Allllllllrighty then. LOL
Many of these people’s families came from difficult circumstances in Europe. For example religious persecution or even debtors prison.
I have the understanding that the opportunities in the colonies gave some families a chance to make a better future for their heirs.
It was difficult to break out of the class system in Europe. The son of a impoverished potato farmer probably had a similar future in Ireland. Moving to the colonies meant a fresh start in life.
The discovery of the American continent made this land available. It didn’t have to be Columbus. Some other explorers would have done the same thing.
To reduce my ignorance, and excuse the digression, but the lows hit during glacial maximums. Is it thought that decreasing CO2 levels were prime movers in causing the cold, or is it believed that the lack of plentiful plant activity due to the cold was more the cause of the low CO2?
Thanks.
Never mind. Found my answer.
I’d agree with you on both of those.
The wikipedia article has some fascinating discussions on how fire affected development.
Control of fire by early humans - Wikipedia.
Agriculture made it easier to find food, likely freeing up time as well. It didn’t mean the people were well-fed though:
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/thoc/agriculture.html
Arguably, both fire (burning stuff, including fossil fuels, contributes to global warming) and agriculture (use of limited resources to grow crops, allowing for population expansion but eventually those resources will be depleted) will ultimately be our downfall, as well.
I’m glad you found it because I didn’t know. I enjoyed reading the article. Thanks!
To the extent that we can judge by modern and relatively modern people, hunter/fisher/gatherers had massively more free time than early farmers (or most current farmers, for that matter). Whyever we took up agriculture, saving ourselves work wasn’t the reason. Eating better wasn’t likely to be the reason either, because as you said farming peoples often actually ate worse. My current theory is that people wanted to be able to stay put, so they wouldn’t have to leave behind those who couldn’t keep up; and agriculture both makes staying put easier and to some extent requires it.
There’s also a theory involving beer.
Not a chance. Whole swathes of life don’t give a toss about atmospheric CO2.
True. It would take a bolide collision with a mass >1.7 quadrillion metric tons to sterilize Earth. Even if Proxima Centauri went supernova, the radiation wouldn’t be high enough to extinguish all life on our planet (to do that it would take a much closer star, with resultant explosion radiation high enough to boil the oceans).
But, the cascading effects of out-of-control CO2 caused by us could certainly spell disaster for humans and all other similarly fragile species on our planet. I’d hate for an alien civilization’s eulogy about us to read, “but on the bright side, at least they didn’t wipe out all the tardigrades.”
Plants need CO2 and animals need plants. Most life on earth goes extinct below 150 PPM. Life will start dyeing off below 200 ppm.
I guess if you consider the Columbian Exchange an event then that is a pretty significant thing. I mean, Europeans “discovering” the Americas meant that they could go on to invent and share with the world German chocolate cake, pizza sauce, paprika, French vanilla ice cream, and French fries. In sum, the world’s cuisine got a boost!
While true, absent humanity there’s no realistic expectation of that low level of CO2 happening for many, many hundreds of thousands of years due to where Earth presently sits in the Milankovich cycles. And even then the cycles only provide a timeframe where dangerously low CO2 becomes possible, however improbable. It’s definitely not a certainty that’s totally forced by orbital mechanics.
Including humanity’s baleful effects on CO2 concentrations, the low CO2 scenario changes from “incredibly distant future” to “almost certainly never.”
IMO it’s probably time to retire that hobby horse for a new one.
I am not really seriously worried about running out. But I d see a lot of advantages to somewhat higher levels. I would like to see a reasonable goal set for levels that do not require the abolishment of fossil fuel use. Presently this is one of those situations where the cure looks a lot worse than the illness.
Hydrothermal vent life does not. There are entire versions of the carbon cycle that don’t require atmospheric CO2 as an input, relying on geogenic methane or similar instead.
Moderating:
Please take that discussion to another thread. This one is about stuff that’s already happened. And “the industrial age dumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere” certainly is on topic, but “i think we ought to have higher levels of CO2 than we have now” really isn’t.
Thanks.
COLUMBUS??? Seriously???
a) As pointed out already, Europeans would have been made (more) aware of the American continents by someone else if Columbus’s voyage hadn’t taken place
b) Despite my elementary school teachers crediting him with proving the world was round, he did nothing of the sort. He didn’t sail west and end up in the eastern hemisphere, remember? His theory — that the land masses he’d heard rumors of to the west were actually the Chinese coast — was wrong, and if the Americas hadn’t been there he never would have made it to China with the supplies he’d brought. His calculations about the size of the earth were wrong.
c) Despite my elementary school teachers crediting him with discovering America, he didn’t do that either. The reason he heard those rumors was that other voyagers had encountered the American coastline.
d) He set in motion a series of events that pretty much killed an indigenous culture, but he was neither the first nor the most reprehensible example of a genocide or a culture’s destruction. If awful, oppressive, etc conquistador behaviors are among those we remark as significant, his fall in line somewhere behind those of Cortez, Pizarro, de Leon, and Coronado.
That’s a pretty impressive array of incorrectnesses and atrocities but none of it rises to anywhere close to the most significant ever. Since Leonardo daVinci was around at the time, I wouldn’t credit him with the most significant thing to happen in the 1490s.
More likely candidates are the previously-mentioned development of language; the harnessing of electricity; the development of writing, also previously mentioned; and the domestication of animals as well as the previously cited development of agriculture.
I’m going with fact that large dinosaurs died off (ever how that happened) and they were not around to eat all the slow, ground dwelling upright apes.
Or there would be no Columbus or anyone to discover the Americas, or anything else.
Well, yes it was eating better. See, hunter gatherers have a rough time in the winter, or when the herds migrate away, etc. They dont usually have the LT food storage of bunches of dried grain for bread.
When food gets scarce, those that cant hunt either starve or depend upon the hunters. Old people are a luxury.
Also, hunter gatherer needs a lot of free open quality hunting space, that limit population.
Even some of the most idyllic island life had agriculture- taro, breadfruit, etc. Not massive field, to be sure, but it was a critical part of life.
Samoan Gardening - polynesia.com | blog.
And they also loosely “herded” pigs etc.
All of the hunter gatherers in the past of course are prehistoric- no records were kept, so altho we can get a lot of what they ate etc from archeology, a lot is still a mystery.
Another reason pretty much everyone took up agriculture- europe, asia, the Americas, etc- is allowing more people to specialize and trade. Certainly HG did have specializions and trading, but it fairly limited- altho there were some surprisingly long trading chains.
But now you can have government, military, cobblers, engineers, pot makers, bakers, leatherworkers, dyers, weaveres, farmers, and more. And a specialized military and city walls means you get to keep your food and lands.
We dont know all the whys and wherefores, but we do know taking up Agriculture was an idea many had and thought it was great.
Those are some of the consequences of taking up agriculture, but I’d be amazed if anyone taking it up had those in mind.
Chances are, there was no one single person or group who made a decision to take up agriculture. Rather it was something people sort of slid into one small step at a time. The time involved being spread out over a couple thousand years or so.
I dont know if it was a conscious decision, but those who started hanging around natural concentrations of useful food plants, or planting crops on purpose, probably were hungry less and had more time to sharpen their spears. Or develop new ones, or to strategize for the next hunt. I agree it was likely gradual.