Why Nations Fail

T
HE
 L
ONG
 S
UMMER
About 15,000 
BC
, the Ice Age came to an end as the
Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland
ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as
much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time.
This warming seems to have coincided with rapid
increases in human populations as the global warming led
to expanding animal populations and much greater
availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put
into rapid reverse at about 14,000 
BC
, by a period of
cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 
BC
,
global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius
in less than a decade, and have since stayed high.
Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer. The
warming-up of the climate was a huge critical juncture that
formed the background to the Neolithic Revolution, where
human societies made the transition to sedentary life,

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farming, and herding. This and the rest of subsequent
human history have played out basking in this Long
Summer.
There is a fundamental difference between farming and
herding and hunting-gathering. The former is based on the
domestication of plant and animal species, with active
intervention in their life cycles to change genetics to make
those species more useful to humans. Domestication is a
technological change that enables humans to produce a lot
more food from the available plants and animals. The
domestication of maize, for example, began when humans
gathered teosinte, the wild crop that was maize’s ancestor.
Teosinte cobs are very small, barely a few centimeters
long. They are dwarfed by a cob of modern maize. Yet
gradually, by selecting the larger ears of teosinte, and
plants whose ears did not break but stayed on the stalk to
be harvested, humans created modern maize, a crop that
provides far more nourishment from the same piece of
land.
The earliest evidence of farming, herding, and the
domestication of plants and animals comes from the
Middle East, in particular from the area known as the Hilly
Flanks, which stretches from the south of modern-day
Israel, up through Palestine and the west bank of the River
Jordan, via Syria and into southeastern Turkey, northern
Iraq, and western Iran. Around 9500 
BC
the first domestic
plants, emmer and two-row barley, were found in Jericho on
the west bank of the River Jordan in Palestine; and emmer,
peas, and lentils, at Tell Aswad, farther north in Syria. Both
were sites of the so-called Natufian culture and both
supported large villages; the village of Jericho had a
population of possibly five hundred people by this time.
Why did the first farming villages happen here and not
elsewhere? Why was it the Natufians, and not other
peoples, who domesticated peas and lentils? Were they
lucky and just happened to be living where there were many
potential candidates for domestication? While this is true,
many other people were living among these species, but
they did not domesticate them. As we saw in 
chapter 2
in
Maps 4
and 
5
, research by geneticists and archaeologists
to pin down the distribution of the wild ancestors of modern
domesticated animals and plants reveals that many of

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these ancestors were spread over very large areas,
millions of square kilometers. The wild ancestors of
domesticated animal species were spread throughout
Eurasia. Though the Hilly Flanks were particularly well
endowed in terms of wild crop species, even they were very
far from unique. It was not that the Natufians lived in an area
uniquely endowed with wild species that made them
special. It was that they were sedentary before they started
domesticating plants or animals. One piece of evidence
comes from gazelle teeth, which are composed of
cementum, a bony connective tissue that grows in layers.
During the spring and summer, when cementum’s growth is
most rapid, the layers are a different color from the layers
that form in the winter. By taking a slice through a tooth you
can see the color of the last layer created before the
gazelle died. Using this technique, you can determine if the
gazelle was killed in summer or winter. At Natufian sites,
one finds gazelles killed in all seasons, suggesting year-
round residence. The village of Abu Hureyra, on the river
Euphrates, is one of the most intensively researched
Natufian settlements. For almost forty years archaeologists
have examined the layers of the village, which provides one
of the best documented examples of sedentary life before
and after the transition to farming. The settlement probably
began around 9500 
BC
, and the inhabitants continued their
hunter-gatherer lifestyle for another five hundred years
before switching to agriculture. Archaeologists estimate
that the population of the village prior to farming was
between one hundred and three hundred.
You can think of all sorts of reasons why a society might
find it advantageous to become sedentary. Moving about is
costly; children and old people have to be carried, and it is
impossible to store food for lean times when you are on the
move. Moreover, tools such as grinding stones and sickles
were useful for processing wild foods, but are heavy to
carry. There is evidence that even mobile hunter-gatherers
stored food in select locations such as caves. One
attraction of maize is that it stores very well, and this is a
key reason why it became so intensively cultivated
throughout the Americas. The ability to deal more
effectively with storage and accumulate food stocks must
have been a key incentive for adopting a sedentary way of

