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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Prehistoric Origins Across Eurasia
When freezing to death, face the wind and stand straight;
when starving to death, never bend.
(dung si ying feng zhan, e si bu zheyao)
—Chinese proverb
China Before Agriculture
China has been inhabited by humans for perhaps a million years. Here we speak, of course, of the geographical region now occupied (and overflowed) by the nation-state “China.” The region is a compact, tightly defined one, bordered by mountains and deserts, but it had no name until the Qin Dynasty unified its inner, richer districts and gave a name that slowly became fixed on the whole land. Strictly speaking, then, applying the name “China” to prehistoric central East Asia is anachronistic (Standen 2011) but has a very long history, so I follow that usage.
During those million years, cold dry glacial periods alternated with warm wet interglacial ones. Primitive humans—Homo erectus and, later, little-known hominids similar to Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalis)—had to cope with these violent fluctuations. Their stone technology was sophisticated and diverse as early as 800,000 years ago (Gibbons 2000; Hotz 2000). Most technology then was evidently of wood or bamboo, and we have little evidence of it. They no doubt fed on anything they could find that would not poison them or outfight them. As we used to say in my youth in the rural United States, they “would eat anything that won’t eat back faster.” However, early claims of evidence for cannibalism in “Peking man” (Homo erectus pekinensis) have turned out to be wrong. The evidence for deliberate use of fire (accepted in Anderson 1988) has also been very strongly questioned by recent research (Weiner et al. 1998; Bar-Yosef and Wang 2012 provide a thorough recent review of the Chinese Paleolithic).
Modern humans—Homo sapiens sapiens—arrived before 30,000 years ago, introducing tools that were more varied, small-sized, and sophisticated (Liu et al. 2013). By 20,000 years ago, people were hunting mammals and birds and eating fruits and seeds across what is now China, leaving many sophisticated stone points, knives, grinding slabs (metates), and other tools for us to find. Among their foods were millets (already very important), beans, gourds, and tubers (notably yams) of genera that later produced domesticated species (2013). The yams may well have been used medicinally, as they were in later times.
Humans were also making pottery at that early date. By far the earliest pottery in the world has been found at Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi, near the mouth of the Yangzi by Xiaohong Wu and collaborators (Shelach 2012; Xiaolong Wu et al. 2012; pottery that may be 17,000 years old has now turned up in Europe, Heritage Daily 2012). It was simple cooking ware. As the investigators point out, these findings somewhat demolish Gordon Childe’s idea of a Neolithic Revolution (Childe 1954) that gave us pottery, ground stone, and agriculture all in one swoop a few thousand years ago. Pottery came later than agriculture in the Near East, but far earlier in eastern Asia. Ground stone was earlier everywhere.
In Japan, pottery was fairly common by 15,000–11,800 years ago and was used a great deal to make fish stews (Craig et al. 2013; it is tentatively reported by 16,000 BCE, Kuzmin 2008a). Pottery was also very early on the nearby Siberian mainland (13,000). Irina Zhuschchikhovskaya (1997; a wonderful name) found it at 11,000 BCE in the Amur Valley. By 11,300 it was well distributed across China (Jiang and Liu 2006; Kuzmin 2008a, b). It spread west through Siberia and Central Asia, reaching the Near East shortly after agriculture began, around 9000 BCE. Perhaps the Near East independently invented pottery (as the New World certainly did), but it looks to me more like a diffusion from east to west. It remains interesting that pottery came long before agriculture all over East Asia, while in West Asia and the New World, agriculture came first.
A Bit About Physical Ancestry
Humans are almost literally siblings beneath the epidermis. We are genetically so close that we are, in that sense, one big family.
Until the use of genetic tests on a large scale, we really could not say much about the complex population history of Eurasia. The mix of peoples was too great. With genetics to help, things have become somewhat clearer (see, e.g., Cochran and Harpending 2009; Diamond 2005b; J. Li et al. 2008). Broadly speaking, humans came out of northeast Africa, starting perhaps 100,000 years ago, and continuing, with a great deal of back and forth movement, usually in slow trickles. The earliest ornaments and other symbolic items first appear in Africa about 70,000 years ago.
In Eurasia, modern humans mixed with Neanderthals, so that modern Eurasians are about 2–7 percent Neanderthal (Africans mixed with their own equivalent neighbors). Also, as modern humans moved east, they encountered a mysterious, newly discovered form of human being. This form was first found as fragments in Denisova Cave, Russian Siberia, just northeast of Kazakhstan and not far from China and Mongolia (Dalton 2010; Gibbons 2011b; Krause et al. 2010; Reich et al. 2010). These are about equally distant genetically from Neanderthals and modern humans. Modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians are about 5 percent Denisovan, and at least some Southeast Asians show some mixing also. By normal biological rules, all these should be subspecies: modern humans being Homo sapiens sapiens, Neanderthals Homo sapiens neanderthalis, and Denisovans another subspecies not yet named. Neanderthals are usually termed a different species (H. neanderthalis), but that should be changed now that substantial mixing is recognized. In spite of mixing genetically, modern humans seem to have largely outcompeted these other types and replaced them.
