Researchers Have a Controversial New Hypothesis For How Civilization First Started

The rise of farming is the cause of the dawn of civilization. Human populations, trade, and tax all grew as food production grew.

The prevailing story goes that way.

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, according to a competing hypothesis put forward by economists.

Multiple data sets show the theory is flawed.

When some parts of the world began to produce a surplus of food, it did not lead to complex hierarchies or tax-levied states.

Social structures began to take shape when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed.

The root of almost all classical civilizations is probably cereals like wheat, barley, and rice. Evidence shows that the land was more likely to host complex societal structures if it was capable of cultivating grains.

The emergence of tax-levying elites can be aided by the relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability.

Roots and tubers are perennial and do not have to be reaped in a particular period, but once harvest is done, they are quite old.

In parts of South America, perennial root crops can be grown all year round. It's difficult to transport and it rots easily.

If there were more than enough roots to feed everyone, then hierarchies beyond chiefdoms would have arisen.

The Maya were one of the most sophisticated and dominant civilizations in Central America, yet they did not rely solely on root crops. This civilization was dependent on maize.

The same goes for people in the Americas.

The type of food grown by farmers was more important to society than how much was produced.

Some civilizations became more complex because of the different social effects of root crops and cereals. A surplus of food in a hunter-gatherer society did not lead to the development of civilizations.

Farming was necessary to improve food production, but researchers think only those crops that could be easily taken led to the rise of an elite class.

Farming communities would not be able to support as many people as they would if a powerful group of society began collecting tax from farmers without extra food on their hands. Their numbers would likely shrink, creating a surplus of food to give to more elite classes.

The elite wouldn't protect their food supplies from bandits if these farmers didn't protect them. Stealing grains is more valuable than stealing food.

The authors of the new hypothesis write that they agree with the conventional productivity theory that farmers produce surplus, but they argue that the food surplus generated by the elite is more important than the surplus.

The cradle of human civilization can be found in the Fertile Crescent, where the largest number of wild relatives of cereals can be found.

Historical societies that did not practice any type of agriculture are found in North-West America, Central Asia, Australia, and South-West Africa. These societies did not have complex hierarchical structures.

There is more evidence for the new hypothesis provided by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It suggests that regions with more productive cereals are more likely to be organized as states with higher rates of taxation.

Even though they are grown on productive farming land, roots and tubers are not related to more complex social hierarchies.

We were able to show that the only crops that were available in certain areas were chiefdoms and states, which were easy to tax and to expropriate.

The most productive lands, those in which both cereals and roots were available and productive, did not experience the same political developments.

The economist Joram Mayshar calls it a curse of plenty. Without a type of food that can be protected by elite individuals, there is no ranked society of givers and takers.

Mayshar says that this reliance on root crops seems to have prevented the emergence of statehood and economic development in some parts of the world.

The new hypothesis can't be fully proved or disproved by the empirical investigations. The authors found no evidence for the prevailing productivity-and-surplus explanation for the emergence of hierarchy.

According to Mayshar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, hierarchy was likely to develop where the climate and geography favored cereals.

Our data shows that the productivity advantage of cereals over tubers increases the likelihood of hierarchy emerging.

We are what we eat could hold more truth than we thought.

The Journal of Political Economy published the study.