmos because they would have been intimately bound up with the natural world.
Now, about those myths and stories, they are the key to understanding how elites were created. For just about the entirety of hominin evolution mushrooms have been available no matter what the climate. They have been ingested for their healing properties and also, for my purposes, for the mind-altering properties from psilocybin. There seems to be consensus for this in the evolutionary anthropological literature. A paper on psychedelics, sociality and human evolution suggests “…the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion, imposing a systematic bias on the selective environment that favoured selection for pro-sociality in our lineage.” [77] With regard to interpreting image making during the Neolithic in Britain a paper on ontology of that period talked about a “…neuropsychological model which identified altered states of consciousness as a means by which certain abstract motifs could be generated by the human nervous system,”[78] However, I would suggest not everyone who ingested a psychoactive substance would have had a great time. Those individuals who managed to cohere their hallucinatory experiences into a story about nature and the cosmos were believed by others. For generations the shamans would have been the astrophysicists of their day such that their demands for places of worship would have been readily acceded to. They were also respected for their healing powers, ensuring successful hunts and fertility.[79]
Animism was accepted in many parts of the world because through it the Shaman explained how all living organisms interacted with themselves including humans. For hunter-gatherers this “…served a beneficial purpose in giving a sense of structure and meaning to clan relations with Nature.” [80]This can help us get in the head of someone who lived in a world without science which might explain why religion became such an important vector of power. The human mentality had been well prepared for clan chiefs to take on shamanic roles and eventually become the priest king. They were obviously on to a good thing because by the third millennium Sumerian texts indicate a list of no fewer than 3600 deities.[81] It must have seemed reasonable to stratify society because the gods themselves were organised into a hierarchy with masculine ones occupying the top echelons.[82] They linked to animism by being associated with forces of nature or animals. The fact that the gods were feared more than loved indicates to me a certain shift from the hunter-gatherers’ more practical relationship with the natural world and its spirits. In a review of Jean Bottero’s Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, the author explains “… the concept the Mesopotamians had of the divinity: a being of high ‘ontological density’ (p. 38), which reveals itself through an irradiation of extraordinary and frightening luminosity, a being whom the faithful address without love, only for protection and to obtain success in life.” Furthermore, Mander states that “Mesopotamian religion is understood through the metaphor of the king, whose behaviours and privileges suitably match the relationship that correlates the gods to men.” So, if you’re that exalted and distant the suffering masses will not concern you.
However, I’m afraid that conclusion needs a more nuanced reappraisal care of G&W. How early freedoms to move away and disobey were trampled on by kings, came down to a perversion of charity. The idea centres on the early ‘temple economies’ of pre–Dynastic Sumer. The women who sought refuge in the temples were welcomed and their work there was regarded as sacred. Thus the ‘charity’ of the temple, whereby they received provisions in exchange cloth manufacture, did at least afford women some status. After ‘charismatic’ warrior kings co-opted the local deity by moving in next door, more captured women were added to the workforce. Gradually women’s status was downgraded and the arbitrary rule of fathers over their dependents ushered in a patriarchy of male domination based on violence.[83]
For Helen Chapin Metz the relationship between the desert environment and religion was simple. She summarized it thus, “The precariousness of existence in southern Mesopotamia also led to a highly developed sense of religion.”[84] The deal between the Gods of ancient Sumer and the individual required sacrifice and mumbo jumbo form the latter while the former provided security and prosperity.[85] There was nothing ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ about the gods’ behaviour. They were all too human in their propensities to rage and anger as well as the occasional bout of kindness. This makes total sense because the humans who invented the various gods and their proclivities were able to harness all that fear to govern every aspect of life. When you have managed to persuade ordinary folk that everything belongs to the gods then you, the priest king, decide how to tax, farm, trade, and make war.
Much of the myth making surrounding the pantheon was handed down orally for 1000s of years before writing. As clan chiefs began to display their identities in increasingly complex societies, they would have been happy to embellish those oral traditions to bolster their hold on power.
From the earliest temple in Eridu of the Ubaid period in 5570 BCE to the time of the genesis myth of that city was written down in 1600 BCE the ordinary citizen was left in no doubt as to the religious justification of the kingly status quo. The origin myth of Eridu describe how “…the mother goddess Nintur called to her nomadic children and recommended they stop wandering, build cities and temples and live under the rule of kings.”[86] Not much room for argument there!
Helen Metz’s emphasis on the power of religion is essentially correct but the evolution of that method of control stemming from a “precarious existence” in southern Mesopotamia needs substantial revision. I will outline the fecund origins of settlement on the deltaic wetlands from 6500 BCE onwards later.
Meanwhile, a few thousand years before the priest-king had sidelined the shaman, in 9000 BCE, hunter-gatherers from the central Fertile Crescent gathered in large enough numbers to be part of a communal embodiment of ancient myths– without the need of coercion from some oppressive elite. Just as Stone Henge represented the apotheosis of neolithic culture in England so did Gobekli Tepe, only 6000 years earlier in Turkey. The consensus for the Stonehenge builders is that they voluntarily cooperated in large enough numbers to engineer a manifestation of belief. At both sites there is evidence of much feasting and at Gobekli, residues from stone vessels nearby indicate grape fermentation. Thus, according to an historian writing a piece on Gobekli Tepe for Academia.edu, “Alcohol, then, was enmeshed with the transition to organised cultic practices.” [87] According to Glover “The discovery of fermentation and the use of beer in social and religious life could thus have led to the domestication of cereals.”[88] Given the huge size of the stone troughs and enormous number of skeletal remains of birds and animals these feasting celebrations could not have been confined to an elite.
That early non-coercive communal cooperation slowly began to shift as more communities were included into a “…collegiate network of trade, […] training… and [ greater productive output, such that] Göbekli’s ‘serpent priests’ were gaining more wealth, status and influence.”[89] The ‘serpent-priests’ Glover is referring to were inferred by the carvings on the T pillars which signify a clan with its identifying totem. In fact, we will discover evidence that throws much doubt on the ‘temple’ hypothesis.
A detailed re-examination of the archaeological record by the German archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt, at Gobekli Tepe and surrounding area will show that the impetus for farming was initiated by an elite formation rather than the other way around.[90] The sheer scale of the site and massive size of the pillars indicate that they could not have been erected by an ad hoc band of hunter-gatherers. Many hundreds of fit young men and their families needed to be recruited from a vast area at the northern tip of the Fertile Crescent and to be housed and fed in one place. When Schmidt was excavating there was no evidence for any settlements at the site itself though there is in the surrounding area at Jerf el Ahmar and Tell Qaramel in Syria.[91] For this reason, Schmidt concluded that Gobekli was either a burial ground from where the dead could survey the Edenic landscape from 1000 feet above or a temple. That thinking has been challenged since Schmidt’s death in 2014 by Dr Lee Clare, faculty member of the German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul Department. He is currently responsible for the coordination of the Gobekli Tepe Project.
Clare’s first major objection is to the assignation “temple” for the function of this 11,000-year-old site. As he explained “… “temples” – in addition to being a place for divine worship – exercised some form of economic power. This interpretation is wholly unrealistic for the Stone Age communities living in the tenth and ninth millennia BC. Such “temple economies” do not appear until at least the late Chalcolithic / Bronze Age.”[92] Clare may have been influenced by professor E. B. Banning writing 8 years earlier who marshalled a wealth of evidence from around the world for the enmeshment of the sacred with the domestic in buildings. He is one of many academics who have argued against the binary view which reflects Western concepts of secular or divine.