At some point in the Near East, the local population sustained a couple of mutations that dramatically lightened their skin, eyes, and hair, allowing them to get more vitamin D, which is produced in the skin under the action of UV radiation in sunlight. Tropical populations everywhere remained dark-skinned. The melanin protects from the excessive UV light in the tropics (and thus from melanoma). Also, too much vitamin D is a bad thing; it is toxic in overdose. But dark skin is a huge disadvantage in the temperate-zone winter, guaranteeing vitamin D shortage unless you are taking supplements or eating industrial quantities of fish (as did the rather dark peoples indigenous to western North America). Too little vitamin D means not only poor bone growth—rickets—but greatly increased susceptibility to multiple sclerosis and some cancers. So humans had to evolve light skin to cope with moving north. These mutations thus spread like wildfire, giving pale skin and often pale hair and eyes to people at the northwest end of the populated world. These are our modern “Europoids” or “Caucasians.” The latter term has a rather charming origin: the physical anthropologist Blumenbach used it in regard to race because he thought the point of origin of a “race” would naturally have the most beautiful people of said race, and he thought the good people of the Caucasus were the most beautiful Europoids. One wonders how he came to these conclusions. Folklore among anthropologists holds that he was working with skulls and thought they had particularly lovely skulls. But he may also have been influenced by the reputation of the living population of the Caucasus.
Meanwhile, dark-skinned people spread through Arabia to India and onward to Southeast Asia and Oceania, where they sustained a whole range of other mutations—poorly known as of this writing. They reached Australia by 50,000–60,000 years ago. Better known is their career after they turned north in Southeast Asia (once past the Himalayan wall). Here they evolved light skin, but the mutation (one main one is known; there are evidently others to be considered) was a completely different one. It produced pale tan—“yellow”—skin instead of pale pinkish (“white”). It did not affect hair or eye color.
Later, farther north, further mutations gave northeastern Asians eye-folds, high cheekbones, padded cheeks, short noses, and nearly hairless faces. These are protective against cold; they reduce exposure of the face and its sensory organs. As the present writer, and any other bearded male who has been in really cold climates, know all too well, moisture freezes on mustaches and beards and becomes a real frostbite risk. Long noses are at risk of freezing.
With agriculture and settlement, northern and southeastern Asians spread out in all directions, leading to a wonderful mix in southern China. Typical extreme northeasterners survive on the very far north borders of China; fairly dark-skinned, short people survive in the far south. In between lies a vast gradient with a great deal of local diversity, variation, and remixing. The flow of people northward from Southeast Asia around 50,000 years ago was reversed about 8,000 years ago, and “China’s march toward the tropics” (Wiens 1954) began. Meanwhile, in Siberia and central Asia, East Asians spread west and West Asians spread east. Siberia was an uninhabited void until sometime between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. Central Asia became a meeting and blending ground where light-skinned, often red-haired or blond, Westerners met “yellow”-skinned and black-haired Easterners. At the dawn of history, most of central Asia was Western in general appearance. It is now substantially more Eastern-looking, thanks to massive migrations, especially of Turkic peoples. Afghanistan today is a wondrous mix of physical types—on a Kabul street or on a trip over the Hindu Kush, one can match individuals, as far as looks go, to Mongols, French, Arabs, or Chinese. To some extent this is still true in parts of Xinjiang, in spite of massive Chinese immigration during the last two millennia.
In India and South Asia, peoples from the Near East and Central Asia have been spreading down from the northwest for thousands of years, but the gradient from African to southeast Asian genetics is still quite visible in the southern part of the subcontinent (Reich et al. 2009).
It follows that standard racial terms are inadequate at best. The people of Europe do represent a fairly tight and genetically unified Caucasian or Europoid population, but they have mixed enthusiastically with everyone else along very broad contact zones. Also, their fondness for importing slaves and, more charitably, for welcoming immigrants has guaranteed that Europe itself is no homogeneous refuge. Similarly, in the East, vast migrations, largely but not only from north to south and northwest to southeast, have blended populations completely. Unsurprisingly, the differences in “intelligence” and “personality” that used to be claimed for different “races” disappear on inspection. Where people (of any origin) get an equal shake in the schools, they all perform pretty much the same. Given their long histories of mixing, this is no surprise.
Variation does not stop with visible adaptations. People evolved to tolerate milk in the West, but not in the East (see below). People throughout the Old World, but not the New, evolved some ability to survive common epidemic diseases—with the result that disease had more to do with conquering the Native Americans than superior armaments did (Diamond 1997). The differences that matter are not the trivial visible ones—which are mere simple adaptations to vitamin D intake, cold winters, and the like—but the invisible ones that convey resistance to smallpox, measles, plague, malaria, and so on. Southeast Asians widely share antimalarial adaptations; Chinese who ventured into that region usually died, in the old days. They often do today, as malaria evolves resistance to common drugs.
A final note of physical relevance to foodways and food anthropology is the existence of human taste abilities and taste preferences. Humans notoriously like meat, sweet, and fat—far too much for their own good, now that all those three things are easy to obtain. But humans also love a wide range of vegetable tastes, fruit flavors, and textures ranging from crisp to soft.
