World History in a Year - Week 6 (5999-4000 BC)
This period sees the much wider expansion of agriculture through the world, both in the form of existing crops and animals and the domestication of new ones. It also sees increasing adoption of permanent settlements – sometimes in concert with agriculture, but not always.
I want to start with the Mehrgarh site, because it’s one of my favourite things I’ve learned about during this project. Mehrgarh is in the Balochistan area of Pakistan, and the key thing about it is that it has numerous layers from different periods of settlement that give us a time-lapse view of the progress of the Neolithic Revolution (agriculture, pottery, permanent settlements). As you move up through the layers from roughly the 6000s to 4000s BC, animal bones go from those of wild animals, to a mix of wild and domesticated, to domesticated animals making up a larger share. In addition, the extent to which animals are domesticated (there are changes to the skeletal structure of animals that indicate domestication – for example, domesticated animals are smaller) increases over time. Similarly, there’s a mix of types of barley – wild, partially domesticated, and fully domesticated – as well as the introduction of domesticated wheat, which is not native to the region. There’s also cotton. And finally, there’s a progression up from no pottery to handmade pottery to large-scale production of wheel-thrown pottery. By the layer where you get wheel-thrown pottery, there’s also copper smelting. The size of the settlement also grows over time. In addition to giving us a picture of change over time, it also shows how agriculture was both being gradually developed at this site (rather than being introduced to southern Asia from western Asia, as was previously claimed) and influenced from outside (the adoption of wheat, which was not native to the region).
Cotton and wheel-made pottery deserve particular note. In addition to Mehrgarh, there’s evidence of cotton being grown during the 5000s or 4000s in western Peru and (based on the finding of a spindle whorl) in Sudan. Cotton wasn’t the first plant grown for textiles – cultivation of linen in Western Asia goes back further – but it was a major one.
The presence of wheel-made pottery in Mehrgarh is also highly significant, because the potter’s wheel is the first type of wheel we have, predating the use of wheels for transportation. There’s a lot of different claims about when the wheel was first invented, with most sources attributing its origins to western Asia in the 4000s or 3000s BC, while others claim Europe. Whether it was first developed in western Asia, southern Asia, or eastern Europe, its use appears to have diffused between these regions relatively quickly.
Back on the topic of agriculture, during this period people in a lot of new areas started farming or herding. These included western Africa around the Niger River (yams), Ethiopia (the grains t’ef and finger millet in the northern regions, a plant called enset further south), Papua New Guinea (taro and yams), Ukraine (herding livestock), and much of Europe, as far as the Netherlands and Spain (wheat and barley). In some places, environmental changes played a role in this. The Sahara dried out substantially during this period, going from grasslands to desert, and people around the Sudanese Nile and Lake Chad, who had been relying mainly on fishing and hunting aquatic animals, switched to herding goats. In other areas, people who were already doing some farming relied increasingly strongly on it: for example in south-central Mexico (maize and beans) and along the Yangtze River in China (rice). The donkey was domesticated in the Red Sea Hills of eastern Egypt, and spread rapidly both to the rest of North Africa and to western Asia.
Permanent settlements became both more common and larger. One of the main sites in China from this period is the village of Banpo (part of the Yangshao culture) in the Yellow River valley near Xi’an, based on growing millet in riverside gardens that flooded each spring; another is a rice farming village at Hemudu in the Yangtze valley. Probably the biggest example of both agricultural intensification and permanent settlement at this time was in Mesopotamia. Increases in food production through use of irrigation agriculture enabled the formation of what has been called the world’s first city: Eridu, in Mesopotamia, which may have had up to 5,000 people.
Not all permanent settlements were based on agriculture, though. On the Santa Barbara coast of California, people had permanent settlements based on a combination of marine harvesting and gathering acorns on a large scale. People also lived in permanent settlements at the Koster site on the Illinois River, hunting and gathering a wide variety of foods from the river and surrounding forest. On parts of the Peruvian coast, people in permanent settlements relied heavily on fishing, while also growing vegetables and, as mentioned above, cotton.
There were a lot of other things going on in South America as well. The first pottery in the Americas is from a site in the Brazilian Amazon, called Painted Rock Cave, during this time. The Valdivia culture of the Ecuadorian coast produced high-quality pottery in the late 4000s BC. The Chinchorro people of northern Chile were the first to create mummies.
Finally, this is the period when we see the earliest megalithic architecture outside of western Asia, with examples both in Europe and Africa. In Europe, the main region of megalithic building was in Brittany, with some of the standing stones at Carnac dating to this period, as well as megalithic communal tombs. The tombs could be very large: the one at the Barnenez site in Brittany is 72 metres long, over 8 metres high, and has several chambers.
In Africa, the main megalithic site was Nabta Playa in Sudan, west of the Nile. Nabta Playa had large standing stones associated with burials of people as well as with sacrificial burials of cattle, indicating a socially stratified society based around cattle-herding. Cattle were a major element in later Ancient Egyptian religious imagery, although they were not numerous there. Nabta Playa also has standing stones oriented astronomically, in alignment with where certain stars (the brightest star in the Big Dipper; Orion’s belt; Sirius) that were important to ancient Egyptians would have been in the 4000s. Both these elements suggest that when, in the 3000s BC, people from Nabta Playa moved eastwards to the Nile Valley in response to the drying of the Sahara, their culture played a significant role in the development of ancient Egyptian culture.
