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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A wide-ranging and accessible introduction to the origins and histories of the first agricultural populations in many different parts of the world
This fully revised and updated second edition of First Farmers examines the origins of food production across the world and documents the expansions of agricultural populations from source regions during the past 12,000 years. It commences with the archaeological records from the multiple homelands of agriculture, and extends into discussions that draw on linguistic and genomic information about the human past, featuring new findings from the last ten years of research.
Through twelve chapters, the text examines the latest evidence and leading theories surrounding the early development of agricultural practices through data drawn from across the anthropological discipline—primarily archaeology, comparative linguistics, and biological anthropology—to present a cohesive history of early farmer migration. Founded on the author's insights from his research into the agricultural prehistory of East and Southeast Asia—one of the best focus areas for the teaching of prehistoric archaeology—this book offers an engaging account of how prehistoric humans settled new landscapes.
The second edition has been thoroughly updated with many new maps and illustrations that reflect the multidisciplinary knowledge of the present day. Authored by a leading scholar with wide-ranging experience across the fields of anthropology and archaeology, First Farmers, Second Edition includes information on:
- The early farming dispersal hypothesis in current perspective, plus operational considerations regarding the origins and dispersals of agriculture
- The archaeological evidence for the origins and spreads of agriculture in the Eurasian, African and American continents
- The histories of the language families that spread with the first farming populations, and the evidence from biological anthropology and ancient DNA that underpins our modern knowledge of these migrations
Drawing evidence from across the sub-disciplines of anthropology to present a cohesive and exciting analysis of an important subject in the study of human population history, Farmers First, Second Edition is an important work of scholarship and an excellent introduction to multiple methods of anthropological and archaeological inquiry for the beginner student in prehistoric anthropology and archaeology, human migration, archaeology of East and Southeast Asia, agricultural history, comparative anthropology, and more disciplines across the anthropology curriculum.
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FIRST FARMERS
The Origins of Agricultural Societies
Second Edition
Peter Bellwood
This edition first published 2023
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Edition History
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd(1e) 2005
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bellwood, Peter, author.Title: First Farmers : The Origins of Agricultural Societies/Peter BellwoodDescription: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2022094078 (print) | LCCN 2022094079 (ebook) ISBN 9781119706342 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119706359 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119706373 (epub) |Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture-History.Classification: LCC HD60 .G643 2023 (print) | LCC HD60 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/08--dc23/eng/20230409 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022094078LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022094079
Cover image: © Sirisak_baokaew/Shutterstock.com
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Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Figures
Preface to the first edition of
First Farmers
(2005)
Preface to the second edition of
First Farmers
(2023)
1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective
Introducing the Hypothesis
The Disciplinary Players
Broad Perspectives
Some Thoughts on Causation and Approach
2 The Origins and Dispersals of Food Production
Matters of Definition
What Changed with Food Production?
The Significance of Agriculture: Productivity and Population Numbers
What Were the Practicalities behind Plant Domestication?
Forager versus Farmer: An Easy Behavioral Choice?
Why Did Food Production Develop in the First Place?
Were There Any Regularities in the Origins of Food Production across the World?
Focusing on the Holocene as an Essential Environmental Background for Food Production
Agricultural Adoption: The View from Ethnography
The “Encapsulated” Hunter-Gatherers of Africa and Asia
The Independent Hunter-Gatherers of Australia, the Andamans, and the Americas
Hunter-Gatherers with Food-producing Ancestries
Why Did Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherers Not Become Food Producers?
To the Archaeological Record
A Final Observation
3 The Beginnings of Food Production in the Fertile Crescent
Introducing the Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent Environment at the Dawn of Agriculture
The Domestication of Plants in the Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent Domesticated Animals
The Hunter-Gatherer Background to Farming in the Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent Neolithic: The Rise of Villages, Towns, and Food Production
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and Its Contemporaries (c. 9500–8500 BCE)
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and Its Contemporaries (c. 8500–7000 BCE)
Further Observations on the PPNB World
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic on the Move: The Zagros, Central Anatolia, and Cyprus
The Real Turning Point in the Neolithic Revolution
4 The Spreads of Food Production beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia
The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe
Western Anatolia
The Aegean, Greece, and the Northern Mediterranean Littoral
The Balkans, and the Danubians of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK)
Northern Europe
The British Isles
The Western Steppes: The Lower Danube to the Urals
European Neolithic Societies
Agricultural Dispersals to the East of the Fertile Crescent
The Indian Subcontinent (South Asia)
The Domesticated Crops of the Indian Subcontinent
Regional Trajectories into Food Production in South Asia: The Consequences of Mehrgarh
Western India: Extending beyond the Harappan
Southern India
The Ganges Basin and Northeast India
Europe and South Asia Compared
5 Africa: Multiple Routes into Food Production
Three African Themes
The African Continent
Before Farming: The Green Sahara
The Spread of the Fertile Crescent Agricultural Complex into Egypt
The North African Littoral
Pastoralism before Crop Agriculture in Northeastern Africa?
The Origins of the African Domesticated Plants
The Appearance of Agriculture in Central and Southern Africa
A Summary for Africa
6 The Beginnings of Agriculture in East Asia
The Environmental Background to Early Agriculture in East Asia
The Domesticated Plants and Animals of East Asia
The Cultural Background to Early Agriculture in East Asia
Where and How the Millets and Rice Became Domesticated
Agriculture and Migration in China
The Archaeological Record of the Early Neolithic in the Liao and Yellow River Basins
The Archaeological Record of the Early Neolithic in the Yangtze Basin
Demographic Trends in Neolithic China
Later Developments (Post-5000 BCE) in the Chinese Neolithic
7 The Dispersals of Food Producers into Southeast Asia and Oceania
The Hunter-Gatherer Background to the Arrival of Farmers in Mainland Southeast Asia
The Oldest Neolithic Assemblages in Guangxi and Northern Vietnam
First Farmers across Mainland Southeast Asia
Early Farmers in Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia
The Archaeological Record of Food Production in Island Southeast Asia
The New Guinea Agricultural Trajectory and Its Role in Pacific Colonization
Early Farmers as First Settlers in Remote Oceania
8 Early Agriculture in the Americas
Some Necessary Background to Early American Food Production
The Geography of Early Agriculture in the Americas
Maize
Other Important Crops
South America: The Andes
Amazonia
Middle America (with Mesoamerica)
The Southwest USA
Of Pipelines and Freeways
Immigrant Mesoamerican Farmers in the US Southwest?
