Humanity and Water – an Intimate Connection
Lower and Upper Paleolithic
The old male lifted his head, nostrils flaring, sniffing the air. He first looked to the path the river took as it meandered through the field before emptying into the sea. He then glanced back at his mate, still trudging across the beach, heavy with child, and at the little one trying to keep up beside her. The walk along the beach was hard, the mud pulling at their feet with each step. But the cloying odour of prey and the presence of scat were reason enough to move away from the sea and follow inland along the bank of the slowly moving waters. They would follow the path the river cut through the land to where the beasts fed on early summer grasses and clover. He gestured to his mate with his crude spear, its flint tip reflecting the rising sun, and with a few guttural syllables, pointed upriver, away from the beach and the ocean. Soon he could hunt. Soon the aching hunger in their bellies would be satisfied.
The archaeological record paints a picture of humanity’s relationship with water, going as far back as 900,000 years. In 2013, fossilized footprints were discovered at an estuary in Happisburgh, UK, preserved hominid footprints believed to be from Homo antecessor. The mix of adults and children was believed to be scavenging for shellfish and clams in the mud of the estuary. Hominids of that time were also known to follow migratory herds of prey animals as they crisscrossed the savannas that made up much of northern Europe during that era.
Similar fossilized footprints were found in New Mexico, dating back 23,000 years ago. In what used to be a a shore by a large, since-vanished lake, dozens of preserved footprints were discovered, some even showing a person carrying a child, as evidenced by tracks where the child was put down, and then later picked up. Tracks of giant ground sloths and mammoths, are found the same area, indicating they existed at the same time.
Where water was present, plants grew, and animals went. Those plants and animals were food for the hominids of that time, one branch of which would evolve into us – Homo sapiens.
Water equated to food and food equated to survival.
The Neolithic
It was many harvests ago since Tamu buried his father. He wasn’t a man yet at that time, still small, but old enough to remember when his people stopped following the herds of animals that provided them food. Not that they had much choice – the rains seemed less and less each cycle, and the animals fewer and smaller. And then one season, the animals never showed up at all. Tamu remembered the hunger, remembered his clan losing almost half their number, including his father. It was around that time when they stopped trying to follow the animals. They noticed seeds dropped near camp sprouted later, and grew more of the same plants. Some of the elders scattered seeds on purpose. They noticed the dry, hard ground just meant the seeds would be eaten by birds and small ground animals, but the ones planted near the waters, where the ground was always wet, seemed to grow lush and full. Tamu smiled as he looked at Lina, his bonded, showing their daughter Suri how to use stones to crush the seeds to a dust they would put into clay jars – clay they made with the same water that provided life to the seeds. The seed dust made food when they let it sit with water, and then cook it over hot rocks. Tamu turned his gaze to the river. Khal, his son, was almost taller than him now, and a man himself. He was using a large sturdy stick with a flattened end to scrape long, deep lines in the ground, coaxing the slow moving river to spill into a field so they could scatter more seeds in the newly wetted ground. Tamu smiled again. As he grabbed his own stick and trudged to the waters edge to help his son, he knew his children would not have to be suffer the hunger he did as a boy.
There came a time in our species history, when we ceased our nomadic way of life, and founded more permanent settlements. Seasonal camps would become permanent. Those early humans had discovered agriculture – primitive of course to what we have now, but to them it was a game changer. What made this revolutionary change in their way of life possible, was the marrying of the deliberate sowing of seeds, with the presence of water.
From small settlements, to villages, to the first small towns, time saw the rise of civilization itself. Around 12,000 BCE permanent communities popped up along rivers like the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile. In what is now the Middle East, civilization grew and flourished in an area abundant with water and agriculture, known as The Fertile Crescent. With these small villages, centred around agriculture and later, trade, our species was able to see how water turned survival into surplus. More food allowed for population growth and division of labour and specialization, such as pottery, textiles, and imagining the gods which governed the rain – early religion.
The connection of early civilization and water also allowed for the rise of hierarchies and governance, above that of tribalism. Who owned water had a form of wealth – thus power, and the areas around these villages were also markers of territory.
Water and its blessings allowed for the birth of the first states. For the first time in millennia, humanity went from a precarious and sometimes cruel and arbitrary nomadic way of life, to one where it could create predictable food surpluses, grow and thrive, create and imagine and build.
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