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warrior-bonding. Beer and wine thus characterised the Old World whereas hallucinogens were more common in the Americas. This provoked a change in ideology in Eurasia, helping the relative demise of shamanism.
    In the Old World what was worshipped instead were two aspects of fertility – the Great Goddess and the Bull. Though the Bull was worshipped as an aspect of fertility, we do well to remember that this animal was more often represented by his distinctive bucrania – its head and horns – than its sexual organs. Probably this was due – as many scholars have said – to the similarity between the bull’s horns and the shape of the New Moon, added to which was the link between the phases of the moon and the menstrual cycle, especially the cessation of menstruation, which would have been noted. At this point in the history of the Old World, the Great Goddess is shown giving birth to a bull, with the bucrania emerging from her womb. Here we have a curious combination: no one can ever have seen a woman giving birth to a bull; there was clearly some confusion at this point over the mechanism of human reproduction. If the bull represented the powerful forces of nature, as well as fertility, as other scholars have maintained, these motifs may indicate that people were unaware of the real mechanics of reproduction and at that time believed instead that women were fertilised by one or other of the forces of nature, represented by bucrania. Whatever the exact beliefs, the essential thing is that throughout the Neolithic period in the Old World – whether the object of worship was the Great Goddess, the Bull, the cow, rivers or streams – the central issue was fertility, in particular human fertility.
    What we now know, but previous scholars didn’t, or didn’t pay due attention to, is that there were two threats to fertility in the Neolithic Old World. There was the weakening monsoon, which affected the fertility of all living things, but there was also the fact that the human pelvic channel had grown narrower under a sedentary, grain-based diet, as compared with a hunter-gatherer one.
    On top of all that was a developing interaction between humans and domesticated mammals that had immense ideological and economic consequences. Put succinctly and chronologically, those developments were as follows:
The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats enabled the exploitation of less good land. This brought about the development of pastoralism, as a result of which these kinds of farmers spread beyond village life and became more dispersed. This dispersal in turn had an effect on religious ideology, a move beyond shamanism. Among pastoralists the calendar was less important, because domesticated mammals give birth at different times of the year, unlike plants which, particularly in temperate zones, are more directly linked to the cycle of the seasons. (Cattle can give birth at any time of the year, goats in winter or spring; with sheep it depends on how near the equator they are – in temperate zones, sheep lamb in spring but in warmer climates the lambing season can extend throughout the year. For horses the natural breeding season is May to August.)
A further aspect of domesticated mammals is that their whole life takes place above ground, as it were. Unlike plants, which need to be sown in the soil, and spend some time out of sight, before re-merging in a different form, animals are less mysterious. In a pastoral society the underworld is less important, less necessary, less ever-present. Together with the relative absence of hallucinogens, this development made the netherworld far less of an issue in the Old World than in the New.
This may have had other consequences. Although people in the New World never developed the wheel, for good reasons, they did have the concept of roundness – they had rubber balls for their ball games, they sometimes formed balls out of human heads or captives’ bodies, which they rolled down