[The Long Read - ERT: 1h] - The recent book by Graeber and Wengrow is hailed as "groundbreaking" and "radical" by critics - but do those claims hold up against scrutiny?
The beginning of plant domestication was not due to experimentation. It was also not due merely to the people becoming aware of the fact that seeds grow into new plants if you you put them on or in the soil. All hunter-gatherers know that.
Exactly. Daniel Quinn wrote that it is likely that almost all societies experimented with plant cultivation to some extend - maybe just by selective weeding around older fruit and nut trees (sparing healthy offspring), or by giving the seeds of exceptionally good trees a head start by burying them in a fertile place. Of course all this is purely speculative, yet I think it highly likely. If anyone knows how Nature works it's hunter-gatherers, plus the reproductive cycle of plants is not rocket science. If Paleolithic humans successfully amputated limbs, made glue from bark and invented archery, they most definitely knew how plants grow. Maybe you'd enjoy one of my other essays concerning this topic:
This is from a blog I put up on Medium: During gathering trips, I observed women deliberately taking a handful of berries or nuts from their bags, and tossing them on the ground as they walked along, and then heeling them into the dirt. I asked why, and was told this was a way of thanking the plants for their bounty, by putting some of their “babies” where they might grow.
I observed the trickle of small seeds and nuts and berries falling out of the folded ends of the leather bags — fewer when women walked along, but more each time a woman paused to spend a few minutes digging up a wild root. She put down her carrier bag to retrieve the root, and when she hoisted it again, a handful of dusty berries, small root vegetables, or nuts might need to be scooped back into the bag. Often she did not bother to do that.
Such small losses of gathered material were hardly noticed, but the cumulative effect was not hard to imagine. Dozens of trips by parties of women, circulating through miles of terrain around each hunter-gatherer camp, repeated over thousands of years as camps appeared and disappeared over the landscape might well increase the range and diversity of species of food considered desirable by the human forager is stunning. Imagine this: 400 Kua women x 6 seeds or other viable plant parts dropped/trip x 3 trips/week x 52 weeks x 100 years = 37,440,000 plants dropped — if even a third of these grew into a new plant, that is over 10,000,000 plants distributed across a landscape –if of comparable size to that traverse regularly by the Kua — of 10,000 square miles. Now consider this: six viable seeds, nuts, or small roots dropped by accident and carelessness during each gathering trip is a conservative estimate, given what I observed on some occasions. And that does not even include the ones deliberately replanted along the way.
Planting near camps (“returning to the mother”) of useful wild food plants was common as well. I observed wild tubers and onions, which were not eaten within two days, and starting to wilt, casually being replanted behind the camping site. Women joked about this as their way of “farming” — and indeed, on gathering trips, they would sometimes detour past long abandoned campsites to harvest plantations of tasty root crops.
The frequent passage of women gathering wild plant food, in areas within a few miles of each temporary campsite, habituated the game to human presence. It was years before I understood the significance of this - it reduced their fear of the human "predator". https://helgavierich.medium.com/why-they-matter-hunter-gatherers-today-9af2a0d642df
Thank you for your very thorough analysis. I also read The Dawn of Everything with a mixture of fascination and irritation. And I do agree that it is an important, scholarly work, providing it really does break open the existing misconceptions about our human ancestors. However, for me, the basic hypothesis was flawed and it doesn't matter how much evidence you throw at a flawed hypothesis, it remains flawed. Like most people these days, Graeber and Wengrow seem to imagine that human behaviour can be separated from our place in the biosphere (or the natural world, or Nature, the web/community of life, whatever you want to call it). While there is a section entitled "The Ecology of Freedom", neither the anthropologist, nor the archeologist understand human ecology and they would have done well (in my opinion) to extend the interdisciplinarity to include a specialist in that field. An indigenous ecologist might have been helpful. As the late human ecologist Paul Shepard pointed out, as a species we were shaped in the Pleistocene by our relationships with non-human life, and regarded ourselves as part of the ecosystem. Our relationships with the 'others' informed our culture, stories, daily habits, our very survival and we were part of the family of life. Even when the first settlers arrived in north America, and the dialogues between indigenous peoples and Jesuits took place, those indigenous peoples would have been deeply imbued with the traditional ecological knowledge acquired through action learning, embodied knowledge, including a profound respect for the community of life on the land, without which they would not have survived. Maybe a settler, especially a Jesuit, would fail to understand that their indigenous interlocutors could be free of chieftains and hierarchies only because they knew that the only 'law' was the Law of the Land. We can see this clearly in current Aboriginal responses to colonial thinking, they can have distributed knowledge (of the land) and no bosses or hierarchies only because everyone agrees to live by the Law of Country (the Land). As the Aboriginal academic Tyson Yunkaporta points out: "you move with the land or the land will move you!"