Humans everywhere also like certain spicy and herbal tastes (Billing and Sherman 1998). This might seem strange, since spices feel hot or even burning and are not major nutrition sources, but Billig and Sherman showed that most (if not all) of them are powerful antiseptic and antifungal agents and have other medicinal values. Many primates seek out such medicinal agents for food and for external application, and humans are clearly part of this pattern (E. Anderson 2005a). The Chinese fondness for things like peppers, cinnamon, rose, fennel, and other spices and herbs fits the world pattern perfectly, and the spiciness of much southern Chinese and Korean food tracks the high incidence of disease and contagion in these areas. Also, chiles are extremely rich in vitamins and minerals, and—like their Chinese relative the goji berry (goujizi or Chinese wolfthorn, Lycium chinense)—they take on a function as poor families’ vitamin pills. Worldwide, chile consumption tracks rural population density, since both its antiseptic and its nutritional values tend to be recognized. It is commonly used as a food preservative in China as elsewhere.
One odd food preference is for mustard-family plants, including the Chinese cabbages and kales, cresses, mustards, and radishes. These plants are second only to chiles and wolfthorn, and in many cases even better than chiles, in nutritional value. The flavorful ingredients are glucosinolates, which the plant produces to kill insects but which are not only harmless to humans but beneficial—we have evolved not only tolerance to them but also the ability to benefit medically from them. Worldwide, many people are repelled by an extremely bitter taste caused by phenylthiosulfates in cabbage-family plants. However, about a third of people worldwide cannot taste the bitterness, because of a genetic difference (E. Anderson 2005a). The Chinese seem to be much more prone to like cabbage-family greens than Westerners are and thus must often be nontasters or mild tasters, but data on this are inadequate.
Yet another important aspect of taste in Asia is the recent discovery of the umami taste receptors. Previously, human taste had been considered to consist only of salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and—if it is counted a taste rather than a burning sensation—hotness or piquancy. Umami, which was not recognized by either Western or Eastern sages, was discovered only in recent decades. It is the savory taste of soy sauce and other ferments. It is found in some other products, largely as a fermentation product. In spite of not being identified earlier, it was extremely important in the development of East Asian food, since fermentation has been a major way of preparing and preserving food, and the umami taste has been a major goal of food preparation for gourmet taste (H. Huang 2000).
All these cases show the importance of the relationship between physical tasting ability and food culture. It is impossible to understand Chinese foodways without a solid awareness of these complex and detailed genetically guided human abilities.
A Bit About Languages
Languages spread from centers to far-flung regions. When modern humans came out of Africa, they brought languages with them, and some linguists claim to find commonalities in all world languages outside of southern Africa. The evidence is elusive, and so far unconvincing to most, but the human radiation was real, so linguistic relationships must have once been there.
Failing proto-world, there is considerable suggestive evidence that all or most of the northern Eurasian languages have some distant relationship (Pagel et al. 2013). “Nostratic phylum” has been proposed as the term for these northern Eurasian languages (and some North American ones) if they are indeed related. The resemblances could be due to borrowing across tens of thousands of years, because the steppes have been a highway since Neanderthal times. But there is no reason to reject common origin out of hand. Evidence may someday resolve the issue.
Today, the world’s languages are grouped into a large number of families and combined in a somewhat smaller but still impressive number of phyla. Typical families are Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic (Chinese). Typical phyla are Indo-European, which includes most European languages and many Asian ones, and Tibeto-Burman, or Sino-Tibetan, which includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burman, and hundreds of related but extremely disparate languages in eastern and southern Asia. Many languages, including Basque, have no known relatives; Basque is its own tiny family and phylum.
A recent theory, developed from East Asian data, relates the spread of agriculture to the spread of language phyla. This theory was developed by Peter Bellwood to account for the dramatic spread of the Austronesian phylum (see Bellwood 2009, with critiques by other scholars appended). Beginning around 6,000 years ago, Austronesian speakers began to move outward from southeast China. They colonized Taiwan, evolving there into the so-called Taiwan Aborigines.” This was only the beginning. Taking to the sea, the Austronesians exploded over the vast realms of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Today, somewhat closely related Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar to Hawai‘i and from New Zealand to Micronesia. Wherever these people went, they took agriculture. Cognate words for chickens, coconuts, root crops, and dozens of other agricultural items and techniques are found all over their vast realm, indicating that the early Austronesians had all these things.
It occurred to Bellwood, and to other scholars, that other linguistic spreads might also be associated with agriculture. This has been the subject of much research, culminating in a volume edited by Bellwood and Colin Renfrew (2002). Independent genetic evidence confirms that many migrations occurred and that agriculture released spectacular demographic expansions. Agricultural peoples moved rapidly from the Near East through Europe and into Africa, expanding in numbers as they did so. Evidence from Europe, Southeast Asia, and western Africa confirms striking demographic expansions directly after the introduction of agriculture in these regions (Gignoux et al. 2011). Farmers multiplied fast and moved out to new lands. Local people were not wiped out but rather merged with the expanding farmers, leaving varying degrees of genetic admixture.
Of course, not all linguistic spreads were accompanied by farming. The Inuit, Athapaskans, and several other hunting peoples spread over thousands of miles without benefit of agriculture. Moreover, having agriculture does not guarantee spread; the Georgian-language speakers have probably had agriculture almost since it began, 11,000 years ago, but have remained confined to a tiny area in the Caucasus. Within eastern Asia, the Yao-Mian phylum has recently spread from southeast China into Southeast Asia, but before that it seems to have been narrowly confined to a small part of south China. The Miao-Hmong phylum started in northwest China, according to some Miao myths. It survives in central and south China, with recent radiation into northern Southeast Asia. It has certainly spread with agriculture but has never gained much territory.