Independent Agricultural Origins in the Eastern Woodlands
9 What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory?
Language Families, and How They Have Evolved
Text Box; The Austronesian languages and their speakers
The Identification and Phylogenetic Study of Language Families
Of Trees and Rakes
At What Rates Do Languages Change through Time?
Missing Links?
How Did Languages and Language Families Spread?
Languages in Competition: Language Shift
Where to Next?
10 The Profound Impact of the Fertile Crescent
Where Did the Indo-European Family Originate, and When?
A Pontic Steppes Origin for the Indo-European Languages?
Elamite and Dravidian, and the Indo-Iranians
The Afro-Asiatic Language Family
The Background to a Genetic Perspective
Genomic Evidence for Neolithic Migration Out of the Fertile Crescent
Indo-European from the Pontic Steppes? The Genetic Perspective
Fertile Crescent DNA Heads East
A New Genetic Perspective on Indo-European Origins?
Genomic Ancestry and the Afro-Asiatic Language Family
11 Asia, Oceania, Africa, The Americas
The East Asian Language Families
Sino-Tibetan
Transeurasian
The Mainland Southeast Asian Language Families
Austroasiatic
Kra-Dai (Tai-Kadai) and Hmong-Mien
Island Southeast Asia and Oceania – Austronesian
Genomic Perspectives on Early Farmer and Language Family Dispersals in Southern China, Southeast Asia, and Oceania
Whence the Polynesians and Micronesians?
Was Taiwan a Likely Genomic Homeland for Austronesian-speaking Populations?
Which Neolithic Populations in China Contributed Genes to Southeast Asian and Pacific Populations?
Oceania: The Trans-New Guinea Family
The African Language Families
The Nilo-Saharan Family and the Khoisan Language Group
The Niger-Congo Family, with Its Bantu Subgroup
The Americas
Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the US Southwest
Uto-Aztecan
South America
Eastern North America
12 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis: Two Decades Later
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
CHAPTER 09
Table 9.1 Some widespread Austronesian...
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 01
Figure 1.1 The geographical overlap...
Figure 1.2 Map of the major language...
Figure 1.3 Map of the major language...
CHAPTER 02
Figure 2.1 An example of internally...
Figure 2.2 Rapid frontier population...
Figure 2.3 Top: The percentages of...
Figure 2.4 Synthetic diagram to...
Figure 2.5 Locations of some...
Figure 2.6 Chronological relationships between...
CHAPTER 03
Figure 3.1 Late Paleolithic/Mesolithic...
Figure 3.2 The archaeological chronology...
Figure 3.3 Ear, spikelet, and grain...
Figure 3.4 Pre-Pottery Neolithic stone...
Figure 3.5 The PPNA stone tower at...
Figure 3.6 Left: The main excavated...
Figure 3.7 Abu Hureyra: an artist’s...
Figure 3.8 Late PPNB stone architecture,...
Figure 3.9 Photo and interior plan...
CHAPTER 04
Figure 4.1 The earliest Neolithic...
Figure 4.2 An artistic reconstruction...
Figure 4.3 The early farming...
Figure 4.4 Left: The Mature Harappan...
CHAPTER 05
Figure 5.1 The major present-day...
Figure 5.2 Early Holocene hunter-gatherer...
Figure 5.3 An archaeological interpretation...
CHAPTER 06
Figure 6.1 The locations of the...
Figure 6.2 The major rice-growing...
Figure 6.3 Time chart of early...
Figure 6.4 Top left: wild perennial...
Figure 6.5 Aspects of early...
Figure 6.6 A comparative diagram...
Figure 6.7 The distributions of...
CHAPTER 07
Figure 7.1 Major archaeological regions...
Figure 7.2 Mainland (with Sumatra) Southeast...
Figure 7.3 Artifacts from para-Neolithic...
Figure 7.4 Incised and impressed...
Figure 7.5 Sites in Island...
Figure 7.6 Dentate-stamped and...
CHAPTER 08
Figure 8.1 The major early...
Figure 8.2 Cultural chronologies for...
Figure 8.3 Central Andean archaeological...
Figure 8.4 A terraced stone platform...
Figure 8.5 The Formative in Peru...
Figure 8.6 Amazonia: its oldest...
Figure 8.7 Mesoamerican archaeological...
Figure 8.8 Map of the US...
Figure 8.9 Top: A reconstruction of...
Figure 8.10 Eastern Woodland archaeological...
CHAPTER 09
Figure 9.1 The Formosan and Malayo...
Figure 9.2 A Bayesian phylogeny for...
CHAPTER 10
Figure 10.1 The twelve major...
Figure 10.2 A genealogy for...
Figure 10.3 Population expansions from...
Figure 10.4 The Pontic Steppe...
Figure 10.5 Suggested Indo-Iranian,...
Figure 10.6 The distributions of...
CHAPTER 11
Figure 11.1 The Sinitic, Tibeto...
Figure 11.2 The indigenous distribution...
Figure 11.3 The distributions of the...
Figure 11.4 Suggested homeland regions...
Figure 11.5 The approximate dates and...
Figure 11.6 The Papuan languages...
Figure 11.7 The major subgroups of...
Figure 11.8 Likely routes of the...
Figure 11.9 Reconstructed language family...
Figure 11.10 Postulated homelands for...
Figure 11.11 Reconstructed language family...