Clare also uncovered– literally– evidence that people did in fact live at the site. Deep soundings have revealed evidence for domestic activities such as flint knapping, large numbers of grinding stones, bowls, mortar and pestles, hearths and cisterns for water. Bearing in mind the climate was a lot wetter then so the site was totally capable of supporting groups of semi-settled hunter-gatherers.[93] He’s also got a different explanation for the large amount of skeletal remains of wild animals. Rather than them being evidence for much feasting they could simply have slipped down from subsequent levels of construction that continued on the site for over a thousand years. So, if the early part of the structure was not a temple but it was certainly too big to be an ordinary dwelling what was its function? The arrangement of the T pillars whereby the two largest ones are surrounded by smaller ones indicates that this configuration of stones represents a meeting. Clare is willing to merely state that the site was a “…space for social gatherings and as physical expressions of local traditions and identity, as suggested by the numerous depictions of animals, humans and related symbolism.”[94] Banning is happy to speculate on the purpose of these gatherings such that they “…develop[ed] practical strategies about their own survival, strategies that would have involved crafting, sharing knowledge and exchanging goods.” More important, though, is unlocking the purpose and significance of the wonderful relief work on the pillars and sculptures. Again Clare is cautious whereas Banning’s ethnographic studies furnish him with the confidence to state that the purpose of decorating domestic structures was “… to commemorate the feats of ancestors; advertise a lineage’s history or a chief’s generosity; communicate “canonical” (Blanton 1994) information about deities, cosmology, or acceptable behaviour; or record initiations and other house-based rituals.”[95] You could argue, here, that two culturally and evolutionary consequential events were occurring. One, the prominence of the role of the shaman is diminishing and two, the competitive assertion of a clan lineage was established. If that is the case it would be fair to suggest “…that hierarchies are already developing regarding conditions of labour, wealth generation and status attained.” Shamans may have been sidelined but over the next few thousand years those clan chiefs began to cloak themselves in ever more divine iconography and generally co-opting people’s belief in the power of an intercessor between the human and their gods. As Banning put it “Shamanic rituals [were] being replaced by commercial imperative.”[96]
Now that we have cleared up the ‘anomaly’ of Gobekli Tepe by identifying it not as a forerunner of the later ‘temple economies’ but as the last hurrah of hunter-gatherers, we could still usefully lean on the French archaeologist, Jacques Cauvin, who had something to say about the art of the late neolithic in the surrounding settlements. He stresses the type of art from 9500 BCE in the Levant changed from being straight figurative depictions of hunting scenes and animals to the symbolic. The images represent a step towards the pictogram– a necessary precursor to eventual writing 4500 years later. The two dominant images from this period are the woman and the bull.[97] He is happy to go beyond the empirical visual record and tease out (speculate) the symbolic archaeology underpinning them. During the next 1500 years the woman sculpted into the architecture of Catalhoyuk had definitely become a goddess. Let’s not forget the Ain Sakhri Lovers, dated to the same time as the first level of Gobekli Tepe was erected– 500 years before Catalhoyuk– where the relationship between a man and a woman couldn’t be more equal. In addition to the seated female deity sitting on a throne of panthers, the discovery of a fat, exquisitely sculpted female figurine dated to between 6300 and 6000 BCE, shows how “…the elderly in Neolithic Çatalhöyük may have held elite status, performing rituals and making decisions that impacted the entire community.”[98]
However, because the fat lady was discovered near the surface it meant that it was buried later so the figurine’s fatness could symbolize high status which indicates a shift to a less egalitarian society. Despite that caveat, what I’m attempting to show here is that for early Neolithic farmers in the Levant and later in Europe, women were accorded far more status which reflected a more egalitarian society than what emerged later post Ubaid culture in the Near East, post Indus Valley Civilization in Northern India and post Stone Henge in Britain.
Before looking at the well documented stages of urban expansion and state formation which clearly establish extreme stratification and immiseration of the many, I want to take advantage of the immense amount of interdisciplinary analysis now concentrated on the Pre-pottery Neolithic in Anatolia. I do this with the hope that subtle and incremental changes in material circumstances in that region at that time – 9000-6400 BCE– can explain how early ‘mild’ stratification prefigured the fully complex set of social, economic, institutional and geopolitical relations in southern Mesopotamia. (You can tell I’m reluctant to use the term civilization!)
Below is a map of the region with sites I refer to:
As you can see, the green area resembles a crescent shape but it’s not strictly the Fertile Crescent. That designation belongs to the Levant and Mesopotamia a few thousand years later. Essentially shift the Eastern arm of the boomerang south to the Tigris and Euphrates alluvium, extend it west to include upper Nile and east to include the north east corner of the Persian Gulf.
Reading through Glover’s piece on Gobekli Tepe an analysis of human blood on obsidian blades, alerted me to the possibility of hideously unempathetic human behaviour 1000s of years before it became commonplace. He was referring to some information in a website devoted to ancient communism. According to the author, Bernhard Brosius, the Neolithic Revolution took place “… in a destructive patriarchal, and hierarchal society of enormous cruelty.”[99] The evidence to ‘prove’ that human sacrifices had been made was the presence of “… thick crusts of human blood on daggers, alters or draining funnels…” in the temples of Cayonu. In addition to the blood, more grizzly evidence of cruelty was found in the form of 70 skulls and parts of skeletons from 400 individuals. Brosius goes on to claim that this sort of evidence disappears after 7200 BCE because the Obsidian flakers rose up and destroyed the temple and the large ‘wealthy’ houses. This revolution, worthy of the name, ushered in an egalitarian society which lasted 3000 years.
I have a problem with Brosius’ unequivocal interpretation of all that blood and bones. There are many papers extant that present a far more nuanced reading of the same evidence. I am more persuaded by interpretations that take into account the mortuary practices and attitudes to death by hunter-gatherers who were staying in one place for a bit longer than they used to. Like Clare I just don’t buy that the temple and its power had had enough time to emerge in the PPNA. It seems to me logical to expect that most cultural aspects of hunter-gatherer cooperation would predominate for a few thousand years after they begin to build substantial homes. Inevitably, over time, when population numbers increase and traditional sources of food dwindle opportunities for perceptions of unfairness increase. This is more or less the conclusion a paper cited by many other papers on Neolithic Anatolia, comes to. A quote from the abstract sums up analysis of peri and post mortem skeletal injuries thus: “Although individual examples of interpersonal violence exist among Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations in Anatolia, but they are far from representing organized violence.” [100] Another later paper by the first Erdal, Yilmaz Selim, provides more detailed explanations of collections of skulls and bones. After examining 446 skeletons at Kortik Tepe there was no evidence for decapitation. The many cut marks on bones could be accounted for by various methods of stripping flesh off the bones as part of a ritual mortuary practise. As Yilmaz explains, “…the underlying rationale for these post-depositional treatments can be understood as speeding up the process of joining the ancestors (Schulting et al., in press) or making the deceased person leave this world for good.”[101] In summary, “…the evidence of secondary burials, removal of the heads, plastering of skulls, painting bones, and plastering skeletons in the PPN settlements of the Middle East indicate that the de-fleshing process, or at least the decomposition of the body, had an important place in a belief system.”[102] I’m not finding any evidence for human sacrifice.
