Cultural Eden

The search for the site of man's first civilized home narrowed down last week. The Iraq Government proudly claimed the oldest agricultural village in the world, recently discovered (see map). Its ruins, presumably about 8,000 years old, lay near Hassuna, about 250 miles from Baghdad. The mud-brick houses had rooms some seven feet square. Mixed in the debris were fragments of jars moulded 6,000 years before Christ. In graves lay remains of people not unlike modern man.

Most interesting find at Hassuna was a sickle made of flint chips set in bitumen, and still sharp enough to cut grain. It proved that the ancient inhabitants were not mere hunting savages. They had passed the most important milestone on the road toward civilization: sowing and reaping crops.

Anthropologists no longer look for a definite single place where the human race first appeared on earth. They know that man's ancestors were numerous, varied and widely distributed before they were fully human. But they still seek the "cultural Garden of Eden": the region where man first discovered agriculture.

Adam and Eve before the Fall were "food gatherers," in anthropological jargon. Like Bushmen and Piutes, they lived on what they could rustle up. But after they ate "of the tree of knowledge" and were driven from the Garden (Genesis 3: 16-19), they became husbandmen. Then Adam tilled the earth "in the sweat of his face."

The announcement from Iraq fitted anthropological theory. The search for the cultural Eden, where the transition to agriculture actually took place, has long since narrowed down to the highland south of the Caucasus Mountains. On its fringes are ruins of settled villages already old when Egypt and Chaldea were peopled by preagricultural savages. But these villages are too highly developed to have been the first farming settlements. Somewhere nearby, anthropologists have believed, lies the place where man first planted--and waited a season to gather the ripened grain.

Most promising spot is a triangular region between Lakes Van, Goktcha and Urmia. Here wild wheat still grows. Small rivers run down from the hills, their narrow floodplains easy to till with crude farm tools. The valleys of the Nile and Tigris were too big and difficult for man's first feeble efforts.

So far, the inter-lake triangle has not been fully explored, but anthropologists are eager to give it a thorough going-over. In its little valleys they hope to find proof that here the first farmers tilled the soil, and that from here their revolutionary mode of life spread by migration and "cultural osmosis" to most of the inhabited world.

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