Comic by David Steinlicht
I’m not sure that any of us can underestimate the impact of the Neolithic way of life. It has been the single largest step in social evolution since the inception of language. The industrial revolution, followed by the computing advances which heralded the onslaught of the information age have not even the slightest implications on human beings as a whole when compared to the radical shift in thinking which fascilitated the transition from hunter / gatherer to farmer.
In the ancient world the threat of a salted earth was one of the most feared consequences of war. To this day the practice still sends a chill down the spine of those who realize the true meaning of the term. Agriculture and civilization as we know it are so inextricably linked that even in our modern era of “magical” food availability we take pause at the icons of doom like plagues of locusts and burning timber land. These symbols of our ultimate damnation, etched into the inchoate proto-mind of all unborn children as an inherited memory, find such deep meaning to us that we are typically at a loss to describe the feelings they conjure.
Some time around 10,000 BC in an area of the world known biblically as Jericho a group of people began cultivating wild cereal grains for harvest. This group, known as the Natufians, were inspired to settle the region due to a radical climate cooling event called the Younger Dryas. The cooling of the immediate environment reduced the capacity of the land to support human life. This forced the people of the Jericho region to band together and form population centers with dependable food supplies. As with most things, necessity was the mother of invention. With their new understanding of the reproductive cycle of edible grains the Natufian populations were able to stabilize their food stores. This concept spread like wildfire.
With cooperative sharing of resources came the need for more permanent housing, systems of law, and perhaps most importantly the paradigm shift between seeing other humans as threats and seeing them as welcome help.
We still struggle hard against the wired primitive responses of our ancestors; but should we? Conflict between those who are different from us is a keystone of the human experience and perhaps one of the only urges which has allowed us to flourish. Perhaps it is the necessary evil of men that allows us to live in relative peace. It is this idea upon which the cold war was based… mutually assured destruction. Are there truly any better means of deterring violent interaction beyond the threat of a mutual obliteration. It is this struggle that urges us to develop notions like “good” and “evil”. It is this same struggle that drives us forward toward the uncertainty which exploration brings.
This balance, this delicate dance of human perceptions, can never yield lest we cease to be what we are. The human animal, hunter, nester, master its domain, is a living embodiment of speculation and the Neolithic experiment has been one of our grandest. Fighting our very nature yet embracing the alien has built for us a labyrinthine of shifting morality. Without something as simple as the agrarian manifest our fear would’ve long removed us from the harsh natural world. By the same turn we can never truly be free of the shackles of war or else we welcome destruction at the hands of the unknown. The world is good at giving us the unknown when we least expect it.
“Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations – as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness – nature pops up with her inescapable demands.” -Dr. Carl Jung
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