1 Behavioral Ecology and the Transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture

GRBQ084-2272G-C01[01-21]. qxd 11/30/05 7:43 PM Page 1 pinnacle Quark11:JOBS:BOOKS:REPRO: 1 Behavioral Ecology and the Transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture Bruce Winterhalder and Douglas J. Kennett he volume before you is the first THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRANSITION T systematic, comparative attempt to use the concepts and models of behavioral ecology There are older transformations of comparable to address the evolutionary transition from so- magnitude in hominid history; bipedalism, en- cieties relying predominantly on hunting and cephalization, early stone tool manufacture, gathering to those dependent on food produc- and the origins of language come to mind (see tion through plant cultivation, animal hus- Klein 1999). The evolution of food production bandry, and the use of domesticated species is on a par with these, and somewhat more ac- embedded in systems of agriculture. Human cessible because it occurred in near prehistory, behavioral ecology (HBE; Winterhalder and the last eight thousand to thirteen thousand Smith 2000) is not new to prehistoric analy- years; agriculture also is inescapable for its im- sis; there is a two-decade tradition of applying mense impact on the human and non-human models and concepts from HBE to research worlds (Dincauze 2000; Redman 1999). Most on prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies (Bird problems of population and environmental and O’Connell 2003). Behavioral ecology degradation are rooted in agricultural origins. models also have been applied in the study of The future of humankind depends on making adaptation among agricultural (Goland 1993b; the agricultural “revolution” sustainable by pre- Keegan 1986) and pastoral (Mace 1993a) pop- serving cultigen diversity and mitigating the ulations. We review below a small literature environmental impacts of farming. Simple pop- on the use of these models to think generally ulation densities tell much of the story. Hunter- about the transition from foraging to farming, gatherers live at roughly 0.1/km2; rice agricul- while the papers collected here expand on turists in Java at 1,000/km2, a ten-thousand-fold these efforts by taking up the theory in the difference. There were an estimated ten million context of ethnographic or archaeological case humans in the world on the eve of food produc- studies from eleven sites around the globe. tion (Price and Feinman 2001: 194); now over 1 GRBQ084-2272G-C01[01-21]. qxd 11/30/05 7:43 PM Page 2 pinnacle Quark11:JOBS:BOOKS:REPRO: six billion people live on this planet, an increase were transmitted broadly through preexisting of 600% in only ten millennia. Agriculture is the exchange networks (Hastorf 1999), stimulating precursor, arguably the necessary precursor, for the migration of agriculturalists into the territo- the development of widespread social stratifica- ries of hunter-gatherers, who were in turn ulti- tion, state-level societies, market economies, and mately replaced or subsumed into agricultural industrial production (Diamond 1997; Zeder economies (Cavalli-Sforza 1996; Diamond and 1991). Social theory (e.g., Trigger 1998) main- Bellwood 2003). tains that present-day notions of property, equal- Foraging peoples initiated domestication. ity and inequality, human relationships to na- They did so through the mundane and neces- ture, etc., are shaped, at least in part, by the social sary daily tasks of locating, harvesting, pro- organization, technology, or food surpluses en- cessing, and consuming foodstuffs. The Mass tailed in our dependence on agriculture. from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer Domestication today is a self-conscious en- (Protestant Episcopal Church 1945, 81) speaks terprise of advanced science and global-scale ef- eloquently of “these thy gifts and creatures of fort, an applied research endeavor comprised of bread and wine . .” In less poetic non-ecclesi- thousands of highly trained and well-supported astical terms, but with no less awe at the high international specialists. Major research centers importance and, well, the simple gastronomic like the International Potato Center in Lima, pleasure of domesticates in our lives, this vol- Peru (www.cipotato.org/) support ongoing ef- ume attempts to advance our understanding forts to further the domestication of useful of why and how this happened. In particular, species; seed banks have been established in we hope to demonstrate the utility of a branch many countries to insure the future diversity of of evolutionary ecology, human behavioral the world’s key domesticated plants (www.nal. ecology. usda.gov/pgdic/germplasm/germplasm.html). The prehistoric beginnings of agriculture though DEFINITIONS were quite different. The modern world that funds and depends on this continuing