Chapter 2.
“The flame is a symbol of every kind of life, and fire is a phenomenon of great antiquity.” — Gaston Bachelard
For millennia, human existence was a relentless dance with the natural world. By necessity, we were hunter-gatherers, living in small, fluid groups, constantly roaming the land for sustenance. Survival was paramount, and this nomadic existence shaped every aspect of our lives. A transformation of profound, indeed evolutionary, significance occurred long before the first seeds of agriculture were sown: the mastery of fire and the advent of cooking. While the precise moment our ancestors first tamed flames remains debated, archaeological evidence from sites like Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa shows traces of controlled fire use dating back perhaps a million years. More definitively, burnt fish remains from Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel show controlled heating from approximately 780,000 years ago. By the time modern humans walked the earth, the control of fire was fundamental to survival and communal life.
The most transformative application of fire was in the preparation of food. The pioneering work of biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, posits that cooking was the critical, overlooked factor in human evolution. Raw food is energetically costly for our bodies to chew and digest. Cooking, through the application of heat, acts as a form of external digestion, pre-processing food outside the body. This process, known as increasing ‘bioavailability’, allowed early humans to extract significantly more calories and nutrients from their sustenance with far less internal effort. This surge in caloric return had monumental implications for human biology. Our brains, despite being only two percent of body weight, demand an astonishing twenty percent of the body’s resting metabolic energy. With cooked food, that metabolic burden was dramatically reduced, freeing up a substantial amount of vital energy to fuel the rapid growth of a larger, more complex brain—a remarkable increase in cognitive capacity observed from Homo erectus onwards.
Anatomical evidence from human evolution supports this theory. Our comparatively smaller teeth, weaker jaws, and shorter digestive tracts are all consistent with a long history of consuming a diet of softer, more easily digestible cooked food. Cooking also drastically cut down the sheer time required for eating, liberating countless hours that could then be devoted to developing complex social bonds, crafting intricate tools, and transmitting knowledge. In essence, the control of food through fire laid the foundational biological and behavioural groundwork that made the subsequent leaps of human civilisation possible.
After millennia of this fire-fuelled existence, a different kind of revolution occurred: we discovered farming. This pivotal development traditionally provided a stable, controllable source of food. With farming came the ability to create more food than immediately required—a surplus. This unprecedented surplus freed people from constant foraging, allowing individuals to specialise in crafts, administration, or defence. Leaders emerged, laying the groundwork for politics and governance. Creative individuals found time to cultivate the arts, building monumental structures or developing new forms of expression. Over time, these initial villages swelled into cities, where concentrated populations and abundant food facilitated the rapid development of literature, writing, and the systematic accumulation of knowledge. Science and technology began to flourish, driven by new needs and opportunities. According to this long-held view, the transition to agriculture was therefore the singular, pivotal step towards modern civilisation and progress.
However, a closer examination of the archaeological and anthropological record reveals a surprising truth. As historian Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book Sapiens, there is a striking lack of evidence to support this romanticised view of agricultural life as an immediate improvement for the common human. What we now understand is that, far from being a beneficial progression, the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming was, in many ways, quite detrimental for a variety of compelling reasons.
Life as a hunter-gatherer was, paradoxically, remarkably easy. Their varied diet and efficient foraging techniques often meant surprisingly few hours of work daily to meet their needs. Farming, in stark contrast, was an arduous, relentless existence, demanding immense and continuous labour. While a hunter-gatherer might have worked for as little as an hour or two a day, an early farmer was routinely toiling for six or seven hours just to grow basic sustenance. This significant increase in workload directly necessitated larger families to provide the necessary labour force, which, in turn, often led to the pressures of overpopulation. Such demographic shifts frequently resulted in humans exploiting too much land, causing it to become degraded and leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of intensified farming.
This problem is starkly revealed through the work of bioarchaeologists studying ancient human skeletons. Their analyses consistently show hunter-gatherers were significantly taller and exhibited fewer nutritional stress signs than their farming descendants. This stems from dietary variety. Hunter-gatherers enjoyed a highly diverse, naturally fortified diet of varied meats, wild fruits, and vegetables. A farmer, however, primarily ate what they grew, often a monotonous diet of a single starchy staple, with limited supplementation. This radical narrowing of the dietary base meant even cooked food provided significantly less comprehensive nutrition. Evidence for this nutritional decline is clearly visible in specific skeletal markers such as increased rates of dental caries (cavities), enamel hypoplasia (defects in tooth enamel), and bone lesions indicative of physiological stress and nutritional deficiencies.
