Civilization #1: Explaining Humanity's Transition to Agriculture

Why did humanity transition from a hunter-gatherer society to agriculture?

In the traditional paradigm—a sophisticated word that just means story, model, or understanding—we transitioned because we were first hunter-gatherers. We lived in groups of about 20 to 50 people and roamed the land looking for food. It was uncertain and unstable. Then, suddenly, there was a revolution: we discovered farming.

Farming provided a stable source of food that we could control. The word we use is domestication, which just means that we bring it under our control. Because of farming, we could now create more food than we needed; the word we use for this is surplus. Because there was a surplus, people could now do things besides farming. For example, we could have leaders, which creates the idea of politics. We could also have priests, which introduces the idea of religion. Then we could have creative people, which gives us arts.

Slowly, over time, these villages grew into cities. Because there were a lot of people and a lot of surplus, we could now have literature—reading and writing—so we could store knowledge and pass it from generation to generation and across cultures. We could now have science and technology. Slowly, over the course of this process, we created modernity, which is the world that we live in today. The pivotal step towards modernity was this transition into agriculture. This is traditionally what we believed about the world.

Unfortunately, there's no evidence for this. In fact, the more evidence we collect, the more we realize this is not true.

The Case Against Farming

What we now know is that it was actually pretty stupid to transition from being a hunter-gatherer into farming, for a variety of reasons.

The first reason is that when you're a hunter-gatherer, it's actually a pretty easy life because there's food everywhere. When you're a farmer, it's a hard life because you have to grow that food. Maybe as a hunter-gatherer, you're working an hour a day, but as a farmer, you were working six or seven hours a day. It was very hard to grow that food.

In the book Sapiens, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has a very famous sentence. The sentence is like this:

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

We felt that we made wheat into our slave, but in reality, wheat made us its slave. The reasoning for this is that out in nature, if you're wheat and you want to survive, you have to make yourself attractive to other people and to animals. You have to be tasty, and you have to be easy to find. You have to do a lot of work. But when you're on a farm and you're wheat, you can just lay back, do nothing, and make humans do all the work. It was a bad deal for humans and a very good deal for wheat.

That's the first problem: you actually do more work on the farm than you do as a hunter-gatherer. This means that now you have to have more children; you need labor to do all that work, which creates the problem of overpopulation. This means that you are using too much land, and then eventually the land becomes dead or not arable anymore.

The second problem is that we're able to dig up the skeletons of hunter-gatherers and farmers, and what we see is that hunter-gatherers are a lot taller than farmers. Why? Protein. As a hunter-gatherer, you have access to meat, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Your diet is varied and very nutritious. But as a farmer, you're eating only what you grow, which is mainly wheat and some vegetables, so you're not getting that much nutrition.

The third problem is that as a farmer, you are much more likely to die early than if you're a hunter-gatherer. Why? Have you guys been to a farm? What's the problem on a farm? Exactly: pigs, animals, they're everywhere. Plus, where do you put the garbage? Where do you go to the restroom? Because people are together in a very unclean place, it's much more likely to contract disease and then die.

For these three reasons, the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming makes no sense. Even today, we are not able to explain why this transition happened. We don't know why we did this.

How Do We Find the Real Answer?

The only thing we can do is construct theories as to why this might have happened. Even though we can't go into the past and look at why we did this, we can do some research, collect evidence, and then create theories. There are four different disciplines from which we can collect evidence.

1. Archaeology: Archaeology is just the study of the past. Basically, you go and you dig stuff up and you see what you can find. Maybe you can dig up someone's house, or you can dig up someone's skeleton or clothing. From that, you're able to figure out what happened in the past. Three pieces of evidence from archaeology we will look at today are Göbekli Tepe, Jericho, and Çatalhöyük. These are places that we've actually dug up, and we know what life was like in these three places.
2. Anthropology: Anthropology is the study of other cultures. In other words, there are places still on this planet where people live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle—maybe in the Amazon, maybe in Australia, maybe in Africa. We're able to go and study these people to understand how we originally thought and why we might have transitioned into farming.
3. Psychology/Neuroscience: This is basically how the brain works: how do we feel, what motivates us, why do we behave the way we behave?
4. Primatology: This is the study of primates, or monkeys. Because guess what, guys? We're monkeys. We're primates. 99% of our DNA is monkey DNA. We can look at certain groups of monkeys to understand how they behave. There are three types of primates that we look at very closely: gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Chimpanzees and bonobos are very close to us genetically; they're the closest to us of all the primates.

