No pre-Western civilisation in Australia?

[Blake]

@lynne-42

Australia does not have any indigenous plants which suit agriculture.

Which isn’t even remotely true. Australia has wild representatives of rice, millet, teff, taro, Macadamia, Terminalia, sunflower, nightshades, grapes, banana, numerous legume species and a plethora of other genera that have been widely domesticated elsewhere. In addition there are numerous endemic plants that would be at least as domesticable as the ancestors of other current domesticates. The idea that Australia doesn’t have any plants that are suitable for agriculture can’t possibly be justified objectively. Diamond had to support his (rather silly) hypothesis by restricting his search for agricultural plants to only grasses and only those native to the tiny Mediterranean climatic zone in the southwest. In doing so he ignored the fact that there are 10, 000 yo agricultural societies within 200 miles of Australia that established in zones where the flora is >90% similar to that of northern Australia.

Any claim made that Australia lacks domesticable plant simply isn’t based on fact.

Nor do any of our native animals really suit farming.

None of the surviving ones, certainly. When humans arrived there were numerous likely domesticable species. In this regard Australia is no different to the Americas, where the domestication candidates were also exterminated. Nonetheless the Americas did develop agriculture on at least two separate occasions. So the idea that an absence of domesticable animals was the barrier to developing agriculture is even less supportable than the idea that it was a lack of domesticable plants.

Nor were they physically close enough to any settled culture to trade domesticates.

That’s just nonsense. Australians have been trading domesticates with other cultures for at least 4, 000 years that we know of, and the truth is that there has probably never been a year when such trade wasn’t engaged in. We know that domesticates were traded 5, 000 years ago because we have the fossil remains: we call them dingoes but they are just a Malaysian dog breed. And we know from the distribution and genetic drift of various parasites that these domesticates were regularly traded both ways for millennia. In addition to dingoes we know that Macassans brought pigs and domestic rice to Australia and propagated them here. We don’t know how long his went on but there’s no reason to assume that it was less than 1, 000 years. Human beings of both groups also travelled back and forwards between Australia and Indonesia/Malaysia so the practice of agriculture was well known within Australia.

The complex and highly efficient knowledge system of the Aboriginal cultures was extremely effective in enabling them to live very well in the variety of environments across this massive country. I guess there was no imperative to settle.

The knowledge of Australians was neither more nor less comprehensive than that of any other HG group anywhere else in the world and was no better able to allow them to live. Nonetheless people everywhere else found an imperative to settle despite having this same knowledge.

@Jerseyman

… many rain-forest natives in South America … have adapted well enough to their environment not to need to change it or themselves as well.

Cite! Seriously, name one South American rainforest group that doesn’t practice slash and burn farming? The fact is that humans can’t live in rainforest. We’d starve to death if we tried. To live in rainforest environments we need to clear the forest so that we can produce enough food to simply stay alive.
As for why Australians never developed agriculture, Flannery’s explanation is the only one I’ve heard that makes sense. In brief, Australia has a very unreliable climate, much more so than anywhere else in the world. Normal climate consists of several years of drought terminated by floods, followed by maybe 5 “average” years before the droughts return. It’s impossible to establish agriculture under those conditions. The English imported agriculture, but it still failed often enough that the populations was dependent on food exports. Agriculture only became viable in Australia when it became practiced on a wide enough scale that catastrophes that wiped out thousands of square kilometres of cropland could be counteracted by food imports from unaffected area.

You can’t establish agriculture in that manner though. The first people to try agriculture would have seen their food supply destroyed by the first drought or flood and had no recourse but to return to a HG lifestyle, with the concommitant starvation if the population had increased in the interval.

IOW its’ not because of alack of available domesticates or the people having different needs to every other place on the planet or the paucity of the soils. It’s simply because to use agriculture in Australia you need a large population with well established bulk trading networks. But you can’t have a large population with well established bulk trading networks until you are already practising agriculture. Catch 22, and so agriculture never developed.

[lynne-42]

@Blake

Which isn’t even remotely true. Australia has wild representatives of rice, millet, teff, taro, Macadamia, Terminalia, sunflower, nightshades, grapes, banana, numerous legume species and a plethora of other genera that have been widely domesticated elsewhere. …
Any claim made that Australia lacks domesticable plant simply isn’t based on fact.

