Login

***Magda Hassan*** · 27-10-2014, 02:59 PM

Humanity's Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution

Chapter summary:

In the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, there are dry and wet seasons, and they must seasonably change their diets to adapt to available foods. Beyond those rainforests, seasonal variation is more pronounced and, once the easy meat was gone, people survived by engaging in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle familiar to today's humans. A sexual division of labor existed; men hunted and women gathered. Men had the strength and speed required to hunt wary animals, particularly large game, while women were less mobile, partly due to caring for children.
Gravettian mammoth villages probably hosted humanity's first semi-sedentary populations, but that short-lived situation ended when mammoths did. The primary necessity for a sedentary population's survival was a local and stable energy supply. One energy supply tactic, as could be seen with those mammoth hunters, was storing food in permafrost "freezers." Seasonal settlements existed where people subsisted on migrating animals or when certain plants had a harvestable and seasonal stage of development.
Although eating roots has a long history in the human line, permanent sedentism began by harvesting nuts and seeds. In the Levant, in a swath of land that includes today's Israel and Syria, about 13.5 kya the Kebaran culture (c. 18 kya to 12.5 kya) made acorns and pistachios a dietary staple.[570] Mortars and pestles were in the Kebaran toolkit for processing acorns, which must be pounded into a paste and soaked to leach out tannins, and that work fell exclusively to women. Domestication often meant artificial selection to reduce/remove plant features that protected against grazing. That made the plants more palatable to humans, but it also made it more attractive to other animals. Many of today's domestic crops could not survive in the wild, and protecting crops from other animals and competition with other plants has been an integral part of the Domestication Revolution.[571] Similarly, many domestic animals would have a difficult time surviving in the wild, including people.
The Natufian culture (c. 15 kya to 11.8 kya) succeeded the Kebaran culture, and the Natufian village at Tell Abu Hureyra in today's Syria was established about 13.5 kya, and was situated on a gazelle migration route. The residents of that village of a few hundred people also harvested "wild gardens" of wheat and rye. Those villagers became Earth's first known farmers, and they had dogs. The original settlement was abandoned during the Younger Dryas and resettled after it ended. The effect of a harsher climate may have spurred the origin of agriculture, which began there about 11 kya. By seven kya, the settlement had grown to several thousand people, and was then abandoned due to aridity. No evidence of warfare is associated with the settlement. A compelling recent hypothesis is that agriculture could not have developed in warfare's presence, as farmers would have been too vulnerable to raids by hungry hunters.[572] In the four places on Earth where agriculture seems to have independently developed: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, no evidence of violent conflict exists before those civilizations, fed by the first crops, began growing into states. Those states are called "pristine" states, as no other states influenced their development. Also, it is considered likely that a primary impetus for beginning agriculture in those regions was the decimation of animals to hunt. Not only was the easy meat rendered largely extinct, but those animals would have also been competitors for crops. The peaceful agricultural villages that feminist authors have long written about, in which women's status was closer to men's than at any time before the Industrial Revolution, actually existed, if only for a relatively brief time, in only a few places.
Only when economic surpluses (primarily food) were redistributed, first by chiefs and then by early states, did men rise to dominance in those agricultural civilizations. Because the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is the best studied and had the greatest influence on humanity, this chapter will tend to focus on it, although it will also survey similarities and differences with other regions where agriculture and civilization first appeared. Whenever agriculture appeared, cities nearly always eventually appeared, usually a few thousand years later.[573] Agriculture's chief virtue was that it extracted vast amounts of human-digestible energy from the land, and population densities hundreds of times greater than that of hunter-gatherers became feasible. The debates on the subject may never end, but today it is widely thought that Malthusian population pressures led to the agriculture's appearance.[574] The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident. Early agriculture was a life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle, and humans became shorter and less healthy when they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but the land could also support many times the people. Another aspect of biology that applies to human civilization is the idea of carrying capacity. Over history, the society with the higher carrying capacity prevailed, and the loser either adopted the winner's practices or became enslaved, taxed, marginalized, or extinct. On the eve of the Domestication Revolution, Earth's carrying capacity with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was around 10 million people, and the actual population was somewhat less, maybe as low as four million.[575] On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, Earth's population was nearly a billion, and again was considered to be about half of Earth's carrying capacity under that energy regime. No matter how talented a hunter-gatherer warrior was, he was no match for two hundred peasants armed with hoes. Today, people practicing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle are usually dependent on the production of nearby agricultural societies. Pure hunter-gathering, of the kind performed before the Domestication Revolution, has almost entirely vanished.[576]
Darwin made the case for group selection, but believed that natural selection primarily worked at the individual level. The idea of group selection has become prominent in my lifetime, if controversial. Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social creatures such as termites, but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by banishment or death, which has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of "uncooperative" genes.[577] When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which was why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies.[578] Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies possessing domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies. Whether they are species or human civilizations, the generation of energy surplus determines their viability.
