Betty Lou The First Berry Cultivator—Part 1

For several hundred thousands of years before Homo sapiens became farmers—in the form of the first Sumerian agriculturalists—our deep ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. They lived in balance with their world. Like animals, they trod lightly on their Earth. They were few in number, took only what they needed, and left little or no trace of their presence.

When their ancestors—apelike hominids—came down out of the trees and began to live on the savannah, they had to learn to exist in the open, finding sustenance while avoiding the numerous predators that would stalk them. They succeeded in thriving in this risky environment, and found ways to cohabit with lions and leopards, as bipeds and quadrupeds learned how to grant the other necessary space to live, without major threat to either.

Our ancestors most likely began their carnivorous diet by finishing off kills left by the big cats or hyenas. Over time their hunting skills improved, as they began chasing down and killing the slower moving, large herbivores, as well as learning how to snatch small game. They supplemented this meat diet with a wide variety of plants—tubers, nuts, fruits, and other vegetables. In fact, vegetation was the major part of their diet.

Archeologists recently made an amazing discovery in a far-flung province of Turkey, at the site of an eight thousand year-old Sumerian settlement. They found primitive clay tablets that were inscribed with very ancient characters that predate a type of script used on later Sumerian tablets. It appears that the story told by the tablets is about how the Sumerians learned to develop agriculture—describing the pioneering work of a much earlier ancestor in Africa. It seems that earlier cultures, dating back as far as 12 millennia ago, had told and retold the story of how this horticultural trailblazer had come upon the method of planting seeds to grow edible vegetables. The actual identity of the first cultivator had been lost in the repeated telling of her story, so the archeologists named her Betty Lou. This is her story.

She lived something on the order of 15,000 years ago (as best could be determined from the tablet cuneiform inscriptions) on the African savannah. Betty Lou was a member of a band of hunter-gatherers, composed of an extended family of about 20 People. And “People” was what they called themselves. As far as they knew, they were pretty much the only living beings like them in the world, for their world was very small. They lived a semi-nomadic existence—settling for a few months around a water hole and then moving on when the water dried up or the local plants and game were no longer easily available.

Betty Lou's band might move four or five times a year—rotating around the region. On extremely rare occasions they would encounter a similar group of humans. They might exchange food or other items, or on even more rare occasions take mates, but those neighboring bands were so infrequently encountered that they did not even consider them to be People. As often as not, they'd fight them.

More on Betty Lou's discovery next time...