Guide
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface to the first edition of First Farmers (2005)
Preface to the second edition of First Farmers (2023)
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Figures
Figures
1.1 Homelands of food production and agriculturalist language families.
1.2 The major language families of the Old World at 1500 CE.
1.3 The major language families of the New World at 1500 CE.
2.1 Internally fueled population growth in Pitcairn Island (1790–1860).
2.2 Rapid frontier population growth in Australia between 1841 and 1897.
2.3 Percentages of produced food in the diets of Old World and New World societies.
2.4 The rapid changes in world climate through the past 90,000 years.
2.5 Locations of existing and recent hunter-gatherer groups.
2.6 Chronological relationships between the major regions of early food production.
3.1 Late Paleolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic archaeological sites in the Fertile Crescent.
3.2 The archaeological chronology of the Middle East, 15,000–6500 BCE.
3.3 Ear, spikelet, and grain of wild and domesticated einkorn wheat.
3.4 Pre-Pottery Neolithic stone tools from Jerf el Ahmar and Tell Halula.
3.5 The stone tower at Jericho.
3.6 The main excavated area and a decorated stone pillar at Göbekli Tepe.
3.7 Abu Hureyra: an artist’s reconstruction of the large PPNB village.
3.8 Late PPNB stone architecture, potentially two-storey, at Basta and Ba’ja.
3.9 Photo and interior plan of a building at Çatalhöyük.
4.1 The earliest Neolithic cultures of Europe.
4.2 An artistic reconstruction of a Linearbandkeramik longhouse settlement.
4.3 The early farming cultures of South Asia.
4.4 Mature Harappan and Post-Harappan site distributions.
5.1 The major present-day vegetational regions of Africa, with crop origin zones.
5.2 The distributions of “Green Sahara” and North African Neolithic sites.
5.3 An archaeological interpretation of the main routes of Bantu expansion.
6.1 The locations of East Asian early food-producing archaeological sites.
6.2 The major rice-growing areas of Asia and the oldest dates for rice cultivation.
6.3 Time chart of early agricultural societies in Southeast Asia and Oceania.
6.4 Wild rice compared with domesticated rice (Oryza rufipogon and Oryza sativa).
6.5 Aspects of early Neolithic life in China, 6000–4500 BCE.
6.6 Neolithic artifacts from Chinese Neolithic sites.
6.7 Archaeological cultures in China between 5000 and 3000 BCE.
7.1 Major archaeological regions of Southeast Asia and Oceania.
7.2 Sites in Mainland Southeast Asia discussed in the text.
7.3 Artifacts from Para-Neolithic and Neolithic sites in Mainland Southeast Asia.
7.4 Incised and impressed pottery from Vietnam and Thailand.
7.5 Sites in Island Southeast Asia and western Oceania discussed in the text.
7.6 Dentate-stamped and related pottery from Island Southeast Asia and Oceania.
8.1 The major early agricultural zones of the Americas.
8.2 Cultural chronologies for early agricultural development in the Americas.
8.3 Central Andean archaeological sites and complexes.
8.4 A reconstructed Late Preceramic terraced stone platform at Caral.
8.5 The Formative in Peru and Mexico, 2000–500 BCE.
8.6 Amazonia: oldest occurrences of maize, anthropogenic soils, and pottery traditions.
8.7 Mesoamerican archaeological sites discussed in the text.
8.8 Map of the US Southwest showing early sites with maize, and cultural regions.
8.9 A reconstruction of the Las Capas site through time.
8.10 Eastern Woodland archaeological sites and cultures, 2500 BCE to 500 CE.
9.1 The Formosan and Malayo-Polynesian subgroups of Austronesian.
9.2 A Bayesian phylogeny for Austronesian.
10.1 The major Indo-European recorded subgroups.
10.2 A Bayesian genealogy for Indo-European.
10.3 Population expansions from the Fertile Crescent Neolithic.
10.4 The Pontic Steppe migration hypothesis of the Copper and Early Bronze Ages.
10.5 Suggested language family movements in South Asia.
10.6 The major subgroups of Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan.
11.1 The Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, and Karen subgroups of Sino-Tibetan.
11.2 The indigenous distribution of the Transeurasian languages.
11.3 The distributions of Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien, and Kra-Dai.
11.4 Suggested homelands for eastern Asian language families.
11.5 The approximate dates and directions of Austronesian dispersal.
11.6 The Papuan languages of New Guinea, including the Trans-New Guinea family.
11.7 The major subgroups of the Niger-Congo family.
11.8 Likely routes of Afroasiatic, Khoisan, and Bantu population and language dispersals.
11.9 Reconstructed language family homelands for Mesoamerica.
11.10 Postulated homelands for the agriculturalist language families of South America.
11.11 Reconstructed language family homelands for the Eastern Woodlands.
Table 9.1 Some widespread Austronesian cognates.
Preface to the first edition of First Farmers (2005)
To present a reconstruction of human prehistory that has worldwide significance is no easy task. There are probably none alive who are fully trained practitioners in all the disciplines that contribute to the subject matter of this book, which is essentially focused on the origins and dispersals of ancient agricultural populations. I can claim professional training only in archaeology. But archaeology is a central discipline in the reconstruction of the human past, with a tentacle-like interest in the results of many other scientific fields.
The task set for this book is therefore a daunting one. The multidisciplinary correlations that point to major foundation layers of farming dispersal in human prehistory, on almost a worldwide scale within temperate and tropical latitudes, cannot be subjected to formal proof. But they can be presented as part of a very powerful hypothesis to be presented in more detail in the introductory chapter. At this point, as a backdrop, I would like to describe how I came to reach my current level of obsession with the history of human cultural, linguistic, and biological variation on such a broad scale.
As a student in Cambridge in the mid-1960s, I focused on the archaeology of the north–western provinces of the Roman Empire, and on the post-Roman (Germanic migrations) period. At that time, most of the glamor associated with the Cambridge department under the headship of Grahame Clark was attached to the Paleolithic/Mesolithic and Neolithic/Bronze Ages, so perhaps I had chosen a dark horse (not to mention a Dark Age!). But my reasons for choosing to study the later portion of the northwest European archaeological record related essentially to my desire to work in periods where the lives of real people ancestral to modern living populations could be reconstructed from written documents, combined with a dense and detailed record from archaeology.