process Clear, standardized terms for the biological and of domestication is, in fact, a creation of the first cultural processes involved in the origins of agri- early humans that pursued, consumed and, in culture worldwide remain elusive, despite con- doing so, modified the wild ancestors of the sta- siderable efforts to define them (Flannery 1973; ples that we consider to be important today— Ford 1985; Harris 1989; Harris 1996a and b; wheat, millet, sweet potato, rice, and domesti- Higgs 1972; Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Rindos cated animals such as camelids, pigs, sheep, 1984; Smith 1998; Smith 2001a; Zvelebil 1993; goats, and cows—to name a few. At present it Zvelebil 1995; Zvelebil 1996). The reasons for in- appears as if at least six independent regions of consistencies in the treatment of terminology are the world were the primary loci of domestica- several and tenacious because they are ultimately tion and emergent agriculture: the Near East; rooted in the nature of the problem itself. sub-Saharan Africa; China/Southeast Asia; These include, but are not necessarily limited Eastern North America; Mesoamerica; and to the following: (1) research on domestication South America (Smith 1998), roughly in the and agricultural origins is inherently a multi- time period from thirteen thousand to eight disciplinary activity, and as such, a wide-ranging thousand years ago (Binford 1971; Diamond set of specialists have worked on the problem, 2002; Flannery 1973; Henry 1989). The archae- each emphasizing definitions that are somewhat ological record suggests that this transforma- parochial; (2) historical change in each research tion took place in societies that look much like tradition of archaeology, botany, and genetics has modern day hunter-gatherers (Kelly 1995; Lee resulted in a range of definitions that may have and Daly 1999). Many of the early domesticates been suitable at the time they were conceived but 2 hbe and the transition to agriculture GRBQ084-2272G-C01[01-21]. qxd 11/30/05 7:43 PM Page 3 pinnacle Quark11:JOBS:BOOKS:REPRO: now add to the confusion; (3) rapidly expanding product of artificial selection by humans, and empirical knowledge and the characterization of whose reproduction and subsistence are man- local developmental sequences results in special- aged directly by people. For plants, such manage- ized language that does not transfer well to other ment almost always involves an investment in regions where similar transformations occurred; seed selection; clearing, systematic soil tillage, (4) agricultural origins are an inherently evolu- terracing to prepare fields, crop maintenance, tionary question and, as in any system of descent weeding, fertilization, and other crop mainte- with modification, categorical or taxonomic dis- nance; and, development of infrastructure and tinctions have fuzzy and, for different cases, facilities from irrigation canals to processing unevenly and perhaps differently demarcated facilities and storage bins. Parallel efforts are en- boundaries; and, (5) food production and agricul- tailed in animal husbandry. Even societies prac- ture have an impact on multiple features of ticing the most intensive forms of agriculture human societies—e.g., economic, political, so- may engage in incidental hunting and gathering cial, and ideological, any one of which might be of wild foods, depending upon their availability featured in definitions. or desirability (e.g., deer, blackberries). Dense Like earlier attempts, our definitions reflect populations and centralized state-level societies limitations of our knowledge and approach. like our own depend upon increasingly complex Hunting and gathering entails obtaining daily systems of agriculture (Boserup 1965; Zeder sustenance through the collection or pursuit of 1991) involving modification to soil texture, wild foods; wild foods in turn being species structure and fertility (Harris 1989) and some- whose reproduction and subsistence are not di- times resulting in severe environmental degra- rectly managed by humans. Data from around dation, one of the great challenges of our day the world indicate that prior to approximately (Stockstad and Vogel 2003). thirteen thousand years ago, all people known Our definition of agriculture emphasizes archaeologically relied upon hunting and gath- domesticated plants and animals. Domesticates ering wild foods. Hunting and gathering popu- are new plant or animal varieties or species lations expanded into a broad range of habitats created from existing wild species through inci- during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early dental or active selection by humans (Smith Holocene when foraging strategies diversified 1998). Typically selection leads to biological char- (Stiner 2001), in part due to the extinction of acteristics that are advantageous

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