Another early Fertile Crescent village, Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k, in today's Turkey, existed from 9.5 kya to 7.7 kya, and was another peaceful agricultural settlement in which the inhabitants numbered several thousand people. It was arguably Earth's first city, but it was more like a large village, without the civic features typically associated with cities.[579] The society seemed classless, and women and men had roughly equivalent status. This is one of the brief social Golden Ages that feminists have studied. The first domesticated sheep appeared at Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k, and the beginnings of cattle domestication appear there as well. Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k's residents raised wheat, barley, and peas. Pottery and obsidian mining and tool-making were major crafts, and those people made the world's first known map. Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k did not have walls, there was no sign of warfare, and many "shrines" dotted the settlement, which probably supported a hunter-gatherer religion. Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k was abandoned in a pattern that would repeat itself in the Fertile Crescent and Old World many times in succeeding millennia; it appears that deforestation and resultant desertification may have spelled the end of Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k, as was probably also the case with Tell Abu Hureyra.
In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures beginning about 8.2 kya, which lasted for a few centuries. It was probably caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting, and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the Younger Dryas, but it still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures occurred.
Those two early settlements may have been abandoned partly due to those climate events, but they would have also deforested their hinterlands and desertified the region, and the settlements were permanently abandoned. In the Jordan Valley, settlements were abandoned at the same time, which is thought to be because a thousand years of agricultural settlements eroded and deforested the land, and sufficient crops could no longer be grown.[580] Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan civilizations.[581]
A contemporary of Ã‡atal HÃ¶yÃ¼k, Ã‡ayÃ¶nÃ¼ Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and male/female differences in diet.[582] Cattle seem to have been first domesticated about 10.5 kya in the vicinity, and is also where pigs may have been first domesticated. Many progenitors of cereal crops still grow wild in the region. The apple may have been the first domesticated tree fruit, and was raised in that region as early as 8.5 kya. Early on, people also began to domesticate fiber-producing plants, and flax was among the first domesticated fiber plants. Fiber crops often competed with food crops for field space, especially when foreign conquerors reoriented that subject population's efforts, which led to starvation in the subject population. A recent example is when the British forced Bengal to grow jute, indigo, and opium instead of food, and Bengal had a huge famine soon after the British conquered it.
Goats were first domesticated in today's Iran about 10 kya. Pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent as long as 15 kya, and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early. Farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, and humans replaced herd leadership. Since humans are herd animals, their understanding of herd behaviors probably made their efforts more successful.
Just as growing large became a strategy for extinction for the world's megafauna when a super-predator appeared that could kill them, forests are the greatest biological energy stores that Earth has ever seen. Trees are Earth's "megaflora," and they suffered the same fate as megafauna wherever civilization appeared. When humans became sedentary, they razed local forests to gain building materials and fuel, and the freshly deforested land worked wonderfully for raising crops, at least until the soils were ruined from nutrient depletion and erosion. Domesticated cattle pulled the first plows, which began more than seven kya. When humans began to smelt metal, beginning about 8 kya, deforestation was easier, so a dynamic arose in the Fertile Crescent in which bronze axes easily deforested the land. The exposed soil was then worked with draft animals pulling bronze plows, and this increased crop yields but also increased erosion. That complex of deforestation, crops, draft animals, and smelted metals yielded great short-term benefits but was far from sustainable, as it devastated the ecosystems and soils and also impacted the hydrological cycle, and gradually turned forests into deserts. Earth was also deforested by the enormously energy-intensive Bronze Age smelting of metal. During the Mediterranean region's Bronze Age, the standard unit of copper production was the oxhide ingot (because it was worth about one ox), which weighed between 20 and 30 kilograms. It took six tons of charcoal to smelt one ingot, which required 120 pine trees, or 1.6 hectares (four acres) of trees.[583] Kilns for making pottery also required vast amounts of wood. Wood met many energy needs of early Old World civilizations, which were all voracious consumers of wood.
