of the environment that was distinctively human: The most that the animal can

achieve is to collect; man produces, he prepares the means of life ... which
without him nature would not have produced. This makes impossible any unqualified
transference of the laws of life in animal society to human society' (1934: 308).
The essence of production, for Engels, lay in the deliberate planning of activity
by intentional and selfconscious agents.
Animals, through their activities, might exert lasting and quite radical effects on
their environments, but these effects are by and large unintended: the non-human
animal, Engels thought, did not labour in its surroundings in order to change them;
it had no conception of its task. The human, by contrast, always has an end in
mind.
Curiously, however, whenever Engels turned to consider concrete examples of human
mastery in production, he drew them exclusively from the activities of agriculture
and pastoralism, through which plants, animals and the landscape itself had been
demonstrably transformed through human design (1934: 34, 178-9). Opposing the
foraging behaviour of non-human species to the human husbandry of plants and
animals, Engels left a gap that could only be filled by calling into being a
special category of humans known to him and his contemporaries as savages. As a
hunter of animals and a gatherer of plants, the savage had, as it were, come down
from the trees but had not yet left the woods: suspended in limbo between evolution
and history, he was a human being who had so far failed to realise the potential
afforded by his unique constitution. Ever since, the humanity of hunter-gatherers
has been somchow in question. They may be members of the species, Homo sapiens, but
their form of life is such as to put them on a par with other animal kinds which
also derive their subsistence by collecting whatever is 'to hand' in the environ-
ment. As the archaeologist Robert Braidwood wrote in 1957, 'a man who spends his
whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry
patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself (Braidwood 1957:
22).
This latent ambiguity also allowed the archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, to take up
the distinction between collection and production - in terms virtually identical to
those proposed by Engels - to draw a line not between humans and animals, but
between
"neolithic people and their successors on the one hand, and 'palacolithic hunters
and gatherers on the other. In crossing this line, the ancestors of present-day
farmers, herdsmen and urban dwellers were alleged to have set in motion a
revolution in the arts of subsistence without parallel in the history of life.
Ushered in by the invention of the science of selective breeding, it was a
revolution that turned people, according to Childe, into active partners with
nature instead of parasites on nature' (1942: 55). Though contemporary authors
might phrase the distinction somewhat differently, the notion of food-production as
the singular achievement of human agriculturalists and pastoralists has become part
of the stock-in-trade of modern prehistory. And understanding the origins of food-
production has become as central a preoccupation for prehistorians as has
understanding the origins of humankind for palaeoanthropologists: where the latter
seek the evolutionary origins of human beings within nature, the former seek the
decisive moment at which humanity transcended nature, and was set on the path of
history.
Underlying the collection/production distinction, then, is a master narrative about
how human beings, through their mental and bodily labour, have progressively raised
themselves above the purely natural level of existence to which all other animals
are confined, and in so doing have built themselves a history of civilisation.
Through their transformations of nature, according to this narrative, humans have
also transformed them-selves. It is a fact about human beings, states Maurice
Godelier, that alone among animals, they 'produce society in order to live - and in
so doing, 'create history' (1986: 1, original