82 i Flora Unveiled
for agriculture, a period lasting several thousand years and shaping Neolithic culture in
important ways, was over.
The use of animal secondary products such as milk and wool during the Late Neolithic
also had profound effects on agriculture and the division of labor along gender lines.
Chemical evidence for dairying has been found in pottery in Britain dating from around
4500 bce onward.^27 By consuming milk and milk byproducts, four to five times more pro-
tein could be obtained than by directly consuming the cow for meat, so the introduction
of milking greatly increased the food value of cattle.^28 Judging from Bronze Age depictions
from the Near East, Egypt, and southeast Europe, milking itself was carried out by men,
although the processing of milk into yogurt and cheese was probably a female task.
Another secondary product that became suddenly important in the Chalcolithic was
wool. The fleece of sheep is actually made up of three types of fibers: kemp, hair, and wool.
Kemps are coarse, thick, and brittle, and are unsuitable for dyeing or spinning into yarn;
hairs are intermediate in thickness and stiffness, but can be spun, especially when combined
with wool; wool is the finest of the fibers and can be readily spun to make yarn. In addition
to its fineness, wool has several other properties that make it superior for textiles. First,
wool’s surfaces are scaly rather than smooth, as in the case of flax fibers, and the scales act
like tiny hooks that allow the fibers to snag each other like Velcro, forming felts. Second,
wool fibers tend to be kinky, and the kinkiness creates tiny air pockets in woolen textiles,
giving them superior insulating properties. Flax fibers, which are smooth and straight, don’t
form such air pockets when spun, and flax- based textiles are accordingly poor insulators.
Third, nonpigmented wool fibers bind most dyes more avidly than vegetable fibers, allowing
for a greater variety of color in woolen textiles.
In wild sheep, the kemp, which forms the outer coat of the fleece, is more abundant than
the wool, which forms an insulating inner coat. Wild sheep molt in the spring, and the
first wool must have been plucked during the molting season, an activity probably carried
out by women. This mixture of kemp, hair, and wool was probably used for making felt
at first. However, the potential for spinning the wool was probably recognized relatively
quickly, and sheep with higher proportions of wool in their fleece were probably selected
over their kempy colleagues. This seems to have happened first in southern Iran around
7000 bce and is in evidence in the Northern Fertile Crescent and Anatolia by around
4000 bce. The job of processing wool fibers, spinning them into yarn, and weaving the yarn
into textiles was probably the domain of women. The proliferation of clay spindle whorls at
many Chalcolithic sites attests to the increase in wool textile production that took place at
this time.
Margaret Ehrenberg has argued that, as a consequence of the Secondary Products
Revolution, men began assuming formerly female roles as farmers and herders.^29 As women’s
role in agriculture contracted, their roles in the spinning and weaving of textiles, food prep-
aration, and child- rearing probably intensified. An emphasis on child- rearing could be seen
as a response to the perceived need to increase the workforce in an expanding economy. But
the new wealth and authority generated by the expanding economies was not being equally
distributed. By the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, the relatively egalitarian farming
communities had become socially stratified and patriarchal.^30 The first recorded religions
of the Eastern Mediterranean region— in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia— all reflect