In virtually all civilizations, there was an early Golden Age that later generations often looked back to wistfully, where life was relatively easy and peaceful, at least until deforestation, soil destruction, and overpopulation took their inevitable toll. In the Fertile Crescent today, the ruins of hundreds of early cities are in their self-made deserts, usually buried under the silt of the erosion of exposed forest soils. As the Mediterranean Sea's periphery became civilized, the same pattern was repeated; forests became semi-deserts and early cities were buried under silt. Before the rise of civilization, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan, and only about 10% of the forest that still existed as late as 2000 BCE still remains.[584] Everyplace that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested.[585] Humanity has reduced Earth's biomass by more than a third since agriculture began. The only partial exceptions are places such as Japan, but they regenerated their forests by importing wood from foreign forests. North America and Asia have been supplying Japan with wood for generations. As civilizations wiped themselves out with their rapaciousness, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, but they were a small minority. Usually lost in the anthropocentric view was the awesome devastation inflicted on other life forms. Killing off the megafauna was only a prelude. Razing a forest to burn the wood and raise crops destroyed an entire ecosystem for short-term human benefit and left behind a lifeless desert when the last crops were wrenched from depleted soils. In the final accounting, the damage meted out to Earth's other species, not other humans, may be humanity's greatest crime. Humanity is the greatest destructive force on Earth since that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and our great task of devastating Earth and her denizens may be far from finished.
Since humans began to make advanced tools and valuable goods, they exchanged them, beginning as early as 150 kya, and cities have always been situated on low-energy transportation lanes. Before the Industrial Revolution, these lanes were almost always bodies of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took only about 1-2% of the energy to move goods across a body of water, such as a lake or ocean, as it did overland. A peasant in Aztec civilization, for instance, could as easily and quickly bring more than forty times the weight of goods by canoe on a trip across the Valley of Mexico's lakes to TenochtitlÃ¡n as he could by carrying a load on his back along the causeways.[586] In 1800, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods more than 5,000 milometers to American shores from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers overland in the USA.[587] In England, in the 13[SUP]th[/SUP] century CE, it cost about as much to transport coal across five hundred kilometers of water as it took to move it across five kilometers of land.[588]
The main reason for low-energy transportation lanes was so that energy supplies (primarily food and wood) could feed the cities, and that flow of energy was often reciprocated with the flow of manufactured goods. The standard pattern of early cities was energy supplies flowing to the cities and city-manufactured goods flowing outward, and cities thereby became hubs of exchange. The so-called "tyranny of distance," which means how far goods could be effectively transported to cities, limited the size of their hinterland and thus limited a city's size.[589] More energy-intensive and energy-efficient transportation enlarged the exploitable hinterland, which allowed cities to grow. The introduction of the wheel could improve matters, but not always. In preindustrial Islamic cultures, the camel was often a more energy-efficient form of transportation than wheeled carts.[590]
Sedentism was the primary outcome and benefit of agriculture. When people became sedentary, they could accumulate possessions, develop new skills, sleep under the same roof all year, and engage in daily communication with many others. Just as language was the first "Internet," cities provided a quantum leap in the quick dissemination of information and ideas. The development of professions is the most important feature of urban life.[591]
The world's first true city is widely considered to be Eridu, which was established near the mouth of the Euphrates River about 7.4 kya, or about 5400 BCE ("Before Common Era," also called BC, for "Before Christ", but BCE is today's convention, just as "CE" has replaced "AD"). Eridu had a population of about 5,000 people at its peak. Eridu was the first city of what became Sumer, which was an agglomeration of city-states. Sumer was established along and between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the ancient Greeks called the region Mesopotamia, which meant the land between the rivers. Ã‡ayÃ¶nÃ¼ Tepesi was in the Tigris's watershed, and it and many settlements like it engaged in deforestation, agriculture, and raising domestic animals. Their practices were not sustainable, as the newly exposed soils washed away, and what remained was depleted of nutrients, although farmers began using manure, both of humans and domestic animals, to restore soil fertility, from the early days of agriculture. Eridu engaged in a practice that characterizes cities to the present day: they harnessed gravity; upstream water flows supplied cities with water and goods were brought down rivers. But in what became Mesopotamia, it also brought silt and salt from upriver deforestation and erosion.
