How the world worked 1

I have a new book coming out this autumn autumn of 2019 and it will cover basically a textbook of historical materialism it'll be talking about the way people have worked and the way the structure of the labor process and technology has shaped society from prehistoric periods down to the present day as a background to that book coming out I'm preparing a set of videos on key ideas that are in the book it obviously is very short compared to the book because it's a long book but the some of the key ideas I hope to express in videos here and if you like the idea spread expressed here oh you're interested in them you can order yourself a copy of the book in this first video I'm going to be talking about modes of production in all of them but in this first one I'm talking about the process of transition to agriculture and the first few thousand years of after that transition now the transition from hunting to agriculture was a single biggest revolutionary step in human development this is the it is important because the boundary between hunting and agriculture involves humanity descending to a lower trophic level in biological terms now for those not familiar with the biological terms biology classifies organisms into autotrophs and heterotrophs now autotrophs are organisms that get their energy from the Sun from light or possibly from chemical sources such as hydrogen sulfide oxidation in the black smokers in the deep ocean above those there are heterotrophs and organisms which get their energy by eating other organisms and carnivores which get their energy by eating other animals are at the top of this so there are trophic levels level one being the autotrophs the plants which get their energy from the Sun level two being animals which feed off the plants now if you look at my diagram here I've shown natural autotrophs or the climax of education of the forest as opposed to the vegetation and agriculture and again I show the human side of it here with a domestic animal versus a deer a hunter versus a wolf as the carnivores now the important point about these trophic levels is that as you move down trophic levels the biomass is bigger and the energy flux is greater roughly the area of the triangles that have drawn there the triangles one two and three correspond to the amount of biomass that each level will support and it's clear that the car livery supports a much smaller biomass than herb every a hunting population lives in the upper trophic levels of the the energy pyramid either at level 3 if it's purely carnivorous like traditional Eskimo populations or if it's a hunter-gatherer population where it gets some of its energy from meat and some of its energy from tubers and things like that then maybe it's its position 2 point 5 now what prevents humans being straightforward heterotrophs eating plants is that most plant matter is inaccessible to our digestive system as a species we are not adapted to break down cellulose and complex carbohydrates in the way that herbivores are and in order to move down the food pyramid to increase our biomass from being a small biomass of apes in trees to being the dominant species on the planet we had to harness these other energy sources by technology and the first technology was fire since unless you have the possibility of heating up tubers they're generally indigestible so fire made a large quantity of plant matter would otherwise be undigestible to us accessible I was the first big step in increasing the energy supply for humans the other step is the development of weapons for hunting Flint arrowheads Flint spear points I showed a particularly fine example of that a late example of Clovis point and these made large animals accessible to us by hunting and therefore modified our much more limited ability to catch meat using our native organs of our body now the significance of the Clovis point I'll come to later one of the points about a hunter gatherer population is that because it lives at a high trophic level it could only support a low population density that's because you just can't have that much biomass at a high trophic level and this has the effect of restricting the size and complexity of human social groups it's possible for hunting populations to settle down and build small settlements under some circumstances if they live somewhere weathers particularly abundant fishing resources the the famous examples are the communities on the Pacific coast of Canada the Native communities there or if they live near Lakes were game came habitually to drink well this evidence of Mesolithic communities in Yorkshire on the edges of lakes there but the settlement size can't be as big as that supported by agricultural settlements this has consequences as an unsettled society hunting and gathering societies tend to be a egalitarian they're not all a gallop terian but all the Galilean societies that anthropologists have studied have been hunting and gathering once and nomadism was essential to that for society to be highly egalitarian it has to be nomadic it people have to have know more than they can carry if your possessions are limited to what you can physically carry in your hands or with a small bag it's impossible for private property to extensively develop they are also immediate return societies where people went out hunting and gathering and ate the food they produce the same day so there's no big stores of food that can be monopolized there are also no non portable products of labour there are no boats Weir's decades pit traps no stores