Civilization?

More and more Halloween displays in my neighborhood. Coming soon: another post dedicated to them.

Halloween critters for Eileen.

A Beautifully Illustrated Cookbook

José Andrés: Zaytinya.
I haven’t tried many recipes yet, but I hope I will do more.
I have enjoyed dining at the author’s restaurants in Washington, DC.

Fattoush salad from Zaytinya. Tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese, croutons, radishes, bell peppers,
red onions, and herbs from our garden. Olive oil, pomegranate, and lemon dressing. (I omitted sumac because I didn’t have any.)

In 2023: our family at one of the Andres restaurants in 
Washington DC.

Two Historical Novels

I originally reviewed this book by John Shen. Yen Nee and SJ Rozan last year:
https://maefood.blogspot.com/2024/07/two-exotic-mystery-tales.html
Reading next: a newly-published sequel about the same characters.

Next book: the sequel, also featuring Judge Dee.
The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J.Rozan.

A Challenging Theory of Prehistory and Civilization

Luke Kemp: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.
There are so many theories of prehistory! I haven’t finished this book yet.

The early chapters of this book summarize the emergence of violence and war in human societies, which in hunter-gatherer times had tended to be very egalitarian and peaceful. I found this fascinating. Here are a couple of passages that capture the author’s ideas about the disadvantages of civilization:

“In Europe, there are no signs of war during the Palaeolithic. Around 9500 BCE, after the entry into the Holocene, evidence of lethal violence begins to become more common. After around 5500 BCE, as agriculture agriculture spreads across Europe, people settle down, and inequality intensifies; clearer indications of warfare, including fortifications, towns surrounded by ditches, and evidence of massacres, all creep upwards. The Near East follows a similar trajectory. The Natufians killed each other at low rates and didn’t conduct war. For thousands of years we find just a few skeletons with fractured skulls and embedded projectiles. Then in the seventh century BCE, perhaps the first fortification in the world – Tell Maghzaliyah in northern Mesopotamia – was constructed near a node of long-distance obsidian trade.” (p. 68)

The author points out that the increasingly dense cities that emerged not only were more violent, but also began to suffer from contagious diseases. He writes:

“Many of the plagues of the world today, such as influenza, measles, mumps, cholera, smallpox, chicken pox, and, of course, Covid-19, are all recent developments from the past ten thousand years. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had to endure the throaty cough of influenza or the painful and disfiguring scabs of chicken pox or smallpox, which emerged only with the advent of urbanism and agriculture. These ‘density-dependent’ diseases require intense interaction between humans and animals, something many of the earliest cities provided in abundance. Such diseases also need a sufficiently large population so they don’t burn themselves out by killing all their hosts.” (p. 89)

This is a challengingly-written and rather long book, and I’m planning to continue reading it around 100 pages at a time.

Related book reviewed in 2017

James C. Scott , Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
Reviewed here: https://maefood.blogspot.com/2017/10/against-grain-contrary-book.html

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

In Vino Veritas

"Indeed, the idea that drunkenness reveals the ‘true’ self, though ancient and universal, is perhaps most famously expressed by the Latin in vino veritas, ‘in wine there is truth.’ This perceived link between honesty and drunkenness goes back to the Greeks,” (Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization, Edward Slingerland, p. 141)

Titian's vision of an ancient Greek feast of Bacchus, God of Wine. A favorite example of Edward Slingerland, used on the cover of his book.

It’s Dry January. The first Dry January was in 2012. This month-long event started small and now it’s big. Popular culture embraces an extreme solution for everyone, whether they have a problem with alcohol or not. Recent news articles promoting paranoia about the most moderate of drinking strike me as evidence of a continuing streak of puritanism that plagues American society. Sure, it doesn’t hurt anyone to give up alcohol, but it hurts society to refuse to acknowledge its benefits as well as its risks. It might be worthwhile to create a responsible, not hysterical, assessment of how they stack up. Prohibition a century ago didn’t accomplish its goals and contributed to the growth of organized crime, alcoholism, and other undesirable results.