Sumerian city-states engaged in irrigation, which raised the water-tables. When the water table in those waterlogged soils reached the surface, the soils turned white with salt, especially with the high evaporation of those hot lands, and it would no longer support crops. The only solution was to stop irrigating and let the land go fallow as the water table fell, but the population pressures did not allow for it, so the process inexorably created saline soils, silt-filled canals due to upland deforestation, and today those Sumerian cities are all buried in silt in a desert. Eridu was a seashore city, and today its ruins lie more than 200 kilometers inland. But before silt and salt wrecked that civilization, many seminal inventions appeared. The sailing ship appeared in early Sumer. Gravity took a ship downstream, and wind power helped it move back upstream.
About 3800 BCE, the Sumerian city of Ur was established at the new mouth of the Euphrates; Eridu was already becoming an inland city, although more from a sea level decline than silt at that time. The ruins of seaside Ur reside more than 200 kilometers inland today.[592] (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The word "urban" is derived from the Sumerian "ur."[593] About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established, upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumeria's first great city, with a population of about 50,000 at its peak. About 5000 BCE, people began smelting copper. The earliest evidence for copper smelting currently comes from a mountain in today's Serbia. In the Fertile Crescent, inventions quickly spread, and by about 3300 BCE, smelters learned to add tin to copper and the Fertile Crescent's Bronze Age began. Metal had obvious advantages over stone, and Bronze Age civilizations in river valleys quickly appeared; the Harappan Civilization formed in the Indus river valley about 3300 BCE, and the first civilization in the Nile river valley formed about 3100 BCE. The wheel was invented around 3500 BCE and immediately spread. Whether it was invented in Sumer, the Indus river valley, or somewhere else in the region is still debated, but its advantages were instantly obvious, particularly where draft animals could pull them. When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they found that Mesoamerican peoples had independently invented wheels, but just had them on children's toys, and the likely reason was that they had no draft animals, not after the megafauna holocaust of several millennia earlier.
Warfare, in which polities fought over water and land, began in earnest in southern Mesopotamia about 4000 BCE, and the third millennium BCE (2999 to 2000 BCE) was a time of constant Mesopotamian warfare. The sieges that city-states inflicted on each other were brutal. When one city conquered another, the men were all killed or blinded and enslaved, and the women and children were enslaved.[594] Slavery began appearing at the beginning of the Domestication Revolution. Slavery only made economic sense in sedentary populations, and by the time of early civilizations and writing, slavery was a universal institution. Enslaving somebody when people lived nomadically would have been impractical.
Making mounds from corpses of defeated soldiers was common in official accounts of battles during the third millennium BCE. One of the first walled cities was Uruk's colonial settlement Habuba Kabira, which was founded around 3500 BCE along the Euphrates in today's Syria, but it was abandoned after several generations. Those wars led to the first written treaties, which were largely concerned with citizens who found themselves on the wrong side the new border.[595] Conscription was an early feature of civilization, closely akin to slavery, although the arrangement was temporary and conscripted soldiers were often promised land for their coerced services; draft-dodging became one of early civilization's art forms.
Stratified urban populations and the agricultural hinterlands that they exploit comprise civilization's primary structure to this day. Soldiers, craftsmen, merchants, priests, and other professions appeared with urban civilization. Slaves only made economic sense among sedentary preindustrial peoples, and forced servitude is the hallmark of early civilizations. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples were repressed by priesthoods of urban religions for thousands of years. On early Fertile Crescent pottery, scenes of dancing people proliferated, which depicted a tradition that probably lasted unbroken for more than 60,000 years. By about 3500 BCE, those dancing scenes began to disappear from pottery, as professional priesthoods conquered the ancestral religion. Western religions have been stifling "ecstatic" religions ever since. Today's Pentecostals and Shakers have rituals that hail back to religion before civilization.[596] The professional urban priesthood became spiritual middlemen, and direct interactions with other dimensions and "ecstatic" states were discouraged or forbidden. Belief and "faith" replaced direct experience, and later, "sacred" texts recorded the alleged deeds and words of spiritual leaders, who were usually religious rebels themselves and did not leave any writings behind. The priesthood not only monopolized the texts but also their interpretation, and again became well-paid middlemen between the divine source and the flock.
