A momentous change in survival skills

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Despite how long we lasted in the wilderness living in nomadic packs, these nomadic packs were not to be – for most of us – our permanent homes. The seeds of their own destruction ever so gradually began to show. We were already clever to invent wood and stone tools. And our cleverness in developing them would lead to more and more refinements. As those refinements happened, our brains would enlarge and continue to enlarge. As we worked making the tools we already knew how to make, our brains would slowly figure out how to conceive of a better tool or a better technique that we could apply to make slow improvements in tools. These improved tools or techniques, which helped us hunt or gather better, slowly led the pack to acquire a bit more food and grow in size, albeit very slightly. Whether it was population pressure or just our continuing cleverness in seeking food, we invented agriculture, and soon an unstoppable process would be set in motion—some call it a revolution—leading eventually to what many people consider to be the crowning glory of humanity: civilization.

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Growing our food

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By about 200,000 years ago or 2,000 centuries ago, we had finally evolved physically and mentally into modern Homo sapiens—very little body hair, a face with a protruding nose and chin, no brow ridge to speak of, smaller teeth adapted to cooked food, and a very large brain. Over several million years and longer, we were getting smarter and smarter. As “archaic” Homo sapiens, which is what the first version of Homo sapiens is called, we continued to thrive for 200,000 years with a hunting-and-gathering sexual division of labor—until just a short instant of time ago in our long journey to today. Just 12,000 (???) years ago, we first invented how to grow plants. Long before, we likely knew about how plants grow, but 12,000 (????)  years ago is the approximate date when we began to grow plants in earnest. We invented agriculture.

           

We say “invented” agriculture. We might have said we “discovered” it. But almost all of the technologies that we customarily say we “invented” were also “discovered.” Some feature, some capability, some characteristic of a part of the natural environment – such as the flaking characteristics of certain kinds of stone, the bendable quality of some woods to use for bows, the blending of ores into metals, the force of water to push objects like paddles on a wheel – these characteristics were “discovered,” and then we manipulated these materials into new kinds of tools. We thus “invented” new tools.

           

So we discovered that the small particles that grew on plants – the seeds – were what grew into plants when they fell down to the soil. Cleverly, we realized that we could use and manipulate those seeds with a deliberate goal of growing a plant with more seeds, with edible seeds. Thus, we invented agriculture. Like all the technologies that we have subsequently invented, agriculture involved our taking raw materials from the environment—plant seeds and soil—and then manipulating them with our hands. (The “mani-“ in “manipulate” means “hands,” “manual.”)  We selected the best seeds and planted them in loosened-up soil. Eventually, we enriched the soil with manure or by fallowing or leaving fields unplanted for a season. We weeded the growing plants, harvested them in bulk, threshed the hulls off, prepared some of the grain to be eaten now, and stored the rest of it for future consumption in clay jars we invented and made. All these activities involved a lot of manipulation by us humans, ending with a consumable product found nowhere in the natural environment. Yes, we invented agriculture, just as much as we invented the wheel or the automobile. After stone toolmaking, this very next invention would be another deliberate way to “make” food. Of the three basics of life—food, clothing, and shelter—it should not be surprising that food would be the first and most important arena for innovation. Clothing and shelter would follow later.

             

From nomadic to sedentary

           

Our invention of agriculture would be transformative, leading eventually to a dramatic new form of social organization—the agrarian village settlement or, more simply, the agrarian village. (“Agrarian” is another term for “agricultural.”) Part-time forms of agriculture, however, prevailed at first. In the places where we usually gathered food, small efforts, perhaps poking in the soil around plants or scattering a plant’s seeds, yielded a modestly more abundant growth when we later returned to that site. The extra food allowed us to spend a little longer time in that location, subsisting on that yield. The more plentiful harvest from that location also allowed the size of the nomadic pack to grow just a bit. But in the early days of agriculture, we had to move on to a new campsite, continuing our nomadic ways.

           

Other intermediate forms of agriculture involved progressively more planting and less hunting and gathering. In one form, we burned sections of forest and planted seeds in the ash-fertilized soil after the fire. Then we left that site to continue hunting and gathering or to burn other sections of forest and plant it, returning to the burnt fields one after another to tend or harvest the plants.