The archaeological literature seems to be constantly offering new sites in Turkey dated to the pre-pottery Neolithic and even earlier. Most of them include either ‘Hoyuk’ or ‘Tepe’ in their names. Both words refer to a settlement that has formed “…when the mud-based buildings erode for natural reasons over time, turning into mounds covering the settlement.”[103] Such is the burgeoning interest in early sedentism that even philosophers wielding sociological theories are entering the fray. One such philosopher from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Gunes Duru, explored the impact of private space on social cohesion in the Neolithic in a paper titled Sedentism and Solitude. He posed some questions linking public spaces to the emergence of family. According to Duru rituals held in public spaces were necessary to create “order” in the new sedentary life.[104] Though he might not be quite right about the primacy of biologically related family if the efforts of a vast multi-disciplinary team at the Catalhoyuk site are correct.
Ian Hodder Has grown a team over the last 25 years who use new scientific technologies and innovative statistical models based on stratigraphic detail at the site to enable myriad inferences about Neolithic life at Catalhoyuk. The sophistication and complexity of those scientific technologies can be gleaned simply by naming five of them: electrical sensitivity tomography; electromagnetic VLF; seismic refraction tomography; self-potential and GPR (ground penetrating radar).[105]
All these techniques were put to good use to refute previous theories about Catalhoyuk. For example, archaeologists have claimed that the population of the site could never have been more than a few hundred because there’s no evidence of temples or large buildings, public spaces, large storage areas or any kind of administrative centres. Therefore, no evidence for hierarchy which is needed to maintain order and prevent violence in large populations. Wrong. Hodder and his team found that ground penetrating radar shows a dense occupation over the East mound–13 hectares– so that the numbers of occupants must have ranged from 3500 to 8000.
So how did 8th millennium society in southern Anatolia function harmoniously? Well, they didn’t all the time. There is evidence for some violence in the skeletal record with many blunt force traumas to the skull but they were the type of injury people lived with, therefore not the cause of death. Hodder suggested they could have been the result of ritual fighting.[106] There is some evidence for the emergence of a religious elite who controlled burials and history but not much else. The graves in the houses with more ritual stuff were not more elaborate and thus more egalitarian. It appears that a networked community based around activities rather than neighbourhood proximity provided one aspect of cohesion. Another important hangover from hunter-gatherer days was proof that children were not brought up solely by their genetic parents. Everyone in Catalhoyuk society was relationally mixed but tightly linked up by those cross cutting occupational sodalities.[107]
For the first 500 years the features outlined above characterized Catalhoyuk society but by 6500 BCE stresses that had been building reached a tipping point. Chief among the stresses was increased fertility. I’m guessing a major problem of increased population density would be the inadequacy of faecal removal. Couple that with increase in cattle domestication – we know how much shit they produce; its no surprise zoonotic diseases took their toll on humans. No matter how house proud Catalhoyukians were in terms of cleanliness they were still living and eating in close proximity to their own waste. Analysis on 8000-year-old faeces at Catalhoyuk show the presence of eggs of the intestinal parasite whipworm.[108] These bugs that pass from human to human were the result of settling down. The environmental crunch factor was probably the drier conditions putting pressure on availability of food sources.
Whereas at the start of the settlement at Catalhoyuk people from the surrounding landscape were sucked in, by 6500 the reverse occurred. Economically, the increasingly dispersed population concentrated more on sheep and cattle management and specialized production for exchange.[109] An indication of increased stratification can be found in the larger houses which also become more independent. Most of the developments of a fully hierarchical city had their genesis here and in other Neolithic sites. To make that final leap writing and taxing grain will be needed.
Larger houses and public spaces were also becoming apparent at another Anatolian Neolithic site – Cayonu Tepesi in the south east. More telling than the existence of public houses per se was the burial practices carried out in them. Pearson et al emphasize the social utility of burial practices which were able to “…combat social tension caused by population increase and uncertainty in resource security, thereby allowing for the successful negotiation of rapidly changing economic, technological, social and political regimes.”[110] As we have noted these burial practices involved chopping the dead up and reburying the sometimes-painted bones. The authors suggest this rearrangement of corpses was an effort “…to mask social inequality through the emphasis of shared worldviews, that is effectively smoothing over social relations that caused tension amongst inhabitants.”[111] They justify these sociological assertions based on identifying what sorts of food were consumed by whom and, crucially, how food is shared over the long term. By looking at esoteric medical indicators like ‘mean nitrogen isotopic ratios’ it was possible to tell that protein from sheep, cattle and gazelles “…made only a small contribution to the average diet…”. Whereas, people buried in the Skull building ate more meat and cereals. Also, they found a dietary differentiation between men and women with the latter eating less meat and cereals. This fact was confirmed by looking at the teeth of males which had more holes from decay caused by cereals than the women whose diet was predominantly legumes.[112] What you ate reenforced your social position while you lived during the 8th and 7th millennium Cayonu Tepesi and determined where you would be buried. The reason I include this information on the measurement of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios is to illustrate evidence for increasing social complexity and therefore beginnings of stratification.
Now let’s move south east to the traditional cradle of civilization between the two rivers (the meaning of Mesopotamia) where they meander to the gulf.
While enthusiastically thrashing about in a long stretch of reeds in South Carolina, Jennifer Purnell demonstrated the diverse bio-productivity of a plant that was plentiful in the alluvium of Mesopotamia 6000 BCE.[113] In the video she informed the viewer that different parts of the plant served different purposes. It could provide poles and bricks for building material; hay for animal feed; fuel to cook on and fire kilns. The hunter-gatherer generalist mentality would have relished the rich diversity of resources of the deltaic wetlands. The generalist shift to specialist post agriculture is often asserted. However, collectively, the hunter-gatherer band had immense amount of specialist knowledge enabling them to be alert to the many and varied opportunities for sustenance “…the scattered and episodic bounty nature may bring their way.”[114]
As Pournelle pointed out there was nothing ‘episodic’ about the bounty of southern Mesopotamia. The people who populated proto-urban settlements on the wetlands knew something later hydraulic engineers and land reclaimers from future centuries didn’t. Those early deltaic settlers knew how to take advantage of shifting ecotones on the littoral riparian. These seasonal shifts in hydration from the Tigris and Euphrates flooding as well as more rainfall were beneficial for the soil’s ability to germinate and grow grain. Teeming waterfowl, game and various marine life all contributed yearlong sustenance along with the aforementioned very versatile reeds. On top of all that the flooded watercourses provided the logistical means to trade agricultural surpluses with the north. So, here we have the Petrie dish of urban consolidation 1000 years before the grain taxing polities of the late Uruk period, 3,500BCE. As Pournelle, quoting Thomas Park said “early stratification occurred long before population pressure reached significant levels, and well before regional trade, extensive storage capacity, or elaborate water-management infrastructure became economically significant” (1992: 90). It was the coordination efforts to integrate the three productive economies of agricultural/horticultural, pastoral/husbanding, and wetland that catalysed complex urban society.[115] According to Pournelle “…despite […] strong egalitarian norms, families who held traditional rights to cultivate fields at even marginally more propitious locations were able to weather famine, garner surpluses, and amass social rank.”[116] She nails how the subsequent late Uruk irrigated agrarian kingdom relied on the “…undergird[ing] by a cosmology expressed as a landscape vision that promised divine beneficence, while recognizing the place of wetland residents’ material contributions to the totality of an idealized good.” Thus, we have the “gradualist innovative efficiency of Uruk elites” who harnessed the already established cultic beliefs in order to subjugate the rural hinterland beyond the towns. Or as Gil Stein summarized, the role of temples “…provided a ritually-based ideological focus that could mobilize labour and tribute from a social sphere far wider than that of a small set of resident patrilineages…”[117]
An important component of that slow slip into social differentiation was specialization. Even without the creation of ruling elites, specialist tasks were bound to emerge from those three ecologically interdependent economies already mentioned. Of course, not all specialist tasks were equal. I imagine status naturally accrues to a person who is sitting behind an abacus calculating surplus rather than the agricultural labourer tilling fields. As a builder’s labourer wheeling muck out of footing trenches I looked up to the brickies, chippies and sparkies who came on site post slab-laying. With specialization came status anxiety. Also, the hunter-gatherer generalist would have had more contact with a variety of skilled based tasks which would have fostered a mutual respect for the collective enterprise. The totality of the social and economic practise could be envisioned by any individual. So, it’s easy to understand how an egalitarian ethos would have predominated. From foraging to surplus-creating-agriculture necessitated a massive de-skilling. The hard repetitive chores of bringing a demanding crop to harvest would have shrunk your world and inured your psyche to suffering. There doesn’t appear to be much literature on how specialization contributed to empathy denying phenotypes in late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic Mesopotamian societies. Although, Frontiers in Sociology put out a paper using impressive looking algebra to show how ‘subsistence’ and ‘producer’ ecologies require different phenotypes with the latter affecting human genetics.[118] The only vaguely interesting idea was that “…marine hunting is somewhere between mobile hunter-gatherer and producer ecologies” in that they have some social division of labour. This chimes with Pournelle’s marshland thesis.
