Serious answer - probably squashes and gourds first. Or, at least, we have evidence for their domesticationat least 3000 years before maize. They are of use not just for food, but also as storage containers, which would be valuable to nomadic HGs too. And they’re a lot hardier to grow than maize, so a “plant seeds, leave and come back to harvest” model of domestication is very believable for them.
Probably, before maize Mesoamericans had a set of crops similar to the crops of the pre-maize Eastern Agricultural Complex - local plants, easily grown (often weeds today), a broad variety, but not always easy to pick up as purposefully domesticated in the archaeological record. Then sufficient experience with those, and maize domestication happens *somehow *(AFAIK the jury is still out on whether this was a slow process of developing teosinte possibly originally grown for animal feed, or lucky hybridization event/s)
This includes the Levant at the time in consideration, only replace seafood with gazelles(who knew the *Age of Empires *tutorial levels were so historically accurate :))
Agreed. Which is why I specifically used the different term of art, “towns” - which are distinguished from even similar-sized village-type settlements by the main economic activities engaged in by the inhabitants - services, manufacturing, markets etc rather than agriculture and other primary activities
My point was that a forgotten seed in a soggy bag, (or something tossed on the midden) would surely be noticed germinating. Ancient humans watched the environment, I’m sure they figured out very quickly that seeds sprout and become new plants. Some plants, like squash, would be pretty hardy left on their own until the tribe returned, I assume.
it’s interesting to speculate but hard to prove the route from knowledge of seed and germination to full-on agriculture (and the process of selective breeding of plants and animals).
Written records made little sense for pre-farming people with their day-by-day economy. Written language in Mesopotamia developed very early from accounting tokens for agricultural produce. A small clay cone represented a small measure of barley; a disk represented a sheep. In this way debts and deposits could be recorded. By 3500 BC there were several hundred distinct token types, but the
Voilà — the first “written records”!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Regarding human evolution, one key mutation has occurred very recently. Lactose tolerance developed somewhere among the dairy farmers of East or East-Central Europe and spread very rapidly. Milk and cheese conferred a huge food advantage: individuals still lactose-intolerant could not thrive. IIRC this mutation probably developed in other places independently.
Another alleged instance of recent evolution is altruism! This is a trait harmful to an individual unless it is very common in his society; then it can be very beneficial. Altruism can be measured experimentally and is found to correlate with certain physical brain observations. Altruism varies between ethnic groups — is this cultural or genetic? Some researchers, IIRC, believe genes and culture sometimes evolved together to achieve predominant altruism.
You dorecall correctly. In as much as m"independently" means “genetically independently”. The traits may still be linked by being tied to the spread of dairy pastoralism, which may have one origin.
Hm, I suppose that’s plausible-- They’re certainly easy to grow, as evidenced by zucchini season every year when everyone’s trying to give away as many as they can, and they were a major food source for Native Americans (one of the “three sisters”) by the time of European contact.
Another problem with natural plants being “shattering”, which is evolutionary advantageous for the plant to be able to scatter it’s seed but a PITA for humans wanting to gather them. Finding and cultivating natural mutations that didn’t shatter was a matter of luck and paying attention (and recognizing the concept of genetic inheritance.)
If humans disappeared tomorrow, our carefully-cultivated but less evolutionary fit varieties would probably quickly revert back to shattering varities. (And “corn”/maize would probably go extinct.)
On the side discussion on what actually is OP, for a long time the co-evolution of human-specialized viruses, and the correlative mechanisms to deal with them for decades has been traced to the rise of agriculture and animal husbandry. More recent methods with archaeogenetics, however, has limited the idea: from “The origin of human pathogens: evaluating the role of agriculture and domestic animals in the evolution of human disease,” (Jessica M. C. Pearce-Duvet, Biol. Rev. [2006], 81, pp. 369–382: "… The strongest evidence for a domestic-animal origin exists for measles and pertussis, although the data do not exclude a non-domestic origin… The broader force for human pathogen evolution could be ecological change… Agriculture may have changed the transmission ecology of pre-existing human pathogens, increased the success of pre-existing pathogen vectors, resulted in novel interactions between humans and wildlife, and, through the domestication of animals, provided a stable conduit for human infection by wildlife diseases.
