The Nomadic Alternative – Page 100

to overflowing. They also learned to parch it, so that it would keep
in storage through the winter.

This fortuitous combination of natural accidents enabled the
wanderers to settle in fixed villages. Archaeologists have unearthed
about sixteen of them along the Fertile Crescent - clusters of small
houses, none bigger than the other, where by inference, no man was
richer than his neighbour. Initially the advantages of settlement
outweighed and obscured its disadvantages. But as men settled, so
their numbers rose. A mother no longer carried her children on long
journeys. Milk from domesticated animals allowed her to wean them
earlier and so give birth more often. And the upthrust of population
exhausted the natural food resources of one region, and encouraged
emigration to fresh lands. But these early colonial settlements
overflowed into places where the grains did not sprout spontaneously.

So the emigres carried seed corn from their original homes to plant
elsewhere. In doing so they divorced the grain from its natural
habitat, removed the normal pressures of natural selection, and
permitted mutant forms to develop from the original stock. The
heads of corn swelled in size and the result was the 'improved'
domesticated wheats and barley the peasant of the Near East plants
and harvests today. Like so many economic transformations the Neo-
lithic Revolution took place - not in the centre - but on the fringe. =

Above all it was an intellectual revolution. For it committed
human society to the ideology of growth and production, and over-
threw the time-honoured concept of man's place in Nature. For hund-
reds of thousands of years he had honoured an equal contract with
the world of his experience. Now he broke it. Instead of confiding
in nature, he manipulated it. Instead of accepting its gifts with
gratitude, he exploited it. Instead of remaining its contented
partner, he became its master. His breach of contract precipitated
an unstable chain reaction which disturbed and finally destroyed
the equality of the sexes and the equable relations he enjoyed with
his neighbours. Once the production of surplus becomes the god-
given right of one group and its principle aim in life, the hoarders