But it seems to me there is a BIG difference between knowing “hey, you can grow shit and eat it” and “here’s all the details you need to succesfully grow shit to eat”.
The loss of knowledge of the latter seems pretty easy. The lose of the former not so much. But if you don’t know the later, then knowledge of the former doesn’t do much for you.
Hell, I’m 21st century man. With the internet. And disposable income. And modern seed and plants and insecticides. With lots of free time on my side. In a moderate climate. The best I every did was grow some $100 tomatoes and some hot peppers.
But they didn’t lose the knowledge it existed, which is part of what John Clay wants. They were a subsector of larger cultures in which they were restricted from that particular kind of job, but that’s like saying that in many locations women had no knowledge of blacksmithing.
Agreed about the 1600s. They were almost all farmers at that point, that’s in the canonical pilgrims at Plymouth Rock story. Even in the early 1800s most Indians on the east cost were still farmers. Then along came Andrew Jackson.
In the stories in Genesis, Cain was a farmer while Abel was a herder. Except we’re talking about Antediluvian cultures here, which would have been completely wiped out except for Noah and his family. And what did Noah do after the flood?
But is there any evidence that any time before then, but after 1491 “most” Indians were hunter-gatherers? I don’t think so.
He did not turn farmers into hunter-gatherers. He relocated farmers to other areas where they farmed, or lived dependent on government provisions. At least the ones who survived did.
The paper I linked to lists only two examples of probable or certain instances of agriculturalists reverting to hunter-gatherers - the Mlabri of Thailand and the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. If one is to add the the qualifier that such peoples are “not even aware of the possibility of agriculture” then I would imagine that the probability is close to zero.
One could add a follow-up question: are there any people in the world today that are unaware of agriculture? I suspect that the number would be miniscule if any. The world is a vanishingly small place.
One could also ask what is “knowledge of agriculture”? All it takes is a hunter-gatherer group to gather some fruit or vegetables from one place, carry them to another place to eat, consequently discarding the seeds and other inedible parts. Then the next year the hunter-gatherer group returns to the same location and sees fruit or vegetables are growing where the seeds were dumped the previous year. Humans have been hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years with brains pretty much identical to our own, so I would think the connection between seeds and new food growing has been made many times. Many existing hunter-gatherers are “semi-agricultural” in that they return to places where previous generations, distant ancestors even, have “semi-cultivated” by, for example, planting the seeds of the fruit they’ve just gathered and eaten before moving on.
Then the big follow-up question. Research has shown that hunter-gatherers tend to have better health while working less to get the calorie intake of agriculturalists. So why did we as, effectively, just another animal species in the World start settling down into fixed locations and developing culture, technology and so on - that which “separates us from the animals”. That’s still a matter for debate so better suited for Great Debates!
I’ve read similar, and that can be expanded from wine and beer to any drug or mind-altering substance. It’s certainly one theory that the reason we, as humans, settled down is to have a constant supply of our fix. Looking at humans today, it’s not an unreasonable hypothesis!
H/G groups are more prone to being completely wiped out by one bad season. Farming communities thrive because they can store food for longer times and feed more people per unit area.
It’s a question of what was the first agricultural product. Traditionally, it was thought to be bread (or something like it), but it could have been beer. Wine, maybe, but more likely beer. That assumes, of course, that there was one, singular “first” agricultural product. That may be so in any given settled area, but let’s keep in mind that agriculture was “discovered” at least 3 separate times in human history.