As a society, we aren’t viewing this issue rationally. Here’s a book that tries to put alcohol in historic and evolutionary perspective, and look for the benefits of alcohol use as well as the negative effects. 

This is a very complex and detailed book, and I can't begin to describe all of the arguments that author Edward Slingerland gives in support of the hypothesis that alcohol and other stimulants contributed to the development of civilization, of social cohesion, and of technological progress in human history. For these accomplishments, both now and historically, he says, humans need what he calls "the Three Cs: we are required to be creative, cultural, and communal." (p. 77). 

Drinking alcoholic beverages, he says, has contributed to all three of these requirements. I can't try to reproduce his discussion: I strongly suggest that you read the book to see this fascinating exploration of history, evolution, and adaptation.

Both good and bad results come from drinking alcohol; Slingerland summarizes the risks: 

 

"An alcoholic beverage typically provides calories but little nutritional value, and is made from otherwise valuable, and historically scarce, grains or fruit. Its consumption impairs cognition and motor skills, damages the liver, kills off brain cells, and fuels ill-advised dancing, flirting, fighting, and even more louche behaviors. In small doses, it can make us happy and more sociable. But increased consumption quickly leads to slurred speech, violent arguments, maudlin expressions of love, inappropriate touching, or even karaoke." (p. 11).

But he also states the following:

"This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates [humans] to cooperate with strangers. The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication." (p. 17). 

Alcohol use, the author shows, predates much of human evolution. He describes how even primates and certain other animals intentionally consume over-ripe fruit that has begun to turn alcoholic, and offers evidence that early humans brewed alcoholic beverages from pre-agricultural plant matter. In fact, he ascribes one of the motives for domesticating grain in prehistory to producing something to ferment into beer! (This is known as the beer-before-bread hypothesis.)

In ancient China, in ancient Turkey, in ancient Greece, and many other prehistoric sites, there is evidence that alcohol was part of life: 

"Jars containing our earliest documented alcoholic beverage—a 'Neolithic grog,' made of honey mead, rice beer, and fruit wine—from the Jiahu tomb (7000 to 6000 BCE) in the Yellow River Valley, were 'carefully placed near the mouths of the deceased, perhaps for easier drinking in the hereafter,' and the contents were no doubt also imbibed by those performing and attending the funeral." (p. 156).  

Potsherd from Göbekli Tepe, Turkey (p. 156)

"Indirect evidence of the ancient connection between chemical intoxication, ritual, and ecstasy is found in a remarkable potsherd, dating back to the early Neolithic (ninth millennium BCE), and found at a site in what is now modern-day Turkey not far from Göbekli Tepe. It shows two joyful individuals being accompanied in dance by a turtle, the presence of a dancing animal being interpreted by scholars as a sign of 'altered states of consciousness.'” (p. 156).

Slingerland argues that collective benefits to society, to creativity, and to individual satisfaction for moderate and controlled drinking, especially drinking of low-alcohol beverages like wine and beer (but not distilled spirits) outweigh the purported benefits of total abstinence:

"All things considered—liver damage, calories, and all—a spot of social drinking is good for you, and this has nothing to do with any French paradox or narrow health benefit. Moderate, social drinking brings people together, keeps them connected to their communities, and lubricates the exchange of information and building of networks. We social apes would find it very challenging to do without it, both individually and communally." (p. 206). 

Here is an example of Slingerland's approach to studies that conclude that drinking is unequivocally bad for everyone and bad for society:

"Demonized from the early modern era well into the twentieth century as the “poisonous tap-root” of all evil, alcohol won back some utilitarian respectability with research suggesting that moderate alcohol consumption—on the order of one to two drinks a day—might reduce risks of heart disease, diabetes, or strokes. As we have noted, though, practicing physicians have never been terribly impressed by this body of research, and have resisted actively recommending light drinking in the same way they do, for instance, regular exercise. The health-based defense of alcohol finally suffered a massive body blow from the 2018 Lancet article that has haunted our discussion, a terrible document that concluded definitively that the only safe level of alcohol consumption was zero. As mentioned above, responses to the Lancet study ranged from a predictable 'I told you so' from the teetotaler crowd to those wanting to challenge the methodology and salvage some health benefits for alcohol. An alternative tack is the one taken in this chapter: uncovering or drawing attention to the various ways in which alcohol continues to serve important individual and social functions, the value of which must be weighed against the more obvious health risks." (pp. 227-228).