But some groups do spread. Bellwood and others have made a very convincing case for the association of the Tibeto-Burman (Sino-Tibetan) language phylum with the spread of millet agriculture. The dates and geography make this seem reasonable. The Tibeto-Burman languages, including the ancestor of the Chinese languages of today, are about as different as you would expect if they branched off from each other 7,000 or 8,000 years ago. I find the association convincing, but it is controversial. G. Van Driem thinks the stock originated in Sichuan (van Driem 1999, 2002). Others (myself included) think it originated further north but then differentiated in Sichuan. Either way, the stock originated very close to the point of origin of millet agriculture.
The spread of the Thai-Kadai phylum is clearly associated with the spread of rice agriculture (Bellwood and Renfrew 2002). We know that Thai-Kadai languages diversified in, and probably spread from, the Yangzi Valley area, where rice was domesticated. Their routes of spread and the probable timing of the spread fit well with the spread of rice agriculture south and southwest. The Austronesian phylum was associated with rice agriculture early and has some very Thai-sounding words; it may be related to Thai-Kadai (P. Benedict 1975), or, more likely, it simply may have become connected with rice agriculture and a few loanwords in very early times. The Thai-Kadai languages branched from each other perhaps 6,000 years ago. Their speakers were, however, probably not the only rice-growers, and Hmong/Miao and Yao/Mien languages were in the right area then, too, and have been associated with the spread of rice by some scholars.
A significant fact is the spread of the Thai root for “chicken,” kai. This word was borrowed into Chinese early, becoming ji in Mandarin but remaining kai in Cantonese. (The Cantonese language is likely the result of Thai speakers switching to Chinese in the Tang Dynasty and since. The Cantonese word for “chicken” is far from the only Thai-sounding word in that language.) Not stopping there, kai went on—increasingly distorted—into Korean, Japanese, the Central Asian languages, and thence into the Western world, eventually as far afield as Morocco (Blench 2007). It is awfully hard to escape the conclusion that the Thai peoples domesticated the chicken, which is native to south China and Southeast Asia. Borrowed words surely indicate borrowed chickens. Other local peoples in Southeast Asia, such as the Austronesians, have their own words for the bird, implying that they were aware of wild chickens before domestication.
Bellwood’s correlation of advanced agriculture with the spread of the Austronesian languages in the islands east of Asia is no longer controversial. Millet reached Taiwan by 3,000–2500 BCE; a recent find revealed large amounts of foxtail millet and rice at Nan-kuan-li. This and related sites probably represent the ancestors of today’s Austronesian-speaking “aborigines” of Taiwan, recently arrived from south China with seeds in hand (Tsang 2005). There is clear archaeological evidence for an explosive radiation of advanced farming and pottery-making people from south China to Taiwan and thence to the Philippines and the islands south and east—the lands inhabited by Austronesian peoples today (Bellwood 1997, 2002, 2005; Donohue and Denham 2010 dispute this, but Bellwood has a very effective answer in the commentary section of their article). However, subsequent profound changes in both language and agriculture took place when Austronesians mingled with Papuans in Melanesia (Paz 2002), with the result that Oceanic Austronesian agriculture looks much more Papuan than Chinese.
When we move to western Eurasia, however, we are in a very different situation. Bellwood and Renfrew hypothesized that the Indo-European (IE) phylum was present at the birth of agriculture in the Near East and spread along with it. This is certainly false. Agriculture in the Near East began at least 11,000 years ago, and the IE phylum is a very close-knit one. Suffice it to say that the Hittite for water is wadar. This and hundreds of other close pairs prove that IE cannot possibly have split up more than about 6,000 years ago. Languages change very fast, especially in the days before books, radio, and television. Languages diverge and differentiate faster than we once thought (Brown 2010), and this process probably happened even faster in preliterate times.
Moreover, we know that agriculture began in the dry Levantine back country. But the IE phylum has shared cognates for a whole host of cool-temperate plants and animals, including laks for salmon. (No, that word isn’t of Jewish origin.) These biota firmly fix the IE origin somewhere between northeast Europe and the Caucasus—most likely in and around what is now the Ukraine. Conversely, IE significantly lacks words for dry Levantine commodities.
Also, there is plenty of evidence for pre-IE farmers in Europe. The surviving Basque language is the most obvious piece, but there are also the host of agricultural and rural words in Germanic that have no IE roots: “wheat,” “sheep,” “eel,” “delve,” “roe” (deer), “boar,” and even “land,” among others (Witzel 2006). Greek also borrowed from non-IE languages a whole host of agricultural and settlement words. Speakers of IE languages would hardly have borrowed such words from hunter-gatherers. Spreading in the other direction, IE speakers of the language ancestral to today’s Iranic and north Indian (Sanskritic) languages borrowed a similar large range of words, including terms for camel, donkey, and brick as well as a whole host of religious terms (including names of gods, like Indra) and literary usages (Witzel 2006).
