“Switching to a new type of economy does not immediately delete what has been imprinted in the human psyche over millennia.” [Minkov, 2009]
About 13,000 years ago ended the last period of glaciations. A time of climatic instability followed. Adding to the melting ice, torrential rains provoked a rise in the sea level and numerous flooding in Asia Minor and the Middle East.
At that time, all human communities were nomadic or semi-nomadic hunters-gatherers, living according to a lifestyle that had existed for tens of thousands of years. Depending on nature for their survival, they had to move on when local resources were exhausted. [See Appendix Dobrizhoffer, Of nomadic life] Let us consider here some of the geographic, demographic and economic consequences of nomadism.
First, in their constant quest for food, humans ended exploring all four corners of our planet, developing a natural predilection for the most hospitable regions, those rich in game.
Secondly, the demographic growth of these communities was limited in two ways: 1) the amount of food that was available determined the number of mouths that could be fed; 2) women had to space out their pregnancies, since they could not carry more than one child during their displacements. For this reason, these populations imagined all sorts of ways to limit the number of births: besides natural methods such as prolonging breastfeeding, they resorted to abortion, to infanticide, and to sexual abstinence as we have seen in the case of the Asmat mother (New Guinea) who waited until the last-born could walk before having intercourse. Not because sex had anything to do with pregnancy, but because this people believed that the energy emitted during the sexual act was so harmful for the new-born baby that it could provoke its death.
Some other aspects linked to the harsh nomadic life – the continuous physical exertion, the long displacements, a diet deprived of the necessary fats or of the minimum quantity of calories – influenced the fertility of women as well.
Beliefs were also used to regularize the size of the community. Most communities thought that the number of spirits for each clan was limited and could not increase or decrease: every death freed a spirit that could reincarnate into another body, limiting this way the number of individuals to the quantity of spirits available.
This limitation throws a particular light on the practice of infanticide, the most frequently used means of demographic control. For these people, the spirit was the most important entity, and not the body the spirits inhabited. It was, therefore, not difficult at all to kill babies – at times of famine, for example – since according to their beliefs, their death would free a number of spirits that would reinvest new bodies when food would be sufficient again [1]. Besides, infanticide offered the possibility to choose the sex of the child who had to be eliminated. Female babies were the first victims, allowing to reduce the demography of the community in the short as well as in the long run. [See also Appendix Dobrizhoffer, Polygamy, infanticide, and demography]
Infanticide has been practiced very extensively throughout history. In Australia, certain tribes devoured one child out of ten to contain the development of their population [1a]. More recently in China where couples are limited to only one child, the ancestral predilection for boys has condemned numerous baby girls to death. Similarly, in India, the infanticide of girls represented 16% of female infantile mortality in the Tamil Nadu province in 1999 CE [2].
Beside the geographical and demographic aspects, a third element concerns the economic conditions prevalent for these nomadic populations. The fact that they depended on what nature had locally to offer, and that they were not equipped to manage any food surplus implied an economy of predation in which each able member of the community had to participate. This, combined with the small size of the communities (between 30 and 50 individuals at most), prevented the creation of a public function: in most cases, shamans and chiefs had to bring back their own quota of food, as everyone else did. Consequently, the political and social structures remained extremely rudimentary.
Because of the frequent displacements, only objects that were strictly necessary and that could be transported were kept, which made the introduction of an economy based on exchange impossible [3]. Furthermore, entirely autonomous – those that were not, did not survive – these communities had no reason to develop a commercial structure, and contacts with other communities remained minimal.
As a result, technological development was considerably slowed. Yet, the knowledge accumulated by these populations throughout the millennia allowed one of the most important revolutions in human history, setting the first stone on which civilization will be built.