Humans, as discussed earlier, have always displayed the full range of emotions. Increased complexity including specialization has increased the opportunity to generate negative and positive emotional responses. I noted earlier that spinning, weaving and sewing was one of the earliest specializations mostly undertaken by women, of necessity for the activity’s compatibility with child minding. I raise Elizabeth Barber’s investigation into ancient cloth production here because I want to make the point that from 5000 BCE onwards children still needed minding. Therefore, many of the new artisanal crafts which required close attention and couldn’t be interrupted such as pottery, jewellery, stonecutting and, especially after discovery of copper, metal working, would have been men. Because the male of the species has a greater need to impress, they are more prone to attach greater or lesser status to particular crafts. Ideas of superiority can engender a lack of empathy. Even by 9000 BCE shamanic clan chiefs had already begun to assert hierarchic privilege so the idea of superiority and inferiority had 4000 years to mature into ruling elites who conquered for the purpose of acquiring slaves. Destruction of conquered towns was routine so not much empathy displayed there by either the elites or the soldiers.
While I can understand how all the new strata accepted deferring power to elites in exchange for organising the building of public infrastructure and the administrative mechanisms for commerce but what all the literature, I’ve surveyed so far, has not explained is why did we exchange so much egalitarian empathy for the acceptance of so much brutality in such a short time. Perhaps Graeber and Wengrow’s 500-page opus,[119] the fruits of 10 years of cooperation on undermining just about every accepted wisdom on humanity’s evolution into citification might help. There appear to be two counter veiling themes: pre agricultural hunter-gatherers did stratify and early cities were more egalitarian. The authors question many assumptions regarding how we evolved culturally, politically and economically. One being the notion of change from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ societies. They outline just how complex many hunter forager societies were.
The reason the two Davids collaborated to produce such a big book was because a great deal of the new science has thrown up so much evidence which demands the questioning traditional assumptions. The chief reason there is no work synthesising this wealth of new information is because there is no vocabulary to do so. An example the authors use, taken from the conclusion, is the lack of an agreed term to describe a city where top-down governance did not pertain.[120]
James C. Scott pointed out, the reason early farmers took nearly 5000 years to build the first substantial settlements on the alluvium of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was because, diseases devastated populations on a regular basis.[121] Living in close quarters for the first time with domestic animals allowed harmful germs to spread from animals to humans –zoonotic– for which we had not yet developed immunity. As well as humans, crops and livestock also failed on a regular basis. This leads me to speculate that such frequency of epidemiological devastation could well have hardened the heart away from compassion towards a grim resignation to the inevitability of loss. Coming to terms with that pain and anguish might have been ameliorated by being able to blame the gods. As I have argued earlier that divine source of emotional scapegoating was harnessed by elites to better bend a large labour force to their will. Helen Chapin Metz also made a direct connection between religion and a harsh life. “The precariousness of existence in southern Mesopotamia also led to a highly developed sense of religion.”[122] However, Metz’s emphasis on belief, written before modern techniques to more accurately identify the ecology of ancient landscapes became available, failed to recognise the productive advantages of three separate but linked ecologies of the deltaic wetlands as Pournelle’s thesis shows.
In the Near East, complex urban societies did not need the intervention of pastoralists to create stratification. Nevertheless, there was much trade between the Maikop culture who were herders between the Caspian and Black seas and Uruk who were a pre-Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia. Their heydays coincided 3700- 3100 BCE. It’s hard to pinpoint direct causes of incremental stratification of Uruk culture by the Maikop but one could infer that they definitely would have contributed to overall wealth which would have increased the dominance of elite coercion.
The Bronze Age which kicked off in 3500 BCE as somebody noticed the copper and tin rich rocks surrounding a camp fire became hot enough to melt and mix the two metals. How they got from observing bits of flaky metal lying around in the ash the next morning to creating city conquering weaponry is hard to research. Perhaps a woman picked a piece up and accidentally cut herself so she thought “Aha, this stuff could be really useful for chopping vegetables.” Whereas her male companion’s eyes lit up with the thought that it could be fashioned into a lethal weapon. Now, before you can deploy all those new metal weapons and chariot fittings you need to invent writing which is what the Sumerians did. One of the oldest cuneiform texts from Bronze Age Sumer translated into English reads: “The female slave of foreign origin.”[123] This might suggest slavery was one of the many evolving material conditions that required some sort of record keeping. Now that we have entered recorded history, we know longer have to rely solely on material artefacts and their distribution. Thus, according to Philippe Beaujard “Archaic texts from Uruk refer to social differentiation {including slavery} and the organization of various professions.”[124]
To explain the nexus between debt, honour, obligation, degradation, women’s virginity, slavery and patriarchy, I would like to turn to Graeber’s book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, to explicate those links. Early Uruk texts, in addition to slaves, paradoxically, indicate the presence of women in all sorts of positions beyond the domestic sphere.
Uruk society may not have been as sexually egalitarian as today but certainly much advanced from 20th century Saudi Arabia. There were not only women rulers but they also inhabited the realms of medicine, commerce, writing and were “…free to take part in all aspects of public
life.”[125] However, according to the renowned feminist historian, Gerda Lerner, although women of this period did hold positions of power to administrate and command a workforce, they were ultimately dependent on their husbands or the king. So how did Sumerian society become so fiercely patriarchal?
Perhaps it was yet another negative consequence of those pesky Steppe herders bringing not only wool and other goods into the cities but also their macho notions of honour and wanting to protect their wives from the threat of slavery and prostitution. However, Graeber cautions against the temptation to blame steppe pastoralists alone because the same de-feminizing process occurred contemporaneously in India and China. Then again, we’ve already chronicled the Yamnaya’s expansions south and east into both those regions. Nomadic pastoralists may have provided the initial “…impetus to urbanization for larger territorial and political units in defence against…{them}”[126] but later there were plenty of other socioeconomic shifts in play. By the middle of the 4th millennium elites of those early Sumer cities had forced farmers to produce surplus for them on land they no longer owned. Couple that with the rise of an influential merchant class facilitating the priesthood’s requirements for metals, stone and cedarwood, the stage is set for armies to secure trade routes and threaten neighbouring cities for land and water.[127] Against that background, Graeber’s and Lerner’s take on emergence of the concept of debt and its relationship to women does make sense. Their analysis follows.