A recent hypothesis, based on virus epidemiology, has the IE languages originating in Anatolia and spreading with agriculture (Bouckaert et al. 2012). But again the timing is wrong; agriculture had already spread widely by the later, and more believable, timing they reconstruct, and one wonders what happened to the earlier propagators. Viruses do not make a very good model for humans.
What, then, accounts for the spread of the IE peoples? The traditional explanation was that they developed riding, horse traction, and horse-based warfare (chariots and, probably later, riding). This explanation has received a powerful boost lately from increasingly clear evidence that the horse was domesticated in Kazakhstan around 5,500 years ago (Anthony 2007; Harris 2010)—just east of the place and time reconstructed for the IE homeland. The horse was probably a food animal first. Only after domestication could it be milked and ridden. Anyone familiar with wild equines will know that they would not stand still for either process! Horses, unlike ruminant livestock, are neither stolid nor intellectually limited. They are high-strung, sensitive, extremely intelligent animals, and to this day it takes a tremendous amount of empathy and skill to work with them. Instead of dull servants like cows, they can become super-smart companions. In Mongolia, my wife saw small boys riding bareback, standing up, controlling the horses by pressure of feet. The horses went through the most amazing maneuvers, sensitive to every touch and knowing exactly what to do.
Breeding to maintain this level of intelligence while getting rid of the natural ferocity and cunning of wild equines was truly a piece of work. Domestication must have been a long process with a lot of mutual learning. The advantages of skilled horsemen include the military edge made famous by both ancient Greek and early Chinese authors but do not stop there; imagine the edge ancient horsemen had in herding, communications, trading, plowing, and just about every other mobile activity.
This theory has recently been supplemented by the idea that the IE peoples had the gene that allowed them to digest lactose as adults. In most humans, the enzyme that breaks down lactose—milk sugar—is not produced after age about six. After that, they suffer major intestinal discomfort if they consume much fresh dairy food over time. Among the world’s milk-dependent peoples, however, mutant genes convey the ability to digest lactose throughout life. These genes are close to universal in Europe. They evolved quite separately among the herding peoples of East Africa (who actually have more genes for this trait than Europeans do). This is a recent development, known from many lines of evidence to be a product of dairy-dependent economics, and arose long after the beginning of agriculture.
The European gene is fairly common in the Near East but fades out rapidly in the rest of Asia. There—in Central and South Asia, in particular—people rely on lactose metabolism by Lactobacillus bacteria to make milk palatable. Lactobacillus breaks down lactose into lactic acid, not only making the food digestible but also preserving it (lactic acid is a strong preservative). Lactobacillus fermentation has thus proved very useful: it gives us yogurt, sourdough bread, pickles, sauerkraut, soy sauce, salami, and many other preserved foods. Asians, using this technology, did not need lactase. However, to carry out and maintain Lactobacillus fermentation requires a rather sophisticated lifestyle on the part of its users. It is not something that dates back to the dawn of farming.
Indo-Europeans were probably too mobile to maintain the sensitive, delicate cultures that give us yogurt and sourdough, so the mutant gene allowed the IE peoples to depend heavily on fresh milk products (Cochran and Harpending 2009). This may have given them a major competitive advantage as they took to nomadic herding. They could easily spread south and east into lands lacking the gene. I think this is quite probable, but evidently the pre-IE peoples in Europe also had the gene, since we know they were relying on cattle and sheep and doing at least some dairying.
The complex of riding and lactase allowed the IE peoples to depend on nomadic stockherding and to be superior at it. This allowed them to spread with lightning speed, which they evidently did, for their languages soon cropped up from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China.
Important to our history is one IE family in particular, the Indo-Iranian. The Iranic languages and the Sanskrit-derived languages of India are modern representatives of this early but compact branch. A number of sound shifts unite them and separate them from other IE families. Indo-Iranian speakers evidently nomadized east and south, eventually conquering and occupying vast realms from Iran to Bengal and from south Russia to westernmost China. In the process they assimilated many speakers of languages now lost. They have, in turn, lost most of their central Asian territory to Turkic languages—showing how fast languages can spread widely and then retreat. Most Turkic speakers today had ancestors who spoke IE tongues.
Bellwood and Renfrew also thought the Afroasiatic phylum—whose most visible representative is the Semitic family—might have developed along with agriculture and spread from the Near East. This, too, is impossible. The Afroasiatic center of diversity is Ethiopia, in or near which this language phylum certainly arose. The intrusion of one small branch, the Semitic family, into Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon, probably going back not much before their entrance to history, with the Babylonians. The original Afroasiatic speakers were certainly like modern Ethiopians physically and culturally.
So, who developed Near Eastern agriculture? The Sumerian language (and its possible relative Elamite) is in the right place at the right time. The Sumerians spread far and successfully into the best farmland before being conquered and linguistically assimilated by the Semites. Their art shows that they looked like modern Middle Eastern people—their genes have survived much better than their languages. My money is on the Sumerians.
We will have to deal with a few other language phyla in this book. The Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, and relatives) arose near enough to IE to have exchanged ancient loanwords. The Austroasiatic phylum evidently arose in eastern India—that is its center of diversity and linguistic range. It spread east, possibly as recently as two or three thousand years ago. One branch is the Mon-Khmer family, which includes Khmer, Vietnamese, and many more obscure highland languages. Bellwood thought the Austroasiatic phylum began in China, but all evidence is against this; all evidence is consistent with an origin in east-central India. The Austroasiatic phylum probably spread with the rise of agriculture in India, about 6,000 years ago.
