Team Tweaks Theory That Stored Grains Created Civilizations

A team of economists has intruded into classical anthropological inquiry by tweaking the surplus food theory of civilizations and claiming that hierarchies arose in societies that produced surplus grains rather than subsisted on root crops like yam, taro, and potatoes.

Photo Insert: The interior of a 3,000-year-old granary

In an article for ScienceAlert.com, Carly Cassella said the team led by economist Luigi Pascali from Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and Joram Mayshar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem put forward a competing hypothesis that suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it.

Instead, multiple data sets covering several thousand years show this reigning theory is empirically flawed.

Even when some parts of the world adopted farming and began producing a surplus of food, it did not necessarily lead to complex hierarchies or tax-levied states. Only when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed, did social structures begin to take shape, they insisted.

Yet, anthropological studies have shown that in primitive communal societies or in hunting-gathering bands, a leadership structure always arises, and the expansion of hunting grounds or farmland necessarily creates conditions for the imposition of rules that lead to social hierarchies and control of resources.

The meta-study by Pascali and Mayshar rely on collated facts, not on their direct observations. The larger the populations, the greater the need for food and the storage of surplus, not necessary as tax to hierarchic leaders but as guarantee that there are comestibles during rainy days.

Control of water and draft animals is also a necessity for large groups and civilizations, which must attain the capability to wage war and control land.

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