By looking at these four different fields, we're able to collect evidence to construct theories as to why we transitioned from hunter-gatherer into farming.

Four Theories on the Transition to Agriculture

Again, what's really important to understand is we don't know what happened; we can only guess.

Theory 1: Coercion

The first theory is the idea of coercion. What this basically means is that there's an elite group of people who didn't want to work, so they made everyone else work. The evidence for this is that, well, guess what? Gorillas do this. If you study gorillas, you will see that they always have an alpha male—the male who's bigger than everyone else and who makes everyone do all the work. He just sits and naps every day, but he gets all the girls and he gets all the food.

Theory 2: War

The second theory is war. The idea here is that if you are on a farm, it's easier to protect yourself in a time of war than if you're out in the forest. You can build walls around your farm, you can defend yourself a lot easier, and you can see the enemy coming. The evidence for this is that chimpanzees, who are like us, go to war a lot. They're very violent; they're always fighting each other. The argument here is that we human beings are just a violent people who are always at war, and we must be afraid of each other. Therefore, when we have the chance, we'll settle down, build fortifications, build walls, and fight each other.

Theory 3: Respect for Elders

The third theory is respect for elders, meaning that as a hunter-gatherer, it's very hard on old people. At a certain point, you're going to have to leave the old people to just stay there and die. Maybe we as human beings are biologically programmed to take care of elders for whatever reason. The evidence for this is anthropology, where every culture respects its elders.

Theory 4: Religion

The last theory is religion, meaning that we settled down in order to celebrate a religion or to practice a religion.

Just to be clear, there's evidence and arguments for all four theories, and there are scholars who argue for different theories. But the consensus—what most scholars agree on today, not every scholar, but most—is religion.

Evaluating the Theories

Let me explain why we think the answer has to be religion.

While it is true that with gorillas there's an alpha male who controls everything, the problem is that if you look at gorillas, the alpha male is huge, and males are a lot bigger than females. So it's possible for one gorilla to exert force and pressure on the others. With human beings, that's harder. Let's just say a nine-foot-giant human being comes into this room and says, "I'm now your boss. You have to grow food for me. You have to give me all your women." What can we do as a class? Beat the crap out of him. You understand? Because we have big brains, and these big brains allow us to cooperate together.

This guy is around, and at first, we're afraid of him, so we let him do whatever he wants. But then he goes to bed, and we as a class discuss, "Hey, what can we do?" Well, we can make weapons, or we can trap him, or we can trick him. We can give him poison food. Coercion among humans is very, very hard to do. In the worst-case scenario where we can't beat him up, what we'll do is just run away. So we don't think coercion is an explanation because there are so many ways for us to fight back and to rebel against bigger people.

We don't think war is a good explanation either. It is true that chimpanzees are naturally violent; they're always beating the crap out of each other. But guess what? Bonobos, who are actually closer to us genetically than chimpanzees, are actually very peaceful. They don't fight each other. So there's no evidence that we human beings are naturally violent. Also, if it is war, then we should be able to find weapons, and we don't really find weapons in archaeology from early humans. Now, there is a lot of violence in early human history—there's human sacrifice, there's group burial where a group of people are killed—but that's basically violence within a group. We don't find evidence of large-scale violence among different groups. It's possible that in the future we'll find evidence, but right now in archaeology and anthropology, we do not have any.