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life.
While it might be collectively desirable to become
sedentary, this doesn’t mean that it will necessarily happen.
A mobile group of hunter-gatherers would have to agree to
do this, or someone would have to force them. Some
archaeologists have suggested that increasing population
density and declining living standards were key factors in
the emergence of sedentary life, forcing mobile people to
stay in one place. Yet the density of Natufian sites is no
greater than that of previous groups, so there does not
appear to be evidence of increasing population density.
Skeletal and dental evidence does not suggest
deteriorating health, either. For instance, food shortage
tends to create thin lines in people’s tooth enamel, a
condition called hypoplasia. These lines are in fact less
prevalent in Natufian people than in later farming people.
More important is that while sedentary life had pluses, it
also had minuses. Conflict resolution was probably much
harder for sedentary groups, since disagreements could be
resolved less easily by people or groups merely moving
away. Once people had built permanent buildings and had
more assets than they could carry, moving away was a
much less attractive option. So villages needed more
effective ways of resolving conflict and more elaborate
notions of property. Decisions would have to be made
about who had access to which piece of land close to the
village, or who got to pick fruit from which stand of trees
and fish in which part of the stream. Rules had to be
developed, and the institutions that made and enforced
rules had to be elaborated.
In order for sedentary life to emerge, it therefore seems
plausible that hunter-gatherers would have had to be forced
to settle down, and this would have to have been preceded
by an institutional innovation concentrating power in the
hands of a group that would become the political elite,
enforce property rights, maintain order, and also benefit
from their status by extracting resources from the rest of
society. In fact, a political revolution similar to that initiated
by King Shyaam, even if on a smaller scale, is likely to have
been the breakthrough that led to sedentary life.
The archaeological evidence indeed suggests that the
Natufians developed a complex society characterized by

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hierarchy, order, and inequality—beginnings of what we
would recognize as extractive institutions—a long time
before they became farmers. One compelling piece of
evidence for such hierarchy and inequality comes from
Natufian graves. Some people were buried with large
amounts of obsidian and dentalium shells, which came
from the Mediterranean coast near Mount Carmel. Other
types of ornamentation include necklaces, garters, and
bracelets, which were made out of canine teeth and deer
phalanges as well as shells. Other people were buried
without any of these things. Shells and also obsidian were
traded, and control of this trade was quite likely a source of
power accumulation and inequality. Further evidence of
economic and political inequality comes from the Natufian
site of Ain Mallaha, just north of the Sea of Galilee. Amid a
group of about fifty round huts and many pits, clearly used
for storage, there is a large, intensively plastered building
close to a cleared central place. This building was almost
certainly the house of a chief. Among the burials at the site,
some are much more elaborate, and there is also evidence
of a skull cult, possibly indicating ancestor worship. Such
cults are widespread in Natufian sites, particularly Jericho.
The preponderance of evidence from Natufian sites
suggests that these were probably already societies with
elaborate institutions determining inheritance of elite status.
They engaged in trade with distant places and had nascent
forms of religion and political hierarchies.
The emergence of political elites most likely created the
transition first to sedentary life and then to farming. As the
Natufian sites show, sedentary life did not necessarily
mean farming and herding. People could settle down but
still make their living by hunting and gathering. After all, the
Long Summer made wild crops more bountiful, and hunting
and gathering was likely to have been more attractive. Most
people may have been quite satisfied with a subsistence
life based on hunting and gathering that did not require a lot
of effort. Even technological innovation doesn’t necessarily
lead to increased agricultural production. In fact, it is known
that a major technological innovation, the introduction of the
steel axe among the group of Australian Aboriginal peoples
known as Yir Yoront, led not to more intense production but
to more sleeping, because it allowed subsistence