According to both, herders’ families felt threatened by the prospect of enslavement and forced prostitution when in contact with urban society.
While at the same time it was fear of mobile pastoralists and desire to protect their womenfolk, that the strict control of women’s sexuality by their families, emerged as the chief driver of stratification. Lerner, applying a Marxist perspective, “…women’s subordination… was built on the commodification of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacities…[which was]…strongly connected to the creation of private property and the monetization of social relations.”[128] Thus, stolen women became possessions of the extended family. So, the first appropriation of private property by men was of women’s gynaecological capacity.
Lerner locates the initial stages of patriarchy to the late Neolithic when periods of economic scarcity occasioned intertribal warfare and thus the “…rise to power of men and military achievement.”[129] I can accept Levi-Strauss’s ideas about men using women as gifts to forge alliances and bride stealing only after tribal rivalries are well established but not as a result of “biological vulnerability in childbirth.”[130] As creators of the hunter-gatherer ‘string economy’ women would have been respected as being integral to band survival.
To understand how honour became measurable and intimately tied up with debt and consequently ownership, G&W explain that the economy of society was ‘human’. You might ask, what about all that evidence for ‘trade’ that has been unearthed since the Palaeolithic? Beads and semi-precious stones turning up far from their source does not mean they are evidence for a commercial transaction. Exchanges over long distances, thousands of years before markets, were one component of the human economy.[131] The purpose of ‘trade’ was to enhance friendly relations. Gift exchange locally facilitated the smooth functioning of a service ‘economy’ but without the financial profit motive. In a human economy money was used “…for social purposes…” including the pricing of specific measurable “…quantities of human dignity.”[132] To try to get to grips with such an alien concept as quantifying monetary equivalence of morality Graeber turns to early medieval Ireland which also functioned as a ‘human’ economy.
We know about the often absurdly detailed legal codes which measured a person’s honour because they were written down form 600 CE. I guess the point Graeber was making in regard to the dawn of patriarchy in early Sumer, was that the innate sexism of the slave girl being the unit of currency in the human economy of medieval Ireland gives us the flavour of the role of honour that pertained in Mesopotamia pre the written record. To continue with the Irish system, honour had a specific price depending on the status of the party aggrieved against. For example, the honour price for a king of which there were many, was seven slave-girls or 21 milk cows and for a wealthy peasant was two and a half cows. Without getting too granular about this, suffice to say that the honour price was based on “…the amount of esteem you had in the eyes of others”[133]. Esteem was calculated precisely by your ability to protect yourself and your dependents from any sort of degradation or insult. If your daughter or wife was raped or a peasant on your estate was attacked it was your honour being violated not the victim’s.
In early Sumer the concept of honour bifurcated into two contradictory meanings. The positive virtue simply meant being true to your word by honouring your commitments. The problematic aspect to it required the kind of violence that reduced humans to commodities. This latter perversion emerged out of men’s sensitivity to assaults on their honour which justified a violent response. When the delicacy of the male ego and the codification of ‘honour price’ coincide with what Lerner described as “…the monetization of social relations…” resulting from the acquisition of slaves, a moral crisis ensued. To put it another way, when the same money that used to measure dignity in the human economy is now used to purchase material goods in the new commercial economy, women bore the brunt of that shift. Slaves were not particularly important as labour but enslaved females were crucial for becoming synonymous with a unit of equivalence. In other words, female humans became currency.
As far as the future of humanity is concerned regarding our propensity to indifference I would like to afford as much agency as possible to past decisions. That way we cannot hide behind evolutionary cultural determinism when making decisions about political arrangements. G&W’s book points to urban cultural alternatives that have been more egalitarian and there’s no reason why we can’t attempt them again. However, when summarizing the complex of processes culminating in patriarchy and the commercial cash economy it is hard not to assert the primacy of cultural evolution. Starting with the taxability of grain and its usefulness for provisioning soldiers whose successful conquests created markets from the theft of looted cities. That process was in turn created by an elaborate administrative system “…whereby thousands of farmers, artisans, traders and labourers were repurposed as subjects…and subordinated to a new form of control.”[134] Of course none of that would have been possible without the first written records of human and material inventory. Thus, the affaires of man do appear to have crashed and blundered into an unfortunate set of circumstances beyond political decision making of any individual or group. Graeber gives the game away when he uses phrases like “…as time went on…” when explaining the metamorphosis of a bridewealth payment to a “… simple payment…” being the “price of a virgin”.[135] To further emphasise the lack of deliberate agency in the creation of cash I find it hard to imagine a situation where a father willingly uses his children to settle debt was a matter of choice rather than the brutal logic derived from the diminution of women’s status. There is Sumerian evidence for fathers selling their children into slavery contemporaneously with the first emergence of money.[136] The overturning of gender relations was integral to the process of de-humanizing society. A state of affaires which has not changed for 4000 years because we refuse to admit the criminal and gendered origins of money.
In trying to answer my original question about how we grew less empathetic to the suffering of others I have traversed the same archaeological terrain which has sought to explain the changing material circumstances which affected our political arrangements. What is troubling for me is, no matter how technically detailed, ground-breaking or theoretically inverting, the recent imaginative inferences are, I am still no closer to an answer. Perhaps an examination of the extent of callous cruelty in the ancient world via Samuel Breiner’s book, Slaughter of the Innocents might provide the impetus for the next chapter. His work looks at how different ancient societies treated children, women and slaves.
There appear to be a number of contradictory behaviours towards children in ancient Egypt. A child “… was not considered human until certain ceremonies were performed.”[137] This meant that parents could sacrifice their child to the gods with impunity– a common practice in the ancient world. How orally handed down stories of capricious gods got to be written down and believed says more about the deliberate means of coercion by elites than the gullibility of the fellahin. Those fictions tell of deviant sexual practices of the gods as well as murder, infanticide, incest, patricide and matricide. Law codes emanating from that kind of behaviour are never going to be very humane. Perversely, according to ancient historians all children born to Egyptian parents must be fed and raised. During the pre-militaristic period in Egypt sons and daughters were treated equally. Slaves, though not numerous, were also treated well. However, all those positive relational aspects were reversed as Dynasties asserted themselves. As an illustration of the celebration of violence in all its grisly detail during the pre-dynastic period in Egypt, 3000-2920BCE, look no further than the Narmer Stela. It is the first recognizable written document from ancient Egypt. And a warning, some readers might find the following information distressing. The triumphant Pharaoh, Narmer, is depicted in full royal regalia viewing his slain enemies, who are lying in two neat rows, bound and naked, their decapitated heads placed between their feet, with their severed genitals protruding from their mouths.
With violence like that sanctioned from the top is it any wonder that children learned to be violent, to despise others and ultimately learned to be abusive parents?[138] The other ancient cultures Breiner covers is Greek, Roman, Hebrew and Chinese. In Hebrew culture, the worst time for children when they were sacrificed and abused was during the biblical period of rigid patriarchy which ended in 4th century BCE. The status and freedoms of women in Periclean Athens was massively reduced. According to an article for the Journal Classical philology, “… they [women] were condemned to comparative seclusion.”[139]
Furthermore, “In Athens, for the most part, women were legal nonentities whom the Greek male excluded from any participation in the political or intellectual life of the city.”[140] So we’ve long known about the appalling state of women and slaves especially in war time ancient Greece yet their philosophy and drama trump a virulent patriarchy.
