HOW DID SEDENTISM BEGIN? THE FIRST THING IS PROBABLY WATER

Groups which were in competition for foraging range bumped against each other after thousands of years of population expansion. 

Groups of early modern humans found themselves hemmed around by other groups, with the result that movement to other ranges nearby  may have been restricted, in any direction, by conflict. So changing hunter gatherer range perhaps ceased to be feasible physically.

The central criterion for a liveable sedentary range, anywhere, was access to water. 

Water was the key to a feasible place for a settlement, in the first instance, a place to be able to defend from neighbors. It could be a section of a stream bank, a spring, a lake. It probably was not in the first instance a high place because of the scarcity of water in such a place, and also probably the relative scarcity of surrounding food grains on hilly or rocky terrain. 

The second requirement was, as Wade describes, the existence of edible grasses in the nearby surrounding area, prior to the development of agriculture.

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

NICHOLAS WADE IS IN SAME KIND OF LIBERAL WHIG HEAD SPACE AS DAVID REICH JUST LESS SO

These first settlements were not started to get interlocal trade under way at all. 

The were started for entirely other reasons. 

One of those reasons was strictly security in a region with few natural areas capable of defense even for a small group. 

High places were the first perhaps of the settlements, and Wade's discussion of the first areas where the first settlers lived corresponds with the areas where the first cultivated grain developed. Before The Dawn, p. 125. 

He admits they settled before cultivating anything.