THE ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE

        The mystery  of agriculture's origin seems even more impenetrable
in light of the recent reversal of long-standing notions that the previous
era was one of hostility to nature and an absence of leisure.  "One could
no longer assume," wrote Orme, "that early man domesticated plants and
animals to escape drudgery and starvation.  If anything, the contrary
appeared true, and the advent of farming saw the end to innocence."  For a
long time, the question was "why wasn't agriculture adopted much earlier
in human evolution?"  More recently, we know that agriculture in Cohen's
words, "is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a
higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base."  Thus the
consensus question now is, "why was it adopted at all?"
        Many theories have been advanced, non convincingly.  Childe and
others argue that population increase pushed human societies into more
intimate contact with other species, leading to domestication and the need
to produce in order to feed the additional people.  But it has been shown
rather conclusively that population increase did not proceed agriculture
but was caused by it.  "I don't see any evidence anywhere in the world,"
concluded Flannery, "that suggests that population pressure was
responsible for the beginning of agriculture."  Another theory has it that
major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pliestocene, about
11,000 years ago, which upset the old hunter-gatherer life-world and led
directly to the cultivation of certain surviving staples.  Recent dating
methods have helped demolish this approach; no such climatic shirt
happened that could have forced the new mode into existence.  Besides,
there are scores of examples of agriculture being adopted -- or refused --
in every climate.  Another major hypothesis is that agriculture was
introduced via a chance discovery or invention as if it has never occurred
to the species before a certain moment that, for example, food grows from
sprouted seeds.  It seems Paleolithic humanity had a virtually
inexhaustible knowledge of flora and fauna for many tens of thousands of
years before the cultivation of plants began, which renders this theory
especially weak.
        Agreement with Carl Sauer's summation that "Agriculture did not
originate from a growing or chronic shortages of food" is sufficient, in
fact, to dismiss virtually all originary theories that have been advances.
A remaining idea, present by Hahn, Isaac and others, hold that food
production began at a base as a religious activity.  This hypothesis comes
closest to plausibility.
        Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known
to have been widely used in religious ceremonies, and to have been raised
in enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes.  Before they were
domesticated, moreover, sheep has no wool suitable for textile purposes.
The main use of the hen in Southeastern Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean
-- the earliest centers of civilization -- "seems to have been," according
to Darby, "Sacrificial or divinatory rather than alimentary."  Sauer adds
that "the egg laying and meat producing qualities" of tamed fowl "are
rather late consequences of their domestication."  Wild cattle were fierce
and dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor that modified meat texture
of such castrates could have been foreseen.  Cattle were not milked until
centuries after their initital captivity, and representations indicate
that their fist known harnessing was to wagons in religious processions.
        Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit similar backgrounds so far
as it is known.  Consider the New World examples of squash and pumpkin,
used originally as ceremonial rattles.  Johannessen discused the religious
and mystical motives connected with the domestication of maize, Mexico's
most important crop and center of Neolithic religion.  Likewise, Anderson
investigated the selection and development of distinctive types of various
cultivated plants because of their magical significance.  The shamans, I
would add, were well-placed in positions of power to introduce agriculture
via the taming and planting involved in ritual and religion, sketchily
refered to above.
        Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture has
been somewhat overlooked, it brings us, in my opinion, to the very
doorstep of the real explanation of the birth of production: that
non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the froms of
time, language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and
psychic life in agriculture.  "Religion" is to narrow a conceptulization
of this infection and its growth.  Domination is too weight, to
all-encompassing, to have been solely conveyed by the pathology that is
religion.
        But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of
religion are certainly part of agriculture, and from the beginning.
Noting that strains of corn cross-pollinate vary easily, Anderson studied
the very primitive agriculturalists of Assam, the Naga tribe, and their
variety of corn that exhibited no differences from plant to plant.  True
to culture, showing that it is complete from the beginning of production,
the Naga kept their varies so pure "only by a fanatical adherence to the
ideal type."  This exemplifies the marriage of culture and production in
domestication, and its inevitable progeny, repression and work.
        The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in
domesticating of animals, which also defies natural selection and re-
establishes the controllable organic world at a debased, artificial level.
Like plants, animals are mete things to be manipulated; a cow, for
instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass into milk.
Transmuted from a state of freedom to that of helpless parasites, there
animals become completely dependent on man for survival.  In domestic
mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively smaller as
specimens are produced that devote more and more energy to growth and less
to activity.  Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most
domesticated of herd animals; the remarkable intelligence of wild sheep is
completely lost in their tamed counterparts.  The social relationships
among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest essentials.
Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is
curtailed, and the animal's very capacity to recognize its own species is
impaired.
        Farming also created the potential for rapid environmental
distuction and the new dominion of nature soon began to turn the green
mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilization into barren and
lifeless areas, "Vast regions have changed their aspect completely,"
estimates Zeuner, "always to the quasi-drier condition, since the
beginnings of the Neolithic."  Deserts now occupy most of the areas where
the high civilizations once flourished, and there is much historical
evidence that these early formations inevitable ruined their environments.
        Throughout the Mediterranian Basin the adjoining Near East and
Asia, agriculture turned lush and hospitable land into depleted, dry and
rocky terrain.  In Critias, Plato described Attica as "a skeleton washed
by disease," referring to the deforestation of Greece and contrasting it
to its earlier richness.  Grazing by goats and sheep, the first
domesticated ruminants, was a major factor in the denuding of Greece,
Lebanon, and North Africa, and the desertification of the Roman and
Mesopotamian empires.