           

At first, then, we learned how to cultivate just one type of food, and we had to roam far and wide in the traditional manner of hunter-gatherers to satisfy our other survival needs. We could do so in the intervals when our field did not require active attention. But roaming long distances for the rest of one’s survival needs and returning repeatedly to the same field of grain demanded more energy and a faster speed of movement, not very efficient with our energy. And it would have left the valuable field unwatched and vulnerable to predators—other animals or other nomadic hunters and gatherers, some of whom had turned to robbery, an easier way to acquire food.

           

These intermediate forms of semi-farming, then, did not last long. Mixing nomadic and sedentary patterns of movement was possible only to a limited extent and was a short period in human history in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The solution that would be more economical with our time, space, and energy was to consolidate all our survival needs in one location. We needed to apply the same technological principle embodied in cultivation of one grain to other plants in our environment, and then to apply it also to animals, to domesticate them. (The word “domesticate” comes from the Latin “domus,” which means “house.” With the invention of agriculture, we built houses or huts that were at first semi-permanent and then stationary.) In this way, we satisfied our survival needs in several semi-permanent locations and the one permanent location. As a result, all or most of our work processes became located in one area—the village and its surrounding areas—an area much smaller than the roaming range of hunter-gatherers.

           

Gradually, the techniques of agriculture developed, seeds were more carefully selected, the soil was more carefully prepared, the plants more carefully tended, and the more abundant harvest more carefully preserved against the decay of time. As a result, the movement pattern of humans changed to longer and longer stays in fewer and fewer locations—until finally, permanent occupation of one location. In this transition, hunting and gathering continued but gradually diminished as agriculture was able to provide more food for the group to survive on, including domesticated sheep and goats (????) to replace hunted meat. Many nomadic packs became stationary villages with a population of 50 to perhaps 300 people, dependent mostly or entirely upon agriculture and animal husbandry rather than hunting and gathering. Some hunting-and-gathering packs gave up their ways and took up full-time animal husbandry of reindeer, sheep, and goats (?????), becoming nomadic herders wandering from pasture to pasture to get food for their herds. Some of these herding groups still exist today, such as the Laplanders in (??????)…

           

The early agrarian villages were not isolated from each other. The small amount of trade that had occurred between nomadic packs of hunter-gatherers expanded into a modestly larger volume of trade between villages. Unlike nomadic packs that moved as a whole group into contact with another group, the stationary agrarian villages were linked by part-time and eventually by full-time itinerant traders traveling from village to village. Moreover, trading involved only small, easily carried items found in the natural environment, like seashells and shiny or unusual stones. But with this expanded trade, culture and technological innovation was able to spread from one village to another at a relatively fast speed. Agriculture itself was transmitted so rapidly by contact between nearby groups that within two or three thousand years—an historically very brief amount of time, as we have noted—nomadic hunting-and-gathering packs disappeared from more than half the habitable surface area of the earth, to be replaced by settled villages—or by turning into one other important form: warrior bands attacking and pillaging villages for food and women. Surprisingly, autonomous nomadic hunting-and-gathering packs still survive today scattered over nearly half the earth’s remaining habitable surface area, though this area is, like the Artic, the Amazon, or the Sahara, usually not suitable for agriculture (Hawkes & Woolley, year, page ????? ).[1]

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The origin of property

           

Eventually, full-scale agriculture brought a revolution in our way of living. Our nomadic way of life ended completely. We became sedentary, living in villages, bound to fields of crops and pastures of animals that came to sustain us, and we settled down in one location to grow our food in fields and pastures. Those villages, fields and pastures, those locations, that territory for growing crops and raising animals, that property became our new source of livelihood. We needed boundaries and laws to define our land separately from the land of others and to protect our fields. The ideas of property and ownership were abstract ideas, embodied in speech and behavior and marked physically only by markers or walls of stone or other material.

           

We also needed warriors to fend off invaders who might steal the products of our fields and pastures. Those invaders were, of course, wandering nomads whose wilderness, once a range for roaming free and ample with food, was being encroached upon and claimed by us, the more numerous farmers. These nomads became the warriors to protect us from other marauding nomads. The agricultural revolution in this way affected many of those previously wandering hunting-and-gathering packs.

