To understand our own mortality is one of the biggest markers of being human. To seek to control it, even more so.

True, we're not sure whether the anticipation and understanding of death is uniquely human, and there are certainly plenty of arguments to suggest that some animals understand death too, but it might be that the concept of a soul that couples with the idea of death is entirely a human construct. In this way, humans would truly be unique.

In his book 'The Buried Soul', the archaeologist Timothy Taylor takes a close look into when it was that humans first started to create the concept of a soul and started to try to define and control their own mortality -and by extension - immortality.

One of the greatest problems with pre-history and early history is the difficulty in source materials and, by extension, the difficulty in stepping into the minds of those in the past. "The past is a foreign country" a wise man once said, and we are often scant-informed tourists. As an archaeologist Taylor is well aware of these problems and how these have led to what he believes are misinterpretations of the cultural data of mortality in the past, often due to anachronisms created when historians put their own modern cultural perspective onto the remnants of history. Too often we either assume that our ancestors thought and acted exactly like us (and therefore we reject the more distasteful parts of their cultures as false), or we view them as barbarians and so don't bother to properly unpick the layers of why their actions were important and unique to them. While Taylor runs through a whole host of different death cultures, it was his treatment of the above issue that I found the most valuable and interesting in the book.

For example, Taylor centres the majority of his book around unpicking an understanding the funeral of a Rus (Viking) chieftain, returning to the vividly described scene as each of his arguments shed more light on it and the mindsets of those involved. In this funeral we have a rare written account provided by an arab ambassador about how the chieftain was interred in the ground while a huge ship and scaffold were created, ready for his cremation. When complete he was disinterred and laid on a great bed on the ship. Of his slave girls, his favourite apparently volunteered and took part in a seemingly strange and brutal ceremony. She was given the rings of engagement, as if she was betrothed to the chieftain, and, heady on ritualistic wine, went to each tent of his closest men and slept with them. Afterwards she was lifted up above three houses, announcing that she could see her parents and others waiting for her in the afterlife. When she went to the great building of the ship she reportedly found herself hesitating and was encouraged inside. The rings were removed, she lay on the bed next to their chieftain and, with a noose tightening around her neck by the old women dubbed the 'Angel of Death', she was brutally raped by seven men as the crown outside drummed their shields to drown out her screams. 

Timothy Taylor

Why did this sequence of events occur?

How reliable is the account?

What purpose did the brutality serve and what was the slave girl's investment in it?

Why on earth do some historians reject the brutal realities and simply sign off with dismissive statements like: "The happy girl thus went to Valhallah?"

What does this ritual tell us about the purpose of death culture, and the potential danger that the chieftain's soul posed to the mortal living?

Taylor answers all of these questions and more with care and convincing evidence. In doing so he also looks into another brutal and controversial element of history: cannibalism. Since the 1970s it has been fashionable for historians to reject cannibalism altogether, finding it more comforting to assert that it never actually happened and was instead a racist accusation or a misinterpretation of evidence, to the point where I assumed this was likely. But Taylor challenges this in a very convincing manner, taking the stance that cannibalism was - and is - commonplace, but served very different purposes for different cultures, all of which features importantly in how these culture interacted with death and funerary rites. Cannibalism isn't something that belongs in a horror movie, but instead can be a legitimate, useful expression of grief that should not be ignored simply because it is distasteful to western historians. I must admit, after the reading the book, I'm pretty darn convinced he's on the right lines.

In the end, I know that in this blog I tend to trot our reviews of books that I like, leaving those less interesting neighbours by the wayside. But out of my pick of excellent books, this really is one worth paying attention to and picking up for yourself. Taylor's combination of engaging narrative writing as well as the exciting (and potentially controversial) views he has of the pre-history and history he knows so well, makes this a book that is both entertaining as well as being genuinely academically important for any interested in the subject. It certainly convinced me to re-evaluate how I looked at various elements of cultural history, which I think is worth it's weight in gold.

What's more, I couldn't put it down. For a non-fiction book is very high praise indeed. 