Early elites claimed divine status, and the priesthood abetted the fiction, and a universal practice among early civilizations was erecting monumental architecture. The ziggurat was the first such structure. Anthropologists think that monumental architecture may be a form of societal/elite display, where a society can flaunt the resources used to make such overawing showings, both to encourage submission to the society's obvious wealth and power, and to also discourage attempts to compete with it. In Sumer, ziggurats were not only the center of the state religion, but also held precious metals such as gold. The priesthood directed mass economic activity, such as organizing irrigation projects. In some ways, the priesthood was only adapting to urbanization. Their professional ancestors developed calendars and other methods of synchronizing vital activities such as plantings and harvests, with their attendant festivals; mistimings by mere days could lead to famine. Sumerian temples had statues in their central place of worship, in human form, bedecked with jewels and other precious adornments. Offerings of food were presented to the statues, which temple personnel ate that night. In the third millennium BCE, temples owned land and had their own workforce; again a "voluntary" one that discharged religious obligations. Although those temples performed valuable societal functions such as taking in orphans, the earliest urban religions were obviously businesses and could become rackets, in a pattern that continues to this day.[597]
Later, palaces appeared, and Sumerian palaces and their related elites are seen today as more of an intrusive dynamic from rural societies, as a kind of invasion and conquest rather than a natural outcome of Sumerian urban life. The elite arguably performed some kind of exchange function, but a common idea among anthropologists is that elites became elites because they could, not because they performed a necessary societal function. In early cities, elites usually arose from new professional classes that created and controlled markets.[598] In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions.[599] Sumer was the first pristine state, and when other pristine states arose, something like convergent evolution happened. They all had similar features, which included: male domination, divinely sanctioned heads of state with harems and other extravagances in their capital cities, including elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, forced servitude, human sacrifice and/or public executions to terrorize the populace into submission, conscripted "cannon fodder" infantry led by elite officers, fortified cities, taxation, and so on.[600] All pristine states passed through similar developmental stages, with some features appearing earlier or later than others, with minor variation among their attributes, but they all had remarkable resemblances, which probably reflected human "nature," in which UP everywhere reacted to analogous economic conditions in comparable fashion.
After consolidating their ill-gotten positions, the elite can rule more gently. Sociologist Steven Spitzer stated:

"Pristine states, precisely because they lack legitimacy, must develop and impose harsh, crude, and highly visible forms of repressive sanctions; developed states, having successfully re-invented' consensus, can achieve social regulation through a combination of civil law and relatively mild forms of calculated' repression."[601]

The greatest threat to all ruling classes has almost always been those that they rule. Only after their rule was secure, usually via bloodshed, did Sumer's elites perform state duties to provide some superficial legitimacy for their status, and priesthoods attributing divine status or divine sanction to secular elites has always been an effective strategy. The close relationship of secular and religious authority is evident at the very beginnings of civilization. Even today, the British Queen rules the Church of England, which is a tradition in Europe that goes back to Roman emperors.[602] The laborers drafted to build cathedrals, palaces, and monuments to aggrandize the elite would always perform more efficiently if they were doing it from religious belief rather than coercion, and the world's monumental architecture was primarily built with "free" labor, not slave labor, as a way of performing religious duties. Combining religious and secular ideologies can even be seen in supposedly secular civilizations, such as American schoolchildren being trained to worship flags, with the words "under God" as part of their daily recitations.
The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization's earliest days. Fixating people on irrational symbols, and then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols; as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally charged symbols. The effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim's lifetime. When people mistake symbols for reality, they are easily manipulated. Large-scale ideological indoctrination probably began in Sumer, as the priesthood concocted and promoted various beliefs. Symbology replaced reality, including the acceptance of the secular elite as deific, getting slaves to accept their status, and getting commoners to give food to the priesthood to fulfill some divinely ordained obligation. Religion passed from experience to belief with the rise of civilization. I am not suggesting that pre-civilized religions were necessarily enlightened. They had shamanic intermediaries too, but with the rise of civilization, the priest class had to work hard to justify the obviously unfair social organization that accompanied stratified populations. Direct religious experience was disparaged and suppressed while the priesthood's religious indoctrination was promoted.
