Did Plants Domesticate Humans? | The First Entanglement • iBiology

Duration: 00:13:56
Transcript

00:00:01:02 (birds chirping)
00:00:12:04 (cowbell ringing)
00:00:23:04 (owl hooting)
00:00:30:23 (footsteps)
00:00:38:13 (ominous music)
00:00:40:10 - If you had sort of rolled up to Çatalhöyük
00:00:43:01 over 9000 years ago as you came across the landscape
00:00:46:06 you see this great mound in in the distance where
00:00:49:06 around 7000 BC about 8000 people started to live together
00:00:55:06 in a very densely packed community.
00:01:02:23 They lived so closely together
00:01:05:03 that they had no streets
00:01:07:09 so they moved around on the the roofs of houses and went
00:01:10:12 down ladders through the houses.
00:01:21:05 So much had to be invented.
00:01:26:04 All these processes that make up a city life.
00:01:33:02 We're just digging up for the moment the first mirrors
00:01:35:21 you know so people had to invent mirrors.
00:01:41:09 They
00:01:42:05 had to invent belt hooks.
00:01:43:13 They had to find ways of holding their hair together.
00:01:53:21 It's a very very innovative time.
00:01:56:05 You know you can see people trying things out
00:01:59:23 tinkering with what we take for granted.
00:02:04:03 I think the sort
00:02:04:23 of way that we see the environment was not possible
00:02:06:23 before Çatalhöyük because the main changes
00:02:10:02 the main interventions are
00:02:11:10 are to do with domestication of plants and animals.
00:02:21:00 Agriculture is the the building block of civilization
00:02:25:06 as we understand it.
00:02:28:03 But it also was a trap into which humans got drawn.
00:02:32:16 (laughing)
00:02:33:14 You ready?
00:02:34:21 (soft music)
00:02:48:02 The story starts small scale
00:02:52:04 but you'll have to talk to Dr. Ceren about why.
00:03:08:08 - You know how some people think little bunnies are cute.
00:03:12:07 That's the way I I see my little plants.
00:03:20:05 We built up a dependency on them and
00:03:22:04 they built up a dependency on us and here we are.
00:03:25:20 How? Yeah okay. I'll try.
00:03:27:13 (laughing)
00:03:28:09 So you really understand it when you actually
00:03:31:18 see what happens to grass.
00:03:35:05 I've got domesticated and I've got wild.
00:03:38:19 Yeah. And this guy you don't really even have to pull at it.
00:03:43:17 It'll just fall and sort of break away.
00:03:49:00 Yeah.
00:03:49:20 And that's what shattering means
00:03:52:06 this is their wild seed dispersal mechanism.
00:03:55:16 They'll break away from the ear.
00:03:57:05 They'll fall in the ground and they'll dig themselves in.
00:04:02:07 But some small portion of the wild shattering ones
00:04:07:16 will actually have non shattering ears.
00:04:11:00 (soft music)
00:04:19:03 - The archaeobotanist's talk about that as a random event.
00:04:22:19 But then the question is why did it become selected for
00:04:26:03 and that that's to do with humans.
00:04:31:09 If you're gathering plants from a field
00:04:34:03 the seed is what you want.
00:04:34:23 So you keep selecting ones that are
00:04:37:03 that are easy to collect.
00:04:38:02 You are less likely to collect the ones that are shattered.
00:04:40:13 They're all scattered over the place.
00:04:47:22 - [Dr. Ceren] Through time the non shattering ears
00:04:50:10 became more prevalent and that's what became domesticated.
00:04:57:06 - But as a sort of unintended offshoot of that
00:04:59:12 the plants couldn't reproduce themselves anymore.
00:05:02:05 The seeds got stuck onto the stalk of the plant.
00:05:09:03 - We actually have to physically go and pull the ears apart.
00:05:14:17 If you had a fully ripe ear and you didn't pick it
00:05:18:06 or you didn't harvest it it might actually rot on the ear.
00:05:21:16 - So the plant is entirely now dependent on humans.
00:05:24:14 And so if humans want to continue depending on that plant
00:05:29:08 they get drawn into planting it and looking after it.
00:05:37:05 The first entanglement
00:05:42:13 sewing and plowing
00:05:44:13 and harvesting and and winnowing and you know
00:05:46:20 grinding it it is it's all just small work.
00:05:50:00 And one way of dealing with the problem
00:05:51:18 of needing more work is is that you just increase
00:05:55:01 your population size.
00:06:02:07 All around the world whether it's maze or yams.
00:06:04:18 Maybe you get apricots.
00:06:05:22 You get increases of people.
00:06:10:10 One way of looking at it is that what really is going
00:06:12:19 on here is that the domestic plants are doing really well
00:06:16:07 out of this.
00:06:17:08 And what they've done is they've domesticated us.
00:06:19:09 You know they they've forced us to to look after them.
00:06:28:11 Entanglement.
00:06:31:01 That dual process that started in the (indistinct).
00:06:36:00 We got dragged into doing things
00:06:38:15 and we had to work harder to do those things.
00:06:41:17 And in order to work harder we invented new technologies.
00:06:46:04 And those technologies involved us working yet harder.
00:06:50:06 Or doing more complex things.
00:06:56:10 And therefore we had to create more technologies.
00:07:04:18 (somber music)
00:07:10:15 So there's a spiral between the humans and technologies.
00:07:26:20 Agriculture it definitely comes with its negatives.
00:07:32:09 Urbanism.
00:07:34:21 Pollution
00:07:38:22 - Environmental degradation.
00:07:43:21 You know as soon as we got agriculture you see
00:07:45:15 that a decline in health on the skeletons.
00:07:48:21 Partly to do with the the less diverse diet
00:07:51:17 but it's also to do with diseases jumping across
00:07:54:02 from animals.
00:08:00:12 These incredible negatives but they just carry
00:08:03:06 on doing the same thing.
00:08:07:03 On and on in an endless spiral.
00:08:27:01 (shovel scraping)
00:08:47:21 - It's between 706000 BC.
00:08:52:17 This specific person
00:08:56:09 I would not know what to pinpoint an exact date but
00:09:04:02 long long time.
00:09:09:11 Humans started to modify their environment.
00:09:14:20 The domestication of both plants and animals.
00:09:18:00 Yeah. Big changes that
00:09:20:06 of course affects culturally biologically all of us.
00:09:26:01 (soft music)
00:09:28:11 You think about your position
00:09:31:05 with respect of all the millennial that preceded us
00:09:35:11 and you wonder about possible changes on the future.
00:09:47:16 You cannot stop this ability of our species to change.
00:09:52:21 It's pretty much like trying to stop a river.
00:09:58:09 (soft music)
00:10:11:08 - You know I think I think we have to accept that
00:10:13:00 that's one of the distinctive things about us
00:10:15:11 is that we are sort of manically concerned
00:10:18:20 with temporality and change.
00:10:25:13 And so you know
00:10:26:09 we do things and then the consequences emerge later.
00:10:35:12 (somber music)
00:10:42:11 So from a young person is it?
00:10:44:04 - Well it's looks like a male maybe about
00:10:47:23 maybe 30.
00:10:50:01 - The question is whether we can go
00:10:50:22 on finding a technological solution.
00:10:53:16 That's the great worry is that sustainable long term.
00:11:01:13 (tractor rattling)
00:11:09:15 The lesson from Çatalhöyük is that humans are
00:11:13:02 are very good inventing things but they're very
00:11:15:00 very bad at working out what the implications are.
00:11:21:14 You know we don't have a long term vision
00:11:24:12 particularly nowadays.
00:11:25:11 We don't have a sense of the long term impacts
00:11:27:10 of what we do.
00:11:35:17 And I think that's something that archeologists
00:11:36:18 can really point to.
00:11:39:06 Really long term.
00:11:40:03 (laughing)
00:11:44:14 (indistinct talking)
00:11:53:22 (hammering)
00:11:55:07 Do we sort of pull back from this
00:11:56:21 and say you know technological change is not
00:11:59:01 gonna be the answer we have to change ourselves.
00:12:05:02 We've got to change our way of being
00:12:06:11 to reorient ourselves and and what our wants and demands are
00:12:10:11 and trying to reevaluate what it is to be
00:12:12:19 to lead a fulfilled and happy life.
00:12:14:12 And and maybe one that has instant change and
00:12:18:15 and activity is isn't as good
00:12:23:08 as one that has more stability and and and continuity.
00:12:30:05 (somber music)
00:12:34:15 (birds chirping)
00:12:45:16 (cow bell ringing)