To sum up, all ancient societies Breiner looked at, treated women, slaves and children worse in their internecine warfare days for Greece and empire building periods for Egypt, Rome, Hebrew and China.
Before concluding this chapter, I would like to briefly reappraise the notion of slavery in ancient societies. Like many categories of freedom and un-freedom, the more culturally specific the enquiry the less binary these labels appear. As Laura Culbertson asserted in the introduction to papers from a seminar in 2010, “Slavery is not in fact definable without reference to relationships within the broader social, economic, and legal concepts that surround it.”[141] What I find interesting about slavery from the ancient Near East is the enormous gulf between not only the status of slaves but also their treatment and economic importance compared to those victims of European colonial masters from 16th to 19th centuries. We are all familiar with appalling conditions on slave ships and the great wealth created by slave labour in the Americas, Caribbean and South East Asia. That knowledge certainly coloured my assumptions about slavery in ancient Mesopotamia. Even though slaves were at the bottom of a deeply hierarchical society they were capable of upward social mobility. So, “…slaves are one social group that was always, and by definition, attached to a household or institution. By those means, slaves were one group that was guaranteed a social status that was not completely or necessarily at the bottom of society.”[142] Owning slaves was far more to do with prestige than economic necessity, especially those with artisanal skills. Your political standing could be enhanced “…by donating slaves to religious institutions (Kleber, seri) or by performing piety through an act of manumission (Babayan 2010), and thus slaves offered value even in their release.” [143]
Previously I have used Graeber to analyse the nexus between the origins of debt and slavery. Another paper from the same seminar also points out that by far the most common source of slavery in Ur III households was debt.[144] Enslavement was also enmeshed in the legal system as punishment for minor and major crimes. Selling yourself into slavery to work off a debt sounds almost reasonable, but enslaving a wife and daughters for a homicide committed by the husband does not. It was “…common practice for parents to sell or pledge their children for debts instead of themselves.”[145] Given that most slave owners were wealthy merchants or upper class, perhaps a period of personal servitude as a cup bearer of barber was not considered so bad.
By trawling through tens of thousands of economic and legal records in cuneiform, incredibly detailed descriptions of specific cases involving slaves have enabled a very comprehensive picture to emerge. One notable instance of enslavement that arose ex delicto (from a crime or transgression) is worth recalling as it illustrates the legal system at least afforded some avenue to dispute a conviction. A court record from the city of Girsu shows “…the enslavement of a wife and her daughters resulted from the fact that her husband committed a murder. Because the culprit himself was already killed under some unknown circumstances, his property and his family were handed over to the sons of the victim. After the flight and the recapture of the culprit’s wife and daughters, they tried to contest their enslavement in court. In spite of repeated attempts to plead their case, they were unsuccessful and their status as slaves was confirmed by the judges.”[146] Clearly the result was not favourable to the wife and daughters but at least they had a process of redress. In amongst these court records are many contestations of slave status which illustrate the mutability of enslavement.
The occupations of slaves also point to a far less binary notion of freedom or liberty. If a freeperson was a skilled craftsperson as a goldsmith and became enslaved but continued to work in a goldsmith’s workshop then his or her material situation might not be all that different. Plenty of slave sale documents attest to those skilled in textile production, livestock breeding and fishing were bought to continue working in those occupations. Other areas include personal hygiene, medicine, beer production, farming and gardening. There is also a record of a slave acting on behalf of an owner builder as a buyer in the sale of an ox.[147] Female slaves are known to have served as wet nurses, nannies, singers and dancers.[148]
I have included these detailed accounts of the actual lived experience of slaves in the third millennium BCE Mesopotamia by way of contrast to abject suffering and immutability of slaves in much later centuries. This observation will fuel a negative answer to my next question I want to research. Now that we know how different cultures from H/G affected the human brain away from sensitivity to the suffering of others, did cruelty diminish from ancient societies to medieval to 18th to 19th century to today? Bearing in mind the differing responses to changing material circumstances sometimes involved human choice while at other times they evolved. If we accept G&W’s thesis that the underlying ethos of accumulation, exploitation, domination and growth has not changed in 4000 years, has there in fact been no growth in empathy for the ‘other’? In addition, did monotheistic religion exacerbate indifference to the other or ameliorate it?
Does the incidence of violent death bear any relation to how much we care for strangers? Pinker concluded that the number of violent deaths per population has declined in the last few hundred years– even with the mega-deaths of the 20th century. War, in and of itself is not really an indicator of a lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Perhaps it is more the motivation to violently conquer, capture and enslave whole towns, that attests to the acceptance of brutality. Before the invention of firearms did the sight of your foe’s severed jugular vein harden you to suffering or, did the image of life ebbing quickly away from your adversary, haunt you enough to soften you. Ancient elites probably always emerged from demonstrations of violence so assembling ever bigger armies to build empires would have been the logical extension to that ethos. Until we had access to ‘letters from the front’ we can never gauge what the peasant/soldier thought of his superiors’ decisions.
Obviously more people are going to die violently when large armies are involved. How the male of our species is motivated to kill and to what extent the individual soldier enjoys the act of killing has been well researched. While the CIA have engaged in torture of Al Qaida suspects and Saudi Arabia still conducts public executions, most societies on the planet enjoy blood lust vicariously through the cinema. I like to imagine that wholesale slaughter of non-combatants by the victorious power has declined over the millennia. However, deliberately bombing non-military targets in WWII, various genocides of the 20th century and ‘terrorist’ atrocities and intra-state insurgencies up until the present day require me to, at least, modify that thought. John Gray argues persuasively that the prosecution of conflict during the last 50 or so years has often involved targeting non-combatants.[149]( As I write Putin’s ‘military operation’ has bombed countless schools, hospitals and civilian homes.) As vile as Assad’s treatment of his own population was, I still do not think these 21st century examples are as routine as massacres in previous eras. Colin Wilson’s Criminal History of Mankind (1984) details arbitrary pillage, slaughter and rape as standard operating military strategy from the Ancient Greeks onwards.
Apart from the ravages of war the sports arenas of Antiquity flowed with blood for the enjoyment of spectators. Citing Aztec priests opening a victim’s chest with an obsidian blade as a ‘human sacrifice’ is problematic. According to a lecturer in archaeology of Latin America, Aztec soldiers’ aim in battle was to capture not kill combatants. The killing of the prisoners was delayed until their death in a temple could be performed as an act of war but not sacrifice. Her point is that compared to the vast numbers of battlefield deaths in European wars the number of fatalities in the Mesoamerican equivalent was much smaller.[150] However, when it comes to the well preserved 500-year-old bodies of a 13-year-old girl and another 4–5-year-old girl and a boy, the archaeological, radiological and biological evidence is unequivocal. The term human sacrifice is appropriate in this case.[151] Maybe the elites sincerely believed in the necessity to appease gods in this way. Even if the parents of “donated” children received socio-economic benefits, “…the ritual would unavoidably…{…}…have created a climate of fear.”[152] The parents had to endure a year of their selected child on death row as the child’s status was elevated via dietary changes and, as the end approached, much consumption of coca leaves and alcohol.
We’re all familiar with the ancient Romans’ spectacle of gladiatorial combat via Hollywood. Crowds would have enjoyed the smell and horror of burning heretics in Seville from 1481onwards. By way of a jolly amusing diversion for a bunch of aristocrats in 16th Century England, after dinner they would laugh uproariously at the screeching suffering of a cat being dangled at the end of a rope tied to a stick above the flames of burning faggots. Perhaps the cat in question belonged to a witch whose similar fate was enjoyed by ordinary townsfolk. As entertained as we are by the grizzly deaths in Game of Thrones, I’m not sure we would tolerate the simulated torture of animals.
