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greater stability of population, rather than the necessary mobility of the hunting groups which preceded them with their large mortality. With these more fixed populations, with more fixed relationships, longer life-spans, and probably larger numbers in the group which had to be distinguished, it is not difficult to see both the need and the likelihood of a carry-over of nouns into names for individual persons.
Now, once a tribe member has a proper name, he can in a sense be recreated in his absence. 'He' can be thought about, using 'thought5 here in a special nonconscious sense of fitting into language structures. While there had been earlier graves of a sort, occasionally somewhat elaborate, this is the first age in which we find ceremonial graves as a common practice. If you think of someone close to you who has died, and then suppose that he or she had no name, in what would your grief consist?
How long could it last? Previously, man, like other primates, had probably left his dead where they fell, or else hidden them from view with stones, or in some instances roasted and eaten them.11 But just as a noun for an animal makes that relationship a much more intense one, so a name for a person. And when the person dies, the name still goes on, and hence the relationship, almost as in life, and hence burial practices and mourning. The Mesolithic midden-dwellers of Morbihan, for example, buried their dead in skin cloaks fastened by bone pins and sometimes crowned them with stag antlers and protected them with stone slabs.12 Other graves from the period show burials with little crowns, or various ornaments, or possibly flowers in carefully excavated places, all, I suggest, the result of the invention of names.
But a further change occurs with names. Up to this time auditory hallucinations had probably been casually anonymous and 11 As at Choukoutien during the Middle Pleistocene and later in the Croatian cave of Krapina. See Grahame Clark and Stewart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 61.
12 Grahame Clark, The Stone Age Hunters (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 105.
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not in any sense a significant social interaction. But once a specific hallucination is recognized with a name, as a voice originating from a particular person, a significantly different thing is occurring. The hallucination is now a social interaction with a much greater role in individual behavior. And a further problem here is just how hallucinated voices were recognized, as whom, and if there were many, how sorted out. Some light on these questions comes from the autobiographical writings of schizophrenic patients. But not enough to pursue the matter here. We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us in understanding Mesolithic man.
The Advent of Agriculture
We are now at the threshold of the bicameral period, for the mechanism of social control which can organize large populations of men into a city is at hand. Everyone agrees that the change from a hunting and gathering economy to a food-producing economy by the domestication of plants and animals is the gigantic step that made civilization possible. But there is wide disagreement as to its causes and the means by which it came about.
The traditional theory emphasizes the fact that when the glaciers covered most of Europe during the Late Pleistocene, the whole area from the Atlantic coast across North Africa and the Near East to the Zagros Mountains in Iran enjoyed such an abundant rainfall that it was indeed a vast procreant Eden, lux-uriant with plant life ample to support a wide range of fauna, including Paleolithic man. But the recession of the polar ice cap moved these Atlantic rain-winds northward, and the entire Near East became increasingly arid. The wild food-plants and the game on which man had preyed were no longer sufficient to allow him to live by simple food-gathering, and the result was that many tribes emigrated out of the area into Europe, while those who remained — in the words of Pumpelly, who originated this
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hypothesis from his own excavations — "concentrating on the oases and forced to conquer new means of support, began to utilize the native plants; and from among these he learned to use seeds of different grasses growing on the dry land and in marshes at the mouths of larger streams on the desert."13 And this view has been followed by a series of more recent authors, including Childe,14 as well as Toynbee,15 who called this supposed desiccation of the Near East environment the "physical challenge" to which agricultural civilization was the response.
Recent evidence16 shows that there was no such extensive desiccation, and that agriculture was not economically 'forced* on anyone. I have been placing an overwhelming importance on language in the development of human culture in Mesolithic times and I would do so here as well. As we saw in Chapter 3, language allows the metaphors of things to increase perception and attention, and so to give new names to things of new importance. It is, I think, this added linguistic mentality, surrounded as it was in the Near East by a fortuitous grouping of suitable domesticates, wild wheats and wild barley, whose native distribution overlaps with the much broader habitats of the herd animals of southwestern Asia, goats, sheep, cattle, and wild pigs, that resulted in agriculture.
T H E F I R S T G O D
Let us look more directly for a moment at the best defined and most fully studied Mesolithic culture, the Natufian, named after the Wadi en-Natuf in Israel, where the first of the sites was 13 R. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan: Expedition of 1904: Prehistoric Civilizations of Anau (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1908), pp. 65-66.
14 V. G. Childe, The Most Ancient East, 4th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).
15 A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), Vol. 1, pp. 304—305.
16 Butzer, p. 416.
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found. In 10,000 B.C., like their Paleolithic predecessors, the Natufians were hunters, about five feet tall, often living in the mouths of caves, were skillful in working bone and antler and in chipping retouched blades and burins out of flint, drew animals almost as well as the artists of the cave drawings of Lascaux, and wore perforated shells or animal teeth as ornaments.
By 9000 B.C., they are burying their dead in ceremonial graves and adopting a more settled life. The latter is indicated by the first signs of structural building, such as the paving and walling of platforms with much plaster, and cemeteries sometimes large enough for eighty-seven burials, a size unknown in any previous age. It is, as I have suggested, the age of names, with all that it implies.
It is the open-air Natufian settlement at Eynan which shows this change most dramatically.17 Discovered in 1959, this heavily investigated site is about a dozen miles north of the Sea of Galilee on a natural terrace overlooking the swamps and pools of Lake Huleh. Three successive permanent towns dating from about 9000 B.C. have been carefully excavated. Each town comprised about fifty round stone houses with reed roofs, with diameters up to 23 feet. The houses were arranged around an open central area where many bell-shaped pits had been dug and plastered for the storage of food. Sometimes these pits were reused for burials.
Now here is a very significant change in human affairs. Instead of a nomadic tribe of about twenty hunters living in the mouths of caves, we have a town with a population of at least 200 persons. It was the advent of agriculture, as attested by the abundance of sickle blades, pounders and pestles, querns and mortars, recessed in the floor of each house, for the reaping and preparation of cereals and legumes, that made such permanence and population possible. Agriculture at this time was exceedingly 17 See J. Perrot, "Excavations at Eynan, 1959 season," Israel Exploration Journal}