Drunk is a readable book because it's so full of highly specific examples; however, this makes it hard to review and summarize. In addition to alcohol, the author adds observations about other similar intoxicants. Consider this, for example:

"The anthropologist Dwight Heath, a pioneer of the study of the social function of alcohol, notes that it has always played a crucial bonding function in situations where otherwise isolated individuals are required to get along—sailors in port, loggers just having come out of the woods, cowboys gathering at a saloon. ... Other chemical intoxicants have also been used to create the particularly intense form of social bonding required for warriors. An early Spanish missionary to the New World noted that some indigenous groups used peyote before heading out to war. 'It spurs them to fight with no thought of fear, thirst, or hunger,' he reported. 'And they say that it protects them from all danger.' The battle rage of the legendary 'beserkers' of Norse legend was likely driven by psychedelics, and the feared assassins of ancient Persia derived their name (Persian hashashiyan, Arabic hashīshiyyīn) from the intoxicant from which they drew their fighting spirit, hashish." (p. 145-147)

I found many interesting and significant insights into the uses and abuses of alcohol in this very penetrating study of a subject that in some ways is almost taboo! A major conclusion:

"We cannot properly grasp the dynamics of human social life unless we understand the role that intoxicants have played in making civilization possible." (p. 303).

Somehow, the book didn’t mention the iconic function of
alcohol in the famous St.Bernard snow rescues.

Review © 2023 mae sander.

Essays on Food

“There is no singular culinary category of ‘Jewish food.’ … different Jewish communities in different times and places developed culinary preferences and styles, but these do not coalesce into a universal culinary category. In general, Jewish communities adopted local cuisines and tweaked them to accord with kosher laws. However, there are exceptions. For example, in New York City in the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants from various European countries swapped recipes and developed the menu of the ‘Jewish deli.’” (Feasting and Fasting, p. 143)

Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food is a collection of scholarly essays about history, Biblical passages, Jewish communities from ancient times through the present, influence of food customs from one ethnic group to another, the ethical issues of modern vegetarianism, and many other subjects. I’ll just tell you about one interesting selection from this book. 

“How Ancient Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians Drank Their Wine" by Susan Marks describes the contact between Jews and the other peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world, and how it influenced Jewish wine rituals. Interactions, including the conquest of ancient Israel by Rome, lasted for several centuries. There is evidence of much influence  of Greek and Roman thought and customs on evolving Jewish practices, especially after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE.

Roman writers such as Plutarch commented on some of the parallel customs of libations, that is, rituals involving pouring out wine, mixing it with water, and then drinking together. Libations were a formal part of a Roman symposium, which was a social occasion also involving a meal and conversations or lectures. There had been a similar form of Temple worship: "Israelite libations may have predated the Temple, while certainly biblical literature reveals the formal inclusion of wine as part of official Temple practice." (p. 178) After the end of Temple worship, Jewish practice of formal meals with ritual wine consumption also developed, and has continued throughout Jewish history to the present. The Passover Seder is one example of such a development.

Rites involving the first wine of the year may have been part of the Temple celebrations, and was definitely part of the fall harvest holiday of Sukkot:

"A contemporaneous witness substantiates the importance of wine for the festival of Sukkot, if not the mixing of wine and water. Plutarch (first to second century CE), an outside observer, connected this festival with both Dionysus and Bacchus, the Greek and Roman gods of wine.”

The conclusion of the author: 

"The ritual actions performed belong to a typical symposiastic meal: the host appointing the one who will lead the blessing, the one chosen then washing in preparation, and finally this leader inviting all to bless. A look at instances of these similarities reveals rabbis engaging the particulars of these Greek and Roman practices and considering the implications of hierarchal order, including the need to push back." (p. 182)

The observation that the Passover Seder has roots in the Roman Symposium is frequently noted, but this article is the most detailed  and interesting historic treatment that I have seen.