Nobody can be genuinely free unless they live by the Law of the Land, recognising their place in the ecosystem and with the ecological knowledge acquired through experience and learning from Elders. To ignore this renders all human projects unsustainable in the long run. As soon as our ancestors started to ignore or deny this, we went wrong. No doubt Jesuits would not mention this even if their interlocutors did, because it would seem absurd to them, believing, as they did, that their god made all things for Adam and told him to use it, tidy it, organise it, according divine will. The colonists and merchants, as Amitav Ghosh points out in The Nutmeg's Curse, saw themselves carrying out god's will and ordering a chaotic nature from which we were separate and superior. Graeber and Wengrow seem to think likewise, albeit in secular and mechanistic fashion.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said here. Humans being a part of the ecosystem (of which subsistence mode is the most prominent and relevant element, which the authors assure us doesn't matter much) is the most important aspect that they ignore almost completely - because it would seriously contradict parts of their theory.
From now on, whenever anyone says my critique is too long and they don't have the time to read it, I'll just tell them to read your comment if they want to understand the fundamental problem with the book explained in under five minutes.
Thank you so much for reading and sharing your thoughts!
I've read The Dawn of Everything and I see it has having value in reminding us of the role of human agency. I have recommended the book to people as an interesting list of exceptions to the rule that civilisation involves hierarchy with often appalling living conditions for those at the bottom. The list of exceptions are I suppose proof that humans are not inherently bad, stupid and apathetic which is some consolation. I agree with everything you've written here. As much as I'd love to believe we can simply re-orientate our existing culture and level of technology to being less horrible such a view ignores certain realities regarding how our current society is physically maintained.
You make the point in several places that agriculture will lead to civilization (including it's hierarchal iterations) eventually, one way or another. I fundamentally agree with you here. I also agree with your point that virtually all humans would have had an understanding of how the seed-to-plant life cycle works, and thus were probably experimenting with seed dispersal long before the beginning of what is popularly termed the Neolithic Revolution. My question: by your same logic (agriculture will invariably lead to states...eventually), could we not also deduce that the human knowledge of seeds/ plant reproductive cycles will invariably lead to agriculture....eventually (assuming an agrarian-friendly climate, that is)? You seemed to acknowledge that with the PNW and Floridian examples. Sooner or later, a group (any group) will reach environmental carrying capacity. And as you say there, the choice at that point is either to disperse, or practice cultivation. But what happens when humans, on the whole, have reached something approaching planetary carrying capacity under foraging conditions? And later, horticultural conditions? This point was obviously reached at some point in our collective past. At that point, would dispersal not cease to be an effective option? And if so, wouldn't the choice become: adopt agriculture, or starve?
