Conclusions

In the post-Ice-Age world, little by little, over thousands of years, most societies abandoned foraging and adopted farming or herding as the way to get their food. The Ice-Age way of life, if not over, is drawing to a close.

First, the transition took a long time and included a long period in which tentative and selective planting, speciation, and hybridization coexisted with prevalent foraging techniques. Many foraging peoples practise the replanting of the roots or bulbs of some of the plants they gather, and have probably done so for many millennia. In times of stress on food sources it would be logically predictable, and consistent with such evidence as we have, for the settled foragers of the cool period that corresponds to the lifespan of the Natufian culture to attempt systematic selection, replanting, and nurturing of important plants. The evidence of remains of surprisingly large molluscs, especially snails, at deep stratigraphic levels of middens over 10,000 years old in various parts of the world suggests that the ‘herding' of such creatures - their selection and collection for breeding - may have preceded other, more ambitious forms of pastoralism.⁵1 The management of wild pasture and the driving or corralling of wild animals blends imperceptibly into herding.

Secondly, the link between climate and culture seems inescapable: humans' huge range of occupancy of diverse environments, and the trans­formative multiplication of human numbers occurred during an Ice Age that seems to have suited humankind.

Finally, though scholars no longer like to speak of the transition to agriculture as a ‘revolution', it was a change without precedent and, in some

51 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 55-8.

ways, without parallel. Not only did it ignite a period of rapidly accelerating cultural divergence; it also constituted a remarkable break in humankind's relationship to evolution, inaugurating a period, which continues to this day, when new species have appeared in the course of what we might call ‘unnatural selection' - speciation and hybridization for human purposes, by human agency. The disappearance of foraging lifeways seems a remarkable turnaround for a predator-species such as Homo sapiens. There was a time before hunting and gathering, when our ancestors were scavengers, but for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years, foraging was reliable and rewarding. Its practitioners spread over the world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat. As foragers, Homo sapiens dominated every ecosystem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species. They achieved startling increases in their numbers, which we struggle to explain. They founded more varied societies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods). They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information. They had their own social elites, political customs, ambitious magic, and practical methods to exploit their environment, thriving through every change of climate.