Work by James Suzman

Author:James Suzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

When Vere Gordon Childe was still teaching in Edinburgh and London, most archaeologists were convinced that agriculture spread because it was enthusiastically adopted by foragers who admired their well-fed farming neighbours. There was, after all, plenty of evidence to show that our evolutionary ancestors were just as excited by novelty as we are now, and that good (and sometimes bad) ideas spread with surprising speed from one relatively isolated population to the next. This kind of diffusion is almost certainly why, for example, new techniques for flaking rocks into blades and points often occur almost simultaneously in the architectural record in many different places at once. Agriculture had also clearly spread this way in some parts of the Americas.

Up until recently, the only reason to doubt that agriculture may not have been transmitted in this way was the fact that a handful of minor hunter-gatherer populations, such as the BaMbuti in the Congo and the Hadzabe in Tanzania, had continued to hunt and gather despite having been in contact with farming societies for thousands of years. As with so many other mysteries about the deep past, it is the busy algorithms set loose by the palaeogeneticists that have offered new insights into agriculture’s expansion. And taken in conjunction with archaeological data and oral histories, the story they tell in most cases is one of the displacement, replacement and even genocide of established hunter-gatherer populations by rapidly growing populations of agriculturalists on the run from Malthusian traps.

Comparison of DNA extracted from the bones of Europe’s early farmers11 with that of DNA extracted from the bones of Europe’s ancient hunting and gathering populations, shows that agriculture in Europe spread courtesy of populations of farmers expanding into new lands, and in the process displacing and eventually replacing established hunter-gatherer populations12 rather than assimilating them. It also suggests that from around 8,000 years ago the growing community of farmers expanded beyond the Middle East into mainland Europe by way of Cyprus and the Aegean Islands. A similar process occurred in South East Asia, where from around 5,000 years ago rice-farming populations expanded inexorably from the Yangtze River Basin, eventually colonising much of South East Asia and reaching the Malaysian Peninsula 3,000 years later.13 And in Africa, there is now unambiguous genomic evidence of the sequential replacement of nearly every indigenous forager population from East Africa to central and southern Africa over the course of the last 2,000 years. This followed Africa’s own agricultural revolution and the expansion of farming peoples who established sequences of civilisations, kingdoms and empires across much of Africa.

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