Whatever the case, thanks for your contribution here. I cannot begin to tell you how weary I have grown of listening to people parrot these ridiculous Dawn of Everything talking points (sensationalist propaganda, much of it) as if they were revelatory, groundbreaking insights. And as if the authors had somehow stepped in and made the final arbitration on ecological/anthropological/ethnographic discussions/debates that have been ongoing for decades, and which are far from settled.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I'm really glad to get so much positive feedback, considering it's somewhat of a fringe topic (like pretty much all the stuff I write about). But back to the matter at hand: the questions you ask are really, really good. I guess if we sat around a campfire together, we could discuss this topic for hours, but in the meantime, I wanted to give you some thoughts that immediately come to my mind concerning this issue. In fact, I started writing a response, but it turned out much longer than I expected, so I posted it as a separate essay here:
Yes, I have read the book, and I had similar critiques of their odd philosophical conclusions (which is what caused me to seek out other critiques like yours- to see if I was alone in my observations.) I am not a primitivist per se, mostly because I've never really considered myself an "anything"... but I agree with your fundamental points about the flaws in their thinking. I would add that they not only ignore the fact that humans are products of their environment- they also completely ignore the facts that humans are products of their brain's evolution and limitations. Both these external (environment) and internal (genetics) factors have done more to shape the course of human history than any "free will" that the authors would love to believe exists within us. Don't get me wrong- I agree with them in many ways philosophically in terms of "how things ought to be" - I just don't actually need to prove to myself that my pipe dreams are the true, natural order of things. Were we to hit the reset button, I'd bet good money that we'd just end up here all over again, unless one of those 2 factors- our environment or our biology- were to undergo significant changes during that time. I love their book for many reasons- mostly, the various archaeological examples they give that I was unaware of- but their clear need to justify their political beliefs through objective evidence is way too obvious, and a little embarrassing. I can embrace the value of anarchy and still admit that humans have a long way to go before they can actually manage being anarchists in any sustainable scale, both in time and population.
Thank you for reading my critique, and thanks for your elaborate comment. I'm glad we agree on so many points. I furthermore agree with your suggestion that the authors did not consider the limitations our primate brains impose on our actions. I'm reading Iain McGilchrist's phenomenal book The Master and His Emissary right now, and it contains plenty of aspects worth considering when talking about human history.
The beginning of plant domestication was not due to experimentation. It was also not due merely to the people becoming aware of the fact that seeds grow into new plants if you you put them on or in the soil. All hunter-gatherers know that.
Exactly. Daniel Quinn wrote that it is likely that almost all societies experimented with plant cultivation to some extend - maybe just by selective weeding around older fruit and nut trees (sparing healthy offspring), or by giving the seeds of exceptionally good trees a head start by burying them in a fertile place. Of course all this is purely speculative, yet I think it highly likely. If anyone knows how Nature works it's hunter-gatherers, plus the reproductive cycle of plants is not rocket science. If Paleolithic humans successfully amputated limbs, made glue from bark and invented archery, they most definitely knew how plants grow. Maybe you'd enjoy one of my other essays concerning this topic:
https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/readers-correspondence-does-plant
This is from a blog I put up on Medium: During gathering trips, I observed women deliberately taking a handful of berries or nuts from their bags, and tossing them on the ground as they walked along, and then heeling them into the dirt. I asked why, and was told this was a way of thanking the plants for their bounty, by putting some of their “babies” where they might grow.
I observed the trickle of small seeds and nuts and berries falling out of the folded ends of the leather bags — fewer when women walked along, but more each time a woman paused to spend a few minutes digging up a wild root. She put down her carrier bag to retrieve the root, and when she hoisted it again, a handful of dusty berries, small root vegetables, or nuts might need to be scooped back into the bag. Often she did not bother to do that.
Such small losses of gathered material were hardly noticed, but the cumulative effect was not hard to imagine. Dozens of trips by parties of women, circulating through miles of terrain around each hunter-gatherer camp, repeated over thousands of years as camps appeared and disappeared over the landscape might well increase the range and diversity of species of food considered desirable by the human forager is stunning. Imagine this: 400 Kua women x 6 seeds or other viable plant parts dropped/trip x 3 trips/week x 52 weeks x 100 years = 37,440,000 plants dropped — if even a third of these grew into a new plant, that is over 10,000,000 plants distributed across a landscape –if of comparable size to that traverse regularly by the Kua — of 10,000 square miles. Now consider this: six viable seeds, nuts, or small roots dropped by accident and carelessness during each gathering trip is a conservative estimate, given what I observed on some occasions. And that does not even include the ones deliberately replanted along the way.
