Group 3: Hunter-gatherers who descend from former agriculturalists

This group has deliberately been left until last because of the uniqueness of its historical trajectory. Some hunter-gatherers appear to have descended from original farming or pastoralist societies, via specializations into environments where agriculture was not possible or decidedly marginal. Some also exist in direct contact with agriculturalist groups closely related in terms of cultural and biological ancestry. The so-called "Manus True" fishing communities of the southern coast of Manus Island in the Admiralty Islands of Melanesia are a good example here,15 existing as they do side by side with a land-based agricultural population from whom they are not sharply separated in an ethnic sense. In terms of history, such trajectories obviously necessitate that these societies be considered separately from the "original/pristine" hunter-gatherers of groups 1 and 2.

But this is a difficult group to deal with in terms of authentication. Often the suggestions of a partial agricultural ancestry are based on linguistic and biological relationships rather than concrete eye-witness evidence. Examples of this group are claimed (and sometimes counterclaimed) to occur in East Africa, southern India, interior Borneo, southern New Zealand, the Sepik Basin of New Guinea, the Great Basin and western Great Plains of the USA, and in relatively infertile interfluvial regions of the Amazon Basin. Indeed, it is a very large group, amongst whom the southern Maoris and some of the northern UtoAztecan peoples were the only ones actually obliged by environmental factors to abandon true agriculture. The existence of this group renders "hunting and gathering" rather an uncertain concept from a historical point of view, but our concern in this section is more with behavior than with history per se. As far as behavior is concerned these people are, of course, genuine hunter-gatherers.

Some of the rain-forest hunters and gatherers of Island Southeast Asia, particularly the Punan of Borneo, the Kubu of Sumatra, and the much-debated Tasaday of Mindanao (fake or genuine!), descend from original agricultural populations, if the linguistic and biological data are any guide.16 In this view, the ancestral Punan and Kubu became hunter-gatherers, especially wild sago

collectors in the case of the Punan, via conscious decisions to move into interfluvial rain-forest hunting and gathering in regions that riverine agriculturalists found hard to penetrate.

Other hunter-gatherers descended from cultivators include some Bantu speakers in southern Africa, possibly the honey-collecting Dorobo or Okiek of the Kenyan Highlands of East Africa, probably some marginal sago-collecting groups (most of whom practice minor horticulture) in the Sepik Basin of New Guinea, and some Indian groups such as the Chenchu and Birhor." In South America there are other such potential group 3 hunter-gatherer populations in the poorer interfluvial regions of the Amazon Basin, such as the Ache of Paraguay and the Siriono and Bororo of Brazil." Perhaps the most interesting are the Numic-speaking Uto-Aztecan peoples of the Great Basin and adjacent areas, who appear to have abandoned a former agricultural lifestyle around 1,000 years ago. These people, linguistic descendants of original maizecultivators in Mexico and the Southwest, eventually found themselves in a dry region where maize agriculture had become marginal or no longer possible (see chapter 8). Some groups still have give-away characteristics of their remote agricultural ancestry, such as pottery-making, irrigation of stands of wild plants, and farmerlike attitudes to resource ownership (Kirchhoff 1954; Madsen and Rhode 1994; Hill 2001, 2003).

Group 3 hunter-gatherer societies are of especial interest because it is far easier for a relatively marginal food-producing community to turn to hunting and gathering than it is for hunters and gatherers to move in the opposite direction. Thus, it is a fair expectation that members of this third group of hunter-gatherers will always have been quite numerous, particularly around the ecological margins of expanding agricultural societies. As to the value of these groups with respect to debates concerning hunter-gatherer adoptions of agriculture, one might protest that having given up agriculture they are quite likely to adopt it again. This is perhaps true, particularly if some technological or economic habits survive from the former agricultural phase. Yet those who lived ethnographically in regions of agricultural possibility (i.e., excluding southern New Zealand and the Great Basin) still behaved essentially as other living hunter-gatherer groups with respect to general lack of interest in agricultural adoption. For instance, Bernard Sellato (1994) notes how resistant the Punan of parts of Borneo are to taking up farming, although Punan women

often marry men from Kayan farming communities.

Indeed, the marriage of hunter-gatherer women to food-producer men is so commonly recorded in ethnography that it is clearly a major avenue of cultural and genetic interchange. Hunter-gatherer men can rarely afford to acquire farmer wives, especially if bride-price payments are involved. Despite the intermarriage, however, Kayan communities still like to keep the Punan in a subservient collector relationship, just as Philippine farming communities do the Agta and as some Bantu farmers do their Pygmy and San neighbors.

