The Nomadic Alternative – Page 102

were equal and every fish, fowl, beast, herb and fruit was free for the taking. When Man presumed to plant his own garden, he fell. And God took his revenge. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman ... And in the sweat of thy brow shall thou eat bread", the Lord cried to Adam. What fruit, fungus or narcotic Eve ate may inspire our speculations. We shall never know. But Eve who caused the Fall gave birth to Cain and Abel. The 'tiller of ground' and the 'keeper of sheep' were twin arms of the Neolithic Revolution.

VIII

Settled agriculture trickled from the mountain flanks onto flat alluvial plains, ringed by mountains or low-lying in river valleys. Here no planter could hope for more than a scant winter crop if he did not lead fertilizing waters in irrigation canals to his drooping plants. But settled life requires more than water. Soil exhaustion would drive him to found new settlements elsewhere unless he found ways of combatting it. Corn leaches the nitrogen content out of the soil. But as early as the 6th Century B.C. ingenious technicians in Anatolia had discovered that peas and beans replace it. By planting both crops together, they ensured the permanence of settlement.

Annually the sediment of chaff, dust and rotting vegetables grew higher, and mud brick houses rose layer upon layer above the plain. Some of the men continued to herd and hunt. At Chatal Hüyük, a Neolithic town nearly eight thousand years old on the Konya Planin in Turkey, frescoes depict lithe men in leopard skin kilts standing suicidally in the path of a wild bull. But as the farmland spread out, the herdsmen retreated farther and farther into the hills.

For the women had grown in importance. They occupied the settlements with their bulk - women stuffed with carbohydrates and anchored to the soil. From agricultural peoples the world over come baked pottery figurines - images of fecundity. Unlike the hard-bellied