Drinking wine at a Passover Seder from the Sarajevo Haggadah, around 1350.

Feasting and Fasting offers a wide variety of approaches to the topics of Jewish food customs and religious laws, from Biblical times onward, beginning in the Garden of Eden with the one fatal prohibition — Don’t eat the apple! While some of the essays are a bit obscure, most of the authors write in a readable, and not terribly academic, style. The book is full of food that’s “good to think.”

Review by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot.com, 2022.

Another Look at Australian History

 

Dark Emu is a very dark book. Author Bruce Pascoe clearly lays out the case that pre-contact Australian peoples were highly organized and accomplished in many ways. In order to explain what the many tribes that lived in Australia were capable of, Pascoe must show the reader how utterly and irresponsibly the English colonizers destroyed their cultivated fields, their stone and wood houses, their fields of native grain, the baking ovens that they used to make bread from the grain, the carefully-built and elaborate structures that trapped fish as they swam in waterways, and many other artifacts that the native Australians had been using for thousands of years. The author then shows how the European heirs of colonial Australia were carefully taught that these great achievements never existed at all, but that the Aboriginals lived in a sort of primitive vacuum. The brutality of the destruction is outdone by the brutality of the denial of what was destroyed. Pascoe writes:

"It is clear from the journals of the explorers that few were in Australia to marvel at a new civilisation; they were there to replace it. Most were simply describing a landscape from which settlers could profit. Few bothered with the evidence of the existing economy, because they knew it was about to be subsumed." (p. 9).

Pascoe examines the diaries and published accounts by many of these early explorers and colonizers of the land, and shows how their testimony bears witness to the existence of agriculture, carefully and beautifully arranged landscapes, and many other accomplishments. Reading the book, I was completely impressed by the descriptions of what the native people produced and how they lived -- and completely depressed at the way it was ruined in the name of English civilization. Pascoe writes;

"If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers, and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate, and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more. Admiration and love are not sufficient in themselves, but they are the foundation of a more productive interaction with the continent. 

"Behaving as if the First Peoples were mere wanderers across the soil and knew nothing about how to grow and care for food resources is a piece of managerial pig-headedness. Smart business people rule nothing out, especially if the seeds of success are obvious. The songlines of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people connected clans from one side of the country to another. The cultural, economic, genetic, and artistic conduits of the songlines brought goods, art, news, ideas, technology, and marriage partners to centres of exchange." (p. 140). 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the book The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery. Several of my Australian blogger friends suggested that I read Dark Emu to obtain a balanced view of the history of pre-contact Australian peoples. I'm grateful to them for this, and I feel that many things I thought I knew have been questioned and corrected.

An illustration of early Australian agriculture: Yam diggers at Indented Head, Victoria, 1835

Yams were a staple of the First People’s diet. (p. 18). 

Blog post © 2021 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com

"The Future Eaters"

"It makes an enormous amount of sense... to see the lack of agriculture by Australian Aborigines as a fine-tuned adaptation to a unique set of environmental problems, rather than as a sign of 'primitiveness.'" -- The Future Eaters, p. 282

My previous review is here:
The Future Eaters

Imagine a human society that became stable tens of thousands of years ago in an environment that differs widely from that of the European or North American temperate climate zones. Members of this society own no fertile fields where grain grows, no large domestic animals raised for food like pigs or cows, and no great forests. Small bands of these humans hunt exotic game such as large lizards or marsupials -- the limited resources of the Australian continent. Until European settlers arrived, several years after the 1770 visit of James Cook and his ship Endeavor, these bands of highly adapted people managed the continent. They utilized the available resources in an efficient but unexpected way that's hard for us to grasp. 

Rereading the 1994 book The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People by Tim Flannery made me think about how totally this unfamiliar reality differs from ours  -- a whole way of life that seems more like fiction than like history.

Members of the small bands of people throughout Australia during the 60,000 years or so of their history lived by gathering bush foods from a variety of sparse woodlands and scrublands in the large territories that belonged to them. They managed the game and the growth of the woodlands by "firestick" -- that is, controlled burns of the forest, which over thousands of years had evolved to ensure the continuity of plant and animal species that they depended on. These were not plentiful, so as my initial quote mentions, agriculture, with its intensive use of localized resources, would not have been practical as an extension of their culture.

