as contentious as other aspects of early human history. For example, small stone, ivory, bone, or clay figures of women, often with enlarged breasts, buttocks, and/or stomach, dating from the later Paleolithic period (roughly 33,000–9,000 BCE) have been found in many parts of Europe. These were dubbed “Venus figures” by nineteenth-century archaeologists, who thought they represented Paleolithic standards of female beauty just as the goddess Venus represented classical standards (Figure 3.1). Some scholars have interpreted them, as well as later Neolithic figurines of women, as fertility goddesses, evidence of people’s beliefs in a powerful female deity. Others view them as aids to fertility, carried around by women hoping to have children – or perhaps hoping not to have more. Perhaps they were made by women looking at their own bodies in mid-life, with the rounded form of most women who have given birth, and represent hopes for good health during aging. Or they were sexualized images of women carried around by men, a sort of Paleolithic version of the centerfold in a men’s magazine. Or perhaps they might have represented different things to different people. Small clay figurines of women from Mesoamerica and coastal Ecuador in the second millennium BCE have been similarly interpreted in a range of ways: as fertility emblems, ritual objects, models of sexuality, and aids to pregnancy.
Figure 3.1 Venus of Willendorf, c. 23,000 BCE.
This small limestone figurine of a woman, made about 25,000 years ago, was unearthed at an archaeological site at Willendorf, Austria. Its large breasts and stomach, and the plaited hair that continues across the face, have given rise to many theories, but like all “Venus figures,” who made it and for what purposes are unknown. Wikimedia Commons. Source, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.
The painted, carved, and otherwise decorated objects and locations from the later Paleolithic may have had ritual purposes, but they are also products of imagination, reason, pride, mischeviousness, and a range of emotions (including boredom). Objects modified in a particular way or by talented individuals – what we might now call “luxuries” or “art” – conveyed status and prestige, which is why they show up in burials, including those of women.
Domestication
Foraging remained the basic way of life for most of human history, and for groups living in extreme environments, such as tundras or deserts, it was the only possible way to survive. In some places, however, the natural environment provided enough food that people could become more settled. About 15,000 years ago, as the earth’s climate entered a warming phase, more parts of the world were able to support sedentary or semi-sedentary groups of foragers. Archaeological sites in many places begin to include storage pits, bins, and other sorts of containers, as well as grindstones. They show evidence that people were intensifying their work to get more food from the surrounding area, preparing a wide range of foods out of hundreds of different ingredients, acquiring more objects, and building more permanent housing.
Sedentism used to be seen as a result of the plant and animal domestication that scholars use to separate the Neolithic from the Paleolithic, but in many places it preceded intentional crop-raising by thousands of years, so the primary line of causation runs the other way: people began to raise crops because they were living in permanent communities. Thus people were “domesticated” before plants and animals were. They developed socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures for village life, such as ways to handle disputes or to make decisions about community resources.
Sedentary villages grew first in an area archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent, which runs from present-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan north to Turkey and then south to the Iran–Iraq border. Here beginning about 10,000 BCE, people built houses and larger buildings, and used digging sticks, hoes, and other tools to gather wild wheat, barley, and legumes, along with flax, with which they made linen cloth. The population grew, but when they needed more food, instead of moving to a new area – the solution that foragers relied on when faced with the problem of food scarcity – people chose to stay put, with the physical and social structures of the sedentary villages they had built. They developed a different way to increase the food supply to keep up with population growth – plant and animal domestication – thus beginning cycles of expanding population and intensification of land use that have continued to today. They saved some seeds for planting, selecting certain ones in order to get crops that had favorable characteristics, such as larger edible parts or kernels clustered together that ripened all at one time and did not just fall on the ground, qualities that made harvesting more efficient. Through this human intervention, certain crops became domesticated, modified by selective breeding so as to serve human needs.
A similar process – first sedentism, then domestication – happened elsewhere as well. By about 8000 BCE, people were growing sorghum and millet in parts of the Nile River Valley, and perhaps yams in western Africa. By about 7000 BCE, they were growing domesticated rice, millet, and legumes in China, yams and taro in Papua New Guinea, and perhaps squash in Mesoamerica. Crop-raising spread out from areas in which it was first developed, and slowly larger and larger parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas became home to farming villages. Domesticated foods often included cereals or other crops that could be ground and cooked into a mush soft enough for babies to eat. This mush – for which there is widespread archaeological evidence – allowed women to stop nursing their children at a younger age. By doing this, women lost the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, and children were born at more frequent intervals, which contributed to population growth.
A field of planted and weeded crops yields 10 to 100 times as much food – measured in calories – as the same area of naturally occurring plants, a benefit that would have been evident to early crop-planters. It also requires more labor, however, which was provided both by the greater number of people in the community and by those people working longer hours. In contrast to the 20 hours a week foragers spent on obtaining food, farming peoples were often in the fields from dawn to dusk, particularly during planting and harvest time, but also during the rest of the growing year because weeding was a constant task. Farming increased the division of labor within communities, as families and households became increasingly interdependent, trading food products for other commodities or services.
At roughly the same time as plant domestication, certain animals were domesticated in parts of the world where they occurred naturally, and then, like crops, taken elsewhere. Dogs were the first, then sheep and goats, and somewhat after this cattle, water buffalo, horses, llamas, and poultry. People learned from observation and experimentation that traits are passed down from generation to generation, and they began to breed animals for qualities they wanted, including larger size, greater strength, better coats, increased milk or egg production, and more even temperaments. Animal domestication shaped human evolution; groups that relied on animal milk and milk products for a significant part of their diet tended to develop the ability to digest milk as adults, while those who did not remained lactose intolerant as adults, the normal condition for mammals.
Where terrain or climate made crop-planting difficult, animal domestication became the primary means of obtaining food; people raised flocks of domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, reindeer, or other grazing animals, a system termed pastoralism. In some areas pastoralism can be relatively sedentary, and so easily combined with crop-raising, while in others flocks need to travel long distances from season to season to obtain enough food, so pastoralists became nomadic, sometimes using horses to travel further. In Eastern and Southern Africa, many groups were pastoralists, with the men typically caring for cattle (the higher-status animals), and the women caring for smaller animals such as goats. In later periods, cattle often formed the bridewealth that husbands presented to their wives’ families on marriage, with fathers and male elders retaining control over young men’s marriages through their control of the cattle. (The introduction of wage labor with colonialism would later upset this control as then the young men could buy cattle for bridewealth or present this in some other form.)
Nowhere do archaeological remains alone answer the question of who within any group first began to cultivate crops, but the