In my final year at Cambridge I began to realize that, while Romans and Anglo-Saxons provided some extremely rewarding topics of investigation, nothing learned in those arenas would or could ever revolutionize understanding of the human condition on a world scale. My late teachers, Joan Liversidge and Brian Hope-Taylor, would probably have agreed. The great beyond was beginning to beckon. Having taken part in an undergraduate expedition with Norman Hammond to trace a Roman road in Tunisia and Libya in 1964, followed by archaeological expeditions to Turkey and Iran with Seton Lloyd and Clare Goff in 1966, I decided to look for more stimulus in remote and exciting places.
The excitement came quickly, following my appointment to a lectureship at Auckland University in New Zealand in 1967. This gave me six valuable years to undertake research in Polynesia, specifically in the Marquesas and Society Islands with Yosihiko Sinoto, then with my own projects in New Zealand and the Cook Islands. It was during this research period that I discovered the value of historical linguistics, and also a population of transparently shared and very recent origin, namely the Polynesians. I began to wonder how such a vastly spread grouping of humanity had been created in the first place, and how its members had subsequently differentiated after the islands were settled. Of course, even back in 1967 I was not the only person intrigued by the origins of the Polynesians. Following a tradition of enquiry that began with the explorers Cook and Forster in the 1770s, I found myself working at Auckland in the good company of Roger Green and Andrew Pawley, both strong advocates of an archaeolinguistic approach to prehistory (Pawley and Green 1975).
In 1973 I moved to the Australian National University, where research fever about the peopling of the Pacific Islands and Australia was at a peak during the 1970s. With John Mulvaney’s encouragement I began research in Indonesia, and witnessed at first hand what I had long realized while in New Zealand. The Polynesians, while widespread, were really only a side chapter to the whole quite staggering phenomenon of Austronesian dispersal. At the same time, as a result of my undergraduate teaching, periodic fieldwork, and sabbatical travels, I had acquired a good working knowledge of several regions of world archaeology, especially at the Neolithic/Formative level, in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
It was during the early 1980s that I began to think seriously about the significance of agriculturalist dispersal in human prehistory, at a time when most archaeologists, reacting against Childe’s concept of the “Neolithic Revolution,” were regarding early agriculture as a very slow and laborious development for most populations. The idea that all the world’s peoples had been relatively immobile since their origins, and had evolved their cultural characteristics essentially by independent and in situ processes, ruled the archaeological roost with little dissent. Western scholarship, in its most intensive phase of post imperial guilt, was leveling the playing field of cultural evolution to mirror-smoothness. My knowledge of the Roman Empire, and Barbarian and Polynesian migrations, led me to be suspicious.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, I began to wonder just how smooth the reality had been, particularly with respect to two very important questions. Firstly, why was the real world of the last few centuries, in terms of its tempo of change and the patterns of human behavior on a group or “ethnic” level, so many light years away from the prehistoric world of slow change, cozy interaction, and long-term stasis favored by many archaeologists in their reconstructions? Secondly, why has so much of the world been inhabited, since written history began, by speakers belonging to a small number of very widespread language families? To many, the latter question might seem odd, especially coming from an archaeologist. But as I will attempt to demonstrate later, a widespread language family must have a zone of origin relatively restricted in extent, and a history of dispersal involving at least some movement of native speakers. “Widespread” in this context means far greater in extent than any polity, empire, or trade system known to us from ethnography or pre-Columbian world history.
In fact, language history was almost shouting out important facts of which the majority of nonlinguistic scholars seem to have been quite unaware. I began to realize that some aspects of the human past must have been completely different from the rather gradualist reconstructions being presented by archaeologists, based as they were on comparative observations of human behavior as preserved in the ethnographic record. Ethnography was, in my mind, beginning to look more and more like a biased database.
I have no idea when I first locked all the pieces of the jigsaw into place, but the 1980s was clearly a formative decade (e.g., Bellwood 1983, 1988, 1989). Colin Renfrew was then developing his ideas on Indo-European dispersal, and others were examining the Bantu spread in Africa (Renfrew 1987; Ehret and Posnansky 1982). Getting up steam took a while for me owing to the vast amount of data to be brought under control, in so many disciplines. My resolve also dissipated frequently as I realized that seemingly attractive hypotheses emanating from other disciplines nearly always attracted as much internal dissent as any major hypotheses emanating from archaeology. All historically oriented disciplines face problems in establishing the authenticity of data and the relative strengths of inferences drawn from those data. How could an archaeologist expect to offer any useful observations on the historical reconstructions of linguists and geneticists?
Today, the answer is clearer to me. Archaeologists do have an important role to play because their data, like those of skeletal anthropologists, are direct witnesses from the past. The majority of linguists and geneticists deal with data from the present, except in the specific cases of languages with ancient scripts and bones which preserve ancient DNA (both rather rare in the contexts discussed in this book).
Direct witnesses surviving from the past are important, just as they are in the academic discipline which modern universities refer to as “history” (i.e., based on written records). But it is no more possible to reconstruct the past entirely from data recovered from the ground, or from ancient texts, than it is to reconstruct it entirely from living linguistic and biological data that can be reduced to phylogenetic trees. Both kinds of data matter. Both need the independent perspective that the other provides, just as do the three disciplines of archaeology, comparative linguistics, and biological anthropology around which this book is based.
It remains to add some acknowledgments. My greatest debt is to Jenny Sheehan of the Cartography Unit in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at ANU. She has prepared most of the maps, a massive job indeed. Others have been drawn by Clive Hilliker of the Geography Department, and by Lyn Schmidt and Dominique O’Dea in Archaeology and Natural History, all at ANU. Without these maps, this book would be far less of an achievement.