Although these bands of people lived in widely dispersed areas, they would gather from time to time to celebrate, to socialize, and to finalize marriages between couples who had long ago (even before they were born) been destined for each other. Individuals in one area might know the family tree of another group living a thousand miles away. This activity, like most of the things they did, contributed to the survival of their way of life, adding to the genetic diversity and collective wisdom of each separated group.

The lifecycles of animals and plants used by these groups were partly dependent on the seasons, as they are in the Northern Hemisphere. However, there were other cycles, often less predictable. Because the vegetation in the extremely dry territories grew very slowly, some plants produced edible fruits only every several years. Animal lifecycles could also vary; for example, one breed of sea lions -- a possible prey species for seacoast dwellers -- had their young every 15 months; that is, at varying times of the seasonal year. The most critical non-seasonal variation in Australia was the periodic drought caused by changes in Pacific Ocean currents: the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which to this day affects the Australian continent drastically. 

Living in this environment for such an eternity (compared to our few thousand years of settled agriculture and what we call civilization) the Australians were very much in tune with the resources that they needed, and they manipulated many things. They used controlled fires, and they paid careful attention to the life cycles of the species that they depended on. They had religious prohibitions on hunting in certain sacred places, for example, which gave some prey animals a chance to breed undisturbed, and thus prevented over-hunting. 

In 1845, the explorer Edward John Eyre made a prediction which Flannery finds very accurate. He wrote that Aboriginal culture was:

"so varied in detail, though so similar in general outline and character, that it will require the lapse of years, and the labours of many individuals, to detect and exhibit the links which form the chain of connection in the habits and history of tribes so remotely separated; and it will be long before any one can attempt to give to the world a complete and well-drawn outline of the whole." -- The Future Eaters, p. 271.

Explaining the extraordinary extent of the Aboriginals' coexistence with their natural environment is the central, eye-opening subject of Flannery's book, which also includes much more information. He covered the pre-human evolution of Australia. He documented the early era of humans in Australia, during which the newly arriving Aboriginals disrupted the prior status quo, and in fact drove a number of native species to extinction. Further, he provided a general history of the human settlement of the lands of the South Pacific. Finally, Flannery described the tragic destruction that occurred when the English took over the continent.

Some of the scientific basis for this book has probably changed since it was written in 1994. I'm sure that the much more accurate methods of gene sequencing that have been developed since then will have added much, and perhaps changed interpretations of natural and human history. The chapters about the way that present-day Australians cope with the special features of their environment have no doubt also been made somewhat obsolete by the drastic nature of climate change as we have experienced it since publication; also by the greater impact on Australia of our warming world. Despite these doubts about the continued accuracy of the book, I think it is most fascinating. I'm glad I have reread it, as I have often thought about it in the years since I first became acquainted with it.

I dedicate this blog post to my Australian blog friends, including Sherry, Francesca, Johanna, and all the others. I very much hope I can again visit Australia and see some of the landscapes and animals that are described in the book.

Review © 2021 mae sander. 

 

Don't Waste Your Time With This Book

I've already wasted too much time reading this dumbed-down version of human history. I'm not going to waste more time trying to explain what I don't like. There are much better books on human evolution, with way more subtlety and fewer sophomoric examples of the authors' prejudices.

NOTE: I know it's a best seller and has the endorsement of many famous people!

"Meathooked" by Marta Zaraska

"From our earliest days on the Paleolithic savanna, when our ancestors were showing off their kills to form alliances and gain social position, meat has always stood for luxury and for riches." (Meathooked, p. 112)

Do you want to learn about the history of creatures eating other creatures' flesh? From the earliest single-cell creatures to modern omnivores and herbivores? Marta Zaraska's book Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million Year Obsession with Meat (published 2016) covers this huge time span. It seems highly relevant to this week's blockbuster news about food -- that meat eaters might not be taking risks as big as they've thought up to now. (For a summary see: Is eating beef healthy...)

