Science: The Earliest Farmers

About 4850 B.C., 300-odd human beings, small-boned and slender, settled on a grassy knoll in a valley in northern Iraq. They and their descendants lived there 500 years. It was perhaps the most critical period in human history. The founding of that village (which anthropologists call Jarmo) may mark the point in time when the first wandering huntsmen settled down to till the soil.

Jarmo, discovered in 1948 by an expedition led by Anthropologist Robert J. Braidwood of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, covers the area of a modern city block. Enough of it was excavated this year to give a good idea of life in the earliest farm days.

Garden of Eden. It must have been a peaceful Garden-of-Eden period. Jarmo had no walls, and its site was not picked for defense. The inhabitants made no heavy-duty weapons, only feeble flint arrowheads for hunting small animals. Jarmo’s mud houses were about 20 by 20 ft., each containing three small rooms and a small courtyard. Between each of the huddled houses were two separate walls. This proves, says Dr. Braidwood, that the Jarmoites had a well-developed sense of private property. The village apparently had its big shots too. One house was much larger than the others, with six rooms and a corridor. It probably belonged to a priest or chief.

Hoes had not yet been invented, so the people of Jarmo planted their crops with weighted digging sticks and reaped them with flint sickles. They grew barley, two kinds of wheat and some sort of legume, probably peas. At first they ground grain by rubbing it with a stone in a shallow stone dish. Later they developed effective mortars and pestles. They baked their bread in mud ovens stoked from the courtyard.

Fertility Cult. In the ruins of Jarmo, Dr. Braidwood found many bones of young sheep and goats, proving that the inhabitants had domestic animals. Probably they grazed their flocks in summer and kept them in the sheltered courtyards in winter. To judge from the scarcity of wild animals’ remains, the Jarmoites did very little hunting.

The religion of Jarmo had probably changed to fit the agricultural life. In its ruins are no idols or magic pictures designed to improve the hunting. In their place are many female figurines, naked and obviously pregnant—proof that the’ farmers and herdsmen of Jarmo had already developed a fertility cult.

To industrialized westerners, the life of Jarmo looks crude, but the Iraqi peasants who live near Jarmo today find it not so strange. Modern villagers still live in houses like those of Jarmo. They still keep their animals in the courtyards and cultivate their scanty crops with tools that are not much better. They still bake their bread in mud ovens that have not changed appreciably since the discovery of agriculture. It took the industrial revolution to make much change in the pattern of village life that was fixed 7,000 years ago.