It can be a long road from burying seeds to real agriculture. Seeds may sprout but to reach the point where they produce a reasonable amount of food requires tending of the plants so hunter gatherers on the move may find nothing when they return to the location of the bean sprouts. And then they need the practice of saving some of what they grow to plant again. Agriculture may have risen in fields where grain grew reliably year after year and people learned to harvest it and store enough to last to the next crop and give up traveling to new locations when the local food supply ran out. Actually planting and tending the crops may have come much later. And even seeing that seeds sprout and produce plants may not have been sufficient in a pre-scientific world where people relied on magical concepts. Even the Sioux in near modern times relied on supernatural forces to bring them buffalo herds though the herd migrations should have been obvious.
That explains why existing plant varieties suitable for cultivation were, in fact, cultivated. It doesn’t explain how we got varieties suitable for cultivation from plants which weren’t already edible in the wild - e.g., potatoes which were apparently derived from poisonous tuber varieties, or maize from inedible teosinte.
Don’t you think agriculture based on existing plants was pretty well developed before such cultivation? Then again, they may have been quite adept at recognizing variations in plants before they began deliberate planting, and possibly spreading the seeds of the more practical and less deadly varieties did alter the distribution of growth, eventually leading to dominance of the preferred types in a sort of symbiotic relationship with humans.
Learning follows a sigmoid (S-shaped) curve. This is true either for a single human studying a new subject, or for the human race as a whole discovering technology.
Knowledge starts at zero. Learning the first few things is hard. Knowledge increases gradually, but the line is almost flat. This can go on for a long time. When you’ve learned a few things, the angle of the curve increases sharply. You can build on what you know already, and the more you know, the quicker you can learn new things.
Those first few steps can take a really long time.
Any explanation for the Neolithic Revolution is going to have to explain why complex iconography and architecture can *precede *agriculture and towns - any explanation that says nothing about social impetuses is likely missing something - Göbekli Tepe is a datum point that indicates larger groups can come together first, and then, who knows, possibly develop the need for agriculture because of population concentration.
A quote I read somewhere: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” It’s supposed to be a Chinese proverb.
Perhaps the ancient Chinese scholar was commenting on the unreliability of witness testimony in light of DNA evidence.
The consensus on the evolution of writing goes something like this -
Caravans in Mesopotamia used to carry clay tokens to represent the count of merchandise - this shape was a sheep, this was a cow, etc. To avoid tampering and shrinkage, they put the tokens inside a clay ball to be opened at the other end - “Moe from Ur sends you 10 sheep and 16 cows”. Then they started stamping the ball with the tokens to show what was inside, so it could be checked anytime, but only had to be opened once, at the end (Plus a personal seal to indicate source). It didn’t take long to figure out a slab with the same impressions served the same purpose and drop the tokens. Once messages began being stamped in clay, it was a trivial step to add additional codes until complex messages could be written.
So that’s an example where a message had to be conveyed a distance without distortion, for a very practical purpose. We owe our literature to accountants. Later, people began writing histories and scriptures to ensure those messages were there for posterity, an example of messages over time. Painting or carving your exploits onto the wall of the temple or palace was a good way to keep them in everyone’s face.
By contrast, a tribe of hunters has very little such need. We forget how powerful memory can be when challenged; people would recite their oral histories or tell stories or legends verbatim - a skill we’ve allowed to wither thanks to writing and recording. The Incas, by contrast, were on their way to written language using knotted strings as memory joggers.
Before maize, what American crops would have even been worth cultivating? You have to have some staple that’s good enough to justify staying in one place to farm, instead of keeping moving to follow the herds. Once you’re staying in place to grow that staple, you can also add more crops, but I don’t think it works with no staple crop at all.
Potatoes? Tomatoes?
They tried that, but it didn’t work out.
A particular problem was communication among different dialects in early communities.
This limited the degree to which those communities could cooperate in early agricultural endeavors.
Eventually, they called the whole thing off.
In what way? I don’t know much about the history of agriculture. Please explain.
Edit - whooosh.
I was almost certain that you were cueing up the joke - I guess that makes it more entertaining if you weren’t!
It’s possible that people first noticed that the plants they ate could later be found growing in the midden, the place where they threw their trash. This would only work, of course, if they regularly returned to the same site. Which is actually pretty common for hunter-gatherers, a lot them follow routes and keep to a set territory.
If I recall, there were plenty of nomadic societies that practiced a very casual sort of agriculture, relying mostly on following animal herds and gathering foods, but maybe doing some casual planting at their winter camp(s) before leaving in the spring and coming back later in the year to (hopefully) some food.
