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 enthusiasm. As recently as the Nineteenth Century, all the Indians of California, now the fruit-basket of America, remained hunter-gatherers, even though they knew of agriculture through trade with farming Indians in Arizona. Were California Indians really blind to their self-interest? Or, could it instead be that they were smart enough to see, hidden beyond agriculture's glittering facade, the drawbacks that ensnared the rest of us?
Another indirect test of the progressivist view is to study whether surviving twentieth-century hunter-gatherers really are worse off than farmers. Scattered throughout the world, mainly in areas unsuitable for agriculture, several dozen groups of so-called 'primitive people', like the Kalahari Desert Bushmen, continued to live as hunter-gatherers in recent years. Astonishingly, it turns out that these hunters generally have leisure time, sleep a lot, and work no harder than their farming neighbours. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food has been reported to be only twelve to nineteen hours for Bushmen; how many readers of this book can boast of such a short working week? As one Bushman replied when asked why he had not emulated neighbouring tribes by adopting agriculture, 'Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?
Of course, one's belly is not filled only by finding food; the food also has to be processed for eating, and that can take a lot of time for things like mongongo nuts. It would be a mistake to swing to the opposite extreme from the progressivist view and to regard hunter-gatherers as living a life of leisure, as some anthropologists have done. However, it would also be a mistake to view them as working much harder than farmers. Compared to my physician and lawyer friends today, and to my shopkeeper grandparents in the early Twentieth Century, hunter-gatherers really do have more free time.