Numerous colleagues have read parts of the manuscript. Here they are, more by order of chapter than alphabet: Nic Peterson, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Lloyd Evans, Sunil Gupta, Dilip Chakrabarti, Vasant Shinde, Virendra Misra, David Phillipson, Norman Hammond, Colin Renfrew, Roger Blench, Jane Hill, Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough. To all I am most indebted, and any errors are mine.
Finally, I need to thank my university and the two departments to which I am attached (Archaeology and Anthropology, Archaeology and Natural History) for allowing me the facilities in time, study leave, libraries, and sharp-witted colleagues to undertake this research. The Australian-American Educational Foundation (Fulbright Commission) and the British Academy gave me visiting awards at Berkeley (1992) and Cambridge (2001) respectively, both immensely useful for broadening my horizons. Students innumerable, both graduate and undergraduate, have asked hundreds of curly questions over the years, as have my many colleagues who don’t agree with me. But most of all I wish to thank my family for putting up with all this obscure burrowing into the past – Claudia, Tane, Hannah, and Charlie. I hope they all enjoy reading the results.
Preface to the second edition of First Farmers (2023)
It is now almost two decades since the original manuscript for First Farmers was submitted to what was then Blackwell Publishing (now Wiley Blackwell) in Oxford. During those two decades, an unceasing flow of new information in archaeology, human genetics, and linguistics means that the text of the first edition, printed in 2004 and officially published in 2005, requires an update.
The first edition of First Farmers had a considerable impact, recognized by a Society for American Archaeology Book Award in 2006. Since its publication it has sold more than 5000 copies, attracted more than 1700 citations in Google Scholar, and has been translated into Japanese (2008), Vietnamese (2010), and Chinese (2020).
First Farmers stirred controversy, especially around the concept of ancient farmer migration and the validity of multidisciplinary thinking about farming and language migration issues (see the multi-author debate in Bellwood et al. 2007, and the papers from a conference held in Cambridge before the first edition appeared, published in Bellwood and Renfrew 2002). When it was published in 2005, the current revolution in the analysis of ancient DNA from human bones and teeth was still a mirage shimmering quite far in the future – it eventually came into dramatic focus around 2015. Many archaeologists at that time still preferred cultural diffusion without any significant population movement as the most acceptable explanation for any observed expansions in our common human past. However, the archaeological, linguistic, and biological records of the time were unable to adjudicate such issues with finality.
Nowadays, the situation has changed. We live in an age of ancient DNA analysis, computational linguistic analysis, and more advanced statistical methods, combined with studies of molecules and isotopes galore from the archaeological record. Many more human population historians now, compared to 2005, especially those who undertake research in linguistics and genetics, have come to accept migration as an important factor in all periods of human prehistory and history.
During the past two decades, the importance of a multidisciplinary perspective in understanding the human past has been reinforced in many arenas of early farmer activity, especially in those “classic” regions of agricultural origin such as the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, central and northern China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Other regions are now jostling to join the list, with Amazonia, the African Sahel, and the New Guinea Highlands making significant headway in recent years.
In this regard, I think it is important to stress that the recent burst of publication in ancient DNA analysis from human bones and teeth has strengthened most of the conclusions about human migration presented in my original First Farmers, albeit with some lingering controversies. I still believe, as I did twenty years ago, that the development of food production was one of the most important transitions in the whole of human history. It lay behind some of the broadest population redistributions in geographical terms ever to be identified, including, almost within living memory, those colonial era outflows of both land-seeking free settlers and unfree migrants, people from whom many readers of this book will no doubt trace descent. I was once an adult migrant who crossed the world, albeit not in search of land, rather a career in archaeology.
There are several other points about First Farmers that I should stress from the outset. Its main subject matter belongs to a newly-evolving macrodiscipline that I would like to identify as human migration history. Such a discipline does not yet exist as a distinct entity in the university and library classifications of the world of human knowledge because it is currently being forged from the cooperative endeavors of specialists in many separate scholarly disciplines. Archaeology, human biology/genetics, and comparative linguistics are perhaps the most important of these disciplines, and this book attempts to bring their results together into an overarching narrative that can be considered relevant for understanding our common human past.
The subject matter of this book falls mainly within the last 12,000 years of human migration history. It begins with the gradual retreat of Last Glacial Maximum (or last Ice Age) climatic conditions and extends through the warm Holocene conditions that the world enjoys now, conditions exacerbated by the human contribution known to most of us as “global warming”. The book examines the development of food production through plant and animal domestication, and the repercussions of food production on human demography and migration. Even though food production can occur with species that are morphologically “wild” (i.e., not domesticated), the evolving systems of food production that have driven human migration history during the past 12,000 years have been based increasingly on domesticated species.
The major hypothesis behind this book was described in the first edition as the early farming dispersal hypothesis. It drew in part from what Colin Renfrew (2002) had previously defined as the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, with the title modified slightly to reflect the importance of humans as biological entities, as well as agents of farming and language dispersal. Indeed, Colin and I had been working independently on the theme since the early 1980s, I in the Austronesian world and Colin in its Indo-European counterpart (Renfrew 1987).
The early farming dispersal hypothesis suggests that, as the world emerged from the last Ice Age, humans in many tropical and temperate regions began to change their way of life from hunting and gathering to the production of food from domesticated plants and animals. As this movement into food production intensified, some (but not all) populations of farmers grew rapidly in number, especially in certain favored regions such as the Middle East, China, the central Andes, and Mesoamerica. With greater numbers, pressures grew to occupy more land for crops and pasture, resulting in outward migration into new territories that initially would have been occupied by hunter-gatherer populations who lived at lower population densities than the early farmers. With these new food producing migrants travelled their languages, genes, and ways of life. These spreads of food production, genes, and associated languages clearly occurred deep in the realms of prehistoric time, long before the rise of literate civilizations and empires.
The early farming dispersal hypothesis today has both supporters and detractors who undertake research in a world of fast-flowing and often revolutionary scientific results from archaeology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology/genetics. Does the hypothesis still carry conviction, some forty years or more after its original formulation? Readers of this book can judge. My own conviction is that, without food production, the world as we know it could not exist, and neither would most people alive today, nor the largest of the world’s language families.