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requirements to be met more easily, with little incentive to
work for more.
The traditional, geography-based explanation for the
Neolithic Revolution—the centerpiece of Jared Diamond’s
argument, which we discussed in 
chapter 2
—is that it was
driven by the fortuitous availability of many plant and animal
species that could easily be domesticated. This made
farming and herding attractive and induced sedentary life.
After societies became sedentary and started farming, they
began to develop political hierarchy, religion, and
significantly more complex institutions. Though widely
accepted, the evidence from the Natufians suggests that
this traditional explanation puts the cart before the horse.
Institutional changes occurred in societies quite a while
before they made the transition to farming and were
probably the cause both of the move to sedentarism, which
reinforced the institutional changes, and subsequently of
the Neolithic Revolution. This pattern is suggested not only
by the evidence from the Hilly Flanks, which is the area
most intensively studied, but also by the preponderance of
evidence from the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East
Asia.
Certainly the transition to farming led to greater
agricultural productivity and enabled a significant
expansion of population. For instance, in sites such as
Jericho and Abu Hureyra, one sees that the early farming
village was much larger than the prefarming one. In general,
villages grew by between two and six times when the
transition took place. Moreover, many of the consequences
that people have traditionally argued as having flowed from
this transition undoubtedly happened. There was greater
occupational specialization and more rapid technological
progress, and probably the development of more complex
and possibly less egalitarian political institutions. But
whether this happened in a particular place was not
determined by the availability of plant and animal species.
Instead, it was a consequence of the society’s having
experienced the types of institutional, social, and political
innovations that would have allowed sedentary life and then
farming to emerge.
Though the Long Summer and the presence of crop and
animal species allowed this to happen, it did not determine

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where or when exactly, after the climate had warmed up, it
would happen. Rather, this was determined by the
interaction of a critical juncture, the Long Summer, with
small but important institutional differences that mattered.
As the climate warmed up, some societies, such as the
Natufians, developed elements of centralized institutions
and hierarchy, though these were on a very small scale
relative to those of modern nation-states. Like the Bushong
under Shyaam, societies reorganized to take advantage of
the greater opportunities created by the glut of wild plants
and animals, and it was no doubt the political elites who
were the main beneficiaries of these new opportunities and
of the political centralization process. Other places that had
only slightly different institutions did not permit their political
elites to take similar advantage of this juncture and lagged
behind the process of political centralization and the
creation of settled, agricultural, and more complex
societies. This paved the way to a subsequent divergence
of exactly the type we have seen before. Once these
differences emerged, they spread to some places but not
to others. For example, farming spread into Europe from
the Middle East starting around 6500 
BC
, mostly as a
consequence of the migration of farmers. In Europe,
institutions drifted away from parts of the world, such as
Africa, where initial institutions had been different and
where the innovations set in motion by the Long Summer in
the Middle East happened only much later, and even then in
a different form.
T
HE INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS
of the Natufians, though they
did most likely underpin the Neolithic Revolution, did not
leave a simple legacy in world history and did not lead
inexorably to the long-run prosperity of their homelands in
modern Israel, Palestine, and Syria. Syria and Palestine
are relatively poor parts of the modern world, and the
prosperity of Israel was largely imported by the settlement
of Jewish people after the Second World War and their
high levels of education and easy access to advanced
technologies. The early growth of the Natufians did not
become sustained for the same reason that Soviet growth
fizzled out. Though highly significant, even revolutionary for

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its time, this was growth under extractive institutions. For
the Natufian society it was also likely that this type of growth
created deep conflicts over who would control institutions
and the extraction they enabled. For every elite benefiting
from extraction there is a non-elite who would love to
replace him. Sometimes infighting simply replaces one
elite with another. Sometimes it destroys the whole
extractive society, unleashing a process of state and
societal collapse, as the spectacular civilization that Maya
city-states built more than one thousand years ago
experienced.