The domestication of species, the foundation of the Neolithic revolution, should not be read according to productivist criteria. Myths also enter the “ technopoesis », This invention of new techniques.
The passage of an economy based on hunting and picking to an economy predominantly agricultural – the “ Neolithic revolution According to Gordon Childe – remains a little -known process. The dominant story remains utility. The picking populations, by bringing wild seeds towards their residential sites, would have involuntarily favored a local seeding of the specimens chosen during picking. Their multiplication nearby and identification with each reproductive cycle of more favorable variants (larger seeds, all arriving simultaneously at maturity, not easily falling from the epis, etc.) would gradually have led the populations to move to an active phase of cultivation and selection. Its incremental progress will ensure its final success.
This theory is inspired by the Darwinian conception of biological evolution – chance and incremental character. It has a universal dimension, agriculture having probably appeared in distinct homes in the Middle East. In this sense, the proposed diagram can be applied almost everywhere, as soon as a number of conditions are met.
Archaeological and physiological discrepancies
The search for the origins of European civilization at XIXe century, as well as the controversy over the historicity of the Bible, contributed to the development of modern archeology in the Middle East, making the region one of the most densely excavated. The data of “ Fertile crescent “Have served as a support for theories on the emergence of” civilization », In which the appearance of agriculture is part.
However, in recent decades, the continuation of excavations has not only reinforced the dominant model. On the contrary, disturbing discrepancies have weakened it. The genetic analyzes of the cereals found highlighted a long -distance exchange of seeds, even before these variants have acquired distinct features of their wild counterparts. In addition, the latency time between the moment when we see the signs of planting plants and the moment when these show signs of domestication is extremely long (several hundred years), betraying the fact that no selection was practiced-in any case, not in the sense of obtaining the criteria of domestication. The behavior of these populations who exchange seeds without obvious particularities becomes enigmatic: it cannot be reduced for “ utilitarian »Increase the yield of crops.
The Darwinian account is also shaken by epigenetic research, that is to say the study of the expression of genes. If genes are a library, epigenetics is interested in the librarian that manages books and the reader who chooses books, consults them, active by reading aloud, etc.
By drawing inspiration from human selection, Darwin imagined an incremental selection, the mutations independent of each other added to long time. His theory seemed verified by the discovery of theDNAbut paleontology, in search of the hypothetical missing links, denied this scenario. Far from observing gradual changes, there were phases of continuity followed by rapid changes – so rapid that it was unable to observe the fossil traces. Which gave birth to a return to grace of theories “ Saltationists “(Nature making jumps) under the new name of” Punctured balance ».
Epigenetics has strengthened this approach. The transition from one morphology to another can be explained not by an accumulation of mutations, but by a process of reorganization of the expression of the genes which can be much faster. Recent research, especially on the information that carries male gametes (which has long been believed to be genetic information “ pure In all history), suggest that part of the biological experience of the individual is of epigenetic nature and that this influence can be partly transmitted to his descendants. Lamarck is back – in a version certainly more sophisticated in terms of biochemical mechanisms.
In the case of domestication, the rate of corticosteroids plays a decisive role in animals. A reduction in these hormones induces a more placid character in individuals, an essential characteristic of domestication, but also a whole set of chain effects, domestication syndromes: faster growth, earlier age, larger number of young people per scope, depigmentation, decrease in hair, decrease in the size of the tail and the number of vertebrae, smaller skull, falling ears, etc. Anything that differentiates a dog from a wolf, a wild boar pig, a domestic rabbit from a Garenne rabbit, a man from a chimpanzee, etc.
However, such substances exist in plants: these are polyamines, the best known of which are putrescine and cadaverine that decomposition corpses emit. Among other features, polyamines delay senescence from annual plants. The smell of corpses lengthens the life expectancy of wheat !
Plants “ survivals »»
On the basis of these clues, Nissim Amzallag directs his investigation towards the analysis of archaic myths, of the admission of the authors of antiquity: Dagan the Mesopotamian, who has given the seeds to men is beautiful zeri (master of seeds), but also beautiful pagra’um (Master of the Scallow) ; Demeter, whose worship of the mystery of eleusis in connection with vitality implies the putrefi corpse of a porcelet and cereal pancakes in the shape of a phallus ; Adonis, whose gardens consist in growing in summer very green seedlings which will then be allowed to dry out without bear fruit ; Osiris, whose replica of the clay corpse is support for the germination of barley seed according to a model close to the gardens of Adonis.
In short, there is a convergence between corpse and seed. In fact, if a corpse is buried, especially at the beginning of the summer, the release of polyanimes has the effect of extending the surrounding plants which remain green, while their neighbors dry. These plants appear to have survival.
This convergence leads to formulating a theory of domestication in the Levantin space which accounts better for archaeological and physiological anomalies observed. The Neolithic populations confronted with the phenomenon deduced that he was performing a transfer of vitality between dead and plants. What the myths testify is that the corpse “ vitalized Nature.
Moreover, the dominant theory in antiquity and even beyond is that the vital power comes from the honey (marrow), located in the brain and spinal cord, sperm being identified with liquefaction of the honey By warm -up. It is, it seems, one of the reasons for the particular status of the serpent as a vital symbol: is not his skeleton the quintessence of the spinal cord ?
The plants thus vitalized become the vectors of honey Ancestors. They would be exchanged as the object of a cult of vitality. On the long time, the repeated effect of polyamines will trigger a self-domestication effect which, very subsequently, will be noticed and maintained for itself by agricultural populations.
Agriculture and domestication
To follow the demonstration of Nissim Amzallag, it is advisable to integrate the disconnection of agriculture, as planting, and domestication, as an act of modification of the lines by selection. It is also necessary to distinguish fertility, the number of births, the vitality and the vigor of the descendants.
By insisting too much, in a productive logic, on fertility and fertility, it is omitted that in societies with high mortality, for which the mechanisms at the origin of the diseases remained mysterious, vitality as ability to overcome the vagaries was essential. What we know about the cults of Adonis and Eleusis testifies to this distinction between fertility and vitality. It is the vitality that is exalted here.
Analysis of the appearance of domestication societies opens up a more general consideration on the genesis of techniques. It is an error of analysis, a tautology, to explain the genesis of a technique by its final use. The peoples of the Neolithic were not reduced to chance and to necessity, a rich symbolic thought not being characteristic of the Moderns. On the contrary, they were endowed with intentions, curiosity, sense of observation, in cosmology which was theirs. It is this mental framework that it is important to take into account.
Nissim Amzallag invites you to distinguish a creative phase which it baptizes “ technopoesis »(Emergence of the technique) of a technological phase (development and exploitation of identified principles). The intentions, during these two phases, can be very different. History abounds these ruptures.
Without technopoesis, more creative and less immediately utilitarian, there would be no innovation, but only a technology perfectioning known techniques and paradigms.
The reflection of Nissim Amzallag is not without evoking the principle of serendipity. It questions public innovation policies which, under the guise of making research immediately, sterilize it. There may therefore be this additional lesson to be drawn from our distant ancestors before domestication: a utilitarian and technological society, by drying technopoiesis, deprives itself of vitality.