Some contemporary historians reckon that the 17th century laws of war assumed that if a town was offered a peaceable surrender but refused, it was legitimate for the siege army to massacre at will on breaching entry to said town. In the case of Cromwell’s retaliatory massacre, in the autumn of 1649, of Catholics in Drogheda, there are plenty of historians who question that legitimacy.
Conclusions.
In trying to answer the question how we became less empathetic to the suffering of others I have equated that quest with changing political arrangements from early sedentism to the late Bronze Age. Of all the specialist scientific advances that have radically altered our understanding of the ancient past I found Jennifer Pournell’s use of new CORONA georeferencing technologies, palaeobotanical, climatic and geomorphological evidence the most compelling. Her analysis overturned the traditional view that the lower reaches of the fertile crescent required centralised planning to construct irrigation which led to hierarchies of control. Regarding the late Pleistocene economy, Elizabeth Barber’s analysis of child rearing compatibility with the creation of string-based products, was pivotal in recognising the primacy of women in propelling humans’ technological and social development. When women succumbed to a patriarchy initiated by the transition from ‘human economy’ to ‘market economy’, empathy for the other collapsed. This take on early commodification and the creation of money out of debt was provided by Graeber’s book on the first 5000 years of debt.
Adam Green’s work on refuting the notion that complex urban societies must involve top-down governance by a close examination of digs at Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan was revealing. G&W ran with this idea and provided evidence that Pre-historic Ukraine, Mesopotamia in the Uruk period and Teotihuacan from 100 BCE to 600 CE, all governed without overlords. The chief take-away from the Dawn of Everything for me, is a refutation of the inevitable. Therein lies hope for the future such that we can look to the past and see that it doesn’t have to be necessarily so.
I have really enjoyed trying to piece together multidisciplinary strands to challenge traditional stories of human’s development or regression from the Neolithic to the Bronze age. The answer to my question about empathy cannot be monothetic. The trouble is, the resultant intellectual tapestry is so rich and complex that I have done no more than bury rather than reveal the answer. But still, maybe that’s a necessary process to ask better questions for the next chapter.
[1] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The dawn of Everything; A New history of Humanity, 2021, Penguin
[2] Ibid, p. 522
[3] Ibid, p. 523
[4] Ibid, p. 13. Quoting Pinker.
[5] Ibid, p. 482
[6] Emotion; the Science of Sentiment, Dylan Evans, 2001, OUP, p. 60
[7] Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions, L.Al-Shawaf and D. Lewis, 2017, Springer Link
[8] Found at Wadi Khareitoun, Judea near Bethlehem. Dated 9000 BCE
[9] Did laughter make the mind? Chris Knight, Aeon Magazine, Feb. 2019
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SnI0PKXqhc
[11] Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence. Peter Gray, American Journal of Play, Spring 2009,
[12] D of E, G&W p. 501.
[13] Crevecoeur, I., Dias-Meirinho, MH., Zazzo, A. et al. New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene based on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba. Sci Rep 11, 9991 (2021).
[14] Paulissen, Etienne and Pierre M. Vermeersch. In the Egyptian Nile Valley During the Pleistocene. Prehistory of Arid North Africa: essays in honour of Fred Wendorf,29.
[15] Ibid
[16] Infanticide and Human Self-domestication, Eric O. Kimber, Gordon M. Myers, Arthur J. Robson, Frontiers in Psychology, May 2021
[17] Ibid
[18] Genes for Aggressive Behaviour Sara Palumbo et al, Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, June 2018
[19] Humans Crave Violence, Jeanna Bryner, Live Science, Jan 2008
[20] Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Evolution. John Hawks et al, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol.17, issue 1. Jan. 2000 pp2-22
[21] Genetic traces of ancient demography, Henry C. Harpending et al, PNAS Feb. 17, 1998
[22] PNAS, Human Population Dynamics in Europe over the last Glacial Maximum, Miikka, Tallavaara et al, 2015
[23] Population structure, infant transport and infanticide among Pleistocene modern hunter-gatherers, W.W. Denham, University of Chicago Journal of anthropological research, Vol30, No. 3, 1974.
[24] Ibid
[25] Slaughter of the Innocents: Child abuse through the ages and today. S.J. Breiner, 1990
[26] CARTA: Violence in Human Evolution– C. Boehm: Warfare and Feuding in Pleistocene Society (UCTV) 2014
[27] The Special Power of Human Tribalism– Richard Wrangham, The Leakey Foundation, video 2020.
[28] Ibid
[29] Ibid
[30] Ibid
[31] CARTA: Violence in Human Nature– Robert Kelly: Do Hunter-gatherers Tell Us About Human Nature? (UCTV) 2014
[32] Debt: the first 5000years, D. Graeber, Melville House, 2012.
[33] John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, 2009, Simon and Schuster.p.115
[34] Creating a Compassionate World: conflicts between caring and sharing versus controlling and holding. Paul Gilbert, frontiers in psychology, Feb. 2021.
[35] Ibid. Physiologies of Caring
[36] Ibid. A Challenge: The Expense
[37] Ibid. The Phenotypic and Epigenetic Effects of Caring
[38] G&W p. 337
[39] If you want the correct nomenclature Ohalo sits in the Kebaran period 21000 BCE- 16000 BCE of the Levartine Sequence. More familiar ‘cultures’ include Natufian, PPNA, PPNB and Pottery Neolithic.
[40] G&W (p. 233)
[41] Ibid. (p. 229)
[42] Weiss, E. et al. (2008), “Plant-food preparation area on an Upper Paleolithic brush hut floor at Ohalo II, Israel”, Journal of Archaeological Science, 35 (8): 2400–2414,
[43] Judith K. Brown, A Note on the Division of Labour by Sex, American Anthropologist, vol. 72, no. 5, 1970, pp. 1073–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/671420. Accessed 22 Jul. 2022.
[44] Elizabeth Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20000 Years. Women, cloth and society in early times. W.W. Norton and Co. 1995.
[45] Hunter-Gatherers vs Farmers, p.10
[46] Sofija Stenafoniv, The Neolithic Artefact that Ensured Our Survival, University of Belgrade, BBC Reel, July 2022
[47] Thea Molleson, The Eloquent Bones of Aby Hureyra, Scientific American, August 1994
[48] Jerry Glover, The Rise and Fall of Gobekli Tepe, Academia.edu, 2017
[49] From the preface, Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO.
[50] As already noted G&W would question my simplistic linear progression of those events.
[51] P. Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, Cambridge Uni. Press, 2019
[52] UNESCO publication, intro, 1991
[53] Matossian, Mary A. K. (1997). Shaping World History: Breakthroughs in Ecology, Technology, Science, and Politics. New York: M. E. Sharpe
[54] Chunrong Zhao, Deconstructing essentialism: translocality as a concept to in the study of eclectic material cultures, July 2020 edition of The Jugaad Project
[55] Martin Furholt, Mobility and Social Change: Understanding the European Neolithic Period after the Archaeogenetic Revolution. Springer Link 2021
[56] Ibid
[57] Ibid
[58] Ibid
[59] https://www.timemaps.com/encyclopedia/pastoralists/
[60] Professor Kristian Kristiansen in Science Daily, Uni. Copenhagen, 2017
[61] Ibid
[62] David Reich, A Tale of Two Subcontinents: The Parallel Prehistories of Europe and S. Asia, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pra7YZWVc-s
[63] Diachenko, Aleksandr; Francesco Menotti (2012). “The gravity model: monitoring the formation and development of the Tripolye culture giant-settlements in Ukraine”. Journal of Archaeological Science. 39
[64] D of E, G&W, p. 288
[65] Ibid. p. 295
[66] David Christian, Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History, Journal of World History Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 1-26 (26 pages) (Accessed via Jstore)
[67] Livui Giosan, Climate Change Led to Collapse of Indus Valley Civilization, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, May 2012
[68] Reich, David, Who We Are And How We Got Here. Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. OUP, 2018. P. 123 paperback edition.