of food in buildings once you have those embedded resources which have been built by labour to be used later those resources can be monopolized and are also no assets in the form of women held by men and exchange by marriage systems another point about a hunting society is that everyone is armed tools which are developed to be used as hunting tools can also be used as weapons against humans bows and arrows spears etc and if in general the population is all equally armed it's impossible to establish any system of personal domination the other important point it's their match elope Gaul societies women as they grow up stay with their mothers genetic studies of hunting and gathering societies prove this to be the case they showed that Y chromosome variations are much more geographically dispersed than mitochondria ones which implies that the women had stayed put with the previous generation of women and battery locality were been staying with their mothers and men having to come in to a household with the dominant woman prevents the rise of patriarchal dominance now if we look at the world today it's definitely not dominated by a hunter and gatherer societies that's because agriculture by moving down a trophic level increases the energy available to society and how does it do this well on one hand it's by moving down the trophic level it also establishes local moral cultures a field is quite different from a forest there's one plant growing there weeds are eliminated so that a much higher proportion of the actual plant matter is plant matter we can eat those two things together mean that it supports more human biomass and a bigger population and a mode of production that supports a bigger population per square kilometre will tend to expand and dominate motive to other modes of production but we have to ask why is it so late homo sapiens has existed for hundreds of thousands of years but agriculture has only existed for thousands of years we've had the intellectual capability to carry out agriculture but haven't done it and if you think that it has such a big energy advantage why did it take so long for agriculture to develop well basically what anthropologists have concluded now is it's because farming is actually much harder work and people only driven to it by necessity the number of hours of labour and that you have to put in and the hardness of the labour that you have to put in as a peasant farmer is greater that people had to put in in a hunter and hunting and gathering society they didn't have to work as hard or so long and therefore they have no incentive to become hunter-gatherers now exactly why the transition took place is not clear it's very likely that it was associated with climate changes which occurred at the end of the last ice age because agricultural societies appear to were isn't very shortly after the ice age ended one obvious change was that during the period of the ice ages the Sahara Desert was fertile and lush and apparently supported considerable hunter-gatherer populations of humans once the ice age ended that climatic band cross the Sahara and the Middle East which had been lushly vegetated turned into desert and populations were driven to the small areas of remaining vegetation around big rivers and those were among the areas were agriculture developed initially another possibility is that improved mythic hunting tools led to the hunting out of large game and made hunting less viable Harris is a particular advocate of this theory applied to North America that the settlers who had the Clovis points he believes hunted the megafauna to extinction and therefore created an ecosystem with very few megafauna and in which a pure hunting mode of life was less viable and people therefore had pressure on them in the area around Mexico where all megafauna had been wiped out to develop maize agriculture it's also possible that adaptations in the mists of the think to people forming settled communities around particular rich hunting resources had prepared people for living in a settled way the main center in you norm or also as a Western Eurasia for the cultivation of our first cultivation of grain crops and first domestication of sheep and cattle appears to have been Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia and once agriculture was harnessed in these areas you've got a gradual growth of population because the land would support more the Renfrew hypothesis on the spread of languages since of the reason why the indo-european languages are spread over the area shown in this map is it starting out from anatolia eight and a half thousand years ago the populations expanded spread and they showed the earliest archaeological evidence when the people were here and the the blue areas that were the last colonized by the indo-european language speakers who spread out from this area due to a rise in the population that could be supported Rep Renfrew claims a similar process occurred in Africa from an area of initial cultivation of millet and cassava in the area around West Africa from which a population expansion spread out spreading the Bantu languages to the east and south in the African continent this process of replacement of hunter hunting societies by agricultural societies continues it's obviously been in the news a lot the clearance of forests in in the Amazonia now ironically this is a secondary replacement in that much of Amazonia was agricultural before the humans or before the Europeans arrived it was the fun farming it communities within the amazon basin had cleared