           

This agricultural revolution became, in fact, the basis for all further social development down to the present. The fields or work territories we established as farmers gradually evolved into other work territories of various sizes in larger societies. Consider these common words that indicate very real work territories in modern as well as older societies: workshop, workplace, office, desk, cubicle, post (“he occupied a post in an agency”), position, station, situation (“her situation at the company was in peril”), province, bureau, department, place of business, agency, field (“her field of expertise was particle physics”), district, domain—all different names for the basic idea—territories—buttressed by rules and laws enforced by owners, managers, local authorities, and eventually, the police power of centralized government. Agriculture was the beginning of property in all its many forms. Even a worker’s desk in a cubicle is property, the permanent property of the bureaucracy and the temporary property of the worker occupying it as an employee. Property started with the planted field, and its transformation continued and continues.

 

Other technological inventions

           

The invention of agriculture was not the only invention that occurred around the time that we invented it. We made other inventions to help us in growing our food, inventions that were consistent with the change from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life.

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Not long after we invented agriculture and perhaps even before we domesticated animals, we newly established farmers invented the crafts of pottery and weaving. Pottery involved taking clay from a deposit in the environment, shaping it, drying it, firing it in the campfire to make it hard, and using it for cooking or burying it in the ground for long-term food storage. Weaving involved gathering animal wool or hair and turning it into long, pliable strands, then weaving it into a fabric ready to be used in further steps to make various end-products such as clothes and blankets and tents. Or plant fibers such as reeds were woven together into baskets. Like cultivating fields of crops or raising herds of domestic animals, pottery and weaving required humans to spend a relatively longer time performing more steps (gathering material, shaping it, firing it or weaving it, etc.) in order to transform raw material from the natural environment into a usable, consumable good. Enough food was being grown to allow some time to do these other activities and create the first “goods.” These interlocked changes were occurring between 12,000 and 9,000 [?????] years ago, quite rapidly in the timeframe of millions of years of human prehistory.

           

As prehistoric farmers, we also developed at least two important tools, the digging stick or the plow and the hoe. The invention of yet more tools for farming, shelter, and food preparation began to take off at this time. Pottery, weaving, and toolmaking, like agriculture, all tended to concentrate the work process within or near the settled village.

           

Almost as remarkable as inventing how to cultivate plants, we also learning to domesticate animals, feeding them on pasture land near the village. Instead of searching for prey in faraway places as hunters did, as farmers we herded our animals, keeping them in much closer proximity to the stationery farming village. ( connect to herder discussion a few paragraphs up or just below – better to place below.)  In the same way that cultivating plants required tending a field from beginning to end, tending domesticated animals involved dealing with the animals through the whole lifecycle from birth to death, with the animals providing milk and wool in midlife and hides and meat at the end. Both tending crops and tending domesticated animals were alike in being long work processes. Both involved a bold change in work habits, which required many steps before a final, consumable product was produced. In these ways, tending crops and tending domesticated animals were consistent with each other. F

           

We must mention one offshoot of animal domestication that led to another form of nomadic life quite similar to hunter-gatherers: nomadic herders living almost completely off the products produced by their herds of domesticated animals—meat, milk, hides, wool, and bone from domesticated reindeer, goats, cattle, yaks, sheep, horses, donkeys, or camels (????? Correct animals for herding???  ). These herders wandered more or less continuously to find suitable new pasture occurring naturally in the environment. Nomadic pastoralism, as this alternative lifestyle is called, was a full-time mode of survival.

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No turning back

           

Growing our food was, however, far from a rosy picture. We gave up a rather more contented lifestyle in the nomadic pack, and we turned to a more labor-intensive, more materially plentiful, but a less contented lifestyle. Does that sound familiar? No doubt abundance and larger yields, though sometimes ravaged by storms and insect plagues, motivated us to transition to agriculture. But we paid a price. Meat, highly nutritious and a major constituent of our diet, declined substantially, largely replaced by grains, which also replaced the wide variety of fruits, nuts, and vegetables we once gathered in the wild. Our nutrition suffered seriously. Our already short lifespan as hunters and gatherers—33 years on average, much longer if we ignore childhood mortality—shortened to 20 years on average as farmers. Our physical height shrank by ________[????] The amount of leisure time that we had as nomads also decreased and our workload increased. Hunter-gatherers typically spent only part-time gathering their food needs. One surviving modern tribe’s food-gathering was estimated to take just 19 hours a week. Farmers, however, typically worked long days. We often had to labor from dawn to dusk. We acquired new skills, but in the process, we lost our keenly refined knowledge of the growing habits of plants and animals that we had to find in the wilderness as hunter-gatherers. In fact, the wilderness was receding as the land turned increasingly to farming.

