In the 1990s, I read Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, which was the first time that I read material like that, and it eventually led to this chapter of my medical racket essay, in which I describe the conflict of paradigms in Western medicine: violent male medicine versus gentle female medicine. Western medicine is good at emergency medicine, which was developed on battlefields, but it is a miserable failure for almost everything else. That schism was also seen in Western mythology, as early agrarian societies had Earth-based gentle female deities, while pastoral societies had violent male sky-gods. Those contrasts reflected the status of women. Marija Gimbutas invented her Kurgan hypothesis, in which pastoral raiders, with their male gods, from the steppes invaded agrarian civilizations, with their female gods, and conquered them. Her work stirred great controversy, but recent DNA studies have largely vindicated Gimbutas’s work.
I began seeing this contrast in other areas, and Richard Wrangham’s Demonic Males was influential in my studies. Wrangham’s studies were of great ape societies and how males dominated them through violence. This led to Wrangham’s becoming the leading proponent for the ancient roots of warfare. Chimps and humans are the only two species that engage in coalitionary killing. Wrangham argued that it either independently evolved twice, which would have been quite a coincidence, or that there was a continuity between chimps and humans, which their most recent common ancestor would have also engaged in. Chimps engage in warfare tactics that are eerily similar to human tactics, such as deceptively staged rearguard attacks.
This triggered academic battles over how old warfare is. Keith Otterbein called it a conflict between the hawks (warfare is old, going back at least to chimps) and the doves (warfare is a recent invention of farming and civilizations). In my opinion, the hawks win. Azar Gat agreed, in his masterpiece on warfare. Gat stated it was succinctly as I have seen: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence, including warfare. And, of course, violence is the province of men, as they commit about 90% of all murders, fight in wars, etc.
A chapter of Wrangham’s Demonic Males was on bonobos, which bucked that violent trend, and the cause of that anomaly has not changed in scholarship since Wrangham wrote about it: female bonobos banded together and overthrew male dominance of their societies. Bonobo societies are consequently the least violent of all great apes. The reason for that change in bonobo societies has also not changed. Bonobos were chimps who found themselves isolated south of the Congo River at least a million years ago. They were the only chimps that did not compete with gorillas, so they evolved to eat more gorilla food (foliage), and they could have large, stable foraging parties. With that stability, females banded together and overthrew male dominance. In a recent summary of studies of chimp and bonobo societies, far more than 100 chimps died violently, while there may have been one violent bonobo death. Also, infanticide is a common occurrence in dozens of primate societies, including all African great apes but bonobos, for which infanticide has yet to be observed.
Otterbein authored the most intriguing hypothesis that I found on how the Domestication Revolution began. Otterbein argued that the domestication of plants was only possible where the megafauna had been hunted to extinction or nearly so, as megafauna hunting and warfare were conjoined, as the weapons for killing megafauna (stone-tipped) also worked great for killing people. Otterbein thought that early experiments with crops could not have happened if the experimenters were continually being raided by hungry hunters.
Women likely domesticated plants as an adjunct to their gathering duties. There have been recent challenges to these ideas, exemplified by a recent Scientific American issue whose cover announced “Woman the Hunter,” as Scientific American went off the rails into woke territory. The fact is that men are twice as strong in their upper bodies as women are, which makes them ideal megafauna hunters as well as warriors, which all of the woke ideology in the world cannot obscure.
Otterbein classified pre-civilized societies into Type A and Type B societies. Type A societies were patrilocal, when means that women left their natal societies to mate, and those societies were dominated by gangs of related males (“Fraternal Interest Groups”). Those societies were extremely violent, as males vied for power. Type B societies were matrilocal or multilocal, which broke up the male gangs. The reason for becoming matrilocal was economic. Early agricultural societies, which were dependent on women’s crops, became those Type B societies, and those were the most peaceful preindustrial societies in the human journey. In Type A societies, women were often little more than chattel, and stealing, raping, beating, and even killing women were typical male behaviors, while such practices were largely unknown in Type B societies.
Humans began domesticating animals around the same time that they domesticated plants. Humans domesticated herd animals, as humans exploited herd instincts and took over herd leadership. Men’s physical strength not only helped them manage herd animals, but they could also defend against theft of their herds by neighboring societies. This is why men ran herder societies, which were Type A and warlike.