Although there is evidence that writing began about 5000 BCE, Sumer became the first literate civilization about 3000 BCE, after their invention of cuneiform around 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian peoples had used clay tokens for accounting since about 8000 BCE, and elite accounting was typical of the first writing systems, or tales to aggrandize the elite. For instance, the quipu of the preliterate Incas was an accounting tool. By the Third Dynasty of Ur, silver became the official unit of accounting, to be supplanted by gold a millennium later, probably due to Egyptian influence.[603]
One of the earliest known works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which began about 2150 BCE. A brief review of the epic highlights elite themes and dynamics of early civilization. Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk around 2500 BCE, and was one-third man and two-thirds god. In the epic's first tablet, he used his kingly prerogative to sleep with Uruk's young women the night before marriage, and his subjects beseeched the gods for assistance. The gods responded by creating a "wild man" to distract Gilgamesh, and after Gilgamesh defeated him in battle they became friends. Gilgamesh then suggested that they travel to Lebanon's cedar forest and kill the demigod guardian of the forest. They journeyed to the cedar forest, killed the demigod, deforested the groves, and rafted back to Uruk with the demigod's head and a particularly large tree to be used in a temple. After the wild man's untimely death at the hands of the gods as punishment for killing the demigod, Gilgamesh then made otherworldly journeys to learn how to become immortal. After defeating stone giants and felling more than a hundred more trees, Gilgamesh built a boat to survive the coming flood, sent by the gods, and in a story that almost certainly inspired the Old Testament's tale of Noah, Gilgamesh survived the flood along with the animals he saved, and gods gathered around the sweet smell of Gilgamesh's sacrifice. After more adventures in an attempt to become immortal, Gilgamesh lamented his folly.
The writers of the Epic of Gilgamesh knew that deforestation led to droughts, and Gilgamesh's war against the forest foreshadowed the fate of numerous Old World civilizations.[604] The city-states of southern Mesopotamia made regular journeys to Lebanon's cedar forest. The ruler of Lagash, not far from Uruk, had plans for aggrandizing his legacy and leveled cedar forests and rafted their logs downriver to Lagash to fulfill his grandiose schemes.[605] The city-states of southern Mesopotamia deforested upstream river valleys and rafted logs to their downstream cities. Wars between the city-states, and wars of foreign conquest to secure forests and navigable rivers (particularly the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun of today's Iran), were common then. Wood became such a coveted commodity that it could approach the value of precious metals and stones, and Akkad's rulers placed names on mountains corresponding with what tree predominantly grew on each one.[606]
What came with the logs, however, was silt and salt. Southern Mesopotamia practiced irrigated farming, so salination and siltation eventually wrecked Sumer. By the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, the king Ur-Nammu made dredging silt from canals a high priority, and his dredging initiative temporarily revived agriculture and made Ur's port navigable once again, which had already been filled with silt.[607] Wheat is more sensitive to saline soil than barley. In 3500 BCE, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts, but salination began taking its toll. By 3000 BCE, when Sumer became the world's first literate society, their tablets record Sumer's decline. By 2500 BCE, wheat amounted to only 15% of the total crop. By 2100 BCE, wheat comprised only 2% of Sumer's crops. Wheat was not the only casualty. Salt-tolerant barley did better, but crop yields began falling precipitously around 2400 BCE, and a steady decline reached only a third of 2400 BCE yields by 1700 BCE.[608] Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, and Sumer's population declined by more than half, and famine was a regular visitor as croplands became white with salt.
Upriver from Sumer, the Akkadian Empire began to form, which was the world's first empire. Akkadians began defeating Sumer around 2300 BCE. Akkad's first king was Sargon, who bloodily came to power, captured Uruk, and dismantled its walls while conquering Sumer. That began a pattern of rising and falling empires in the Fertile Crescent that characterized the region for thousands of years. The Akkadian Empire collapsed after only 180 years of existence, and there was a resurgence of Ur under its Third Dynasty around 2100 BCE; the oldest preserved laws were then written. The Code of Hammurabi, written when Babylonians ruled in their turn a few centuries later, reflected earlier Sumerian laws, and they notably documented the barbarity of their times. Murder and robbery were capital crimes, but capital punishment was also meted out for offenses such as stealing a slave, deflowering a wife before the husband could (when the deflowerer is killed), or a wife is unfaithful (when the wife is killed). A boy striking his father would lose his fingers or hand. "Eye for an eye" came from the Code of Hammurabi.
