Ghost of a flea

Stories from the Stone Age - Ep. 1, Daily Bread (2003)

Two things; first, something the writers get consistently wrong. Early farmers were not inadvertently mimicking natural selection in their plant and animal husbandry, quite the opposite. Early farmers were quite intentionally ("advertently"?) choosing strains to encourage and strains to discard. Natural selection is design without a designer, farming is selection by design.

Second, something they got exactly right (I suspect, inadvertently). The writers describe the first intentional planting of grain seeds as a "sacrifice" of precious food. This is not only correct on its face but correct in a profound figurative sense as well. I have never come across a satisfying explanation of sacrifice (my favourite has been George Batailles' description of sacrifice as a form of communication) but here it is at last. I sacrifice food I could have eaten by burying it in the ground and if all goes well my sacrifice returns to me many times over at the harvest. It is a short leap from there to imagining other kinds of sacrifice - of meat, say - returning in the form of a successful hunt.

Finally, an observation. Those early farmers were not burying their dead under the kitchen floor. They were planting them.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at January 16, 2012 06:48 AM