How did we get here? Prehistory and the birth of Civilisation

I'm starting this because I want to write out my thoughts. I want to unfold my presumptions in order to bring to light my mistakes, my errors, my ideological compromises, the holes in my thinking. I'm trying to learn, and to beginning by working out what I already think I know. So I'm starting from the beginning, as far as I understand it. I fully expect that I'm wrong about the majority of the things I write. As I learn more I'll be able to reflect on what I used to believe and contrast it with the things I'm reading and hearing and thinking. The story I write here is going to be a mix of economics, history, materialism, politics, psychology, folk stories and spirituality, sociology. Please don't take anything I write as true without thinking and researching for yourself, because that's what I'm doing too. I will later do separate posts about each of the books and authors I touch on. This is a *very* unfinished and brief summary.

So without further ado: How did we get here? The story so far.

At some point in the history of Humankind we emerged from the jungle/savannah of Africa and started to spread across the world, maybe 100,000 years ago. The why of this is interesting in itself and I don't yet know much about it. Possibly some degree of climate change, population growth and competition, following the animals we were hunting, or, if you listen to Terrence McKenna, a search for magic mushrooms. Over the course of maybe a couple of hundred thousand years or so humans reached all of the corners of the Earth. Most of the societies of this time were some mix of hunter-gatherer, nomadic and then later pastoralists, with different degrees of agriculture emerging in different places.

At such a time there were thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of discrete cultures around the world, each with their rich traditions and modes of life. The most recent 10,000 years, with the development of 'civilisation' (which we call 'history'), represent such an incredible blur, such a mad, chaotic, unbelievable change in the natural history of species on this planet that it's almost impossible to grasp. Suffice it to say that we've gone from a world where humans, living in a myriad of cultures, were one of many creatures in an incredibly diverse ecosystem, to one where the whole earth ecology and economy is gripped in a single, totalising, self-destructive culture hell-bent on turning every last living and dead thing on this planet into a method of providing human food, and in so doing has enslaved almost every human and animal and plant on the face of the Earth. This culture, and the stories it is telling us, is leading us towards a desert planet. It's the story of the how and why of this that I wish to examine.

I'm going to do a whole other post about interpretations of the biblical story, which I've ripped wholesale, with some modifications, from the fascinating books 'Ishmael' and 'Story of B' by Daniel Quinn. He claims that there grew in the fertile crescent a culture, which for the sake of concision I will call 'Totalitarian Agriculture'. This was a culture where the people decided to get the entirety of their food through agriculture, and expand and destroy any opposition or competition to this food. It works as another term for 'civilisation' in the normal sense, and in the books Quinn argues that the 'East' and 'West' are twin cultures that resulted from totalitarian agriculture. This culture spread across the face of the Earth until the situation which we know now, where it is almost the only culture left - for this reason, Totalitarian.

It appears that at this time the division of sexual labour occurs. The argument is that most hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies tend towards matriarchy and 'fierce egalitarianism' or the compulsory and total sharing of property within the tribe. This goes also for sexual relationships and the raising of children, which is everyone's responsibility. As such, although their are different relationship practises and marriage customs in all sorts of societies around the world, most cultures do not require people to refrain from sex outside of marriage. As Ocalan writes in the book 'Liberating Life: Women's Revolution':

"The 5000-year-old history of civilisation is essentially the history of the enslavement of woman...During the Neolithic period a complete communal social order, so called "primitive socialism“, was created around woman. This social order saw none of the enforcement practices of the state order; yet it existed for thousands of years. It is this long-lasting order that shaped humanity‘s collective social consciousness; and it is our endless yearning to regain and immortalise this social order of equality and freedom that led to our construct of paradise. Primitive socialism, characterised by equality and freedom, was viable because the social morality of the matriarchal order did not allow ownership, which is the main factor behind the widening of the social divisions. Division of labour between the sexes, the other issue related to this divide, was not yet based on ownership and power relations. Private relationships inside the group had not yet developed. Food that had been gathered or hunted belonged to all. The children belonged to the clan. No man or woman was the private property of any one person. In all these matters, the community, which was still small and did not have a huge production capacity, had a solid common ideological and material culture. The fundamental principles sustaining society were sharing and solidarity – ownership and force, as life threatening dangers, would have disrupted this culture."

Ocalan argues that it is due to the male hunting culture that patriarchy develops, via the elder male shaman who creates the ideological arguments for the preeminence of men, and that their skills in warlike activity lead to the development of warlike gods and culture. Then the male powers take over the primitive agricultural society that previously held the mother-godness as central.