Finally, a fatefully important, putative phylum for Asian history is the Altaic, including the Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic families. These three branches are very distantly related, if they are related at all. Much doubt has been cast on whether there really is an Altaic phylum. (It was once extended even farther, to include Korean and Japanese, but very few linguistic scholars accept this now, and evidence is overwhelmingly against it.) The Mongol languages show rather puzzling similarities not only to Turkic but also to Uralic and IE languages, ranging from such startling word resemblances as minii “mine,” to the Mongol noun case system’s similarities to Russian and Finnish (as opposed to Turkic, which structures these things differently). However, these similarities are notably lacking in pattern, indicating that they are likely borrowed. Those not borrowed very possibly have an older common origin in the “Nostratic” universe. Mongol has three roots for “I, me” (bi, min-, and na-), and all of them sound like pronouns in various languages all over the world (cf. Yucatec Maya in “I, mine”). Is this evidence for Proto-World (as some maintain) or merely a result of these being extremely easy sounds for the human mouth to make? People tend to save energy when talking—“television” becomes “TV”—and the commonest words, especially those much used by children, naturally become short and simple.
The Turks and Mongols certainly nomadized, camped, and fought side by side for thousands of years. They also lived near Uralic peoples, and had early contacts with the Tocharians and probably other Indo-Europeans. Mutual influence was inevitable. The basic vocabularies of Mongolian and Turkic languages, however, do not show any believable relationship. No one can miss the similarities of English one, two, three, Latin unum, duo, tres, and Sanskrit eka, dva, tri, and there are hundreds of other such sets of cognates, even for quite complex concepts (Celtic ri, Latin rex, Sanskrit raja, …), in Indo-European. But try to find any similarities between (Khalkha) Mongolian neg, khoyor, gurvan and Turkish bir, iki, üç, “one, two, three.” The basic vocabulary words in the Mongol and Turkic languages are usually very different—unless they are so similar that they must be recent borrowings. On the other hand, there are some very deep and basic cognates, including the word for milk. The word for water is close—su in Turkic, us in modern Mongol—but Chinese is similar too (shui from earlier söi or swu). Perhaps we are looking at a very ancient common origin and a great deal of subsequent mutual influence. In any case, the idea that Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic are related in an Altaic phylum seems extremely shaky, if not downright defunct (Vovin 2005).
Color words are as confusing as in English: just as English has half Germanic (blue, white) and half French (violet, purple), modern Mongol has basically Turkic loans for black, yellow, and deep blue, but utterly un-Turkic words for white, red, and gray, and even a thoroughly un-Turkic word for blue (now used for pale blue). The borrowing for deep blue is significant: it refers to the sacred blue of Heaven (medieval Turkic gök, Mongol kök, now khokh; the change from k to kh pronounced like the ch in German ich is standard in modern Khalkh Mongolian). The native word tsenkher refers basically to nonsacred blue. Anyone familiar with Mongolia will know the sky-blue silk scarfs wrapped around every venerable tree, rock, cairn, shrine, and other object (including the occasional telephone pole) that is sacred, fortunate, or deserving of spiritual respect. Borrowing the Turkic word for the sacred color may indicate respect for Turkic cultural forms in the early medieval period, when the Gök Turkic Empire ruled Mongolia and much of Central Asia.
The Altaic phylum, or cluster, bears the name of the Altai Mountains, where it supposedly originated. If it did not originate there, at least the Turkic languages apparently did. All these languages come from the cold steppes and forests of high Central Asia. The Altaic peoples emerge into history fairly late but were obviously active much earlier, having quickly acquired nomadic herding and riding, presumably from Indo-Europeans.
The Altaic peoples have shown a truly astonishing ability to build huge empires. The Mongol Empire is only the most conspicuous of many. Turkic, though not the other languages, has shown a monumental ability to flourish at the expense of local languages. Millions of square miles of formerly IE and other languages’ territory are now Turkic speaking. There are parts of Turkey that in historic times have switched from Hittite to Phrygian to Greek to Turkish—yet archaeology reveals no change in the people themselves. They were and are genetically the same lineages. They switched languages according to who had most recently conquered them.
Similar, if less complicated, language shifts are almost universal in Central Asian history, as elsewhere. Conquered peoples usually pick up the languages of their conquerors, but if the conquerors are few in number, the reverse takes place. In China, the spread of Chinese languages within historic times has led to linguistic absorption of many Thai, Miao, Yao-Mian, Austronesian, and others. Often, these older languages leave traces. Cantonese, in particular, seems to have begun as a form of Tang Dynasty Chinese spoken by Thai people; its tone system, much of its vocabulary (remember kai), and other traits reflect the massive linguistic acculturation of the Zhuang and other Thai-related minorities in historic times. This sort of linguistic acculturation guarantees that any language phylum is going to include languages spoken by very diverse peoples.