           

Perhaps that loss of knowledge trapped us in agriculture. But for whatever reason, once we embarked on the road laid out by agriculture, there was no turning back. The biblical story of Adam and Eve being expelled forever from the Garden of Eden—from a life of ease plucking food from generous trees and shrubs to a life of toil in the fields—may well reflect this dramatic and permanent change in our daily living. The dating of Adam and Eve in the Bible to around 6,000 years ago is not far off from 10,000 [???] years ago when archaeologists say agriculture was invented.

 

"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food….And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die….And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed….[The woman] took of the fruit [of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil], and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat….and they knew that they were naked….And unto Adam [God] said,…Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;…Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken." [2]

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This amazing passage from the start of the Bible reflects both the relative ease of life in the “garden” and the toil and sorrow following the irreversible expulsion from the garden. It may well be that the “knowledge of good and evil” refers to our invention of agriculture and the associated crafts of pottery and weaving. Like all innovations in technology including the stone toolmaking that preceded it, agriculture is based on new knowledge of how to take items from our environment and manipulate those takings into food and other products useful to us. (We use the term product not only in the industrial sense, but in the very generic sense of whatever is produced or made from components or from the natural environment, whether in ancient or modern times. The word pro-duct comes from Latin pro-, “forward” and –duct “bring,” “lead.” Something brought forward.)

           

Besides the expulsion, the biblical passage is also very suggestive of another feature of this momentous change to agriculture: the change in Adam and Eve from being not ashamed of their nakedness to being ashamed of it. The next invention after food-making would be clothing, perhaps for clothing’s usefulness in protecting us from heat or cold, but perhaps at first for its use in hiding our sex organs and thereby reducing the visual stimulus and access for sex and for sending us into hidden locations for sex. This new modesty would coincide with a growing population, which resulted because agriculture produced more calories of food than hunting and gathering. Perhaps more people around, sexual access could not be stopped immediately by a nearby elder, which was the enforcement method among early hunter-gatherers. Rather, sexual access needed to be controlled from a further distance. Elaborate kinship systems that channel sexual access would soon arise in simple agrarian societies.

 

Short versus long work process

           

The change to agriculture changed our movement patterns. Agriculture involved two basic changes in the pattern of work and the movements accompanying it. First, the work process (in a generic sense) to create any particular product was lengthened, sometimes considerably. Our oldest human ancestors had a short work process, a short series of actions or activities performed as they sought out and consumed wild plants and animals, gathering them in the wilderness at the end of their growth cycle and consuming them raw immediately or very soon. The process was as simple as picking fruit or vegetables from plant stems that virtually held them out, ready to pick. This short processing of their food fit with and was inseparable from their nomadic movement pattern, as the group moved from one site to the next, staying only a short time at each site, performing the same short series of activities again and again on each new batch of food at the site, exhausting the food there, and moving on to the next site in their wandering circuit. Hunters, the men, were the first to develop a longer work process. They had to shape their stone tools, walk to a hunting site, wait for prey, catch it, perhaps skin it, cut it into smaller pieces, and bring it home.

           

Early farmers, in contrast, had a long work process, a fairly long series of activities performed on the same field of planted food, starting not at the end of the growing cycle but at the beginning. This long work process required farmers to stay in one location around their village. They tilled the soil, planted the seed, weeded, and kept watch over the field for months, all before the final harvest, which reaped the mature crop and processed it further—threshing it, winnowing it, grinding it, and other processes, and combining it with other ingredients to cook it—all to make it ready for final consumption. Men and women divided up these tasks in various ways in different villages or regions.  

