As the account on carrying capacity shows, agriculture enables a community to feed a larger number of people on the same territory. But what could have been the reason to increase the carrying capacity in the first place? On this, there are several different hypotheses. One, held by many, presupposes scarcity. That is, within a given area, either the population is growing, or natural resources are dwindling. Agriculture then is a way to combat scarcity. Another interesting hypothesis presupposes the wish to produce a surplus as an insurance against lean years. This, however, causes the population to increase, and if there is nowhere for this extra population to go, the population density increases. Before long, there is no turning back: the choice is between carrying on with agriculture or starvation.
Whether agriculture arises out of scarcity or an attempt to avoid scarcity, it can only do so in favorable climatic and geographical circumstances. In the climatic and vegetation belts in the north (tundra, taiga, or desert), small groups go on hunting and gathering, with the possible addition of some stock breeding. As already indicated in the preceding text, Central Asia and Iran have a very limited agricultural potential, and thus a very limited carrying capacity. In the steppes of Central Asia, nomads took to extensive cattle breeding. It is only on the margins of the Eurasian continent that agriculture can flourish. In the Near East, about 8000 BC, at the end of a long drawn-out process, a number of plants and animals have become domesticated, especially wheat, barley, sheep, and goats. From 6500 BC, agriculture makes headway in Europe and in what is now West Pakistan; in 5000 BC, millet is cultivated in Northern China (along the Huang He or Yellow River) and rice in Southern China and East Asia. These dates are, it should be noted, provisional: all the time new archaeological discoveries push back the earliest dates of agriculture in Asia. Possibly, we are dealing here with developments independent of what happened in the Near East. That is certainly the case in New Guinea, where an independent horticulture develops from around 7000 BC. Africa enters into the story rather late: from the 3rd millennium BC onward, millet and sorghum are cultivated. Central America and South America are a world apart: from the 7th millennium BC onward, products such as beans, peppers, potatoes, manioc, and maize are domesticated; cattle breeding, however, always remained relatively unimportant. In due course, the specific New World agriculture would give rise to complex cultures independent of Eurasian or African developments.
Figure 3 A Sumerian frieze showing dairy production (c. 2600-2350 BC). This Sumerian frieze of limestone inlaid with bitumen and copper, from a sanctuary at Tell Ubaid, near Ur, now in the British Museum, has been dated to between 2600 and 2350, and thus is the oldest known depiction of the milking of cows (on the right-hand side) and what probably is the churning of butter (on the left). Dairy production, the spinning of wool and the usage of animals as draft or pack animals and as mounts are the most important outcomes of the so-called secondary products revolution. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Domestication is not a single event: it is an ongoing process. Vines and olives, for example, were domesticated in Syria and Egypt in about 3000 BC. Newly domesticated animals and plants go on dispersing: thus, the cultivation of vines and olives reaches Greece in about 2500 BC, and enables the characteristically Mediterranean polyculture of grain, vines, and olives to develop. Also, the so-called secondary products revolution, which followed the original domestication, was as important as the domestication itself. During this secondary products revolution, in fact not so much a revolution as a slow evolution, ever more secondary products were extracted from domesticated animals and plants, such as dairy products, wool, hair, and linen, and animals were put to work as draft animals in front of sledges, carts and plows, and as mounts or beasts of burden.
to agriculture, sedentary societies arose on the periphery of the huge Eurasian continent: in Europe, in the Near East, in India and Pakistan, and in East and Southeast Asia. These sedentary societies, quickly developing into states, were largely dependent on farmers. The northernmost parts of Eurasia were too sparsely populated to allow for state formation, and the Central Asian heartland became, as was stated earlier, the realm of preMongolian stock-raising nomads. Different climatic zones give rise to different societies: two basic economic systems can be distinguished, that of the cattle-herding nomads who mainly exploit the natural resources in a certain area and then move on, and that of the farmers who invest in the land they work, by weeding, plowing, manuring and so on, and thus tend to stay put. Both systems usually exist symbiotically side by side. Nevertheless, there is also endemic conflict between the haves of the periphery and the have-nots of the center. In these conflicts, the peoples of Central Asia sometimes prevailed, as when in the last half of the second millennium BC, groups that were later to be called Iranians and Indo-Aryans turned to the south and established themselves in Iran and India. Also, from about 1200 BC, Mongolian nomads, and in the first centuries AD, the Turks, played an important part. But usually the successes obtained by the invaders from Central Asia were short-lived, as the communities of farmers on the periphery were so populous: the invaders were almost always absorbed by the groups they tried to subject.
World History
