Once the breeding of cereal grasses such as barley,
einkorn and emmer appeared to worthwhile, more and more groups of people
decided to settle and build fenced villages and gardens. They did not plant one
variety in straight lines as their Babylonian and Assyrian offspring would do
in the plains and industrial farmers do today. No, they did it in casual,
haphazard ways. Tribals in Karnataka, India, name this style ‘mandika tanam’.
Men were needed to protect plots against attacking neighbors
and wild aninals while, in turn took to raiding other villages and loot the
popular cereal produce. Men also came in to help growing the popular cereals.
With long sticks they would poke holes in the soil to allow women put seeds in
the holes. Women pulled the weeds. But for heavy work in the processing of
harvested grains men got involved again. In short, they penetrated the plant
domain of women.
Population growth made groups to leave the foothills and
settle in the plains where they cleared the wild shrubs and trees in order to
grow, along with soft foods, the new cereals. As this cereal production grew in
size and workload, men contributed more time and attention to it.
It took thousands of years to learn breeding better
cereal varieties, planting in straight lines to make weeding and harvesting
easier, bringing water to dry places, using hand plows and finally go for deep
plowing with draught animals. With those developments men got increasingly
involved in the farming, the organization and building of larger-scale
irrigation works and the overall leadership of agrarian affairs.
Unintentionally yet, if you want, tragically, the women
who started farming facilitated the men taking control over most of the food
supply. As a consequence, men came to control family life and wider social life
as well, on the road to patriarchy that has poisoned interactions between women
and men till the present day.
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