There are actually some places where hunting and gathering can support a settled population. The two I’m aware of are the Pacific Northwest and parts of Japan. These tend to be locations that have access to seafood resources, ample rainfall, and other conditions leading to above-average fertility and a surplus of food that can be stored.
These non-nomadic HG societies still can not achieve really dense populations, but they certainly can build villages.
Prior to agriculture, based on HG societies that survived into modern times, you could still have a form of “cultivation” and certainly a lot of rules about who could gather what foods.
Pre-European contact California Natives made extensive use of oaks and their acorns - particularly productive trees, or those with particularly tasty acorns, would be protected and competing plants near them eliminated. Who could harvest which tree and how much involved complicated rules This isn’t agriculture as we normally think of it, but it is management of a food resource.
People who manage extensive number of oaks to secure acorns would probably understand cultivating an annual grain like maize pretty easily one it was either explained or shown to them.
The HG’s of the Kalahari in Africa have similar rules and care for nut-producing trees in their territory.
Even casual selection - discouraging unwanted plants that are growing near food plants - could increase the food supply in an area and lead to actual cultivation.
I question your assumptions about some of those foods.
The potato’s ancestors might have had toxins that could be removed or rendered inactive, with potatoes arising from mutations that lacked those toxins. There is some reason to believe this happened with some of the nuts we eat as well. For example, domestic almonds are much less bitter than their wild relatives.
Some of these foods might have originated as “famine foods”, much as acorns were regarded in Europe - aside from the rare mutant, acorns require removal of tannins prior to eating which is, to be blunt, a pain in the ass.
Teosinte is not so much inedible as another pain in the ass food - tiny seeds that required a lot of labor to gather. They aren’t too small to eat - teff has a smaller seed - but they do have a hard seed case that would need to be dealt with somehow. Any mutant that lacked the seed coat and/or was larger would have been valuable enough to be preserved by even casual cultivators.
Modern first-worlders don’t appreciate just how much food processing our ancestors had to do. We still eat foods that would be toxic in their raw state - raw tapioca is deadly, cooked we give it to babies. Taro and rhubarb are two more that require cooking. Cultures that utilize cycads have often elaborate procedures for rendering them safe to eat, and even then the safety is questionable (Guam has a lethal disease that might be linked to consuming cycads). I’ve already mentioned removing tannins from acorns. My mother-in-law had a minimum two hour process for detoxifying pokeweed in preparation for using it as food.
So, in fact, quite a few foods “aren’t edible in the wild” but are, in fact, edible IF you know how to process them. And you don’t need a particularly sophisticated technology to do it, usually water and/or fire are adequate to get the job done.
Also :D, by the way.
Bolding mine.
Agree completely. And it can take vastly longer in a pre-literate culture where things that aren’t yet useful are readily forgotten.
Ref a later post in this thread, I can imagine the idea that some seeds sometimes sprout into the same sort of plant the seed came from was noticed over the millennia by many bright folks in many wandering bands. But unless within the living memory of that discovery in that small group somebody else in that same small group made it useful by adding the next step, whether that was extra water, poop for fertilizer, correct depth or season of burial, or whatever, there’d be no reason to include this idea as part of the oral lore to be passed on. So that knowledge would die out again and again as that one bright person died in his/her turn.
It takes several relevant reinforcing ideas to occur all within one lifetime in one group to get the spark of discovery to catch the tinder of learning and become the flame of knowledge worth passing on.
A lot of millennia can pass with small groups *aaaaalmost *discovering agriculture before the lucky coincidence strikes in one group. Which group then has to be successful enough to survive and grow for a few generations to give the idea enough time to spread far enough that it won’t die without them to keep it alive.
IANA archeologist, so I can’t say how plausible it is that very small scale agriculture was practiced here and there at random spots in human space and time over many dozen millennia without ever catching on widely and permanently. But that seems almost inevitable to this layman. The evidence we have of everything back that far BP is very, very spotty.
In our era we’re surrounded by theoretical science; learning for learning’s sake with confidence that even if we never live to see what it’s good for, it’ll be good for something some day. That’s a remarkably modern idea. Not even 500 years old.
Since no one has corrected this: The consensus for The Americas is ~15K years ago; ~45K years ago for Europe. Longer ago than that for Australia, and we evolved in Africa so, it’s not surprising we could be found there in that time period.
That sounds like what I’m saying. You need to develop agricultural practices based on existing plants before cultivating new ones. There was more than just corn and spuds though, there are plenty of other American crops like yucca, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and peppers to name a few. They weren’t major staples but there must have been many local plants used both before an after agricultural development.
“Peking Man” and “Java Man” are H. Erectus. Those populations are not known to have produced Mousterian tools. We know next to nothing about what culture Denisovans had or did not have, so we can’t really say anything about their behavior.