My impression of this book: it's half good and half not so interesting. I'm sorry to say that I wasn't impressed much by the earlier chapters covering the first one-celled organisms that started eating each other and then quickly moving onward with the role of meat in human evolution. The author provides much information about the ways that a vegetarian or even in some cases a vegan diet can provide fine nutrition, and that meat-heavy diets can cause various health problems (obviously a few years ago when the author was writing, this was the mainstream view). But there's kind of a boring side to the way she makes her point. There are many many books that do a better job with this subject.

The later chapters were much more interesting, because the author tried to understand why humans love meat so much, and she especially explored the reasons why the vast and varied efforts to promote vegetarian diets have failed in America and in Europe ever since the earliest efforts in the 19th century. Her main point was that promoters of vegetarianism like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg also hated strong tastes and made sure that the diets they proposed were very uninteresting to eat. Vegetables and grains were overcooked and spices were prohibited along with meat. And she repeatedly points out -- MEAT TASTES GOOD!!

Throughout the world today, more and more meat is being consumed: Meathooked has very interesting chapters on how and why this transition is happening. In China the rate of increase is enormous. Even in India with its tradition of a plant-based diet, more and more of the rising middle class are choosing to eat meat, even eating beef (which they sometimes say is water buffalo not sacred cow meat). Rising Indian technology workers and other educated Indians are rejecting the traditional food although it's almost ideal for complete protein without meat, and the taste is great -- "vegetables stewed with spices were served on scented rice, followed by dishes of flavored curd, saffron caramel, and sweet cakes with pomegranates and mangoes." (p. 121)

The health of the planet is very much a matter of concern in the final chapters of Meathooked. The author could easily be working with the current protest movement against the vast human activities that are accelerating disastrous climate change. The way she puts it is that if the growth of meat consumption continues as it seems to be going, we'll need another planet to grow the feed and raise the animals that are required to feed everyone on earth the amount of meat that Americans now consume.

Blog post copyright © 2019 Mae E. Sander for maefood dot blogspot.com

"Dinner With Darwin: Food, Drink, and Evolution"

Jonathan Silvertown, in his recently published book Dinner with Darwin, presents a tour of humanity from prehistory to recent times. He explains what hominids -- both humans and pre-humans -- ate while evolution, natural selection, and artificial selection were combining to create both our species and the many species of plants, animals, and even micro-organisms that we gather and/or cultivate for food.

Darwin's name in the title isn't just there because the publisher thought it would boost the book's sales (a temptation many publishers don't resist). There are quite a few references to Darwin's various publications, noting from the start of the book that Darwin's concept, natural selection, is "the process that not only produced our food but also produced us. Our relationships with food demonstrate evolution in ourselves and in what we eat." (p. 3)

The origins of cooking, the processes by which a number of pre-human species developed methods of improving food and crops, and how cooked food changed early hominids is the concern of one early chapter in the book. I was familiar with some of the details Silvertown presents, because of Richard Wrangham's important book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009). The evolution of cooking and its effect on humans took place mainly before humans migrated out of Africa.

In the second chapter, I found material that I haven't read in other books. Silvertown continues his prehistoric coverage by tracing a migration that began around 72,000 years ago. Humans slowly proceeded from the horn of Africa along the south-west coast of the Arabian peninsula, around the coast of Southeast Asia, up the coast of China, across the Bering Strait, and down the West Coast of the Americas until humans reached Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego approximately 10,000 years ago. Generation by generation, what did they eat? Shellfish, especially mussels: "a food almost as timeless as mother's milk." (p. 29) Silvertown describes the mountains of seashells along the route of human migration, eventually quoting Darwin's description of the Tierra del Fuego natives whom he encountered when the Beagle visited there in 1832: "Whenever it is low water, winter of summer, night or day, they must rise to pick shellfish from the rocks." (p. 34) Of course I enjoyed this observation as I was recently in Tierra del Fuego -- though very sadly, the natives Darwin met were the victims of genocide by settlers later in the 19th century, and none of them are still present.