[69] Ibid p. 141
[70] Jared Diamond, Collapse, Penguin, 2005
[71] Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, Scribe, 2016
[72] Sharad Patil, Problem of Slavery in Ancient India, Social Scientist Vol. 1, No. 11 (Jun., 1973), pp. 32-48
[73] Green, Adam S. (2021). Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization. Journal of Archaeological Research.
[74] Ibid
[75] Ibid. p.299 authors explain Corvee labour
[76] Andrew Curry, Gobekli Tepe: the World’s First Temple? Smithsonian Magazine, 2008
[77] Jose M. R. Arce and Michael J. Winkelman, Psychedelics, Sociality and Human Evolution, Frontiers in Psychology, September 2021
[78] Chris Fowler, Ontology in Neolithic Britain and Ireland: Beyond Animism, 2021, Religions, MDPI
[79] Neyir Kolankaya-Bostanci, The Evidence of Shamanism Rituals in Early Prehistoric Periods of Europe and Anatolia, dergipoark.org. 2014
[80] Jerry Glover, The Rise and Fall of Gobekli Tepe, 2017, Academia.edu
[81] Ira Spar, Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
April 2009
[82] Mander,P. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. University of London; Cambridge Vol. 66, Iss. 1, (Feb 2003): 66-67
[83] G&W p. 521
[84] Helen Chapin Metz, Iraq Country Studies, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress,1988.
[85] Ibid.
[86] K.K. Hirst, Eridu (Iraq): The earliest City in Mesopotamia and the World, Thought Co, 2019
[87] Jerry Glover, The Rise and Fall of Gobekli Tepe, 2017, Academia.edu
[88] Ibid
[89] Ibid
[90] Andrew Curry, Gobekli Tepe: the World’s First Temple? Smithsonian Magazine, 2008
[91] Jerry Glover, The Rise and Fall of Gobekli Tepe, 2016, Academia.edu
[92] Lee Clare, interview in Arkeolojik Haber, 2019
[93] Lee Clare, video with Pre-History Guys, 2022
[94] Lee Clare, interview in Arkeolojik Haber, 2019
[95] E.B.Banning, So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East. Uni Chicago Press Journals, Vol 52, No. 5, Oct 2011
[96] Ibid
[97] Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the origins of Agriculture, Cambridge Uni. Press, 2003
[98] Chris Kark, Archaeologists from Stanford find an 8,000-year-old ‘goddess figurine’ in central Turkey, Stanford News, Sept. 29 2016
[99] Bernhard Brosius, From Cayonu to Catalhoyuk, Ancient Communism website, 2005
[100] Y.S. Erdal and O. D. Erdal, Organised Violence in Anatolia: A retrospective research on the injuries from the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, 2012, Science Direct
[101] Y. S. Erdal, Bone or flesh: de-fleshing and post depositional treatments at Kortik Tepe (south-eastern Anatolia, PPNA period) European Journal of archaeology 18 (1) 2015, 4–32, Academia.edu
[102] Ibid
[103] M. G. Drahor et al, Integrated usage of geophysical prospection techniques in Höyük (tepe, tell)-type archaeological settlements, Archeosciences, 2009.
[104] Gunes Duru, Sedentism and Solitude: Exploring the impact of Private Space on Social Cohesion in the Neolithic, Research gate, 2018.
[105] Ibid Drahor et al
[106] Ian Hodder, What we learned from 25 years of research at Catalhoyuk, Oriental Institute, video on YouTube, 2020
[107] Ibid
[108] A.P. Taylor, Parasites in Ancient Poo Reflect Neolithic Settlers’ Lifestyle, The Scientist, July 21 2019
[109] Ibid. Ian Hodder
[110] Jessica Pearson et al, Food and social complexity at Çayönü Tepesi, southeastern Anatolia: Stable isotope evidence of differentiation in diet according to burial practice and sex in the early Neolithic, journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2013. Pub Med.
[111] Ibid
[112] Ibid.
[113] Dr Jennifer Pournelle, Ancient cities sprung from marshes, UCS School of Environment, video on YouTube 3013.
[114] J.C. Scott, Against the Grain, Yale, 2017, (p.89)
[115] Jennifer Pournelle, Marshland of Cities: Deltaic landscapes and the evolution of Civilization, Dissertation for University of California, 2003, Academia.org
[116] Ibid
[117] Stein, personal communication to Algaze 2001, in Pournelle, Ibid.
[118] Zsoka Vasarhely and Istvan Scheuring, Behavioural Specialization During the Neolithic– An Evolutionary Model, 2018, Frontiers in Sociology
[119] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New history of Humanity, 2021, Penguin Random House
[120] Ibid (p. 522)
[121] J.C. Scott, Against the Grain, Yale, 2017, (p.95)
[122] Helen Chapin Metz, Iraq Country Studies, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1988.
[123] Adam Green, podcast on Indus valley Civilization, Cambridge Tides of History, 2022
[124] P. Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, Cambridge Uni. Press, 2019
[125] Debt: The First 5000 Years. D.Graeber, 2014 (p. 178)
[126] Ruby Rohrlich, State Formation in Sumer and the Subjugation of Women, Feminist Studies Journal, Vol.6, (Spring 1980) pp. 76-102
[127] Ibid
[128] Martin Furholt, Re-conceptualising Stepp migrations: and alternative narrative of third millennium BC mobility processes, Springer Link, 2021
[129] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford Uni Press, 1986
[130] Ibid. p. 49
[131] G&W p. 23
[132] Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011 (p. 176)
[133] Ibid. p. 172
[134] J.C. Scott, Against the Grain, Yale, 20817, (p.140)
[135] Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011 (p. 179)
[136] Graeber, D. Debt the First 5000 years, 2014, (p. 129.)
[137] Samuel J. Breiner, Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Through the Ages and Today, Springer, 1990
[138] Ibid.
[139] A. W. Gomme, The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries, Classical Philology Vol 20 No 1 1925
[140] William J. O’Neal, The Status of Women in Ancient Athens, International Social Science Review, Vol. 68 No.3, 1993, pp. 115-121
[141] Slaves and Households in the Near East, editor Laura Culbertson.
Papers from the Oriental Institute seminar held at the Oriental Institute of the university of Chicago March 2010, from the introduction.
[142] Ibid
[143] Ibid
[144] Hans Neumann, Slavery in Private Households Toward the end of the Third Millennium BC. Same seminar
[145] Ibid
[146] Ibid
[147] Ibid
[148] Ibid
[149] Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war, Guardian, 14 March 2015
[150] Dr Elizabeth Graham, There is no such thing as ‘Human Sacrifice’. Mexicolore website, 2009
[151] Andrew S. Wilson et al, Archaeological, radiological, and biological evidence offer insight into Inca child sacrifice, PNAS, 2013
[152] Ibid, Discussion.
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