Then we look at respect for elders. Even though this is a theory, there's an argument that back then, they didn't really care about dying that much. The reason why is that for most of human history, we human beings have seen life history as a circle. For example, right now it's summer; it's going to turn into fall, then winter, then spring, then summer again. The world moves in a cycle. Well, human life also moves in a cycle: you're born, you die, then you're reborn, then you die again, then you're reborn again. Back then, they really didn't care if you died. In fact, if you're an old person, you're probably like, "You know what? I'd rather be dead." If I die, I'll either be reborn or I'll go into the spirit world. They didn't really fear death or see death the way we see death.

That leaves religion as the most likely possibility. This is what most scholars believe happened.

Archaeological Evidence for Religion

We're going to look at three different archaeological sites: the first is Göbekli Tepe, the second is Jericho, and the third is Çatalhöyük.

Göbekli Tepe: The World's First Temple

These places were only discovered in the past few decades, so these are new places we're only starting to understand. This place is in central Turkey and dates back to about 9500 BC, so this is over 11,000 years old. And we don't even think this is the oldest place.

If you did your research, you will know that this is basically a place of religious worship. You can see that they constructed this place so that there are these T-shaped pillars. And these things are huge. This is a human being, and this is a T-shaped pillar.

We think—again, this is all theory, we don't know that much because this is all recent—that these T-shapes represent human beings. Within these T-shapes are animals. You can see that they've aligned or built this T-shape in a way that they can practice a ritual or worship. The people who were leading this were probably who we call shamans, or religious leaders that help us bridge our world with the animal world and the spirit world.

Göbekli Tepe is a place of religious worship. What's interesting about it is that the religious site is the oldest, but we also find houses that were built later on. What we think might have happened here is that hunter-gatherers would come to a place now and then to practice religion. Ultimately, as human beings, we have a yearning or a need to understand "why," and religion solves this problem for us. Also, as a hunter-gatherer, you need to associate with other hunter-gatherers in order to find mates—to find husbands and wives to reproduce. This sort of religious center is a great time to come and practice your religion, but it's also a great time to feast and to meet someone you can marry and have children with.

These places are often led by shamans, and what makes them special is that they are charismatic leaders. Charismatic leaders are people like Madonna, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton. They're people who, for whatever reason, people just love them and want to follow them. Maybe what happened was that these charismatic leaders built this place, and they became like celebrities. People came from all over to meet them, to hear them, to hear the religion, and to meet other people. Over time, some people even chose to stay with them and build houses to celebrate them. Then, when they died, people still worshiped them in their death, and so this place became a temple.

There are other theories. There are some people who will tell you that space aliens came down and built this place because it's so sophisticated. But the one that scholars most agree with today is that it was a religious center.

Where does religion come from?

Even though we all have the need for religion, we don't all have the ability to produce religion. These charismatic leaders are people who have visions or dreams of God or the spirit world. Then they present their visions to other people. We have people like this throughout human history: think of Jesus, think of Muhammad, think of Buddha, think of Confucius. These are people who have these visions of God or of spirituality or of a new world and present them to people. Because they're charismatic, they're able to attract followers and spread their religion.

That's what probably happened here as well. As you can see from the picture, it was very hard work to build this temple. This was 11,000 years ago; they didn't have bulldozers, they didn't have shovels. This was all by hand. For them to want to dedicate their lives to building this temple—because it took a long, long time, years and years and hundreds of people—well, you needed something called religious devotion. Faith.

This is what is in the pillars at Göbekli Tepe. What's really interesting about these pictures is that these are animals in the motion of hunting. The fox, for example—the way the fox hunts is it jumps up in the air and then goes down and attacks the prey. So this is in the motion of attack. Why would they do that? What's the point of having animals on these pillars?

What's really important to understand is that back then, we human beings did not see ourselves as separate from the other world. Animals, trees, humans—all equal. First of all, if you're going to kill these animals, you need to ask for their forgiveness. Otherwise, their spirit, their soul, will haunt you. They'll take revenge on you. So if you kill them, you must ask for their forgiveness, and one way to do that is by paying tribute to them.

Second, we can learn from these animals. They're the best hunters in the world. So before we go on a hunting trip, we might have a ceremony to channel their energy, power, and wisdom.