             

Quantity produced

           

Another factor lengthened the early farmers’ work process: storage, often by burying clay pots of grain in the ground, another step for women. Their plants were grown in very large batches, and most of the harvest was prepared for long-term storage in buried, large clay pots or other forms, adding more steps to the work process. Storage also required them to stay in the vicinity of the stored food. Besides the change from a short to a long work process, a second basic change in our work and movement patterns that came with agriculture. Products were processed in larger—much larger—quantities at each step. When the farmers performed one step in the processing of a field of grain, they were processing many more units of that product, many more stalks of grain, for example, compared to what hunters and gatherers processed when they stopped at a location to gather a patch of fruit or seeds in the wild. For example, hunters and gatherers may have spent, say, several hours harvesting the fruit or seed from a patch they had found, yielding enough to eat on the spot and perhaps keep them for a day. In contrast, the farmers in that same amount of time tended many times more stalks of grain in their field. And each time they came to a particular field, they processed that large quantity of grain only through one step in the long growing cycle—say, a round of weeding in the field of grain or threshing a field’s harvest (beating it to remove the husk from the edible seed). In the end, the field yielded a full season’s or a full year’s supply of grain. In sum, hunter-gatherers had a short work process on a small quantity of food consumed immediately, all performed in one foray into the wilderness; farmers had a long work process on large quantities of food, performed in and around the village settlement, in a series of tasks or operations carried on throughout the growing season. This long agricultural work process took place over the course of a full growing season or a full year, and was inseparable from the stationary movement pattern of the farmers within the area of their villages and the surrounding fields and pastures.

           

While it might seem that hunting and gathering were precarious operations, always facing the possible loss of a particular plant or animal for any one of many reasons, the most dangerous operation, in fact, was agriculture. While hunter-gatherers could easily turn to other types of food sources in other locations, farmers, if they lost their crop due to weather events, plagues, or other circumstances, faced the loss of part or all of their year’s supply of that food source. In other words, farmers were vulnerable to long-term hunger or even famine.

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Specializing the environment  

           

Yet another change occurred with agriculture. We humans significantly altered the environmental space around the social unit, the settled village. Nature on its own tends to produce a diversity of resources in any one location, resources potentially useful to us humans. In any one location, then, hunter-gatherers found only a short natural supply of one or more particular kinds of wild foods they could eat. In contrast, the effect of agriculture was to specialize the resources of the environment. In a certain amount of space—a field, for example—agriculture selectively proliferated just one resource—just one variety of grain, for example—and destroyed even short supplies of any other resources there. Other fields around the village had to be used for other types of plants. Or crops were rotated from one field to another and back again over seasons or years. Pastures were another specialized space, and the animal tenders made sure the animals moved to different areas of pasture to allow it to grow and refresh. Beyond villages lay unmodified forests and wilds to which the farmers went to hunt, gather firewood, dig out  clay deposits, and other resources. Villages, too, were specialized. Not one campsite for all, the huts or small houses of each villager family were separated from each other and devoted to one family, usually an extended family. Around rhe huts or houses were vegetable and herb gardens for each household, another specialization of space. Sometimes, a few craft specialists, at first part-time and later fulltime, had their own specialized spaces:  the medicine man/shaman, the blacksmith, even the merchant who traveled to other villages to exchange shells, precious stones, and a few, easily portable goods, such as weavings. And in later times, a walled-off, impressive house and courtyard became the home of a warrior lord and his fellow warriors, whose job was to defend the surrounding villages from marauding bands of warriors, descended from nomadic hunter-gatherer packs.

             

This alteration and specialization of the environment would, of course, continue and grow immensely as we learned to grow and harvest food in ever-larger farms, and as farms specialized in one type of food product and learned to apply various technological innovations—the tools of cobblers, bakers, and tailors, for example, and the tractors, reapers, balers, and other machines to process farm products—that would lead to industrialization of farm operations and many other manufacturing operations. This same pattern of making spaces uniform in content would proceed on and on through all the other product-areas of specialized craftsmen and industrially manufactured products.

           

Viewed from above, the movement pattern in this historic transformation to agriculture involved slowing down our wide range of wandering as hunter-gatherers and concentrating our movements in and around agrarian villages, their fields, their pastures, and outlying wilds as we became farmers. At the same time, however, viewed from above but closer up, the movement of farmers within the agrarian village sped up compared to the movement of hunter-gatherers around their campsite.

