The Seeds of Civilization (and the Demise of the Soviet Union)
From the Fertile Crescent to our Supermarkets
Boris in the Freezer Aisle
For all the cultural angst they inspire, from “Whole Paycheck” shoppers frittering their wealth away to the processed food aisles that are clogging our veins and dulling our wits, supermarkets are a wonder of the modern world. Packed into long, wide rows, are fresh fruits and vegetables from across the world, olives, grains, pastas, hundreds of sauces and spices, an ocean’s worth of fish, bivalves, and tentacled oddities, fresh boules, loaves, and rolls of bread, to say nothing of the sweets and, of course, the much maligned (and beloved) aisle with hundreds of varieties of chips. What might one of our prehistoric ancestors feel upon passing through a pair of gleaming automatic doors into a bounty greater even than promised in the afterlife?
What, even, might a man feel who occupied the upper echelon of an expansive state bureaucracy only 35 years ago? In 1989, Boris Yeltsin, newly elected to Soviet parliament, had just completed a tour of Johnson Space Center, the hub of human space flight. There, he reviewed plans for an American space station, visited the Mission Control that supported the Gemini missions and, an engineer himself, asked many highly technical questions of NASA scientists.
Afterwards, he made an unplanned pitstop at a Randall’s Supermarket.
Boris wandered the aisles of this Randall’s in stunned amazement. Yeltsin, always the engineer, asked in disbelief whether specialized education was required to operate the store and if there were others like it. He remarked on the sheer variety and affordability of the food. Reflecting on the experience later in his biography, he wrote:
When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.
That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.
Though many of us now take for granted the supermarket, maybe even consider it with mild apprehension, Yeltsin’s experience seems to be broadly representative of people who grew up without such abundance. Of the people I’ve spoken with who grew up in socialist regimes, when they discuss leaving the Soviet bloc, their first visit to a Western supermarket is often brought up unprompted.
The supermarket is the product of many transformative technologies and globalized institutions. The electric motor (1837), commercial refrigeration (1856), flash freezing (1924), myriad improvements to farming and processing techniques, standardized cargo containers (1956) and advanced logistics along with the reduction of tariffs and the expansion of trade agreements that were drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the most important technology, the sine qua non of the supermarket is vastly older: around ten thousand years.
Sowing and Reaping
Of all the crops produced today, 80% (by weight) of these species were domesticated by the time the first cuniform accounts were recorded. The first of these, wheat, was domesticated around 8,500 BC in an area known as the Fertile Crescent. This region of particularly fecund earth around the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers, along with the Eastern Mediterranean is where humanity first began setting down roots; first literally by domesticating plant species, then figuratively by establishing permanent settlements.
Until the 9th millennia BC, history had unfolded slowly. A million years passed between the development of a crude stone tool for chopping roots and a slightly more sophisticated stone tool for butchering meat. Another 400 thousand years passed before humans learned to cook that meat with fire, and nearly another two million to become fully biologically and intellectually human: capable of speech and culturally sophisticated. From the point that humans first began to cultivate crops and establish permanent settlements to the present is a mere 11 millennia.
As with the first australopithecine to craft a stone tool and the first Homo habilis to forage fire from the dying embers of a lightening strike, the people of the Fertile Crescent permanently altered the course of humanity. Domestication happened gradually and without the intention to guide the course of evolution for these species. While foraging for food, they came across an unremarkable grass that they knew bore seeds that they could work into something tasty enough. With stone sickles, they sliced the heads from these wheat stalks and carried them back to camp. Inevitably, some of these seeds fell along the route back, resulting in a path of wheat the following year.
Over many generations, wheat became more abundant and foragers noticed that this area was good to visit because they could be sure of an ample supply of food. What’s more, the ever-larger amber fields of grain were becoming tastier and easier to harvest. Surrounded by more grain than was worth harvesting and processing, they would select patches with the largest seeds that were least likely to fall off during the trip back to camp. Similar dynamics led to the domestication of barley, peas, and olives around the same time.
During this time, the people of the Fertile Crescent also domesticated sheep and goats. (Interestingly, man’s best friend, the dog, appears to have been domesticated 10,000 years earlier, but perhaps not as food. As they returned to the same areas year after year, they noticed they were encountering the same herds and made decisions that prioritized slaughtering certain individuals to keep the herd healthy. They killed the older animals as well as the most aggressive to allow the most docile and fertile to live and continue to multiply. By sparing the lives of the young, fat, and fertile, they deferred present consumption and invested in the future health of the herd.
Each generation left fields slightly more fruitful and herds somewhat fatter for the next generation to reap. These investments yielded a reliable and bountiful source of food that could be preserved for use during leaner times. Returning to the same area each year, people began to build permanent structures. Perhaps the first of these were for storing the surplus food they harvested. They may have initially intended to live in these structures seasonally but eventually settled full time. Perhaps this was simply out of convenience, but it may have also been to keep at bay invading tribes who might pillage these investments in their absence.
