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| Books |
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| | In this part of the site, we'll be highlighting books by Science Festival participants, and also
books of general science interest.
Caroline Wickham-Jones
Fear of Farming
Windgather Press (2010)
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If you want to identify a typical human being, looking at the length of time that humans have been around on the planet, you would take a hunter-gatherer. For most of our history, we have been out on the trail, gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. We were doing that in Britain, as Caroline Wickham-Jones points out in her new book, seven hundred thousand years ago. That is the evidence from a site at Pakefield in Suffolk, which has yielded stone tools of flaked flint.
The Pakefield finds, which push the date of settlement of Britain two hundred thousand years further back than was previously believed, come from a time when we were still joined to Europe. Indeed, she notes, the channel of water that separates us from the Continent may be only eight thousand years ago, a very recent phenomenon on that great span of human life in this part of the world.
And that is the key to this new book. Things that we regard as fixed features of human life are often new and anomalous when see in the huge sweep of time that we have developed in. And this applies in particular to farming. It has only been here in Britain for the past six thousand years. For the other 694,000 years of human occupation the source of food was hunting and gathering.
Hunters and gatherers
It can’t have been such a bad way to live, since our ancestors managed to survive on it, and Caroline gives examples of hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into modern times, and are only fading now because of the intrusion of the 21st century. She points out that hunters can live off the land in harsh conditions where we have difficulty in surviving. That was the hard lesson learned by the Franklin expedition in the Arctic, where the native Inuit could survive and where the explorer John Rae did so as well through adopting their methods.
But somewhere along the way, we changed to farming, and it seems that we are still having to cope with the change. Genetically, we are adapted to a hunter-gatherer diet, but farmed foods required salt and sugar for storage and preservation, and our bodies find it hard to cope with our preferences to continue with these. She quotes an interesting example from the University of Oslo. It seems that the pale skin of northern Europeans could have come about from the reduction in vitamin D that comes from a shift in diet from hunter-gatherer foods to cultivated ones. The hunters get quantities of vitamin D from sources like marine animals. The body’s adaptation of skin colour to let more sunlight in for vitamin D synthesis is a sign of a deficiency – it lightens its skin colour to let more sunlight in, to try to make good the losses in vitamin D. And, she notes, those deficiencies in vitamin D are now being linked with a many health issues – 'from the onset of multiple sclerosis to heart disease and premature death'.
In dominion over nature
We do, of course, regard ourselves as more 'advanced' than the hunter-gatherers from whom we have sprung. The qualities we like are often related to agriculture. People are 'cultivated' rather than 'savage' – a word which comes from the Latin for woodland. But what has happened, she says, is that through farming, we got ourselves on a path of instability – of rising population, of a greater and greater demand on the earth’s resources, with consequences that now look increasingly dangerous. Farming involved the concept of ownership of land, and dominance of nature, and a process that led to us shutting ourselves off from it in cities of stone and concrete.
But, she points out, it is not only our bodies that feel the loss of the hunter-gatherer diet – there are our own preferences as well. Given a choice in the supermarket, many of us will opt for shellfish, once the staple diet of the hunter-gatherers of Scotland. We seek out wild foods – herbs, berries, nuts and fungi – we travel in search of wild places. We ourselves feel incomplete – we are trying to find again that old relationship with nature that our ancestors had. 'Perhaps without realizing it, we have started to rethink some old wisdoms,' she says. And if we really seek sustainability, we have to get to the root cause of our imbalance with nature, and learn to think like hunter-gatherers again. 'The way is open for a positive future, but it does require a radical reconsideration of much that we have taken for granted.'
The archaeologist’s perspective of the long past from which we have come, together with her own first-hand studies of many sites and peoples of today, has given Caroline Wickham-Jones an ideal standpoint from which to write this book. It is clearly and logically written, building up its arguments step by step, and is fresh and lively. She writes to raise awareness of what is being lost with the vanishing of the hunter-gatherer societies and seeks to open up a dialogue, at a time when we need new options; and she makes the case superbly. It is a book that everyone should read. |
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Caroline Wickham-Jones
Fear of Farming
Windgather Press (2010)
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by Italo Calvino
Why Read the Classics?
Vintage Classics (2000) |
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