In Sex at Dawn (1) they argue that monogamy, and patriarchal society as a whole, developed with agriculture specifically. Only with agriculture did people settle and start to protect land as property, which was handed down over generations. The development of a warrior caste, in order to protect land from others, led to the preeminence of male fighters, who came to control social decisions. As they were rewarded for their service with land, they developed an interest in knowing that the child of their partner was theirs, and therefore in controlling women's sexuality. The division of labour in which the mother becomes the primary carer and men become fighters thus develops.

This is not specifically an argument against all agriculture, or a suggestion that all agriculture leads to Totalitarianism. There were other forms of agriculture. In Britain, Francis Pryor(2) argues that the ancients used trained wolves to help them herd migrating deer etc. and essentially restructured the land in order to move their prey where they wanted them. They were early animal farmers. Waves of agriculturalists, in the sense we usually mean it, possibly moved out from the fertile crescent and spread new ideas and methods of agriculture, but so far I don't know to what extent different agricultural cultures developed. Was the Irish celtic civilisation Totalitarian? I don't know enough but I don't believe so. I don't know to what extent we would include the civilisations of Africa or Americas as Totalitarian Agriculturalists or not. I've heard it said, though without much authority, that the Amazon was developed into essentially a garden where the food and medicinal plants that people needed were everywhere to be found, without destroying the local ecosystems. It's possible that North American agriculture was not at all a totalising one. Howard Zinn's People's History of America tells of the societies of the Carribean met (and exterminated) by Columbus, which certainly had agriculture and more or less egalitarian societies. Similarly we can read accounts of the societies of the aboriginal peoples of the North American continent. A book called Dark Emu which is on my radar but I haven't yet read apparently tells the story of the development of a highly complex nomadic agriculture in Australia, which was subsequently destroyed by the European settlers, and would further complicate this story. Each of these societies had developed greater or lesser centralisation of power, advancement of technology, patriarchal societies, private property or not. Each would require investigation in turn.

In any case both books argue that private property and inheritance are tied to the development of patriarchy and agriculture. And that in the fertile crescent all of these develop under the influence of the city-states with their God-Kings. The development of monotheism seems to in some way reflect the entrenchment of absolute hierachies into the power of individual rulers. Just as we see a transition from Gods of the Earth to Gods of the Sky during the transition to agriculture, we also see a transition from many Gods to a single God during the transition to civilisation. This is a rough rule only, which we can think of many exceptions to. This society then spreads to South Asia, the Mediterranean, and then further abroad with successive empires.

So we have gone from the first emergence of humankind out of Africa to the development of city states, empires, godkings, patriarchy and agriculture. The scene is set for the history of the history of the early civilisations.

(1) I refer to 'Sex at Dawn' by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, and also to things that I've read in 'Debt, the First 5000 Years' by David Graeber, and 'A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things' by Raj Patel and Jason Moore. I'm going to have to reread each of these because it's been a while and I can't remember where I read what.
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qZo0_YaBhc

Notes from other books to come:
A Radical History of the World by Neil Faulkner,
A People's History of the World by Chris Harman
Debt, the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Notes from 'A Radical History of the World' Part 1.

Faulkner N, 2018. Marxist historian. As he admits in his introduction, the book is to some degree European or Anglo-centric. His approach is that "history is continuously created and recreated by conscious, collective human action... the struggles of the common people - slaves and serfs, handloom weavers and mine workers, women fighting oppression, black people fighting racism, colonised people fighting imperialism... drive the historical process."

The history begins with the various homo species expanding over the Earth (possibly driven by climate change) and the emergence of homo sapiens, who live for a time with and interbreed with homo neanderthal and others but ultimately either wipe out or at least out live all the other homo species. The adaptations that homo species have are enlarged brains, the capacity to communicate, tool making. Homo sapiens are the most adaptable, and at the end of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, essentially the only species.

The success of sapiens as hunter gatherers leads to extinction (circa 10,000 years ago) of most big game across the world, the wiping out of the mammoth, giant deer, etc. The combination of this and climate change leads to famine and a drive to change the way of life. Homo Sapiens develop pasturalism on the one hand and horticulture on the other in Asia (although it also develops independently in various places). Horticulture leads to the first surpluses, grain silos, and specialisation of labour to a never before seen scale. Population increase follows surpluses and traps all agricultural cultures to continue doing so forever more as no other way of life can support the larger populations.