I have updated my perspectives on human migration history in many other books since the original 2005 publication of First Farmers. Its Wiley Blackwell successor, First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective (Bellwood 2013), deals with migration through all periods of human prehistory. My edited book The Global Prehistory of Human Migration (Bellwood 2015) presents perspectives by many archaeologists, linguists and geneticists that cover prehistoric migration in much of the world. My most recent Wiley Blackwell book, First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia (Bellwood 2017), updates my perspective on southern China and Southeast Asia, especially for the Austronesian linguistic and population dispersal from origins in southern China and Taiwan. My most recent book, The Five-Million-Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture (Princeton University Press, Bellwood 2022), presents for a general reader my views on the whole of hominin and human migration history.
Some acknowledgements are necessary. The following have kindly read short sections of text that deal with their fields of expertise: Harry Allen, Tim Denham, Dorian Fuller, Norman Hammond, Charles Higham, Hsiao-chun Hung, Nicolas Peterson, Philip Piper, Martine Robbeets, and Peter Sutton. The excellent maps of Jenny Sheehan prepared for the first edition in the College of Asia and the Pacific at ANU have been updated by me using Adobe Illustrator, with many new ones added. Wiley Blackwell have kindly assisted in providing resources for obtaining copyright permissions where required for this edition. The Australian National Library made available the books and journal articles upon which this book is based, and I must acknowledge my continuing emeritus professorial status in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at ANU that gives me access to such essential resources. Finally, I wish to thank the many staff members at Wiley Blackwell who have seen this edition through to publication, especially Clelia Petracca, Laura Adsett, and Dhanalakshmi Narayanan.
References
Bellwood, P. (1983). The great Pacific migration.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future for 1984,
80–93.
Bellwood, P. (1988). A hypothesis for Austronesian origins.
Asian Perspectives
26: 107–117.
Bellwood, P. (1989). Foraging towards farming.
Review of Archaeology
11/2: 14–24.
Bellwood, P. et al. (2007). Review feature on
First Farmers
(first edition).
Cambridge Archaeological Journal
17: 87–109.
Bellwood, P. (2013).
First Migrants
. Wiley Blackwell.
Bellwood, P. (ed.). (2015).
The Global Prehistory of Human Migration
. Wiley Blackwell.
Bellwood, P. (2017).
First Islanders
. Wiley Blackwell.
Bellwood, P. (2022).
The Five-Million-Year Odyssey
. Princeton University Press.
Bellwood, P. and Renfrew, C. (eds). (2002).
Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis
. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Ehret, C. and Posnansky, M. (eds). (1982).
The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History
. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pawley, A. and Green, R. (1975). Dating the dispersal of the Oceanic languages.
Oceanic Linguistics
12: 1–67.
Renfrew, C. (1987).
Archaeology and Language
. London: Jonathan Cape.
Renfrew, C. (2002). ‘The emerging synthesis’: the archaeogenetics of farming/language dispersals and other spread zones. In: Bellwood and Renfrew (eds) 2002, 3–16.
Chapter 1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective
Introducing the Hypothesis
Most of us subsist today on foods derived from the products of domesticated plants and animals, and always have done so in historical memory. Even “wild” foods such as oysters, fish, lobsters, and mushrooms are frequently farmed, and some show domesticated characteristics. The human status as top mammal depends without question on food production. Hunting and collecting entirely from the wild would not support even a tiny fraction of the world’s current population of almost eight billion people.
The development of the agricultural systems that provide virtually all the world’s food has occurred over many millennia, and still proceeds apace with the genetic engineering of increasingly homogeneous but epidemiologically vulnerable super-species (Saladino 2021). The nature of farming today is under continuous pressure as environments react to the load of billions of hungry humans and to the curse of climatic unpredictability. We are living through a crucial period in human history, perhaps a turning point with respect to the future, a period of colossal technological, economic, and demographic change.
Since the first edition of this book appeared in 2005, the world has come to fear the threat of anthropogenic climate change, and it has suffered the shock of a truly global pandemic. We can rightly think that the current rapid rate of change in all aspects of life has never been matched in history or prehistory. But, compared to the present, was the world of prehistory just a quiet forgotten fuzz of peaceful background noise, enlivened only by the occasional glimmer of action in places such as Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia? I doubt it. There are many indications that the human world was just as busy in prehistoric times as it is now, albeit without such huge populations or global networks of communication. This book suggests that major episodes of human movement occurred from time to time, in various parts of the world, as different populations developed or adopted food production and then spread farming, languages, and genes, in some cases across vast distances.
To unravel the histories of these upheavals, which impacted eventually upon all the world’s populations, even those living far from agricultural latitudes, is a complex matter. This is partly because the tales told by archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists do not always correlate as conveniently as one might wish.
In order to approach what often appears to be a debate in which specialists all talk across each other, concerned only with data from their own discipline, this book is framed around a multidisciplinary hypothesis. The early farming dispersal hypothesis postulates that the spreads of early farming lifestyles were often correlated with prehistoric episodes of human population and language dispersal from agricultural homelands (Figure 1.1). It suggests that the present-day distributions of language families and human biological/genetic populations across the globe, allowing for the known reassortments that have ensued in historical times, still reflect to a high degree those early dispersals.
Figure 1.1 The geographical overlap between homelands of food production in Africa and Eurasia (dotted ovals) and homelands of major agriculturalist language families, as identified in this book. Bantu is a major and expansive subfamily of Niger-Congo; Malayo-Polynesian is a major and expansive subfamily of Austronesian.
However, the early farming dispersal hypothesis does not claim to have absolute explanatory power. It is only by understanding why it works for some situations, and not for others, that we can improve understanding of the last 12,000 years of the human past in a meaningful way. The hypothesis works well for three of the most celebrated source regions for ancient agriculture and civilization – the Middle East (Fertile Crescent), central and northern China, and Mesoamerica. I suspect it works well for these regions because each of them gave the world immensely productive domesticated crops and animals that still dominate today in feeding all of us. Wheat (Fertile Crescent), rice (central China), and maize (western Mexico) account for 60% of the world’s food energy intake according to the National Geographic Society,1 and I suspect it is no coincidence that these three regions produced some of the most astonishing social and cultural creations of the ancient world.