It is certain that the Chinese languages proper have expanded with the Chinese state. The core of geographic China became Chinese speaking by the Shang Dynasty. The state of Chu, in and around what is now Hunan, seems to have originally spoken various Thai-Kadai languages. It became Chinese speaking in the latter part of the first millennium BCE—first among the elite, later—slowly—among all. With the spread of the Chinese-speaking groups, several very different languages developed: Cantonese, Shanghainese (Wu), Hakka, two or more Fujianese languages, Gan, Xiang, and so on. These have often been miscalled dialects for political reasons: political leaders have generally promoted the dominant and by far the most widely spoken language, Mandarin or Guoyu (“National Language”). A dialect is, correctly, a subvariant of a language—not a language in its own right. Guoyu is now rapidly replacing local languages and their (actual) dialects. This is, demonstrably, a huge loss to local cultures, literature, the arts, and free expression.
As with the term “China” in its geographical sense, referring to the inhabitants of the region as “the Chinese” or “the Chinese people” before the Qin Dynasty is technically wrong. I try to avoid it but obviously do not always succeed. From Qin on, there is the problem of whether one is using “the Chinese” to mean the linguistic Chinese, or the people of the Chinese state, or the people of the geographical region called China. I usually try to stick with language, but consistency is simply impossible, if only because one must quote sources that use the term quite differently. The linguistic Chinese are now called the Han Chinese, from the Han Dynasty. However, many of the citizens of the Han empire were Tai, Yao, Miao, Vietnamese, Austronesian, Mongol, proto-Turkic, and so on and on. Some spoke languages now extinct and unclassified, like the language of the Xiongnu. So “Han” is as misleading a term as “Chinese.” However, it is established, and I cannot escape it.
The Origins of Agriculture
After humans managed to do without agriculture for around 150,000 years, they suddenly invented it in at least five places (perhaps more) almost at once. These were quite independent inventions. “Agriculture” is defined as food production based on domesticates, that is, plants and animals significantly changed by human selection from any wild ancestors. The selection can be deliberate or accidental, but it is usually deliberate. (Claims that inventing agriculture was an accidental or semi-accidental process are simply not credible; Asouti and Fuller 2013. The most accessible and accurate critique of theories of agriculture is Barker 2006. See also E. Anderson 2011.)
Long ago, V. Gordon Childe (1954) famously wrote of three key revolutions in human history: Neolithic, Urban, and Industrial. The Industrial does not concern us in this book, and the Urban will be treated later. As to the Neolithic: Childe followed the archaeology of his day in thinking that agriculture, pottery, settled life, and ground stone tools all developed together as part of one complex. This was suggested by the archaeology of the time. It has turned out to be wrong. Ground stone, pottery, and settled life all came earlier (and in that order). Pottery developed in East Asia at least 20,000 years ago and independently in the New World considerably later. Settled village life and ground stone tool technology have both been independently invented many times in many areas. Agriculture did ultimately revolutionize human society, but only very slowly.
Agriculture developed first in the Near East, specifically the interior Levant somewhere between south-central Turkey and central Palestine. Then agriculture was invented at least once and probably twice in China. Subsequent inventions occurred in central Mexico, highland and lowland South America (probably as separate events), New Guinea, and possibly the Mississippi Valley and western Africa.
Wheat and barley were both domesticated in the Middle East. Barley may have been independently domesticated in a few spots (D. Harris 2010: 75). The earliest wheat domesticates were two species: einkorn (Triticum monococcum, or T. urartu var. monococcum), native to Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Fertile Crescent. The development of einkorn wheat centered on the Karachadag (Black Mountain) in southeast Turkey but may have been domesticated over a much wider zone (Asouti and Fuller 2013; D. Harris 2010: 77). This species hybridized—naturally or through human selection—with the grass Aegilops speltoides to produce emmer, T. turgidum var. dicoccum, a wholly unnatural plant. Both were domesticated in southern Turkey and the western Fertile Crescent, with innovations likely occurring at various points and diffusing.
Einkorn is almost extinct today, but emmer remains a popular crop in parts of the Middle East, and especially in Italy, where it is known as farro. Thriving in cold wet mountain conditions that bread wheats hate, it remains common in the high Apennines. It also makes a superior porridge and good pasta. Much more important is a selected variety of it, durum wheat (Triticum durum). This is not really a species—simply a form of emmer with extremely hard grains. It is the ideal pasta grain, allowing good al dente preparation. It is largely confined to the Italian world and to the northern Great Plains of North America, which have ideal conditions for growing it and therefore grow most of the world supply. But it reached China early: it is described in the fourteenth-century Yinshan Zhengyao and was found uncommonly but quite widely in North China by J. L. Buck (1937) in the early twentieth century.
The real action, however, took place when emmer crossed with another Aegilops, A. tauschii, in northern Iran or the Azerbaijan region around 6000 BCE. Somewhere just southwest of the Caspian Sea, about 8,000 years ago, a woman noticed that her bread was astonishingly good. It was miraculously light and fluffy, as though the gods had inspired it to rise. Consistently, the bread made of grain from one part of her family field produced bread like this. No one else had anything so good. She and her husband thanked the gods, then carefully selected the grain from that part of the field, and saved it for seed. As neighbors and relatives learned of it, the new high-quality seed spread more and more rapidly. Eventually it took over the world: bread wheat is now the most commonly grown plant on earth and the staple food of billions of people.
