Reading Practice 23

[1] For most of human history, we have searched for food by hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plants. This allowed small wandering groups to easily supply basic necessities for their families. Only concerned with providing what they needed, the grouping of such societies could be rather simple, revolving around age and gender categories. Societies such as these were based largely on principles, which went beyond distinctions based on age and gender, virtually all people had equivalent status, rights, and access to all resources.

 

[2] Archaeologist Donald Henry suggests that the combination of a rich habitat and sedentism (permanent, year-round settlement) led to a large increase in the human population. In his view, nomadic hunters exhibit relatively low levels of fertility. Their staple diet consists of high-protein, low-carbohydrate foods. Such a diet results in lower body-fat levels, which are medically associated with low fertility in women. High levels of physical activity and long periods of nursing, which are common among modern simple hunters, probably also contributed to the low levels of female fertility if they were also common among ancient foragers.

 

[3] In Henry’s view, settling down in areas with abundant food resources would have contributed to higher fertility levels among the sedentary foragers. A diet consisting of added wild cereals like soluble fiber and insoluble fiber produces proportionally more body fat, leading to higher fertility among women. Cereals, which are easy to digest, would have supplemented and then replaced their mother’s milk for old toddlers as the main food source. Since women are less fertile when they are breastfeeding, replacing cereals with their mother’s milk would result in a closer spacing of births and the possibility of a larger number of live births for each woman. A more sedentary existence may also have lowered infant mortality and perhaps increased longevity among the elderly population. The weaker members of society could safely stay in a fixed village rather than be forced regularly to move great distances as part of a nomadic existence, which poses a higher risk of accidents and trauma.

 

[4] All of these factors may have contributed to a trend of increasingly larger populations among some groups of humans in the Holocene (since 9600 B.C.E.). Over time, even humans living in a rich habitat can reach carrying capacity, which is the maximum population an area can bear within the context of a given subsistence system. Human population growth is like a rocket: once it picks up speed, it is difficult to control. So even after reaching an area’s carrying capacity, epoch human populations probably continued to grow in food-rich regions, exceeding the ability of the land to feed the population, again within the context of the same subsistence strategy. In some areas, small changes in climate or minor changes in plant characteristics may have further destabilized local economies.

 

[5] One possibility for a group to surpass the carrying capacity of a region is for them to exploit connecting land. However, good land may itself be limited—for example, within the confines of a river valley. When neighbors are in the same position of having filled up the whole of the desirable habitat available in their home territories, expansion is also a problem. Moreover, expansions overlapping onto the neighbors’ territory can lead to conflict, especially when they too are struggling with the land’s capacity to provide enough food.

 

[6] An alternative option is to stay in the same area while strengthening and adapting new strategies for finding food there. The impulse to produce more food to feed a growing population was satisfied in some areas by the development of more-complex survival tactics involving intensive labor. These tactics using labor then required more coordination and greater cooperation among the growing population, a development that brought about a change in the social and economic equations that came to define those societies. Hierarchies that did not exist in earlier hunting groups became helpful in structuring cooperative labor and in organizing more-complex technologies, making it likely that these hierarchies may have existed even before domestication and agriculture, as pre-Neolithic societies (before the tenth millennium B.C.E.) reacted to increases in population.