The Emergence of a Farming Society and the Patriarchy

 by Maddy Ross

Around 12,000 years ago, the advent of farming transformed the way humans lived and inhabited the Earth. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors started with wild varieties of crops like peas, lentils and barley and around the same time started to herd animals like goats and oxen. It is generally agreed among academics that farming began in the Fertile Crescent which is the area to the East Of the Mediterranean Sea. The climate of this area made it particularly suited to the growth of agriculture with its regular rainfall. 

What makes this change so interesting is the effect it had on human society and development. This transition from a hunter gatherer way of life in many parts of the globe had a distinct effect on early humans lives. In terms of demography, the neolithic human population increased significantly except not for the reasons you might think. Research shows that there was actually a deterioration of health and nutrition as the cropped farmed did not allow for as varied diet hunting did, despite the unpredictability that hunting entailed. Thus the population increase was most likely down to the shortening of birth intervals. As groups settled around their crops they ditched their nomadic lifestyle which was not particularly suitable to frequent pregnancies and the caring of children. Infectious diseases were also likely to have increased as human communities became more densely populated as we began to form bigger groups based around our crops.

What’s particularly fascinating to me is the study that suggests that the emergence of agriculture coincided and arguably caused the emergence of a patriarchal society. The ability to accumulate resources for the first time is when an imbalance occurred according to Mark Dyble, an anthropologist. Research shows that hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian and women and men played equal roles. In a computer model scientists found that when only one sex had influence, as is usually the case in male-dominated societies, tight hubs of related individuals emerged. However from what we know of typical hunter-gatherer societies the average number of related individuals is predicted to be much lower. When men and women have equal influence in the computer model there were lower numbers of related individuals, suggesting that early human societies were egalitarian. In early human societies sexual equality may have had an evolutionary advantage as it would have fostered wide-ranging social networks and closer cooperation between unrelated humans.

Sexual equality wouldn't have been as evolutionary advantageous to men with the emergence of agriculture when they would’ve been able to have multiple wives and have more children with multiple women. According to Dyble “It pays more for men to start accumulating resources and becomes favourable to form alliances with male kin.”

The emergence of agriculture arguably had a significant role in the development of human society and culture globally. Limited research has been done into the start of patriarchal societies but it’s clear that agriculture leading to the development of material possessions had a part to play.