This Talk

Speakers: Ceren Kabukcu, Ian Hodder, Marco Milella

Audience:

General Public

Recorded: January 2023

Talk Overview

Did humans domesticate plants, or did they domesticate us? Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old site in Turkey, offer lessons on how agriculture and other major innovations can yield unexpected long-term consequences for human society and the world around us.

Created in collaboration with Scientific American.

Please head to the Science Communication Lab’s website for more films like this along with educator resources, full video transcript, and most up to date content.

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Speaker Bio

Ceren Kabukcu

Ceren Kabukcu

Ceren Kabukcu, Ph.D., is a bioarchaeologist with expertise on the identification and analysis of carbonized plant remains from archaeological habitations of early farmers and late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers from the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. She completed her Ph.D. in Liverpool and subsequently held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship with a project looking at… Continue Reading

Ian Hodder

Ian Hodder

Ian Hodder is an archaeologist and professor. Since 1993, he has been excavating the 9,000-year-old Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey, shedding light on the development of one of the world’s earliest societies, the social and economic organization of the settlement, and the transformation from hunting and gathering to agriculture and civilization. He is… Continue Reading

Marco Milella

Marco Milella

Marco Milella, Ph.D., is a research assistant at the Department of Physical Anthropology, Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Bern. Born and raised in Venice, Italy, Marco got a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna. He then moved to Switzerland, working first at the University of Zurich and now in Bern. He… Continue Reading