I am more than ready to accept what you say, if you can show where an Australian indigenous species was domesticated elsewhere as a crop for establishing agriculture. Being able to domesticate after agriculture has been established is a different situation entirely. Same species - not genus, not general group. Some species are much easier to domesticate and thus expand into other crops. I would not be surprised by such a crop, especially taro. But this is not an area I know well. I am looking at cross-cultural generalisations in hunter-gatherer knowledge systems, so don’t go into the details of any given culture. Just to look at this issue, across all the Australian Aboriginal cultures and environments, would be a life time’s work! You can’t generalise as if they are a single culture.

@Blake

That’s just nonsense. Australians have been trading domesticates with other cultures for at least 4, 000 years that we know of, and the truth is that there has probably never been a year when such trade wasn’t engaged in. We know that domesticates were traded 5, 000 years ago because we have the fossil remains: we call them dingoes but they are just a Malaysian dog breed.

I don’t call dingoes a farming domesticate. No question dogs were part of the culture, as they are across the world.

@Blake

We don’t know how long his went on but there’s no reason to assume that it was less than 1, 000 years. Human beings of both groups also travelled back and forwards between Australia and Indonesia/Malaysia so the practice of agriculture was well known within Australia.

How interesting. I need to look at that more. I remember vaguely reading something along those lines. I am happy to sit corrected on that. Can I have a cite?

@Blake

The knowledge of Australians was neither more nor less comprehensive than that of any other HG group anywhere else in the world and was no better able to allow them to live. Nonetheless people everywhere else found an imperative to settle despite having this same knowledge.

This is where I do have expertise. I did not claim it was more or less comprehensive than others. Nor would I. My studies show that hunter-gatherer groups world wide have extensive complex knowledge systems. The implications of this has not been recognized, however - but that is another topic. Clearly the Australians were more successful than many other h-g groups, in that they survived for so long - longer than any other continuous culture (that doesn’t mean the culture didn’t change). Maybe you have some other definition of successful, which is fine.

If you look at Yoffee’s recent work on civilizations, you’ll see he’s really into the fact that most are flakey and shot-lived, especially city states and bigger civilizations. I am reporting from a talk he did a few weeks ago, so can’t give a cite easily, but Norman Yoffee is an expert in this field.

@Blake

To live in rainforest environments we need to clear the forest so that we can produce enough food to simply stay alive.

For the Baka pygmies, they say it is exactly the reverse. The slashing of the forest is destroying their natural diet and lifestyle. Cite: http://www.pygmies.info/

@Blake

As for why Australians never developed agriculture, Flannery’s explanation is the only one I’ve heard that makes sense.

Agree it makes sense. Most of what Flannery says makes huge sense. Happy to accept this is a major factor. But you did say agriculture was established and went on for over 1000 years above. So I am a bit confused about these apparently conflicting statements.

@Blake

IOW its’ not because of alack of available domesticates or the people having different needs to every other place on the planet or the paucity of the soils. It’s simply because to use agriculture in Australia you need a large population with well established bulk trading networks. But you can’t have a large population with well established bulk trading networks until you are already practising agriculture. Catch 22, and so agriculture never developed.

Agree it is certainly not the lack of good soils. I do need proof we have an indigenous species which has been an early domesticate in another culture. I can’t think of any extinct indigenous animal species which is in the same family, even, as a species which has been domesticated elsewhere.

I have learned a lot from your input, Blake, and look forward to learning more.

[lynne-42]

@Blake

The knowledge of Australians was neither more nor less comprehensive than that of any other HG group anywhere else in the world and was no better able to allow them to live. Nonetheless people everywhere else found an imperative to settle despite having this same knowledge.

I tried to avoid the pedant hat, but I can’t. There is no way you can claim other hunter-gatherer groups had the ‘same knowledge’. Nor can you make such assumptions about the comprehensiveness. It just isn’t known. The sort of knowledge I am talking about is the formal knowledge encoded in the esoteric knowledge systems, and these are only superficially documented for a few cultures, some Australian Aboriginal, some chiefdoms, such as Native American and Canadian Indian Nations, and a few others.

None are documented fully enough that anyone could make such a sweeping generalization on hunter-gatherers. The linguists I am working with say it is about 5 years of immersing in the language and culture before you will even get a glimpse of this stuff. Then you will get one or two Songs, out of thousands, in a year.