More Great Books and Media on Mortality and the Human Imagination:
- Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind - By Yuval Noah Harrari
- The Self Illusion - by Bruce Hood
- Paranormality - By Richard Wiseman
- Gunther Von Hagen's Autopsy Series

Generally, people like to view history a one long linear road to progress.

A fish climbs out of water to walk on land; a monkey drops down from a tree and stands up in the long grass, stone tools turn to bronze and iron tools, hunter-gathering turns to farming, cities grow and soon enough we rocket off into space, all the while getting cleverer and living more fulfilling lives.
Of course this is all a lie: history just isn't that simple. Instead of a linear path, history can be a lot more...well...

For example, breakthrough inventions can be discovered simultaneously, or created 'early' and then forgotten, or even developed only to be deliberately rejected. History can be doomed to repeat itself, or can be wiped away in one sudden catastrophe. 'Progress' is relative and is inescapably tied to the values of the people who live at the time: values that often seem to make little logical sense. 

So, with that in mind, I wanted to take a look at what is viewed as the biggest leap forward in human history: the Agricultural Revolution. Was it the big and 'inevitable' leap forward that we have always been told it is? In his book 'Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind' Yuval Noah Harari argues that it was instead the worse mistake we could have made.

Hunting and Gathering

Part of the Gobekli Tepe Temple

In prehistory human societies (Sapien or otherwise) sustained themselves by hunting and gathering for around 2.5million years. The land they roamed could, on average, support around 100 individuals with relative ease. The ability to roam gave us a very varied diet, and one that could be flexible enough to support us when one stream of possible food ran dry. Humans could shape their environment if they wished, for example by using bushfires to clear areas to encourage herds to graze nearby. Without the need for static property, there was less anxiety about possessions being linked to survival, so warfare was less endemic than in modern societies. There is proof that humans at this time, following a hunter-gathering way of life were culturally diverse, intelligent, and could even pool resources to build fantastic structures. For example, the Gobekli Tepe Temple was built in 9,500BC before widespread agriculture.

The agricultural revolution began around 9,500-8,500BC in Southeast turkey, western Iran and the Levenant, though it was a phenomenon that cropped up in all corners of the globe quite individually. The idea itself seems a simple one - people began to discover that they could cultivate certain types of plant and by doing so, allow themselves to create a stable source of food that they could, in theory, rely on.
So far, so logical.
But, as Harari argues in 'Sapiens', humanity's choice to move into agricultural production was, in the end, the biggest mistake that humanity has made. Instead of improving our lives, it drastically reduced our quality of lives and set us on a path that was impossible to walk back from.

The Dark Side of the Agricultural Revolution

No one can fault the logic behind the agricultural revolution: people were simply trying to work nature into providing more food for them. But in tying themselves to the land and in forcing themselves into back-breaking seasonal work humanity lost much of it's freedom, encouraged greater warfare and effectively destroyed the variety of their diet and leisure. Now that humanity were dependant on one particular crop for their diet, a huge swathe of anxiety followed.

Cultivating wheat, for example, took from dawn until dusk. If the wheat got sick, humans had to worry about the sickness and invest time and effort into curing it. If the rains didn't come the humanity would starve because of the drought's destruction of their one real food source. Wheat demanded perfect ground so humans broke their backs clearing fields and weeding away competitors. Days were no longer flexible, but were forced into routines that forced humans to worry and plan years and decades into the future. If someone threatened the land that they had put all the effort into, everything could be lost at once. Retaliation was brutal because running away was simply not an option. 

The aim was to create more food so that the individual societies could prosper, but even in this the revolution failed. While agriculture allowed the larger production of one type of food, in line the settlement and reliance on this meant that the human population swelled. Instead of human population being controlled by the resources of the environment that they lived on, agriculture warped the environment into a factory. While human population could grow, this meant that - should the one vital link the the new much shorter food chain collapse - humans died in their thousands. Hunting and gathering, like most animals, had natural fertility checks: if a woman breast fed a child for four years or so, she was less likely to fall pregnant and when food was scarce puberty occurred later. In agricultural societies children could be fed on cow milk or paste made from the crops instead, female fertility recovered more quickly, and more children could be produced whenever there weren't full-blown starvation conditions. In Hunter-gatherer societies a small band of people were maintained with steady fertility rates dependant on a shifting environment that largely plateaued it people were creative about how they pursued their food. Instead, agricultural societies could be stable for a large period, but were far more vulnerable to extreme peaks and troughs that could wipe out a thousands with one bad harvest - thousands that had literally no other way to subsist. 