Thus, the group 3 hunter-gatherers overlap with those of groups 1 and 2 in terms of behavior and social situation, and only appear to differ in terms of origin. The factor of origin in this respect, however, is very significant, for the group 3 societies offer one trajectory of cultural evolution that can terminate for ever the idea that evolution from foraging to farming is a one-way street.

Why Do Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherers Have Problems with

Agricultural Adoption? A Comparative View

They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Householdstuff &c°, ... In short they seem'd to set no value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities. (Captain James Cook, describing the Natives of New-Holland [New South Wales, Australia] in 1770; Beaglehole 1968:399)

The absence of farming in areas susceptible of it, like California, is thus not due to natural limitations but to cultural limitations of a historical character - the feebleness of agricultural stimuli. (Kirchhoff 1954:533)

The above descriptions of the three groups of ethnographic hunter-gatherer societies indicate that some have shifted into fairly marginal economies of agricultural production in recent centuries. But very few, it seems, have actually been observed in ethnographic times adopting a full-time farming livelihood supported by only minimal hunting and gathering. Why not? Is it because there are special factors that have made such adoptions almost impossible in the face of a torrential outpouring of European colonization and conquest during the past 500 years? Did hunter-gatherers adopt agriculture much more frequently before this? Perhaps, but the fact still remains that there are obviously many aspects of mobile hunter-gatherer society that are antithetical to adoption of the sedentary lifestyle of the cultivator. On top of this, we have the attitudes of the farming and pastoralist societies themselves, often ranked and status-conscious, with whom some of the ethnographic hunter-gatherers have come into contact and by whom many have eventually been encapsulated. We have, therefore, two pincer-like reasons why hunter-gatherers face a catch-22 situation and find it

hard to adopt agriculture - unsuitable social relations on the inside, combined with adverse relationships with other populations on the outside.

What about those societies for whom encapsulation has not been an issue? Here, we still have to explain why Cape York Aborigines did not adopt yam and taro gardening across Torres Strait, given all the other material borrowings, including outrigger canoes, that are known to have crossed the same route. We also have to ask why southern Californians did not adopt maize cultivation from the peoples of the lower Colorado valley long before Spanish arrival. In a detailed review of this question for California, Bean and Lawton (1976:47) seem to hit the nail right on the head when they state: "The abundance of California's food resources and highly developed techniques of energy extraction, however, made it unnecessary to adapt an agricultural mode, except in some of the marginally productive desert areas."

This suggests, so far, that we have two basic sets of reasons for agricultural nonadoption - the social reasons, and the economic lack-of-necessity reasons. There is a third reason, presented by the Californians and northern Australians. Although relatively affluent in food supplies, the people of both southern California and Cape York were also separated from their nearest agricultural neighbors by small but significant geographical transitions. In the case of northern Australia it was a sea gap and increasing dry-season length toward the south, moving away from agriculturalist New Guinea. In the case of California it was desert and the shift from a semi-arid Arizona environment to a Mediterranean-type climate with very marked winter rainfall seasonality. Bean and Lawton tend to dismiss the latter problem on the grounds that maize was grown widely by Indians in California in the colonial conditions of the 18th and 19th centuries, but this development merely demonstrates that "where there is a will there is a way." Prior to the mid-18th century it seems there was no will.

In addition to this, the low-density Yuman and Uto-Aztecan agricultural populations in Arizona probably saw no reason to attempt to expand their ranges across the Mojave Desert into California, except for hunting and gathering purposes. These populations had low levels of production tied to localized irrigation systems and it is unlikely they would have seen any necessity to cross forbidding desert terrain to enter a quite different climatic zone. Elsewhere in the world where bio-geographical transitions needed to be crossed, as from Pakistan into India and from temperate China into tropical

Southeast Asia, agriculture also spread very slowly. Into Australia and California agriculture never spread at all and the indigenous hunter-gatherers simply continued, prior to the European period, in the lifestyle they knew best.