Throughout the book, Silvertown emphasizes not just what is known, but how scientists know it. For example, the history of grain and bread is reflected in a number of Egyptian tombs, in Mesopotamian clay tablets recording a large number of types of bread and flour and cooking techniques, and other evidence from archaeological sites. He also explains why agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent (the modern Middle East): the region was particularly good for the development of so many cultivated crops because its annually varying climate fosters annual plants which set abundant, large seeds at a particular time, and these plants, because of their adaptation to the varying climate, are relatively easy to change by artificial selection. 

Other scientific evidence of evolution in hominids and food species appears throughout the book. Silvertown explains how material left on human teeth found in ancient sites can show just what foods the teeth-owners were consuming, because the build-up of dental plaque can be analyzed by recently developed methods. In the chapter on wine, beer, and the processes of fermentation, Silvertown traces the evolution of the microbes that humans have domesticated in order to create alcoholic beverages and other fermented foods. He describes how naturally occurring toxins in herbs and vegetables evolved by co-evolution with animal and insect predators, and how these were tamed by human agricultural selection, by cooking, and by other food processing. There's also information about how early evolution enabled human sensory organs to detect poisons, and thus allowed us to consume -- and even to enjoy -- nutritious though poisonous plants. Many details about chemical receptors on the tongue, in the nasal apparatus, and elsewhere in the human body are very intriguing. The final chapter is a defense of GMO development, which the author sees as another extension of human ingenuity in evolving crop improvement.

Fascinating maps show the migrations and other information about human history. Here is an example:

Map from Dinner with Darwin, p. 10.
Ma means million of years ago.
Ka means thousands of years ago.

Unlike several of the authors I've recently read on food history and human evolution, Silvertown is a scientist, not a journalist -- he is a professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of Edinburgh. The science in the book is presented effectively for a non-technical reader, but the author does not talk down to the reader. I admire his approach to his topic: he finds out things by looking at scientific studies, not by interviewing people. I especially appreciate that he isn't a name-dropper! In sum, I found his book both entertaining and very enlightening.

"Against the Grain" : A Contrary Book

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (published 2017) is difficult for a reader like me, a lay reader without a lot of formal training in history. The book is presented as viewing prehistory in a new way -- reinterpreting the story of how humans took over the earth, how humankind eventually developed agriculture and cities and political classes, and how inhabitants of emerging settled cities might not have been all that happy with "civilization." Scott's purpose is to rework the classic narrative of "progress, of civilization and public order, and of increasing health and leisure." (p. 1).

There's some paradigm-shifty content of course, but what the book really does is to show a reader like me new things about the non-elite city dwellers (where elites usually get the most attention), and above all about people that history sometimes terms "barbarians." These "barbarians" were the people outside the cities and their territories, people who didn't rule the land; didn't till the fields and produce the grain for the storehouses that supported civilization; and didn't build the monuments. Some outsiders were raiders that lived on caravans trading goods between civilized cities. Some were nomads who gathered forest foods and hunted, or did mixed agriculture not field crops. At times, these were enemies of the cities' rulers -- kings, priests, nobility. Scott mainly describes the history of Mesopotamia, but includes examples from many other emergent civilizations such as Greece, China, and the Americas.

We remember the cities and their rulers because their stone constructions and written history to glorify their efforts survived, Scott observes. Life in early cities posed lots of difficulties, not always acknowledged. "An epidemic, one imagines, was capable of devastating a city in a matter of weeks. A shortage of fuelwood or the gradual siltation of canals and rivers resulting from deforestation was more a matter of gradual economic suffocation -- quite as lethal but far less spectacular." (p. 195). But life outside the cities was active and vital though it left far fewer traces. People outside, cultivating land or hunting and gathering, could have a kind of counter-civilization, more freedom than the subjects in the cities, and sometimes fewer diseases of civilization.

Scott's description of the many downsides of early city life is interesting and detailed, and very revealing to a reader like me. He shows that many of the non-city people nearby frequently had escaped from cities, where forced labor and slavery kept larger populations alive and supported a relatively idle upper class. Mining and smelting metals, quarrying huge stones, and constructing pyramids, temples, palaces, and tombs demanded low-wage or slave labor: there's no other explanation for people accepting these horrific tasks. The written records don't directly admit the rulers' troubles, but the archaeological record combines with hints in the archives to suggest their problems.