I have not seen anything that convincingly challenged that general framework of pre-civilized societies. Wrangham and Otterbein were right, as far as I could tell, and Gat’s work stands unrebutted in this area. Warfare is ancient and engaged in by males, and only when females were in economic ascendance and banded together was male domination overthrown.
It was a relatively short-lived ascendance for women, however. When draft animals were used in agriculture, men began to take it over, and when civilization arose, women’s status universally declined and would not rise again until industrialization. Women became the broodmares of agrarian civilizations.
There were a number of reasons why people began to domesticate plants. As I noted in my previous post, the Second Epoch saw the increase in Earth’s human population by a factor of a thousand, and all of the easy meat had been hunted to extinction. Also, by 12,000 years ago, Earth was fully into the interglacial interval that we live in today, which has been called The Long Summer. One of my favorite anthropologist authors has been Brian Fagan, who wrote a book with that title. In interglacial intervals, the warming ocean expels carbon dioxide, higher carbon-dioxide levels are good for plants, and that, combined with the warmer and wetter climate of this interglacial interval, made it an ideal time to experiment with domesticating plants, especially with so many more mouths to feed. Crops formed the basis of what I call the Third Epoch, which was a radical leap in energy production. Humanity’s population increased by hundreds of times in the Third Epoch.
The anomaly of Australia validates Otterbein’s hypothesis. With the possible exception of the Murray River region, Australia stayed a continent of hunter-gatherers until the British invaded in the late 1700s. While nearly all of the Australian megafauna quickly went extinct after the arrival of humans, today’s kangaroo was the great exception, because it is fleet-footed and mothers carry their vulnerable infants with them. Consequently, megafauna hunting never died out in pre-”discovery” Australia, and all aboriginal Australian societies were patrilocal and extremely violent. There were plenty of domestication candidates among the bush foods that Australians ate, but they were never domesticated, with the possible exception of the Murray River area, which would have been ideal for plant domestication.
Early plant domestication had a “honeymoon,” as the forests and soils were intact, “pests” had not adapted to crops yet, so crops were an early winner. Societies based on crops produced many times the calories per acre that hunting and gathering did, and farmer populations exploded. The Fertile Crescent is where plants were first domesticated on Earth, and croplands soon began to spread in what is called the Neolithic Expansion. It was only when that honeymoon was over that farming became drudgery and people shrank, compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. But there were many more people to feed, so going back to hunting and gathering was not feasible, unless the human population collapsed to a tiny fraction of its pre-farming numbers.
Women’s status also began declining, and the spread of farming cultures often meant the extinction of hunter-gatherers, especially the men. Sometimes, the hunter-gatherers adopted farming themselves, but more often the farmers displaced them. DNA studies have shown multiple population replacements in Europe, for instance. Behaviorally modern humans drove Neanderthals to extinction, hunter-gatherers were displaced by farmers, and invading herders from the steppes (Gimbutas’s hypothesis) displaced the early farmers. During the Neolithic Expansion, hunter-gatherer women married into the relatively prosperous farming communities, which is how the DNA of hunter-gatherer men disappeared from the gene pool. But early on, men rose to dominance once again and there is a genetic bottleneck, as men were able to indulge their chimp proclivities and monopolize the mating opportunities. The Neolithic Expansion in Europe often degenerated into highly violent societies that even engaged in cannibalism.
Otterbein’s hypothesis of a decline in megafauna hunting seems to have held in all instances of plant domestication, but far from all agrarian societies became matrilocal. When the most isolated societies on Earth were discovered in Highland New Guinea in the 20th century, they were patrilocal subsistence farmers, and they were the most violent societies on Earth, in which a third of their societies went extinct each century from warfare. Those peaceful horticultural, matrilocal villages indeed existed, but they were a short-lived phenomenon in the human journey, in one of those few golden ages.
Plant domestication happened independently in several places on Earth, with the right conditions (called the “Lucky Latitudes”), and in four of those regions, about five thousand years after the invention of agriculture, civilizations arose, also independently, in something like convergent evolution. The rise of civilization is the topic of the next post.