Out of Eden
Life prior to the agricultural revolution certainly wasn’t a walk in the park (though it did involve plenty of walking through park-like landscapes). They lacked the comforts of modern life: somehow enduring an existence devoid of morning coffee and babka. But, it appears, life was not miserable. In fact, it may have been quite good most of the time for most people. The work they performed and the social interactions they maintained were all exactly what millions of years of evolution had equipped them to do. In fertile regions, where most people lived, people probably worked less than they do now. The average person might decamp with the sunrise, gather staples, hopefully bag a boar or spear a trout, and return home by noon to prepare food. Communities were small and intimate, usually capped at around 150 people: the largest number of close relationships a person can maintain. They all lived active, healthy lives and extremely low population density hindered the spread of pathogens. Most had a diverse, nutritious diet. Although they lacked modern medicine, disease was not nearly as rampant as it is now. Getting mauled by a wild beast was probably a lot more common, though.
Through the agricultural revolution laid the foundation of civilization, it also introduced the final three horses of the apocalypse. Out of Eden, new troubles awaited.
For so said the Lord God: How much more when I send [all] four of my evil judgments-sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence-against Jerusalem, [ought I] to cut off from it man and beast.
—Ezekiel 14:21
Sword
With the advent of permanent settlements, people were no longer limited by what they could carry on their backs, so they acquired more possessions: houses, myriad tools, surplus food, and art. This presented an appealing target to those who wished to acquire great riches by the sword rather than by the sweat of ones own brow. Predictably, conflict and violent death grew over this period as conflict-mitigating institutions did not yet exist.
It is estimated that around 15% of people in this period died violent deaths. Estimates of different populations from the antecedent period vary widely from a 0.25% to nearly half, but the mean seems to be rather lower. At 15%, this rate Is approximately three times higher than the bloodiest century in modern times, the 20th during which an estimated 200 million people were murdered by communist and fascist regimes. (For context: a back-of-the-envelope calculations suggests that the powdered skeletons of these 200 million people would fill all 102 floors of the Empire State Building1.)
Pestilence
Plague afflicted farmers and shepherds as well as their flocks. During the agricultural revolution, the global population grew, as did population density. Throughout the hunter-gatherer era, communities were usually no larger than 150 people and occupied broad territories. Agriculture enabled the land to support many more people. Increased density, along with greater contact with animal populations resulted in the incubation of disease which could spread much more rapidly in the burgeoning villages than they could in the wild.
Famine
Hunter-gatherer peoples tended to have a broad and varied diet. Bad weather, disease, or additional competition may impact a few species at a time, but as a proportion of the overall diet, the impact wasn’t likely to be insurmountable. If needed, the cost of moving to a new, more bountiful area was relatively low. Once settled, though, farmers were more susceptible to famine. An abnormally dry or wet season could wipe out their primary food source. Disease could render their flocks sickly and lean. With larger populations to support, insufficient food would periodically decimate agricultural communities. Without the deep knowledge of their ancestors to help them find new food sources, and with a larger population to support, famine could lay waste to entire communities. It took only a single broken link to lose knowledge that had accrued over hundreds of thousands of years.
Necessity, Mother of Invention
Why did agriculture emerge as late as 8,500 BC? We’ve been anatomically human for around 300,000 years, culturally sophisticated for at least a third of that time, and fully intellectually and socially human since at least 60,000 BC.
Partly, because things were going fairly well as they were. We were developing tools to be more effective hunters, we had fire to get more nutrients out of our food, and we had hundreds of thousands of years experience in foraging tasty, nutritious, non-poisonous food. But also, 60,000 years ago, the world was in the middle of an ice age that dramatically reduced the area of arable land.
Then, around 13 thousand years ago, the planet underwent a dramatic period of warming that greatly expanded the regions where domesticable species were able to grow. Over this same period, large mammals, which had comprised a large portion of the diet, were hunted to extinction. In the simplest terms, the expected value of foraging domesticable crops began, in some places, to surpass the expected value of hunting and gathering wild species.
What is so Fertile About This Particular Crescent?
Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent predates that of anywhere else in the world by at least 1,000 years. Aside from the Fertile Crescent (8,500 BC), China (7,500 BC), and possibly New Guinea (7,000 BC) and Sahel (5,000 BC) and those regions that imported agriculture from these original regions, the rest of the world remained hunter-gatherers for at least 5,000 more years. Why was the Fertile Crescent the first adopter and why did it get such a big head start on civilization?
In all of human history, the oak tree was never domesticated. Nor were truffles. Nor vicuña nor peccaries, nor most species, even those with medicinal, gastronomic, or sartorial value to us. Most species simply aren’t able to be domesticated. There are, however, climates that provide the conditions that lend themselves to domestication. Mediterranean climates, such as those of the Fertile Crescent, which have hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters favor annuals. These sort of plants live for only a year so they have to grow quickly. They forgo energy-intensive woody tissues and instead pour their energy into producing large, gorgeous flowers and, importantly, seeds.