Farming spread from central and west Asia in waves, taking thousands of years to spread across the continents. Different cultures adopted these new technologies at different times as the ecologies / environment required it. Larger populations destroy ecologies as land becomes scarcer and farming degrades the soil. This leads to the development of territories and property, which must be defended. The first wars occur during these periods as raiding parties seek to steal surpluses and communities decided to wipe out opposition for control of land resources. Society begins to develop primitive classes in the form of warriors, chieftans and religious leaders. [Presumably early agricultural societies push out other hunter gatherers by chopping down forests, clearing land etc., putting a pressure on huntergatherers to adopt farming methods. Possibly this also leads to wars].

The combination of animal knowledge and metalworking leads to the invention of the plough. Combination of herding and farming regenerates the field and leads to greater surpluses. Hand-based horticulture gives ways to the tilling of fields, and this leads to the formation of Patriarchy. Previously societies had gendered division of labour with adult women spending much of their lives pregnant or suckling, and therefore predominantly employed gathering rather than hunting, however both forms of work are seen as equally valuable. Even in early horticultural communities women can look after babies while hoeing, deweeding, planting etc. But the plough requires heavy manual labour and the management of large beasts like ox, difficult to do while looking after children, and the control of this is mostly given to men. Additionally the development of the warrior casts, necessary to protect surpluses from neighbours, moves the balance of power to men. Matrilineal/matriarchal societies become increasingly patriarchal/patrilineal: for men to pass on 'property' to their children, they begin to control women's reproduction in order to know who is the father.

The combination of the above technologies and social organisation leads to the 'urban revolution' around 5,000 years ago, which produces the first class societies. Most have some combination of god-kings, priesthood, warrior, free citizen, artisan, serfs and slaves. This develops first in Sumer (Southern Iraq) but in a similar time period in Pakistan, China, Mesopotamia, Egypt and others, and does so independently - civilisation does not 'spread' so much as pop up where the circumstances create it. Civilisations war with each other, engage in long distance trade, annex regions for control of resources (metal, timber, etc) with their standing armies and demand tributes, and ultimately, collapse. Over the period called the Bronze age empires rise and fall repeatedly without great change in technology or social organisation.

Faulkner outlines three engines of historical progress:

1. Technique, the continuing accumulation of knowledge that makes possible better control over nature.

2. Struggle among rulers for wealth and power - either within the ruling class (struggles between eg. different aristocratic families) or between ruling factions i.e. war between rival states and empires.

3. Class struggle within society, serfs against lords, slaves against pharaohs, etc.

[Why does he not include climate as one of the drivers of history?]

Each of these moves differently at different times and places, and so each historical moment has to be considered on its own grounds. What is the state of technique in each historical place and moment? What is the struggle between rulers at each time and place? What is going on in the class struggle? What is the relation between each of them? Therefore, each moment in history is different and history is complex. But nonetheless general patterns can be interpreted.

For example throughout the bronze age the ruling classes were generally conservative in the sense of suspicious of new technology, and therefore hindered technical development. Surpluses were invested into armies and other forms of ideological control, such as religions and their temples or pyramids. This in turn limited technological growth by mystifying the nature of the universe. These ideological forms make scientific progress more difficult. As ruling classes compete with each other they have to amass greater surpluses. Without improving technology they have to further oppress lower classes, squeezing them for ever more productivity through taxation. This drives the development of class struggle, pressuring slaves/serfs/workers to strike and rebel, and further reduces the opportunity for development of technique.

Egypt develops glass (a luxury good), Babylonians accounting (a way to measure wealth) and Phoenicians writing (a way to record it). Technology develops to some extent, but only to the needs of the ruling classes and not to improve productivity of farmers or manual labourers. The development of revolutionary technology has often occurred at the periphery of empires for this reason, which has enabled raiders, barbarians, pirates to develop technologies to attack empires and undermine them. Internal conflict in an empire or class conflict make them vulnerable to aggression from neighbouring elites, particularly if these have improved weaponry.

Empires periodically rise and fall as these social orders lead to stagnation, which often lead to climate degradation, famine, rebellion and/or invasion by neighbours and collapse.

Around BC 1,300 the late Bronze age empires begin to collapse, and the invention of iron working starts to spread. Iron is plentiful, harder than bronze, and can be used to create tools and weapons. As the technique for high temperature furnaces spreads it democratises access to metal, improving farming techniques. Faulkner argues that Iron working leads to smaller polities and less top-down societies.