Читать книгу Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker - Страница 11

In this book, we shall be dealing with evolution. We shall try to describe the evolution of crop plants from their wild progenitors to fully domesticated races and the emergence of agricultural economies from preagricultural ones. We shall deal with the activities of man that shaped the evolution of crops and that influenced the shaping of crops as human societies evolved. Crops are artifacts made and molded by man as much as a flint arrowhead, a stone axe head, or a clay pot. On the other hand, man has become so utterly dependent on the plants he grows for food that, in a sense, the plants have “domesticated” him. A fully domesticated plant cannot survive without the aid of man, but only a minute fraction of the human population could survive without cultivated plants. Crops and man are mutually dependent and we shall attempt to describe how this intimate symbiosis evolved.

The word “evolution” means an opening out, an unfolding, a realization of potential as in the opening of a flower or the germination of a seed. It implies a gradual process rather than sudden or cataclysmic events, with each living thing being derived genetically from preceding living things. Evolution as a process means change with time and the changes may be relatively slow or rapid, the time relatively long or short. Thus, the differences brought about by evolution over time may be small or great. As we shall see, some cultivated plants differ very little, if at all, from their progenitors. The same can be said for the evolution of agricultural economies and the sociological changes that have occurred in the process of developing fully agricultural and industrial societies from hunting–gathering systems.

To develop a degree of understanding of what has happened and what agricultural systems mean to mankind, we need some sort of picture of what life was like before agriculture. We need to establish a baseline from which we can visualize the domestication of plants and the emergence of agriculture. What kinds of plants did man eat before today's crops were available? What did he know about plants, and what might have caused him to begin the process of domestication? The descriptions given here will necessarily be brief and sketchy, but will give an idea of the condition of man before he began to grow plants with the purpose of using them for food.

We also need to know something about man as a hunter to understand ourselves. Lee and DeVore (1968) have put it succinctly:

Cultural Man has been on earth for some 2,000,000 years; for over 99% of this period he has lived as a hunter‐gatherer. Only in this last 10,000 years has man begun to domesticate plants and animals, to use metals and to harness energy sources other than the human body.… Of the estimated 80,000,000,000 men who have ever lived out a life span on earth, over 90% have lived as hunters and gatherers; about 6% have lived by agriculture and the remaining few percent have lived in industrial societies. To date, the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved.

As a matter of general education and self‐understanding, it is important that we know something about this basic human adaptation. There are two general approaches to the problem: (a) we can study surviving nonagricultural societies and examine the ethnographic observations made within the last few centuries, or (b) we can attempt to interpret preagricultural life from the artifacts, refuse, and other clues left by ancient man and recovered by archaeological techniques. In this chapter, we shall deal primarily with the first approach but the archaeological record shall be touched on in later sections.