Perhaps the most devastating problem was the increased likelihood of early death for farmers. This stemmed from the very nature of early agricultural settlements. Farms and permanent villages were often unsanitary environments. Animals lived in close proximity to humans, facilitating the transfer of zoonotic diseases. People lived in much denser populations than nomadic groups, often in unclean conditions, making them far more susceptible to infectious diseases. Archaeological evidence from sites like Çatalhöyük frequently reveals higher rates of parasitic infections and other contagious illnesses within these communities.
It is within this context that Harari’s particularly famous and insightful sentence gains its full weight: “we did not domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us.” The prevailing belief was that we had consciously and successfully enslaved wheat, bending it to our will for our exclusive benefit. The reality, Harari suggests, is precisely the opposite: from an evolutionary standpoint, wheat made us its slave. In its wild state, wheat must expend considerable evolutionary energy making itself attractive and easy to find for animals and people to ensure its seeds are dispersed. But once on a farm, wheat could simply ‘lie back’ and compel humans to do all the arduous work of tilling the soil, protecting it from weeds, harvesting it, and ensuring its continued propagation. For the individual farmer, this was a poor bargain—trading a varied, often less laborious lifestyle for a life of harder labour, poorer health, and a heightened risk of starvation. For wheat, however, it was a masterstroke of evolutionary strategy that allowed it to proliferate across vast swathes of the globe.
For these profound reasons—increased labour, poorer nutrition, and a heightened risk of disease—the transition from a seemingly freer, healthier hunter-gatherer existence to the demanding, disease-ridden life of early farming, from a human perspective, initially makes little sense. These are among several hypotheses actively debated by archaeologists and environmental historians today as they continue to grapple with the complexities of this pivotal, and seemingly detrimental, shift in human civilisation.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the emergence of simple flatbreads may, in fact, have predated the earliest established farms. Discoveries at sites such as Shubika 1 in Jordan indicate that semi-nomadic Natufian people were baking charred crumbs from wild barley and wheat approximately 14,000 years ago. This surprising fact challenges the traditional view that bread was merely a product of settled agriculture. It suggests, instead, that the human desire for bread may have been the very force that motivated people to begin cultivating and domesticating grains systematically. In a conceptual sense, if the ability to control food production laid the bedrock for civilisation, then it could be argued that civilisation came from bread.
This principle is universally applicable: the control of a foundational, calorie-dense, storable grain—be it wheat in the Fertile Crescent, or rice and millet in China—is the crucial act of power that fuelled the first complex societies. In China, stone grinding tools used for processing wild cereals (like millet and wild rice) predate settled agriculture. These tools, which appeared as early as 23,000 to 19,500 years ago at sites like the Nanzhuangtou culture in Hebei and the Yuchanyan Cave in Hunan, suggest that early nomadic groups were already capable of turning grains into a workable food source. Archaeological work points to the early domestication of millet in the Yellow River region (around 10,000 years ago) and rice in the Yangtze River region (pre-dating 10,000 years ago). This shows parallel development where indigenous wild grains were targeted for complex consumption long before they became fully domesticated crops.
The development of bread continued to intertwine with social and economic progress. By around 4,000 BCE, the ancient Egyptians are widely credited with the revolutionary discovery of leavened bread, mastering the art of fermentation and baking soft, rising loaves. This advancement was swiftly institutionalised, transforming bread from merely a food source into an economic instrument. Ancient Egyptian labourers, for example, were frequently paid their wages in loaves of bread and beer. This practice highlights how controlling food production—from its earliest flat form to the refined, rising loaf—became synonymous with stability, wealth, and the very structure of organised political life.
The journey from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturalists, profoundly shaped by the earlier mastery of fire, represents one of humanity’s most significant and paradoxical transformations. While the agricultural revolution brought undeniable hardships, its unprecedented food surplus truly laid civilisation’s bedrock. This surplus allowed for labour specialisation, the growth of larger, more complex communities, and the conditions necessary for the emergence of political structures, religious institutions, cultural expressions, and the accumulation of wealth. In essence, controlling food production didn’t just fuel human bodies; it fuelled the very foundations upon which intricate power dynamics would eventually be woven, setting the stage for all subsequent societal complexities.
Next Chapter: The Built Environment: Learning its Language
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