substantial areas and it was substantial agriculture in north america as well and the arrival of the spanish on the american continent spread small pox cold flu etc to which the people weren't immune and caused the tremendous population craps and reforestation and that reforest ation produced its own signature and carbon dioxide and climatic effects at the time but this process of deforestation that's taking place in Amazonia now occurred in in Europe over a period of several thousand years the these are maps which show the degree of deforestation or forest clearance at different periods here at 1000 BC start at the Iron Age you see agricultural widespread the light colors here are roughly half cleared land so that the extensive areas in Italy Greece Anatolia what's now France Spain and Germany were there were clearly substantial populations who had cleared or partially cleared forests if we then move on to 3000 350 AD which is the end of the Roman Empire the dawn of feudalism you see that the process of forest klaris was much more developed the whole of Western Europe essentially had been cleared and areas of clearance were beginning to spread into northern Russia the Baltics so not only was the Roman Empire deforested but substantial deforestation had occurred in in the Barbarian areas and therefore had provided the population density in the Barbarian areas that enabled the barbarian invasion to be successful around this period if you go on to the start of the industrial area you see that deforestation has not gone much further and the rest of Europe the this indicates areas which almost entirely given over to grain agriculture or to other forms of agriculture these reddish areas and the earlier like this would be typical English farmland where you have interspersed woods with with fields and you see that the the steps have been cleared there the forests have been cleared from Russia except in the boreal northern forests so agriculture has spread right across during the feudal period now I'm talking about feudal period and the Roman Empire etc but the early agricultural communities were a Galleria the Neolithic farming communities don't seem to show much sign of social inequality people were typically living in long houses like this reconstructed one and we know from longhouse communities that have been studied in Borneo or North America where they survived until recent periods that these were egalitarian communities on some often matriarchal and even when they form villages look like Catholic in Anatolia all the houses with the same size and there's also an absence of fortified settlements these are farming settlements spread across the countryside with no forts or indications of warlike activity but this gradually changes and questions why his catal hoyuk the iconography would tend to indicate there was matriarchal this masses of houses all the same size no clearly clear differentiation according sir to social status so it would appear to be a non class Society 7,000 BC there now there are certain empirical things that anthropologists have noticed we know that early farming used hand tools it used as days and hoes there weren't any plows and if there are no plows are no Oxford oxen or horse cart or cart horses and there are then no instruments or means of production that aren't easily available there's no expensive means of production like an ox or a horse who could be monopolized there's also lots of unused land to which people could migrate as population grew so you can't establish a man law class if people can simply up sticks and move a few miles away and cultivate a new field so a land owning monopoly could not be established during this period and hence there were many thousand years of account aryan farming before classes arose because classes required the monopolization of resources they required either the monopolization of land or monopolization of animal resources in the early stages class inequality depended on a shortage of land you can't establish private property inland till you've got a shortage of it and competition for land and resources gives rise to a warrior overall which gives rise to the social dominance of men and can give rise to a warrior aristocracy it also depends on the use of animals for power because once you have animals you have unequal ownership of hurts you have the inheritance of hurts you have the possibility that herds can be exchanged for wives as bright prices you have raiding and more conflict raiding for cattle again leads to the dot the rise of the warrior role and we can see this in the archaeological record of Scotland you see initial communities with long houses and then gradually you start to see the rise of fortified settlements like the the bra houses which are completely essentially impermeable stone houses this this is more than two thousand years old still standing in the Shetlands they're really big buildings if you go and see them and you start seeing the hill forts and the top of all the main hills so that people either lived in these fortified houses or they lived in fortified settlements and tops of hills where they could guard their cattle and it's clear that this point endemic warfare was a existed between tribes and claims on land and on property had already been established and you are getting the rise of class society at this stage and the roughly what you'd say the start of the Iron Age in in not on you

Channel: Paul Cockshott

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Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019