The Nomadic Alternative – Page 99

Hebrews flashed into history - a time when small bands of hunters followed the tracks of wild game on their seasonal migrations from the valleys to the mountains. The hunters of the so-called Mesolithic were far from helpless or under-equipped. They had bows and arrows, nets, traps and hunting dogs. The women gathered what came with the seasons - wild grains and vegetables, honey, berries, apples, figs, truffles and mushrooms, birds' eggs, edible grubs and fish from the streams. And we must visualize these small communities with all their possessions and children on their backs ascending the forests of cedar, holm-oak and cypress to the cool uplands of summer, retreating again before the first winter snows.

Not every animal is a candidate for domestication by man. But the moufflons and bezoar goats of the Fertile Crescent had been candidates millions of years before the emergence of man himself. The hunters, perhaps from laziness, perhaps from the pressure of too many mouths to feed, noticed the innate docility of these animals. And they found that instead of hunting them, they could stampede them into palisaded abbatoirs, where the animals might await slaughter in the people's own good time. The herding of surplus animals thus guaranteed an abundance of meat throughout the year, including the lean season. It also gave them the added advantage of extra milk, which drastically modified methods of child-rearing. But these corrals also implied fixed settlement. Once the effects of inbreeding had pacified their wildness, domesticated sheep and goats might be herded up and down the mountains at will. But at first their owners could neither leave nor move them.

On these same mountain-sides sprouted the wild grasses, ancestral to modern grain - emmer, einkorn and wild barley. The wives of the hunters had learned to grind wild corn into rough flour and to bake flat unleavened bread on red hot stones. At a height of three thousand feet the natural growth of these grasses was - and still is - so profuse that the ladies could go into the fields at the height of summer and reap as much grain as they liked to fill their granaries