Just as precipitation ran to the ocean in floods before plants colonized land, denuded lands and razed forests no longer held water like a sponge, and transpiration no longer contributed to the hydrological cycle. Rampant deforestation contributed to flooded Mesopotamian rivers and the region also became drier. The flood that Gilgamesh survived, which is evident in the archeological record, was probably related to deforestation, although a great deal of speculation exists regarding the origins of flood myths. The Black Sea is one candidate for flood legends, where the rising interglacial global ocean flooded the lake to levels higher than during the glacial period. Another hypothesis has rising seas flooding the lower end of Mesopotamia. There are arguments that the legend of Atlantis related to a seashore civilization drowned under a rising interglacial ocean, but I think that an increasingly deforested Sumerian hinterland gave rise to the floods of legend.
Just as with megafauna extinctions or the Neanderthal extinction, there are plenty of scientists and scholars who argue that human-agency is not responsible for the decline and collapse of civilizations, question whether they collapsed at all, assert that climate change did it, or invasion did it, and so on. The battle of competing hypotheses is part of the process of science, but all scientists whose hypotheses deflect responsibility from humanity (their in-group) have an inherent conflict of interest, and their work should be examined with that in mind. In the historical era, particularly when Europe conquered the world, the rapid deforestation and desertification of newly conquered lands was evident. Within a century of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, a valley of verdant forests and fertile farmland was turned into a semi-desert by deforestation and sheep grazing. That valley is known as the Mezquital Valley today, because the desert-dwelling mesquite is the dominant tree in that semi-desert. British invaders of Australia did the same thing to New South Wales within 50 years, via deforestation and sheep grazing.[609] Streams quickly dried up, but flooded when it rained, as the "sponge" of the forest ecosystem was removed, so flood and drought accompanied deforestation. Atlantic islands were quickly denuded and desertified by invading Spaniards and Portuguese.
Since 2003, I have been a student of collapsed civilizations, and there are vigorous academic disputes on the subject. Jared Diamond sees collapses as a result of environmental degradation, while Joseph Tainter perceives it as declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.[610] Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization's EROI.[611] Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts.[612] What they are all stating, in one fashion or another, is that the civilizations ran

Login
Username:
Password:	Lost Password?
	Remember me

Possibly Related Threads…
Thread		Author	Replies	Views	Last Post
	Private equity bets on energy 'revolution'â€”in oil and gas	Magda Hassan	0	12,047	19-11-2014, 11:36 AM Last Post: Magda Hassan
	The Energy Racket	Magda Hassan	5	28,503	18-03-2014, 11:30 PM Last Post: Magda Hassan
	Nuclear energy or free energy?	David Guyatt	0	4,608	21-10-2013, 10:17 AM Last Post: David Guyatt
	Patent filing claims solar energy â€˜breakthroughâ€™	Magda Hassan	3	8,093	28-05-2013, 02:51 PM Last Post: Dawn Meredith
	Plasma Device Supposed to Generate More Energy Than Input.	Peter Lemkin	2	6,091	18-04-2013, 11:21 AM Last Post: Peter Lemkin
	Japanâ€™s Energy Board Meets After Dropping Anti-Nuclear Members	Magda Hassan	2	6,267	16-03-2013, 12:51 PM Last Post: Jan Klimkowski
	On Free Energy	Christer Forslund	2	6,587	31-12-2011, 10:22 PM Last Post: David Butler
	Energy policy role at No 10 for former BP man.	Magda Hassan	0	5,107	12-03-2011, 06:48 AM Last Post: Magda Hassan
	DEZHOU china's GRID SOLAR VALLEY energy centre	Bernice Moore	3	7,737	31-01-2011, 09:58 PM Last Post: Magda Hassan
	Twenty-First Century Energy Superpower China, Energy, and Global Power	Magda Hassan	0	5,561	20-09-2010, 01:11 AM Last Post: Magda Hassan