Having reviewed the varied reasons why hunters and gatherers should not adopt agriculture, it is now necessary to ask what kind of hunter-gatherers could have dodged the overall catch-22 situation with success and aplomb, avoiding encapsulation in the process, back in the Neolithic or Formative? Under what circumstances would hunters and gatherers have positively and successfully adopted agriculture, such that they were able to "take over" the economy, technology, and maybe even language of a neighboring farming group and convert their takeover into a powerful force for expansion? This, after all, is what any claim for local hunter-gatherer adoption of agriculture as a major driving force for both language and material culture expansion in prehistory must imply. Mere adoption of low-energy sporadic cultivation by a huntergatherer population, or incorporation of a hunter-gatherer group and its genes into a dominant agriculturalist society, is not a relevant issue in this regard.

The answer to the above question is not an easy one, for it is of course possible that hunter-gatherer societies existed 10,000 years ago quite unlike any of the recent past with respect to their attitudes toward adopting an agricultural lifestyle. But again, one must express some doubt on this. There is nothing in the archaeological record to indicate that ancient hunter-gatherers were structured beyond the range, from band to chiefdom, that we witness in huntergatherer ethnography. If we wish to ask what would have happened when agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers came face to face in regions of very high agricultural potential, such as the fertile alluvial plains of temperate Europe, central China, or northern India, then comparative ethnography and history suggest the following possibilities:

a)Hunter-gatherers would have been unlikely to adopt agriculture if they were not in direct and continuous contact with agriculturalists. They would also not have adopted agriculture by remote action across bio-geographical transition zones or uninhabited terrain.

b)When the contacts were direct, that is, when the agriculturalists were actually living within the territories used by hunter-gatherers, then the initial trends would have been for mutualism and exchange.19

c) The hunter-gatherers would have begun to adopt agriculture as the agriculturalist pressures on land increased. But here we have that catch-22 situation again - as the pressures increased, so would the encapsulation and domination, thus reducing the social likelihood of successful agricultural adoption. There would always have been a window of opportunity for hunters and gatherers to adopt agriculture. But if it was an ephemeral one, as it would have been in situations of rapid farmer demographic increase, then most hunter-gatherers would have been less likely to pass through it.

So far, therefore, there appear to be no compelling reasons why any ancient hunters and gatherers would have commonly adopted agriculture on a permanent basis, or would have tried to do so unless pushed, or even why the many Neolithic farmer populations would simply have sat by quietly and watched hunter-gatherers adopting the livelihood from which they derived their social and symbolic power. But, of course, there is a very important loophole here for those disposed to vote for huntergatherer adoption of agriculture as the main means of agricultural spread in Neolithic times. This concerns environmental specifics and issues of farmer-hunter comparative demography. In regions that were marginal for agriculture, or in coastal regions where maritime food-collecting populations were quite dense, it is obvious that the chances of the native hunter-gatherer populations "taking over" a tentatively introduced agricultural system could have been higher, at least according to pure logic. Much would depend on how rigidly the farmers wished to protect their ethnic identity, on how much they would have been willing to recruit new members through intermarriage with hunter-gatherers, and on how much their economy was coming under stress with the move into less favorable environmental conditions. These are complex issues that cannot be dispatched with one-line answers, and many examples of such situations are discussed later. But let us not forget again that high productivity in a rich coastal huntergatherer economic system, even with sedentism and storage, does not necessarily make agricultural adoption any more likely.

Despite these fairly negative views on the possibility of agricultural adoption by hunter-gatherers, it is certainly not being suggested here that ancient huntergatherers could never have adopted agriculture from outside sources. But they would only have been likely to do so in situations where they had some

demographic or environmental advantage over any farmers in the vicinity, and where there would have been significant reasons why the normal huntergatherer disinterest in agricultural adoption should be overturned. We cannot assume that hunter-gatherers would automatically adopt agriculture just because it was sitting under their noses. We also need to remember that many populations of hunters and gatherers survived alongside agriculturalists in many parts of the world for millennia, without adopting agriculture, just as we witness in the ethnographic record.

The following chapters will demonstrate that the spread of agriculture in the past could not simply have occurred only because hunter-gatherers everywhere adopted it. Agriculture spread in Neolithic/ Formative circumstances mainly because the cultural and linguistic descendants of the early cultivators increased their demographic profiles and pushed their cultural and linguistic boundaries outwards. Occasionally, existing hunter-gatherers were offered short-lived windows to do the same. But such windows were probably rare, at least in terms of unilateral adoption of farming by hunter-gatherers without a substantial presence of farmers in the vicinity.