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                   INSERT MAX WEBER DRAWING

 

The spaces in and around the village were specialized spaces, laid out very roughly in a pattern of concentric circles: first, the huts, the cottages, or other form of domicile were grouped in the center. Then herb and vegetable gardens – “horticulture” – were established immediately around the homes. Then fields of crops, such as wheat, barley (???), and other grains, were laid out around the village. Then pasture areas for their herds of domestic animals were next. And finally, farthest away, the residual forest for occasional hunting and for materials such as clay, reeds, house-building materials, and firewood (Homans, year, page). This agrarian village, typical of fully sedentary farmers subsisting on the food they produced, was a far cry from the naturally sheltered spot in an untamed wilderness that hunter-gatherers took as their temporary campsite.

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Changing movement patterns

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The work techniques of hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and of farmers, on the other, conformed perfectly to our different movement patterns. As nomadic hunter-gatherers, we moved long distances from patch to patch or hunting site to hunting site on successive days. In contrast, as farmers we remained through each one’s lifetime mostly within the confines of the stationary village and its immediate surrounding areas of fields, pasture, and nearby forests. But we moved day after day back and forth between the various fields and specialized spaces within the confines of the village, the fields, the pastures, and the surrounding outlands.

           

So our movements in the wilderness were rapid as we moved quickly from one foraging spot to another, and yet our movements within the pack were slow. Each person stayed in constant contact over many years with just a few other humans, which – in terms of people interacting with each other – were long, slow movements. When agriculture took over as the primary source of food, our movements, for all practical purposes, reversed. Compared to hunter-gatherers, we moved very slowly from site to site and planted ourselves for a considerable stretch of time at each site. Or we did not move at all from one location to another. We were a permanent, stationary village. But within the village and its surroundings, individuals moved more rapidly in all areas of life:  from one person to another, from one nomadic pack to another, from one field to another, from field to pasture, and from pasture to pasture. The population increased because of the greater calories in cultivated foods. Individuals had more people to interact with, so our contact with each individual was shortened.

           

To visualize this transformation in movement patterns as we go from hunter-gatherers to village farmers: in one type of economy or division of labor, we are moving rapidly over a large region but remaining in contact with a handful of the same other individuals, the latter being a slow pattern of movement. In the other type of economy or division of labor, a larger number of us moves slowly or not at all through from one geographic site to another, spending more time as each site until we become a permanent village settlement. But inside the village REPETITIVE??? NEED TO COMPLETE, NEED TO PUT ELSEWHERE?

           

With all our survival needs distributed among specialized spaces around the village, we farmers did not have to roam nearly as far geographically as our nomadic ancestors. But we had to move continually from space to space around the village in order to process each particular type of product in its unique and specialized location. Given the length of the work processes for most of the products we depended on, it was in general necessary for us early farmers to perform work in stages and on large quantities of each product at once. We would complete only one or two steps in one location with one product and then move on to different work activities with different products in other specialized locations. In this way, we advanced the processing of all our survival needs little by little. We moved from work in the fields to work on pottery, then on to our herds, then into our gardens, then out to the forest, including many return trips to our huts or cottages during and at the end of the work day. Our movements would occur in various daily, periodic, or seasonal patterns, as required by each product being produced. Many of the work processes in fact required periods of inactivity, such as the drying period for pottery or the germinating period for newly planted seeds. In those interludes, work in other areas could be accomplished.

           

Movement from product to product was fast, even if geographical movement was slow. Only a short time was spent with each product, but many more products were worked on in a single stretch of time. See box on speed of movement.

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Their campsite, moreover, was much smaller than an agrarian village and also far less specialized in terms of the spaces immediately around it. There would have been the campsite center for socializing with space to sit or squat, eventually encircling a fire after fire was tamed [GET DATE]. Various operations may have occurred right at this socializing center: chipping away on stones for their simple hand tools or cutting meat or scraping the hide clean. Nearby perhaps was a specialized space for firewood. Further away would have been a specialized area to relieve oneself. Later on, if they had advanced further, various small huts might have circled round the campfire. On all this, we are speculating, as descriptions of prehistoric campsites are not readily available [???] But with simple needs and a very simple economy, the spaces would have been close by and few in number.

 

It would turn out that we would continue with the agrarian movement patterns that had arisen and we would invent and develop and invent and develop and take them to veritable extremes: millions and millions of businesses large and small producing an incredible quantity of products with both individuals and products taking long-distance movements at very rapid, mechanized speeds.

 

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[1]
[2] Genesis 2:8-9, 16-17, 25; 3:6-7, 17, 23, King James Version

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Questions or comments:  schlomings@gmail.com.

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