Eight thousand years later and many thousand miles away, a laboratory team learned that the local wheat had crossed with a wild grass, a local form of goat-face grass (Aegilops tauschii). From that grass, the local wheat obtained a gene for a form of gluten that allows the dough to trap carbon dioxide bubbles more effectively than regular gluten. The result is light, fluffy bread.
No one knows the name of the discoverer, but we can be sure that it was a woman: baking was a woman’s job then as now in that area. She benefited humanity more, I believe, than all the kings and generals of history.
This (slightly fictionalized) event produced bread wheat. It is nicknamed “BAD wheat” by geneticists because the genomes are respectively labeled A for the female ancestor (T. urartu), and B and D for the successive Aegilops inputs. A possible separate hybridization of the same species produced spelt, which makes better porridge but worse bread. This was not the end—other wheats have been developed but they are local and need not detain us here.
Many other domesticates come from the Fertile Crescent, and much activity seems to center on the aforementioned Karachadag, where chickpeas are native and where some strains of barley may have originated. The oldest known cultivation so far, however, is in Syria and Jordan, where agriculture goes back to 9500 BCE or earlier.
Dogs were domesticated about the same time, or even earlier (recent claims have them going back to 30,000 years ago). They were presumably the earliest domesticated animal, but we know surprisingly little about their origin. They first show up in ritual burials (touchingly including children buried with puppies) from the earliest agricultural levels. Sheep and goats were domesticated not long after, and somewhat later came cattle and pigs. Cattle certainly, and pigs almost certainly, were independently domesticated in several different places. We know this for cattle because the domesticate strains are radically different forms. The Indian zebu is not even the same species as the Near Eastern cow, and hybridizing them was a modern scientific triumph. The traditional East Africa cow (the Ankole) is different from both.
Contrary to older ideas of progress, stockherding came well after farming, not before. The ancient Greeks thought herding was lower on the human scale than farming and so must have come earlier. They saddled history with this latter illusion, dispelled only by modern archaeology. Snobbism never makes good theory.
This is not the place to get deeply into theories of agriculture, but suffice it to say that all the classic theories are wrong. Most of them depend on the idea that people were primitive savages who wandered around at the mercy of nature until some genius noticed that seeds grew into plants. Of course, everyone has known the latter for hundreds of thousands of years. Agriculture was about choosing to sow, not about learning that seeds grew into plants. Other theorists assume people invented agriculture because they “needed food,” but Carl Sauer (1952) proved long ago that people would have to be settled, knowledgeable, and aware of diverse and rich resources before they took up farming. Desperate people don’t have time to invent. As the Chinese proverb says: “When you are thirsty, it’s too late to dig a well.”
The really revolutionary new finds are recent discoveries of large settlements just before agriculture began. The huge ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is only 60 km from the Karachadag (Mann 2011 provides stunning photos). In Jordan, a large, well-to-do, architecturally sophisticated village with a huge and beautiful assembly hall arose just before agriculture began (Mithen et al. 2011; this is the same Steven Mithen who delightfully holds that humans sang or at least chanted before they talked [Mithen 2006], an idea originally stemming from Giambattista Vico [1999, orig. ca. 1740]. I love the idea, but alas it is unprovable.) The villagers were eating well from game and wild plants. Clearly, settled, well-fed life preceded agriculture.
Therefore, fairly recently, some scholars have argued that agriculture was invented not to prevent starvation but to allow people to have a large supply of favorite foods at hand for convenience, defense, and trade. Perhaps, in light of the striking architecture in Göbekli Tepe and Jordan, ceremonies required copious supplies (Hayden 2001; Mann 2011). I would bet on trade as the major driver. It provides an incentive to have lots of food close to the village to be ready at hand and also protected from raids.
Very soon after the domestication of wheat and barley, chickpeas, lentils, and other legume crops were domesticated in the Near East. Beans were early in China, Mexico, Peru, and other ancient centers of farming, also. Their easily available protein makes them desirable crops to go along with the grains, which provide bulk calories and B vitamins but not enough protein for an easy living. The other great source of protein, animal husbandry, soon followed, with sheep and goats in the Near East, pigs and chickens in China. Then, not much later, or perhaps even earlier, came vegetables and herbs; they do not preserve well archaeologically, so we know less about them. Among the fascinating mysteries of science are the origin points of our common fruit trees. The peach and mei are native to China, probably the northwest and center, respectively. The apricot can only be localized to Central Asia somewhere. The walnut, hazelnut, almond, quince, domestic grape, and several other species center on the Caucasus and the mountains of eastern Turkey and northern Iran and could have been domesticated anywhere in that region (or near it). The pistachio is native to the mountains of Iran and neighboring countries. Various species of pears and cherries were domesticated in both West and East Asia. One rare case of actual localization is the apple: genetics has pinpointed the domestic apple to the mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan, significantly close to the city of Alma Ata, whose name means “father of apples” (or “apple camp”).
Humans worldwide tend to domesticate the same kinds of fruit trees and other plants and animals. Different but closely related species of cherries were independently domesticated in Turkey, China, and Mexico thousands of years ago. Plums, chestnuts, and several other fruit and nut trees show similar patterns. The domestication of the mallard duck in the Old World (probably China) is paralleled by the domestication of the muscovy duck in South America. Pigs were, according to at least one genetic study, independently domesticated several times. And so it goes—through grains, squashes, and many other groups of plants.