The third thing is basically to appease them or to become their friends. We don't want to hunt foxes; we want to hunt gazelle. There's more meat on gazelle, and they're easier to capture. But we want to be friends with the lion. We don't want to be enemies. So it's a sign of respect to the animals.

That was basically their religion. Coming together for the religious festival was about celebrating the relationship with these animals as well as channeling their power, their energy, and their wisdom so that they could go hunt as well. This is probably one of the earlier religions that we have.

Jericho and the Natufian Culture

This is Jericho, and Jericho is part of something called the Natufian culture. The Natufian culture appeared about 15,000 years ago in a place we call the Levant, which is basically the Middle East: Israel and Syria. What was special about the Natufian culture were three things.

First of all, they were sedentary, which basically means that they stayed in one place. Remember, hunter-gatherers roamed around, they moved from place to place. But these were hunter-gatherers who were sedentary. They were not farmers; they were hunter-gatherers, but they stayed in one place. The reason why we know this—there's a lot of evidence—but one reason is that they basically hunted gazelle. Gazelles are like deer, and the thing about gazelles is their teeth color is different according to the season because they eat different foods. So we're able to dig up these gazelle bones, look at their teeth, and recognize that they were hunting gazelle in this area both in the summer and the winter, which meant they did not move.

Second, they had domesticated crops. The reason we know is we're able to dig up seeds of crops—vegetables and wheat and barley—which meant that they had the capacity, the technology, to farm, but they chose not to farm. Basically, the way they developed this technology was for gardening. They were hunting and gathering most of the time, but some of them, for fun or for pleasure, had their own garden, and that's how they developed the technology.

The third thing that was very important is something called the Cult of the Skull. They probably worshiped animals, but they also worshiped ancestors. The reason why we think so is we're able to find skulls in these places. They basically took someone's head, their skull, and put clay on it to protect it, and they put it in their houses to worship it. This is the beginning of ancestor worship.

This is called the Tower of Jericho. When we first discovered this, we thought it must be evidence that Jericho went to war because it had walls and then a tower. The walls are to protect you from your enemies; the tower is to see your enemies coming. But then they did more research and realized that this tower is a religious monument. It's the same as Göbekli Tepe, where it is cosmological, meaning that at the longest day of the year, the mountain over here will cast a shadow over the tower, and the tower will cast a shadow over the entire village, covering it all up in darkness.

Why would they want to do that? This is like right after the last ice age, so it's actually pretty cold. They did this for religious reasons. When you cover your village in darkness, you feel as though you are in connection with the sky. They must have had a religious belief in which part of the worship was to cover the village in darkness. They designed a tower in a certain way so that it would cover the village in darkness, and they could see that as magic. That's evidence that your religion is correct. Otherwise, how do you know religion is correct? Only by performing magic can you show that this charismatic leader who came up with this idea speaks to God.

Having a skull around allows you to communicate with the spirit world and learn its secrets. Some of the secrets may be how to construct the tower in a way that you're able to cast a shadow over the village. That's their method of scientific discovery: to communicate with the spirit world through your ancestors. Their level of intelligence, their understanding of the world, is just as sophisticated as our understanding of the world. We think that when we go to science class, we're learning facts and knowledge, but guess what? Maybe a thousand years from now, people will look at our science, like physics, and be like, "Oh, that was a religion too." In terms of intelligence, they were just as creative and as sophisticated as we are today, but they just had a different set of beliefs.

Çatalhöyük: A Religious Community

The last place I want to look at is Çatalhöyük. Çatalhöyük is a huge place, also in Turkey, pretty far from Göbekli Tepe, and this dates back to about 7500 BCE. As you can see, it's a huge village. We think that at its height—this was around for about 2,000 years—it had about 8,000 people. That's a lot of people.

The thing about Çatalhöyük that stands out is, first of all, it's huge. Second of all, they didn't have a place of worship or government, meaning that all the houses were the same. It was a very egalitarian society; everyone was the same. What's even more interesting is that in every house, the living room is basically a temple unto itself. It was a place of worship and religion. This means that Çatalhöyük is a place where religion permeated, or was in, every place they were. We think that Çatalhöyük is one of the first religious communities.

