The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

assure you also, with heartfelt affection, that I shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the chief blessings of my life. I shall be happy to see you for dinner, and if you can come at three o'clock, it would give me great pleasure, as I should be particularly glad to see you, my dear, before the rest of our friends come.

Most sincerely, faithfully, and affectionately yours,

REBECCA SCHROTER.

This letter of surrender was addressed to the composer Franz Josef Haydn, who, at the same time as he was enjoying this doting English lover, also boasted of an Italian mistress and an Austrian wife. Haydn knew how to use great art for its original purposes.

TEN AGRICULTURE'S TWO-EDGED SWORD

Agriculture is conventionally regarded as the human hallmark whose adoption made the biggest material contribution to the improvement in our lifestyle over that of apes. In fact, recent archaeological studies have made it clear that agriculture brought many of the curses as well as the blessings of modern civilization.

To science, we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth is not the centre of the universe but merely one of nine planets circling one of billions of stars. From biology, we learned that humans were not specially created by God but evolved along with tens of millions of other species. Now, archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the last million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture (plus animal husbandry), supposedly our most decisive step towards a better life, was actually a milestone for the worse as well as for the better. With agriculture came not only greatly increased food production and food storage, but also the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse modern human existence. Thus, among the human cultural hallmarks being discussed in Part Three of this book, agriculture represents in its mixed blessings a halfway station between our noble traits discussed in Chapters Eight and Nine (art and language) and our unmitigated vices, discussed in many of the remaining chapters (drug abuse, genocide, and environmental destructiveness).

At first, the evidence for progress and against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth-century Americans and Europeans as irrefutable. We are better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than Ice-Age cavemen, who were still better off than apes. If you are inclined to be cynical, just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied food, the best tools and material goods, the longest and healthiest lives in human history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We obtain most of our energy from oil and machines, not just from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would really trade the life of today for that of a medieval peasant, caveman, or ape? For most of our history, all humans had to practise a primitive lifestyle termed 'hunting and gathering': they hunted wild animals and gathered wild plant food. That hunter-gatherer lifestyle is often characterized by anthropologists as 'nasty, brutish, and short'. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (according to this view) no respite from the time-consuming struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was launched only after the end of the last Ice Age, when people began independently in different parts of the world to domesticate plants and animals (see Chapter Fourteen). The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it is nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, the question 'Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Our planted crops yield far more tons per acre than do wild roots and berries. Just imagine savage hunters, exhausted from searching for nuts and chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it took those hunters to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line goes further and credits agriculture with giving rise to art, the noblest flowering of the human spirit. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to grow food in gardens than to find it in the jungle, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. But free time is essential for creating art and enjoying it. Ultimately it was agriculture that, as its greatest gift, enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B Minor Mass. Among our major cultural hallmarks, agriculture is especially recent, having begun to emerge only 10,000 years ago. None of our primate relatives practises anything remotely resembling agriculture. For the most similar animal precedents, we must turn to ants, which invented not only plant domestication but also animal domestication.

Plant domestication is practised by a group of several dozen related species of New World ants. All those ants cultivate specialized species of yeasts or fungi in gardens within the ants' nest. Rather then relying on natural soil, each gardener ant species gathers its own particular type of compost: some ants grow their crop on caterpillar faeces, others on insect corpses or dead plant material, and still others (the so-called leaf-cutter ants) on fresh leaves, stems, and flowers. For example, leaf-cutter ants clip off leaves, slice them into pieces, scrape off foreign fungi and bacteria, and take the pieces into underground nests. There the leaf fragments are crushed into moist pellets of a paste-like consistency, manured with ant saliva and faeces, and seeded with the ants' preferred species of fungus, which serves as the ants' main or sole food. In an operation the equivalent of weeding a garden, the ants continually remove any spores or threads of other fungus species that they may find growing on their leaf paste. When a queen ant goes off to found a new colony, she carries with her a starting culture of the precious fungus, just as human pioneers bring along seeds to plant.

As for animal domestication, ants obtain a concentrated sugary secretion termed honeydew from diverse insects, ranging from aphids, caterpillars, and mealybugs to scale insects, treehoppers, and spittle insects. In return for the honeydew, the ants protect their 'cows' from predators and parasites. Some aphids have evolved into virtually the insect equivalent of domestic cattle: they lack offensive structures of their own, excrete honeydew from their anus, and have a specialized anal anatomy designed to hold the droplet in place while an ant drinks it. To milk their cow and stimulate honeydew flow, ants stroke the aphid with their antennae. Some ants care for their aphids in the ants' nest during the cold winter, then in the spring carry the aphids at the correct stage of development to the correct part of the correct food plant. When aphids eventually develop wings and disperse in search of a new habitat, some lucky ones are discovered by ants and 'adopted'.

Obviously, we did not inherit plant and animal domestication directly from ants but reinvented it. Actually, 're-evolved' is a better term than 'reinvented', since our early steps towards agriculture did not consist of conscious experimentation towards an articulated goal. Instead, agriculture grew from human behaviours, and from responses or changes in plants and animals, leading unforeseen towards domestication. For example, animal domestication arose partly from people keeping captive wild animals as pets, partly from wild animals learning to profit from the proximity of people (such as wolves following human hunters to catch crippled prey). Similarly, early stages of plant domestication included people harvesting wild plants and discarding seeds, which were thereby accidentally 'planted'. The inevitable result was unconscious selection of those plant and animal species and individuals most useful to humans. Eventually, conscious selection and care followed.

Now let's return to the progressivist view of this agricultural revolution of ours. As I explained at the outset of this chapter, we are accustomed to assuming that the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture brought us health, longevity, security, leisure, and great art. While the case for this view seems overwhelming, it is hard to prove. How do you actually show that lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting for farming? Until recently, archaeologists could not test this question directly. Instead, they had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the view of agriculture as an unmixed blessing. Here is one example of such an indirect test. If agriculture had been visibly such a great idea, you would expect it to have spread quickly, once it arose in some source area. In fact, the archaeqlogical record shows that agriculture advanced across Europe at literally a snail's pace: barely 1,000 yards per year! From its origins in the Near East around 8000 BC, agriculture crept north-westwards to reach Greece around 6000 BC and Britain and Scandinavia only 2,500 years later. That is hardly what you can call a wave of