Planting near camps (“returning to the mother”) of useful wild food plants was common as well. I observed wild tubers and onions, which were not eaten within two days, and starting to wilt, casually being replanted behind the camping site. Women joked about this as their way of “farming” — and indeed, on gathering trips, they would sometimes detour past long abandoned campsites to harvest plantations of tasty root crops.
The frequent passage of women gathering wild plant food, in areas within a few miles of each temporary campsite, habituated the game to human presence. It was years before I understood the significance of this - it reduced their fear of the human "predator". https://helgavierich.medium.com/why-they-matter-hunter-gatherers-today-9af2a0d642df
Thank you for your very thorough analysis. I also read The Dawn of Everything with a mixture of fascination and irritation. And I do agree that it is an important, scholarly work, providing it really does break open the existing misconceptions about our human ancestors. However, for me, the basic hypothesis was flawed and it doesn't matter how much evidence you throw at a flawed hypothesis, it remains flawed. Like most people these days, Graeber and Wengrow seem to imagine that human behaviour can be separated from our place in the biosphere (or the natural world, or Nature, the web/community of life, whatever you want to call it). While there is a section entitled "The Ecology of Freedom", neither the anthropologist, nor the archeologist understand human ecology and they would have done well (in my opinion) to extend the interdisciplinarity to include a specialist in that field. An indigenous ecologist might have been helpful. As the late human ecologist Paul Shepard pointed out, as a species we were shaped in the Pleistocene by our relationships with non-human life, and regarded ourselves as part of the ecosystem. Our relationships with the 'others' informed our culture, stories, daily habits, our very survival and we were part of the family of life. Even when the first settlers arrived in north America, and the dialogues between indigenous peoples and Jesuits took place, those indigenous peoples would have been deeply imbued with the traditional ecological knowledge acquired through action learning, embodied knowledge, including a profound respect for the community of life on the land, without which they would not have survived. Maybe a settler, especially a Jesuit, would fail to understand that their indigenous interlocutors could be free of chieftains and hierarchies only because they knew that the only 'law' was the Law of the Land. We can see this clearly in current Aboriginal responses to colonial thinking, they can have distributed knowledge (of the land) and no bosses or hierarchies only because everyone agrees to live by the Law of Country (the Land). As the Aboriginal academic Tyson Yunkaporta points out: "you move with the land or the land will move you!"
Nobody can be genuinely free unless they live by the Law of the Land, recognising their place in the ecosystem and with the ecological knowledge acquired through experience and learning from Elders. To ignore this renders all human projects unsustainable in the long run. As soon as our ancestors started to ignore or deny this, we went wrong. No doubt Jesuits would not mention this even if their interlocutors did, because it would seem absurd to them, believing, as they did, that their god made all things for Adam and told him to use it, tidy it, organise it, according divine will. The colonists and merchants, as Amitav Ghosh points out in The Nutmeg's Curse, saw themselves carrying out god's will and ordering a chaotic nature from which we were separate and superior. Graeber and Wengrow seem to think likewise, albeit in secular and mechanistic fashion.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said here. Humans being a part of the ecosystem (of which subsistence mode is the most prominent and relevant element, which the authors assure us doesn't matter much) is the most important aspect that they ignore almost completely - because it would seriously contradict parts of their theory.
From now on, whenever anyone says my critique is too long and they don't have the time to read it, I'll just tell them to read your comment if they want to understand the fundamental problem with the book explained in under five minutes.
Thank you so much for reading and sharing your thoughts!