Remember that before, religious sites were places you went to maybe once in your lifetime or maybe once a year, but it wasn't part of your everyday life. Whereas in Çatalhöyük, religion was in your life from birth to death. At this point, their religion is extremely sophisticated, meaning that they can explain everything using their religion. Their everyday life and their religion were completely aligned together.

This is a painting that you will see in most houses in Çatalhöyük. What is going on here? Again, there are different theories, but let me explain what most scholars believe to be the accurate theory. This is just a theory; we have no evidence for this, but this is what we believe.

We believe that the people at Çatalhöyük worshiped a mother goddess, because a mother goddess is what gives life to everything. Think of Mother Nature, think of a woman giving birth to her child. The mother goddess is represented by the bird because a bird flies all around the sky, so the sky belongs to the bird. The bird can take different forms; this is a vulture. So the mother goddess can also take the form of a vulture.

So what's going on here? Why is the vulture with headless people? The way that they combined ancestor worship with their belief in the mother goddess is they believed that when a person dies, they'll put that person's dead body out in the open. It's a sky burial; if you go to Tibet, they have sky burials. The vultures will come and eat all the flesh, and that is the tribute or the sacrifice made to the mother goddess. The mother goddess basically cleans the body, and then you take the bones and you bury them back in your house. You take the skull and you keep the skull in your living room to worship your ancestors. In other words, it is an extremely comprehensive or complete religion for understanding the world.

This is also in Çatalhöyük, in many houses. Clearly, this is a hunt. Some people believe that these human beings are mocking or taunting or laughing at the animals as a way to subdue them, to tame them, to domesticate them. That's one theory. But another theory is that what they're really doing is dancing because they are worshiping or paying tribute to these animals they're about to kill. This goes back to Göbekli Tepe, where they're trying to respect the animals. "We dance with you, we're friends. I'm sorry I have to kill you, but hey, we're only taking your meat. Your soul is still going to be born, or it's going to go to the spirit world." This is a way of paying tribute or respecting the animals they're about to hunt to maintain the harmony of nature and the relationship with nature.

Again, what's really important is that this is a pretty complete religion that explains everything to these people, and that's why it's so attractive. If you're a human being, you want to know why. Well, the religion at Çatalhöyük explains why.

This is a picture of the mother goddess. Again, we have debate about what this is. Some people believe that it's just a fertility goddess, but other people believe this is the mother goddess. If you are in a place like Çatalhöyük, you're most concerned about giving birth because giving birth is what rejuvenates your society. So it makes sense that your god, the person you worship the most, would be a mother goddess.

This is clearly a bull. If you see pictures of Çatalhöyük, you will see that they have many, many depictions of bulls in their houses. What we believe—again, this is a theory—is that if the mother goddess represents life, giving life, the bull represents vitality and energy. It's the bull that gives the mother goddess the energy to give birth. The bull represents the male, the mother goddess represents the female, but only if the male and the female conjoin, come together, will you have life.

Clearly, they're not hunting. Clearly, they are worshiping the bull. They're paying tribute to the bull.

Conclusion: Religion as the Catalyst for Agriculture

Let's go back to the original question: why did people transition into agriculture?

The theory that most scholars believe is because of religion. It was because people had a religious need that they came together to have these religious festivals. There were some charismatic leaders who were so brilliant that people chose to settle down with them, and so they became sedentary. They developed a religion around the sedentary lifestyle, which included ancestor worship.

But over time, because you're in one place, you're going to deplete the resources of the area around you, of the forest, which means that you must go to farming. Then, eventually, because you have so much population and you farm too much, you're forced to move somewhere else. When you move somewhere else, you actually bring your religion with you.

That's how we can explain the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. There was no one spark or one moment when this happened. We think it took thousands of years over time because, ultimately, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was so much more attractive to people—so much easier and more attractive than the farming lifestyle. But the benefit of the farming lifestyle is that you had a religion, and that's why people ultimately chose to farm.