She does not explore how such demonstrated evolution of a non-human organism is matched by discrete evidence of human evolution to invite and make homey a gut for other non-human organisms, or of man-generated processes by which these pathogens are dealt with. (Which is the question at hand…:))
The convergent evolution of humans and their agriculture is most strongly suggested by Harris in the 700-page anthology Foraging and Farming. The Evolution of Plant Exploitation D. R. Harris and G. C. Hillman, eds. (1989); Kristen J. Gremillion’s rich Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory (Cambridge: 2006) has only a brief interlude on “the two-way street,” and cites the enyzyme lactase as one such example.
On this, The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change, Chris Gosden and Jon Hather, eds. (Routledge:1999) is particularly good on the anthropology and changing social economics (hell, the genesis of such things) of pre- and proto-agricultitural stuff; the introductory survey “Cash-Crops Before Cash: Organic Consumables and Trade,” by Andrew Sherratt, is excellent (although it has the unfortunate Marxoid tone present in much of the rest of the volume).
The debate on this is long-going and “luck” may not have anything to do with it in some species essential in agriculture, and “shattering” is not necessarily a bad thing:
In Gremillon’s Prehistory, cited above in post #48, she writes:
The simple action of harvesting a stand of wild grasses, such as
wheat, and then sowing seed from that same harvest automatically favors
plants that germinate early, grow quickly, and mature at the same time,
because these are the ones that fall to the sickle and produce the next
generation. The method of harvesting is of crucial importance here,
for a technique that relies on the tendency of ripe seeds to fall to the
ground – such as collection in baskets by shaking or beating on the
seed heads – will have precisely the opposite effect on the direction of
selection. Subsequent generations from this sowed seed will not lose
the ability to disperse naturally, avoiding the fate of most domesticated
cereals, which surrender reproductive independence for the security of
annual sowing.
Here she cites “Early Hominid Hunting and Scavenging: A Zooarcheological Review,” by M. Domínguez-Rodrigo and T. R. Pickering ( Evolutionary Anthropology 12:275–282 (2003), which is a companion piece to his more readable (for me, at least, a layman) “Hunting and Scavenging by Early Humans:
The State of the Debate” (Journal of World Prehistory, 16:1, March 2002).
The planet has been through cataclysmic events, the nature and devastation of which may well be beyond anything we’d want to consider or imagine. I’m referring to bolide (comet/meteor) impacts, more than anything earth based. It seems for the last 10 000 years the heavens have been very kind to us.
So it’s quite possible, even likely, that a reset button got pushed, maybe even more than once. It could be that our ancestors developed writing and improved their technologies only to be wiped almost off the planet, losing all their developments in the process. It might’ve been that northern hemisphere ancestors had writing and tech while the southerners were still very basic, and the climactic change bought about by an impact event wiped out the northerners completely and left the “primitives”. It might’ve been that most developed cultures were coastal and totally flooded (to this day) by tsunamis and later icecap melting. Who knows.
Actually if you study the Fruit Fly (Drosophila melanogaster), it will change its genetics quite rapidly. This fly is used for genetic research.
Based on that, I would say humans are definitively NOT like we were even 200 years ago!
And we are evolving today… Survival of the fittest! Those who are TEXTING ON THEIR CELL PHONES WHILE DRIVING will not survive, and those who do not will live and reproduce.
Funny thing: civilization destroying impact events leave behind evidence. There isn’t any. (Yes, I’m aware of the Firestone/West Younger Dryas impact claims–I don’t think that they stand up to scrutiny.)
Fruit flies are used for genetic research precisely because their genetics change so rapidly: among other things, because in the time a human goes from first wail to first tooth, they’ve had multiple generations, but IIUIC that’s not the only reason. There are some aspects in which we know we are evolving (IIRC, wisdom teeth are on their way out), but again IIUIC it’s nowhere near as fast as Drosophila even when you account for the differences in timescales.
And those who are texting while driving may already have reproduced.
As Cyril Kornbluth out over 60 years ago in “The Marching Morons”, civilization seems to have a negative effect on evolution. Certainly, we breed out aggressiveness, as the guy staying home on the farm has a peaceful life and can raise more kids than the adventurous guy who marches off to war an gets killed early. (However, we’re still working on that). Insulin, eyeglasses, vaccines, welfare have all done their part to ensure the survival of the less fit. Intelligence may correlate 9somewhat) with who is rich, but it seems that richer people tend to have fewer children than poor people, until they reach the category of super-rich.
Agriculture doesn’t depend on making the discovery that seeds grow into plants. That’s an obvious fact that doesn’t require any special insight.