When they went to war with other cities, the early despots usually took loot and slaves -- though not usually new territory. They had enough trouble governing the land they already owned, controlling their subjects, and keeping the local "barbarians" from stealing their wealth and retreating into the wild areas where they lived. The captured people, along with local slaves or workers, contributed to the huge building projects. Captured women became breeders of new slaves or in some cases of new subjects: early societies were sometimes open to changing of one's class. And walls around settled areas functioned not only to keep out the "barbarians" but to prevent slaves or unwilling workers from running away to a freer life. Slowly, successful outsiders could became partners with the city rulers in quite a number of ways, such as taking a share of the wealth in exchange for ceasing their raiding activities.

Before Scott gets to the invention of cities, he details a history of agriculture and how it led to life in settlements. There are quite a few surprises in this account: for example, his very detailed case for the necessity of grain-growing agriculture -- rice, wheat, barley, maize -- in enabling cities to form. I won't try to summarize this. Scott undermines quite a few of the accepted "facts" that usually appear in accounts of the prehistoric transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to sedentary life. He considers both later written history (by scribes in early cities) and recent discoveries in archaeology, especially the timing: settled agriculture in some form existed for centuries or millennia before cities appeared.

Several "golden ages" of new civilizations ended in interim "dark ages" when cities fell into ruins. Scott makes us question the usual interpretation that this was a loss for humanity: the people who had labored to build the cities became more free and perhaps happier and even healthier when the darkness descended. Maybe it wasn't so dark to them, but only to later elite writers and propagandists favoring giant building projects and ambitious rulers -- the workers "may well have avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility, and perhaps avoided death in combat. The abandonment of the state may, in such cases, be experienced as an emancipation." (p. 211).

Before the discussion of settled agriculture and cities, the heart of the book, Scott begins by describing how early humans and pre-humans changed their environment -- and changed the whole earth -- by using fire to clear forests, to chase and entrap large game animals, and to affect edible plants before humans could be said to cultivate them. He concentrates on domestication of animals and in what he also calls "domestication" of subjects and slaves. This is a long story, and includes much human activity besides fire. As the New Yorker review of Against the Grain puts it: "Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch." (Review: "The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?" by John Lanchester, New Yorker, September 18, 2017)

I won't try to duplicate Scott's interesting argument about how very early humans and pre-humans employed fire and changed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Scott suggests that earlier accounts don't appreciate how very long was the era when cultivation of crops and domestication of animals were a predominant way of life, but cities and higher organization didn't yet emerge. Early chapters of the book give details and sources for all this.

For me, the value of Against the Grain is not in what it may or may not challenge about conventional accounts of the history of human civilization and its opposites, but the details of how the inhabitants of early cities and the outsiders who lived differently interacted for many millennia. To see what's new and what's conventional in Scott's account, you really have to read it carefully.

What makes us human?

Very early hominids at some point learned to eat cooked food. This allowed evolution of "smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies, and reduced body hair; more running; more hunting; longer lives; calmer temperaments; and a new emphasis on bonding between females and males. The softness of their cooked plant foods selected for smaller teeth, the protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for male, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey. .... one lucky group became Homo erectus -- and humanity began."

So ends the last chapter of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human by Richard Wrangham (quotes from p. 194). The book is a wide-ranging compendium of the scientific evidence for each of the points made in this summary -- not a collection of speculations or just-so stories, but hard research-supported data. The evidence is overwhelming. And as a bonus, in the Epilogue, he observes some of the consequences of his conclusions as they apply to the modern tendency towards obesity, and has a really interesting overview of the deficits in currently available nutrition and calorie information.

Wrangham's study of evolution and of the chemistry, physics, and nutritional value of cooked vs. raw foods has rapidly become a classic. From the time of first reviews, which I read shortly after its publication in 2009, until now, when it's referenced by a wide variety works on food and evolution, I've been meaning to read it. Finally I have done so.