Even in the peaks, when the crops were well, the quality of life was still back breaking for the majority - over time any surplus was used to feed an elite. The common farmer - the majority - in the end had a far rougher life than his ancestors and farming was to blame.


Why Choose a Lifestyle That's Worse For Us?

The agricultural revolution was never a matter of humans becoming somehow more clever and taking 'the next logical step' towards farming. The very nature of the human species is that, genetically at least, very little has changed about them: we simply haven't evolved much past the original Homo Sapiens. Once we learnt to speak, and to imagine, evolution became a secondary concern: instead of growing to adapt to our environment, Harari argues, we instead created complicated myths and social structures that allowed us to pull together and make our environment and how we responded to it work for us. This could be achieved without the need for a shift to agriculture and certainly hunter gatherers were no less intelligent than even modern people today.

So, if people were as clever as we are now, surely they noticed that they had made a bad choice? Why carry on with agriculture if humans had more back breaking work, longer hours, higher chance of starvation, less nutrition, less free time and more anxiety for warfare? Harrari suggests that the reason for this was simply time.

Around 18,000 years ago the ice age shifted and global warming took hold, creating more rain and therefore a climate more suitable for wheat to grow. Eating wheat was no simple task, it needed to be ground and to be processed in order to be edible and so people would take the crop with them to their temporary settlements to prepare. People would have camped for this 'harvest', and the wheat seeds would have found favourable conditions near humans. A camp that may have lasted five weeks would, in generations time, last a little longer and a little longer. Villages would spring up and offer the benefits of settlement such as storehouses and granaries and places to store more and more advanced tools. While initially low level agriculture would mix with hunter-gathering, it is no surprise that creative children would attempt to improve on ideas they have seen from their parents. One child might discover that using a hoe and plough was far more effective and his granddaughter might find that making use of fertiliser and fences would be more effective. As more and more effort was put in, as people became more used to a more static lifestyle, and as each generation made small improvements on the previous generation, eventually humanity was locked into a lifestyle of permanent villages and permanent farms and a weighty routine that locked them in place. People worked harder and got creative to try to have a better life. But in doing so they became more dependant and the hardest work became the bare subsistence of normality. When the population swelled past the point that hunter-gathering could support the group of humans, there was no escape. Farming was here to stay.

Is it all bad?

That's one small step for man...

Like any big mistake in life sometimes all you can do is to accept it and move on as best you can. The way the majority humanity has structured itself means that there is no viable alternative while ever there are so damn many of us. But that is where things get interesting.
the huge population is held together by creative 'myths' that allow for unprecedented social cooperation. By compartmentalising a food production method, it allows urbanisation and it also enables many sections of society to focus on other tasks than the creation of food and to co-orperate towards seemingly impossible (and 'impractical') goals that could be realised. Without the agricultural revolution there could have been no renaissance, no industrial revolution, and no silicone revolution.

Nevertheless many societies still suffer under the agricultural yolk of a low nutrition and low quality of life. As a species, we are still staggeringly overpopulated and still vulnerable to terrible drought and to the wars and psychological anxiety of having static property. Farm animals are subject to horribly stunted life-expectancies and psychological  and physical suffering. The average person simply doesn't understand the natural world around them in the same detail. Arguably, even today there are many elements of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that are superior. But we have made our beds and, lying in it, we strive to make the very best of it. While history isn't linear it is still difficult to imagine how, without the agricultural revolution, we could have ever put man on the moon.




Sources
- 'Sapiens': a brief histroy of humankind' by Yuval Noah Harari