Of the 56 species of grass that produce the largest seeds, 32 of them are in the Fertile Crescent. Of these, wheat and barley, the first species to be domesticated, have some of the largest seeds. These species needed the least “work” to domesticate because the seeds were already of a size that was useful to humans. They are also self-pollinators, another trait that Mediterranean climates favor. Self-pollination makes it easier for mutations to perpetuate through the generations. Had the first farmers attempted to harvest a cross-pollinating species for larger seeds that stay on the stalk long enough to bring to harvest, they would have been frustrated when those seeds were fertilized by a plant without the favorable mutations they were selecting for.
The Fertile Crescent was blessed with a wildly disproportionate number of species capable of domestication. Soon after domesticating wheat and barley, olives, peas, and lentils were cultivated. The Fertile Crescent is also the native land of four of the animals most commonly eaten even today: goats, sheep, pigs, and cows. Had the people of the 9th century BC Fertile Crescent encountered only a single species suitable for domestication, it’s unlikely they would have entirely changed their lifestyle and committed themselves to cultivating that species as it wouldn’t have offered an advantage over hunting and gathering. Fortunately, they were blessed with an absolute cornucopia of species which required relatively little effort to manipulate into tastier varieties.
A More Familiar Sort of Life
The farmers and shepherds of this era forged an entirely new sort of life. Permanent settlements supported by agriculture would become the dominant model across the world amongst almost all peoples. These communities could do something that their hunter-gatherer forefathers couldn’t: they could invest in the future. The surplus of each generation carried forward into the next. It might be just a little bit of grain. It might be a few more buildings. It might be a slightly better tool or an improved relationship with a trading partner. Over many generations, these modest surpluses accumulated into something truly magnificent: the foundation of civilization and the lives of many, many more millions of people.
From the first writing of which we have any record to now is roughly the same length of time from that first writing to the advent of agriculture. Unlike the first sapiens to use use stone tools or cook with fire, or the ice-age Sunghir people who buried their children with four years worth of labor, we have more than just a few, tantalizing hints of who the first agrarians were! The age of the first settlements is just beyond the edge of the familiar. We can see their labor in the genetic code of the species they domesticated. We can see their diet in the burnt remains of trash mounds and storage containers. We can see the scythes they used to reap their fields and slaughter their herds. We can even see the cities in which they lived.
Jericho, perhaps the first walled city, was founded at dawn of agriculture, around 9,000 BC. We can still see the tower they built at the center of their city. Around this, we could see signs of the famous 8 foot tall wall surrounding the city a thousand years later. The wall was built to defend against attacks by outsiders and is portentous of the many, many waves of migration and warfare that continue to this day.
If these early people had not defended their investments, if they had left them in the care of people who were not, themselves, invested in the health of the herd, in building things to last, in advancing the human condition, our civilization would not have taken root. People take for granted things they don’t build themselves. Had agricultural communities succumbed to attacks by hunter-gatherers, the fields would lie fallow, the herds would all be slaughtered for a great feast day, and the ovens would go unused for want of a knowledge of their purpose. During that visit to Randall’s Supermarket, Boris Yeltsin realized that not all such societies had been relegated to the dustbin of history…yet.
References
Blumler, Mark A., Roger Byrne, Anna Belfer-Cohen, Vorsila L. Bohrer, Brian F. Byrd, Robert C. Dunnell, Gordon Hillman, et al. “The Ecological Genetics of Domestication and the Origins of Agriculture [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 32, no. 1 (February 1991): 23–54. https://doi.org/10.1086/203912.
Diamond, Jared M. Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: Norton, 2017.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2011. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Perennial.
Lincicome, Scott. Cato.org, September 15, 2023. https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day.
Reddit user, Brad6363 calculates that mass equivalent to that of 335 human skeletons fits in 64 cubic feet, or apx. 0.19104 skeletons per cubic foot. This, suggests that it would take a volume of 38.2 million cubic feet to fit 200 million skeletons. The Empire State Realty Trust puts the volume of the Empire State Building at 37 million cubic feet. So actually, you’d also need the main building of Bielefeld University to handle the overflow.
So interesting Nika! I never knew that something as common & widespread as oak trees had never been domesticated.
And because everything reminds me of a song I read this with a tune from the oddly named aughts band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin -- known as bit less cumbersomely as SSLYBY -- playing in my head :-)
What an amazing piece, yet again, Nika. Thanks wholeheartedly. Reading you is such a pleasure! Amazing.
By the way, in 2001 I worked briefly for an international organization in Belarus. I lived in reverse what Yeltsin experienced entering a Western supermarket for the first time in America. I was absolutely shocked, mesmerized at the view of the unlabeled few products available.
PS: for anyone who may wonder if it was Hillary Clinton who domesticated the first wheat plant in what today is Iraq a long, long time ago… the answer is “yes, certainly.”