agricultural sciences

This is a wonderful book. It is so short that each page, indeed each sentence has to be filled with information and thoughts that derive from this data. My greatest interest is in the first domestication of livestock, a subject usually covered with trite inaccuracy in books dedicated to the subject, let alone works like this with such a broad sweep of study. This book covers domestication using reference to the latest scientific publications, and if it is as accurate as this in the tiny bit for which I have some background knowledge, it gives me reassurance that the rest of the book is filled with information of a similar high quality.

Is it pessimistic to feel that the whole of life is made of choices made because things change? This is what reviewer Ted Rushton says. Surely his perception of what is written in this book is flavoured by his belief in 'human progress'as he actually quotes. There is no such thing as human progress, and this is the underlying concept behind the whole of the Darwinian School of Thought. It was Darwinian Thought that brought 'How Agriculture Really Began' to us, with its little set of illuminating companion volumes.

The book is superb, Mr Rushton's critique is flawed, and enters the realms of fantasy with his discussion of flowers. But why not judge for yourself?

There are two ways of looking at life; the liberal is optimistic and tends to consider happiness as a prime motivation, while the conservative is pessimistic and views hardship or challenge as the key to success and greatness.

This book definitely offers the conservative viewpoint. Tudge argues, and presents a mass of hard data to back his theory, that "domestic agriculture" began in response to environmental crisis and an impending food shortage. Interesting, if true. In all likelihood, we will never know for sure. But, this book isn't valuable for its conclusion; it's worth reading because he examines an issue archaeologists overlook or ignore -- the "why" of human progress.

After all, why farm if your ancestors have lived for several million years merely by hunting and gathering for the few hours per week needed to be comfortable. Tudge asserts, "They did it because they were forced into it when their paradise was taken from them and they were shoved together into hills that just turned out to be especially hospitable. Arable farming is seasonal, but in the season it is hell . . ."

This book, quite brief at 50 pages consisting mainly of background material, suggests why people may have given up the carefree lifestyle of hunting and gathering and become dreary farmers. He cites apparent evidence for the beginnings of agriculture as far back as 40,000 years ago, not the merely 10,000 or so years as now thought. When he is on solid material like this, Tudge has compiled a real service.

Personally, using the exact same data, it's realistic to argue that people began farming for fun, because it made life more pleasurable. It probably started 100,000 or so years ago, when people added flowers to their burials. Flowers serve no practical purpose, but are an expression of beauty and respect for the dead. It wouldn't take long for people to discover that a flower brought home for its beauty, after it is died and discarded, produces a new flower from the seeds of the old. As the sense of personal happiness grows, the motivation would have been all the greater.

Aha!! We can have flowers at our doorstep, not just in the distant fields. It's like a magpie, with its love of brightly colored objects. It's a pure pleasure principle. The same goes for the first domestic animals -- anyone who has tasted wild and domestic animals knows the finer taste of domestic brands. Baby pigs were brought back and raised, instead of being killed with the sow, and when they became adults the meat far much tender, juicier and tasty.

Grain, and grapes, are wonderful. There is ample speculation the first grain was not used for bread, but was mixed with water to make beer. Grape juice will ferment on its own. Both produce fun results; drink them, instead of from the flowing stream, and a person feels happy.

This book offers all the fundamentals to sustain my argument, and obviously all the basics to support Judge's thesis. It's too bad he couldn't have added a "choose your own ending" element by adding another five or six pages. Because of what his idea tells us about ourselves, it would be all the more valuable.

Do we motivate people today, based on centuries of experience, with hardship and disaster? Or do we use happiness as a motivator, as in the idea "it feels great to have a vigorous physical workout." When you review the basics, as succinctly offered in this book, it puts modern reality in perspective.

The book is really about ourselves. Are we noble savages, as Tudge and John Jacques Rousseau suggest, motivated only by fear and punishment? Or are we pleasure seekers, eager to do anything that sounds like fun?

This book offers one answer, clear and concise. It is superb for that reason, and well worth reading. Optimists won't have their viewpoint refuted, and will likely learn much just the same. All in all, an excellent book.

This brilliant little book contains more interesting ideas in 53 pages than most books on human origins contain in 500. Of course it's not all true, and it's not all original. Tudge's explanation for the origin of serious agriculture - the "pleistocene overkill" in which human hunters rapidly killed off the game and produced a food crisis - probably derives from a very thorough, if much less exciting book, Mark Nathan Cohen's The Food Crisis in Prehistory, published as long ago as 1977. And Tudge's other thesis - that late palaeolithic people engaged in a kind of "hobby agriculture" is perhaps more questionable.

It's certainly true that initial agricultural activity would not have left much trace, so it undoubtedly goes back further than we think. But any thesis about proto-agriculture before the widespread game extinctions has to contend with the fact that the game themselves - and particularly the elephant family - would have made man's first attempts at environmental manipulation quite difficult, simply by trampling over things and eating the "crops". So the great slaughter of the big game had three effects. Firstly it provided a splendid source of food, permitting a great growth in the human population. Secondly, it then used up most of the game, producing an urgent need for new sources of food for the expanded population. Thirdly, by killing off most of the game and scaring away what remained, it made agriculture possible.

But nobody expects Colin Tudge to come up with all the answers. What is wonderful about this book is that it puts forward exciting ideas in an exciting way and provokes thought and discussion. It's just the kind of book we need.