The Nomadic Alternative – Page 140

From the guts of the earth, were the two inventions which had destroyed the communistic, nut-gathering, fruit-picking, skin-wearing society of equals. Poverty had been impossible when property was shared, and in those idyllic times the gold of Arabia and Phrygia would not have bought the liberty of a free man. "Then men began to cheat. They fastened on properties, and after setting in these boundaries, fought and snatched whatever they could from one another. The strongest got the biggest shares ..." The rich invested a Big Villein, or Big Brother, with special powers to protect their vital interests (a concept almost identical to the earliest written accounts of the rise of military dictatorship in Sumeria around three thousand B.C.). For when the rich smothered their castles with sculptures, the poor felt themselves deprived of sculptures. The acquisition of property, Jean le Meun said, meant the abdication of happiness. "They never knew security again, when out of greed they took for themselves what had previously been common to all, as are the air and sun."

In the last chapter I have seemed to support the idea of sudden Neolithic Fall. This was an exaggeration. Agriculture and metallurgy did not produce the great revolution which broke up the society of equals and lured men from contented freedom to settlement and its discontents. Wherever in the world it took place the transition to agriculture merely marked the culmination of a larger process - the gradual drift of mobile peoples towards settlement. The will to settle is more significant than the technical accomplishments that made settlement possible.

Till recently the natives of the coast of British Columbia remained in the hunting stage. They lacked agriculture and such metal objects as they made, they hammered from nuggets of natural copper. These tribes - the Nootka, the Kwakiutl, the Bela Koola, Haida, Tlingit and Tshimshian - lived on a coast where the sea throws up its own harvest of astonishing richness. The salmon ran so dense-packed in the rivers that travellers reported one could almost cross over on their backs. Furthermore these peoples