oh i just threw rice export in it for your benefit. and i didn’t say it was the wild variety.
ice farming in africa (he actually googled it! :lol: )
Oh, and Mac, before you spout off any more ignorance4 concerning African pygmies, I suggest you at least skim through thisprevious thread where we thoroughly debunked this nonsense.
If you still insist on repeating the nonsense that African pygmies are HGs then we will know that it is willful ignorance we are dealing with.
So, Mac, are you able to actually adress the issue?
Or are you going to do your usual trick: slink away form the thread now that you have been shown to be spouting ignorant tripe?
And so patiently too.
Just to nitpick, but while Oryzae is an Old World genus, Wild Rice (genus Zizania) is native to the US and Canada, and was used as a food by Native Americans.
i took the trouble to read it. it’s all just you and your usual style: winning an argument through sheer insistence. :o
isn’t efficiency all we’re talking about here? why cultivate plants in a pantry? for variation?
LOL! gathering wild rice is sure to entail leaving some plants un-harvested or some grains falling back to the ground which will then germinate. i know that’s unintentional but it sure qualifies as farming. ha!ha!
did the hawaiians plant all those coconuts along the beach or did the nuts float an entire ocean to reach oahu? what about coconuts found farther inland? probably planted those.
hey blake, i didn’t think you’d be a fun guy. smart and knowledgeable too!
Never read Little House of the Prairie. I have however worked on a farm. A modern farm with machinery. So I have an idea how much labor goes into agriculture.
And I know enough history to know how much more effort went into a pre-modern farm. The basic answer to how many man-hours pre-modern farming took is “all of them”. So your claim that hunting and gathering took more labor than farming strikes me as unlikely.
You’ve also missed a simple point. Early people didn’t hunt and gather in the same places they did later. They used to do it on the most productive land where it took the least amount of effort.
But the same land that was most productive for hunting and gathering was also the most productive for farming. Hunters and farmers wanted the same land. And a community of farmers was bigger than a community of hunters. So the farmers ended up with all the most productive land and the hunters ended up with all the least productive land.
It’s only complicated if you’re looking for complication.
As I pointed out, there’s a sizeable grey area between “too few people to sustain an agricultural system” and “too many people to live off the land”.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that a piece of land will sustain enough self-producing food to feed 5000 people. Or that same land could be converted into farmland and sustain 80,000 people through agriculture.
Now let’s assume you need a population of at least 500 people to sustain a year-round farming community.
So between a population of zero and five hundred, your only option is hunting and gathering. And between five thousand and eighty thousand, your only option is farming.
But between five hundred and five thousand, you can go with either hunting and gathering or farming.
So once again Mac has com in, [posted alot of ignorant carp, and once a landlide of evidence has been presented showing that he is talking hsit, he simply slinkls away.
Just to recap:
**What Mac said: **Almost all Native Americans were content to hunt and gather. Almost none of them were farmers and they did not want to be
The truth:Mac just made this up. Almost all Native Americans were farmers.
**What Mac said: ** HG tribes in africa maintain a mobile population of less than 30
The truth Mac just made this up. Such groups do not exist.
**What Mac said: ** HG groups in Africas live by ice farming.
The truth: This is just crazy. Mac just made this up.
**What Mac said: ** Only agriculture can sustain such population growth.
The truth: Mac just made this up. Most human populations have grown solely reliant upon hunting and gathering.
**What Mac said: ** Some native americans also planted rice, and the USA remains a major rice exporter to this day because of this tradition.
The truth: Mac just made this up. Rice does not even occur naturally in North America. There is an utterly unrelated species of grass called “Wild Rice” but it has never been planted nor has it ever been exported commercially.
What Mac said: There are no examples of HG population that grew to significance and remained HG.
The truth: Mac just made this up. The vast majority of all human populations grew to significance as HGs. Australian Aborigines are the clearest example, but obviously the entire world’s population had grown to significance prior to the invention of agriculture.
What Mac said: Fisher folk along the amazon are exclusively HGs.
The truth: Mac just made this up. These people are all either farmers or else trade with neighbouring farmers for food.
What Mac said: African pygmies are exclusively HGs
The truth: Mac just made this up. It is in fact impossible for humans to obtain enough food in the African rainforests. African pygmies are all seasonal farm labourers. They hunt in the forest during the off season and trade the material they get with the farmers and, nowadays, with the local shops.
I could keep going with the ignorant nonsense he has posted in this thread, but it’s really not worth it. He does this to every single thread he enters, then when the facts show that he is posting nonsense he slinks off.
Hey, this is just GQ, no need to jump onto people like that without provocation.
Huh? That surprises me, given that the Canadian Indians are famous for their Oryza, or wild rice, which they grow in lakes. Are you saying they got this from the Spaniards half a continent away?
ummmm… inuits (those who stay traditional.) nothing wrong with trading for some agricultural produce though.
always a pleasure. 
No, it does not qualify as farming by any definition. More ignorant crap from mac.
Once again, your gross ignorance of this topic is showing.
Hawaii has never been home to HGs. The Polynesians were accomplished agriculturalists when they arrived. They brought their crops with them, including coconuts, pacific almonds, cordyline and many of the other species that have now become feral on the island.
So yeah, of course the Hawaiians planted those coconuts, they didn’t carry them across 3, 000 miles of open ocean for decoration. They carried them to plant them in their gardens.
It’s a bit sad that you are unaware that coconuts are a feral garden plant in Hawaii and not a native plant. It is even sadder that you believe that there were once HGs on Hawaii.