The early farming dispersal hypothesis also suggests that major episodes of population expansion tended to occur with increasing dependence upon the products of domesticated plants and animals (Bellwood 2009). Such expansions generally involved populations who were both systematically engaged in food production, and in possession of domesticated plant and animal species that could be transferred successfully into environments different from those in which they originated. These domesticated repertoires were termed “portmanteau biotas” in the eloquent account of European colonialism by historian Alfred Crosby (1986).
The expansions of those early farming societies that form the focus of the early farming dispersal hypothesis imply the existence of correlations between biological populations, languages, and cultures, especially during episodes of expansion. Most of us will be aware of such correlations in many population expansions within the recent colonial past, for instance, during the early decades of establishment of British settlers and their English language in North America, New Zealand, and Australia, mainly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This said, however, it is an easy matter to point to other situations where cultures, language families, and complexes of related genes do not correlate in their distributions so neatly, particularly in the record of ethnography and among many living peoples today.
For instance, people of quite different biological ancestry can often speak related languages, even the same language – again, modern Australia and the USA offer obvious examples. Not everyone who speaks English in those countries today has ancestors of British origin. Such situations need not imply that the early farming dispersal hypothesis is automatically wrong, or that language, culture, and biology can never correlate at the population level. Many of these seemingly disjunctive situations reflect normal and expectable processes of population admixture that occurred sometimes during, and sometimes long after, the original episodes of dispersal.
It is also important to emphasize right from the start that the early farming dispersal hypothesis is not claiming that only farmers ever dispersed into new lands or established language families in prehistory. Hunter-gatherers feature widely in this book since their lifestyle, in terms of its long-term stability and reliability, has been the most successful in human history. It fueled the initial human colonization of the whole world, apart from Antarctica and some oceanic islands, as discussed by me and other authors in three of my own recent books (Bellwood 2013, 2015, 2022). It is not my intention to put farming on a pedestal, but merely to examine its impact on the world of our post-Paleolithic ancestors.
The farming story also gives all the world’s ancient farming populations a kind of equality, in the sense that so many peoples and cultures contributed, not just an elite few. We have signs of what appear to be independent agricultural origins in the Fertile Crescent, central and northern China, the Sahel zone of sub-Saharan Africa, the New Guinea highlands, Mesoamerica, the central Andes, southwestern Amazonia, and the eastern temperate woodlands of the USA. Some of these regions went on to produce urbanized civilizations, some did not. On the other hand, some regions of ancient complex and urbanized culture, such as Egypt, Mediterranean Europe, and South Asia, do not appear to have undergone their own independent developments of food production, even if, for instance in the case of South Asia, they served as homelands for certain domesticated species.
Even in the eight homelands just listed, did food production develop in complete independence? For the most part, the answer is “yes.” But the ancient human propensity for engaging in long-distance contact can sometimes be astounding, implying that any concept of total independence, in total isolation, can be fraught with uncertainty. Ideas can have wings, as also could domesticated plants and animals.
In this regard, trade, exchange, and other forms of contact can never be overlooked entirely. A surprising example of this occurs within the history of maize, a plant that was taken initially in an early domesticated form from Mexico into South America, and then brought back into Mesoamerica after further domestication in South America had made its cob more productive. I deal with this intriguing progression in Chapters 8 and 11. Fertile Crescent domesticated animals also appear to have been transported into northern Africa before the indigenous developments of millet agriculture in that continent (Chapter 5). In these situations, total independence of human action is by no means always assured.
The Disciplinary Players
To understand the cultural and biological expansions of early food-producing populations in historical perspective, we need to examine data drawn from several different fields of study. Firstly, we have Archaeology, the study of ancient human societies from their material traces left in or on the ground. Archaeology occupies much of this book and is a research discipline that has the advantage of dealing directly with evidence created at the time in question, evidence which often can be precisely dated by radiocarbon dating or other absolute chronological methods. But archaeology has the obvious disadvantage that such evidence is usually fragmentary and sometimes ambiguous, often reflecting aspects of human existence that survive only through discard behavior, with the conspicuous exception of artifacts placed with human burials. Interpretation of the archaeological record in terms of the patterns and relationships of ancient societies, especially in prehistory, is not an easy matter.
Secondly, we have Comparative Linguistics, with the emphasis on comparative reflecting the fact that our periods of concern are so long ago that they always predate the invention of writing and directly documented history. Admittedly, some anciently written languages such as Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite can offer valuable data for reconstructing deeper linguistic history. But, for the most part, comparative linguists present their reconstructions of the histories of language families from a comparison of many languages, either still spoken or recorded in historical accounts. There is an advantage here over archaeology in that the database, in the case of a living language, is normally complete in the sense that a whole society cannot operate using only half a language. However, linguists have no direct window through time on ancient preliterate people conversing. A proto-language or language family tree is a reconstruction; an ancient village or cemetery is (or once was) real.
Thirdly and fourthly, we have the two research disciplines contained within the overarching field of biological anthropology, these being Palaeoanthropology and Population Genetics. The former, like archaeology, is the study of material drawn directly from the past, in this case human skeletons (or parts thereof), items which are of course quite common in archaeological contexts. Ancient bone can also contain recoverable DNA, and since 2015 this field of study has been catapulted into a level of prominence in the study of the human past that often causes gasps of astonishment.
When I produced the first edition of this book almost 20 years ago, ancient DNA recovery and analysis were mostly a dream for the future. Most population geneticists worked then with genetic material from living populations. They created their historical interpretations by reconstructing the molecular ages and dispersal geographies of the lineages (or haplogroups) that resulted from nucleotide mutation within non-recombining, sex-linked, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining portion of the Y chromosome. MtDNA is inherited through females, the Y chromosome through males.