Agriculture depends on making the economic decision that tending a particular stand of wild plants is worthwhile, as opposed to just going off to some other stand of wild plants.
It’s a mistake to think of agriculture as a revolution. Sure it’s a revolution when you consider the whole process. But it’s not revolutionary to the first people doing it. It’s just going to a lot of trouble to make sure that a particular favored food plant is protected and propagated. Hunter gatherers eat a very wide variety of plant species, most of them pretty unpalatable. When you come across an area with an abundance of productive plants, doing a little work to chop back the competing plants and reseed the productive plants makes sense. But it’s work. Is it worthwhile work? It depends on how much other stuff there is to eat.
For things like potatoes that are toxic in their typical wild form, you first develop ways to detoxify the plant. Often this is as simple as thorough cooking, or washing with ashes from the campfire, or fermentation. So how did they learn that some plants are poisonous but can be eaten if you prepare them correctly? Starvation. Hunter gatherers know thousands of plants, and only a handful of them can be just picked and eaten raw. Others are only eaten when you’re starving and there’s no other food, then grandma explains the way to detoxify the nasty plant that’s barely worth eating.
If that toxic plant is also very productive–if it produces a lot of potentially edible but toxic parts, like tubers and such, then learning the correct methods for treating that plant to make it edible becomes very useful. And when you’re dealing with this plant a lot, finding a particular strain that isn’t quite as nasty as the other plants is very notable. Wow, that potato I just ate almost didn’t make me gag, I should find that plant again and cultivate it.
Again, agriculture doesn’t require any new insights or knowledge from hunter-gatherers, it just requires a commitment to doing a lot of boring work that might or might not pay off. Specialized techniques and tools come later, but the methods of dealing with marginally edible plants are already known.
This sort of thing gets trotted out every discussion of evolution, and it contains some misunderstandings and invalid assumptions.
First of all, the definition of “fitness” in natural selection is ONLY that which leaves more descendants than that which leaves few or none. That’s the ONLY criteria. Under those terms, the agriculturalist that has 10 children live to adulthood, who then each have 10 children, is more fit than the nomad who has 3 children, who each have 3 children, even if the farmers are all short, near-sighted, and malnourished and the nomads are all tall, strong, and have perfect vision. That is why there are so damn many folks who eat agricultural food and so damn few nomadic HG’s left in the world.
So, it doesn’t matter if people need glasses, or need insulin at the age of 50, so long as they generate sufficient offspring to keep the race going. Evolution doesn’t care if you, personally, live to be old, or whether or not your old age is painful or not, or if you become diabetic and your feet rot off and your kidneys fail just so long as you out reproduce the competition.
As far as the differential in numbers of offspring between rich and poor humans, the poor tend to have more children in hopes more will survive and provide either free labor and/or a social network of support. The rich have fewer children, but lavish more resources on each one. Each can be a viable method of continuing one’s genes.
So no, civilization is NOT making us less fit - it’s just changing our environment to one where those willing to wear glasses and get an education will prosper over those who stubbornly refuse to correct their children’s vision and leave them squinting and uneducated.
A thing that increased the population of a species cannot be said to have a “negative” effect on evolution. (In fact, the term “negative effect” really does’t make sense when applied to evolution since evolution is neither negative nor positive-- it just is.) I’m afraid you’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that evolution has a purpose, and that purpose is to produce the more and more intelligent animals.
Yes and no. think of civilization as one form of evolutionary pressure. We are adapting to an environment where use eyeglasses and insulin, lesser immune systems and lack of aggression are perhaps no so much desirable traits as “not-negative” traits, thus are not selected against. This is all fine as long as that environment persists. Think of us as like bees or hummingbirds - what if there were a lot fewer flowers? We are adapting to a specific environment. When/if circumstances change, those adapted too specifically to the current environment will be the first to suffer.
Evolution does not have a goal (other than the result of the best adapted to the environment survive better); human society certainly does - our current quality of life is based on our intelligence. Yet, we have a society that does not select well (i.e. breeding differential) for intelligence, in fact the opposite … if one accepts that to some extent, financial success is somewhat correlated with intelligence. (I accept this is a debate, but the more typical consensus seems to be that intelligence is about 50-50 nature and nurture.)
We are building a society that is more and more susceptible to disruptions for multiple reasons - war, economics, disease, climate. I’m sure the a diabetic in Aleppo is not comforted by the concept that evolution is neither negative nor positive. (I pick on diabetes because Type I is thought to be relatively hereditary…)