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That is not a reference,. It is just another ignorant claim.
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yes, there is something wrong with trading for some agricultural produce. You said that people existed in the modern world as pure HGs. Not as hunters. Plenty of people in Australia make a living as kangaroo or pig shooters. That does not make them HGs in any sense of the word.
So please provide a reference that says that some Inuit survive purely by hunting and gathering.
Of course you won’t. You make an ignorant comment, get called on it, try to support it with an even more 3ignirant comment and so ad nauseum. It’s ignorance all the way down. You simply lack the most basic knowledge of the topic that you are trying to discuss.
misquoted some of it, you did. i said, a lot of them appeared to be content to live off the land.
south african bush men, pygmies in the bush, somalian terrorist bands.
this one killed me. i was talking about the far north, i threw in “ice farming” as an obvious joke and he flew at mach speed to african ice farming. 
not convinced about your aborigine claim. “growth” does not end with population increase but also some form of advancement. which is why “fertilë belts” are so closely mentioned when discussing “seats” of civilization.
you got shot down here. there IS wild north american rice against your insistence. and the exported rice was never mentioned to have come from that type of rice.
oh yes, they are significant.
[all others repetitive.]
I have provocation. This is not an isolated instance. He has been doing this to at least 5 threads every week for the past month. And it is always as bad as his behaviour in this thread. One provably nonsense statement after another.
I have no idea what you are referring to, so I really can’t comment. I just know that there were no plants of the Genus Oryza in the New World prior to its importation form Spain.
how 'bout this, orya WAS introduced but there was in fact wild north american rice?
i think someone’s wishing i had slunked away. 
Hand on, are you claiming that you worked on a farm that used machinery for *subsistence *agriculture? Because if it was a commercial farm then it has no bearing at ll on what we are discussing.
I’m calling bullshit.
Can you show me a single example of a single farm anywhere in the world where every single hour of labour went into producing food for subsistence? Because that claim seems ridiculous on its face
Once again, I am calling bullshit.
Name a single place anywhere in the world where people hunted and gathered after agriculture that they did not also hunt and gather before.
The one thing we can say with absolute certainty is that people lived everywhere that they possibly could. The idea that there existed lands that could support people, but people did not bother to exploit them is ridiculous on its face.
But you just said that at low population densities farming produces no more food than H/G. So how did the community of farmers become bigger? Since the community of HGs had just as much food, but were doing less work, why didn’t they become bigger than the farmers? They had the same initial population size, but the HGs were actually in better physical shape because they had to work less to maintain precisely the same population.
So how did the community of farmers come to be bigger?
No, it’s complicated if you look at the facts and at what you actually posted.
But once you provide references to support the basis of your position then I might change my mind.
And as I pointed out, and colonists account will prove to you that a single family can easily farm the land. So where is your evidence that farming requires a minimum population size?
But why *would *you, when over that entire time range it takes more labour and you produce no more food?
And since you produce no more food for the same labour, why does the HG population remain stable, yet the agricultural population grow? What is that is allowing that growth?
Same ignorant crap repeated. I ask for a reference for his claim, and he repeats the same nonsense.
So now it;s a joke. :rolleyes:
He’s not convinced that the Australian Aboriginal population grew. He seriously thinks that all half million people arrived by boat from somewhere else.
Ignorance keeps fighting back.
Yes, it does, That is exactly and solely what population gorwth means. It begins and ends with population increase.
Give us one defintion of population growth that requires “some form of advancement”. Just one.
No, there is not.
There is plant called Wild Rice.
It was never cultivated, as you claimed.
It is not the same plant that the US commercially exports. Which is what you claimed.
Honestly, at this stage I am going to give up and take it to the pit. Willful ignorance simply can not be fought. Mac just makes one stupid, ignorant statement after another. As soon as one is shot down he tries to prop it up with a new statement that is even more ridiculous. I have debunked his claim that Indians cultivated rice 6 times now and he is still claiming that it is true.
I don’t know about provocation or previous threads. What I do know that in this thread, an interesting question has been posed by the OP, very carefully formulated to avoid quick and false conclusions. Mac comes in, posts a short guess, and then you come in and shout at him with one-liners.
If you do know more about the subject than him (I don’t remember your credentials), then I’m not seeing it. Moreover, your one-liner battle and “Bullshit” shouting match with him is boring and derailing the thread. If you know more, then please, post a good explanation - with cites, so we don’t have to take your word vs. his - instead of just shouting bullshit. Then we could all learn something, and evaluate where you get your knowledge from, and where the evidence lies. Right now, an interesting topic has become a boring shouting match where two sides are playing “I say”, instead of evidence.
I don’t know the genus name, I just know that the wild rice, as it’s called here, is supposedly a different kind than the asian rice, that it grows wild (by itself) in the lakes and is harvested by the indians from boats, in a sustaining way (enough grains fall overboard to sprout next years plants), and that the Indians have been doing this “for a long time”. Now maybe the people who told me this were all misinformed, or that a long time refers back to the Spaniards. But maybe you could give some cites.
I’m also surprised what you say about the plains Indians. My information was - esp. as Cecil in his column writes - that the plains aren’t able to support agriculture without help, because they’re too dry and windy, so grass-growing and “cattle” - hunting the bisons that graze there naturally - is the most sustaining form.
I’ve also read that many of the Indians who hunted bisons did so during the migration season, when the buffaloes were together in big herds travelling from one area to the other; but in the spring they planted small plots of vegetables near their permanent homes (tipis only for travelling after the bisons, not all year round), and would harvest those in the autumn.