I've read The Dawn of Everything and I see it has having value in reminding us of the role of human agency. I have recommended the book to people as an interesting list of exceptions to the rule that civilisation involves hierarchy with often appalling living conditions for those at the bottom. The list of exceptions are I suppose proof that humans are not inherently bad, stupid and apathetic which is some consolation. I agree with everything you've written here. As much as I'd love to believe we can simply re-orientate our existing culture and level of technology to being less horrible such a view ignores certain realities regarding how our current society is physically maintained.
An amazing insight, I have learned so many things, thank you for sharing!
You make the point in several places that agriculture will lead to civilization (including it's hierarchal iterations) eventually, one way or another. I fundamentally agree with you here. I also agree with your point that virtually all humans would have had an understanding of how the seed-to-plant life cycle works, and thus were probably experimenting with seed dispersal long before the beginning of what is popularly termed the Neolithic Revolution. My question: by your same logic (agriculture will invariably lead to states...eventually), could we not also deduce that the human knowledge of seeds/ plant reproductive cycles will invariably lead to agriculture....eventually (assuming an agrarian-friendly climate, that is)? You seemed to acknowledge that with the PNW and Floridian examples. Sooner or later, a group (any group) will reach environmental carrying capacity. And as you say there, the choice at that point is either to disperse, or practice cultivation. But what happens when humans, on the whole, have reached something approaching planetary carrying capacity under foraging conditions? And later, horticultural conditions? This point was obviously reached at some point in our collective past. At that point, would dispersal not cease to be an effective option? And if so, wouldn't the choice become: adopt agriculture, or starve?
Whatever the case, thanks for your contribution here. I cannot begin to tell you how weary I have grown of listening to people parrot these ridiculous Dawn of Everything talking points (sensationalist propaganda, much of it) as if they were revelatory, groundbreaking insights. And as if the authors had somehow stepped in and made the final arbitration on ecological/anthropological/ethnographic discussions/debates that have been ongoing for decades, and which are far from settled.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I'm really glad to get so much positive feedback, considering it's somewhat of a fringe topic (like pretty much all the stuff I write about). But back to the matter at hand: the questions you ask are really, really good. I guess if we sat around a campfire together, we could discuss this topic for hours, but in the meantime, I wanted to give you some thoughts that immediately come to my mind concerning this issue. In fact, I started writing a response, but it turned out much longer than I expected, so I posted it as a separate essay here:
https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/readers-correspondence-does-plant
Yes, I have read the book, and I had similar critiques of their odd philosophical conclusions (which is what caused me to seek out other critiques like yours- to see if I was alone in my observations.) I am not a primitivist per se, mostly because I've never really considered myself an "anything"... but I agree with your fundamental points about the flaws in their thinking. I would add that they not only ignore the fact that humans are products of their environment- they also completely ignore the facts that humans are products of their brain's evolution and limitations. Both these external (environment) and internal (genetics) factors have done more to shape the course of human history than any "free will" that the authors would love to believe exists within us. Don't get me wrong- I agree with them in many ways philosophically in terms of "how things ought to be" - I just don't actually need to prove to myself that my pipe dreams are the true, natural order of things. Were we to hit the reset button, I'd bet good money that we'd just end up here all over again, unless one of those 2 factors- our environment or our biology- were to undergo significant changes during that time. I love their book for many reasons- mostly, the various archaeological examples they give that I was unaware of- but their clear need to justify their political beliefs through objective evidence is way too obvious, and a little embarrassing. I can embrace the value of anarchy and still admit that humans have a long way to go before they can actually manage being anarchists in any sustainable scale, both in time and population.
Thank you for reading my critique, and thanks for your elaborate comment. I'm glad we agree on so many points. I furthermore agree with your suggestion that the authors did not consider the limitations our primate brains impose on our actions. I'm reading Iain McGilchrist's phenomenal book The Master and His Emissary right now, and it contains plenty of aspects worth considering when talking about human history.
I think this paper will be of interest https://www.academia.edu/43337084/Exceptions_to_the_Rule_Ethnographic_Alternatives_to_Cumulative_Cultural_Evolution