Nowadays, with the rise of rapid genomic sequencing methods, most population geneticists have switched to studying patterns in the millions of recombining nucleotides involved in the reproduction of the whole human genome, although the phylogenies of mtDNA and Y chromosome haplogroups still play useful roles in interpretation. Unsurprisingly, the chapter in my first edition that most needed revision and updating was the original Chapter 11, on human genetics. In this revision I have reorganized Chapters 10 and 11, focused separately on language families and genetics in the first edition, into two chapters that are now organized geographically – Chapter 10 on the Fertile Crescent, and Chapter 11 on the other global regions of early agricultural enterprise.
In support of these major research disciplines there are many others that provide important data. Within the natural sciences we have paleoclimatology and geomorphology, both studying changes in the earth’s environments over time, and those fields within zoology and botany that study the origins and histories of domesticated animals and plants. We also have anthropology, with its ethnographic corpus of observations about real human behavior in traditional societies. Then we have physical dating methods based on different kinds of radioactive decay, and chemical methods of tracing artifacts to their raw material sources. Isotopic analysis can tell us if a person died near or far from where they were born, and what kinds of food they consumed when alive. A multitude of sciences contain somewhere within their vast fields of endeavor some techniques or observations which can help us to understand the deep past.
Despite all this disciplinary detail, the ultimate field of study that transcends all others is human population history, not just history as written down in books, but the history of humanity as it has unfolded worldwide, in the case of this book over at least the past 12,000 years. Historical interpretation from a comparative perspective is the goal, and in this quest the research disciplines of archaeology, comparative linguistics, and the human biological sciences are contributors to, but not sole arbiters of, the most convincing explanations.
Broad Perspectives
This book owes its origin to three primary observations:
Archaeology. Within the early agricultural past of mankind there existed periods of continent-wide dispersal of archaeological complexes, as recognized through the spreads of closely linked artifact styles and shared food-producing economies. In the archaeological literature these complexes were associated in many parts of the Old World with the inception of the “Neolithic,” and with the corresponding Late Archaic and “Formative” (or Early Agricultural Period) in much of the New World. The changes in question led from hunter-gatherer mobility focused on small impermanent settlements with low population densities, into a world of larger sedentary villages and denser farming populations, associated with many new aspects of technology and material culture. These archaeological spreads of early food-producing populations were associated with homeland regions, and many of these agricultural homelands overlapped geographically with the likely homelands for several major language families (
Figure 1.1
).
Linguistics. Prior to the era of European colonization there existed (and still exist) several very widespread families of languages across the world, the term “family” in this sense meaning that the languages concerned share a common ancestry, having diverged from a common forebear (
Figures 1.2
and
1.3
). I explain this in more detail in
Chapter 9
but note here that celebrated examples of language families that will be known to many readers include Indo-European in Europe and Asia, Austronesian (including the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily) in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and Niger-Congo with its remarkable Bantu subfamily in sub-Saharan Africa. These language families exist because their ancestral languages spread from homeland regions, rather than through convergence in place out of hundreds of formerly unrelated languages.
Figure 1.2 Map of the major language families of the Old World at 1500 CE. Background map by Clive Hilliker, Australian National University, with linguistic boundaries redrawn from Merritt Ruhlen (1987).
Figure 1.3 Map of the major language families of the New World at 1500 CE. Background map by Clive Hilliker, Australian National University, with linguistic boundaries redrawn from Michael Coe et al. (1986).
Genetics and bioanthropology. As well as the linguistic and archaeological distributions, within the early agricultural past of mankind there were many episodes of biological population movement, especially according to a large amount of newly acquired information from the analysis of ancient DNA. This information was not directly available when the first edition of this book was published, but it is of powerful significance now. Much of it equates well with observations made by archaeologists and linguists about the migrations of ancient food-producing populations, especially from the viewpoint of the early farming dispersal hypothesis.
Let us look at the significance of widespread archaeological cultures and major language families in a little more detail. Firstly, the archaeology. Why do we find, from time to time in the post-Paleolithic archaeological record, spreads of stylistically related material culture associated with early food production, sometimes distributed over almost continental scales? Examples exist within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultures of southwest Asia, the first Neolithic cultures of Europe, the early Iron Age cultures of eastern and southern Africa associated with Bantu farmer migration, the Formative cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes, the Adena and Hopewell cultures of the eastern USA, the Lapita culture of the western Pacific, and the oldest prehistoric cultures of the islands of Eastern Polynesia and New Zealand. These spreads were greater in extent than any conceivable single functional political unit or society, at least as far as the comparative ethnographic record of subsistence farming societies is concerned.
These remarkable archaeological spreads all correlated closely with relatively early phases in the agricultural prehistories of the regions concerned, or with initial human settlement in the Lapita and Polynesian cases. What is really striking is that such episodes of widespread cultural homogeneity never retained their unity for long, since descendent populations slowed down their migratory activities and developed regional lifestyles as they settled into new environments. Initial homogeneity broke down into subsequent regionality. For instance, after the 4000-kilometer-wide (Admiralty Islands to Samoa) Lapita cultural unity dissolved into regional expressions after 2700 years ago, the archaeological record of western Oceania never again revealed a linked spread of such vast extent, despite the continuing occurrence of inter-island migration.
Secondly, let us look further at the topic of major language families. Why, for instance, does the Austronesian family of languages have more than 1000 member languages, spread more than halfway around the world, from Madagascar to Polynesia? By what mechanisms did the languages ancestral to this family spread over such a vast area? One presumes they did not simply drift there by themselves, like wisps of cloud on the wind. Similarly, why did the Indo-European family have a similar spread long prior to 1000 BCE, between Bangladesh and northwestern Europe, but in this case across continents rather than oceans? It is particularly striking that both language families had attained their pre-Columbian distributions long before the existence of any written records or conquest empires.
Ethnographic and pre-Columbian historical records around the world give us no comparative examples of spreads on such scales. Alexander the Great and the Romans,