Some of the Songs of the Dreaming of the Yolngu, for example, have been recorded and explained on DVD, (Ceremony) but far from all. Some never will, because of the restricted nature of the knowledge. I’d be delighted if anyone can point me to resources which give this sort of detail for other hunter-gatherer cultures.

The knowledge can’t be documented in writing because you can’t replicate an oral knowledge system in writing, as the linguists who work in this field constantly note. You can only describe some of it.

So the details of hunter-gatherer knowledge systems is mostly a blank canvas.

[Sailboat]

@Blake

As for why Australians never developed agriculture, Flannery’s explanation is the only one I’ve heard that makes sense. In brief, Australia has a very unreliable climate, much more so than anywhere else in the world. Normal climate consists of several years of drought terminated by floods, followed by maybe 5 “average” years before the droughts return. It’s impossible to establish agriculture under those conditions.

That’s what I was trying to touch on with this:

@Sailboat

Australia is also very dry, but also suffers from less predictable weather than the larger landmasses.

[Animastryfe]

@Quartz

On every habitable continent in the past 12000 years, mankind changed from hunter-gatherer to farmer and empire. Sometimes, they slipped back. Except in Australia: there humans never progressed beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. Is there any explanation for this? Does Australia lack a key resource necessary for early civilisation?

I’m reading (but haven’t finished) Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. In it, he says that just because food production (farming) started independently in a few select areas, does not mean that eventually the other areas would not start farming. I think he said something about the aboriginals in Australia at the very beginning of domesticating some kind of plant in the east/southeast, and if they were left undisturbed for a few thousand years than they may transition to full scale farming.

[Blake]

[quote=“lynne-42, post:23, topic:503209”]

I tried to avoid the pedant hat, but I can’t.

@lynne-42

I am more than ready to accept what you say, if you can show where an Australian indigenous species was domesticated elsewhere as a crop for establishing agriculture.

Does rice fit your criteria?

Just to look at this issue, across all the Australian Aboriginal cultures and environments, would be a life time’s work! You can’t generalise as if they are a single culture.

Nonetheless you just composed a comprehensive post doing exactly that, including stating that all Aborigines had complex and highly efficient knowledge systems and all of them lived very well in the all environments across this massive country. Many, probably most, Aborigines had lives that anybody using this message board would describe as hellish of they had to live it. Regular starvation, enforced genocide, constant warfare, inability to treat even basic injuries and disease and so forth. That is not living well and is not evidence of an efficient knowledge system.

I don’t call dingoes a farming domesticate.

Nor do I You missed the point. What the continual cross oceanic trade in dingoes establishes beyond any doubt is that Australians were physically able to obtain domesticates at any time they in the last 5, 000 years should they have desired them. Your claim that they could not obtain domesticates for other peoples is simply nonsense. Can you possibly explain how Australians were physically close enough to obtain dingoes form other cultures, and physically close enough for other cultures to farm both animals and plants on the mainland of the continent, and yet Australians remained physically incapable of obtaining domesticates form these people?

Can I have a cite?

Since you are doing a PhD in this subject I am surprised that you haven’t read it already: Flannery, The Future Eaters.

[quote]
I did not claim it was more or less comprehensive than others.
[/quote

In which case it could not be the reason why Australians failed to develop agriculture and people in every other continent did.

Clearly the Australians were more successful than many other h-g groups, in that they survived for so long - longer than any other continuous culture

That is either a total is a total non-sequitur. or perfectly circular. If you are defining success by survival time, then you are stating that Australians were more successful than other groups because they were more successful than other groups. Perfectly circular.
If you are not defining success by survival time then the mere fact that they existed along time is not evidence of success and the whole thing is a gigantic non-sequitur.

For the Baka pygmies, they say it is exactly the reverse. The slashing of the forest is destroying their natural diet and lifestyle. Cite: http://www.pygmies.info/

The Baka have never obtained their food from the rainforest. They have always traded high value forest products such as meat, honey and ivory with nearby agriculturalists as well as working as farm hands. Most groups have also always practiced some agriculture for themselves. This trading with outsiders or food is a common method used by humans to exploit rainforests, but the people are in no way obtaining the majority of their food from the rainforest.

But you did say agriculture was established and went on for over 1000 years above. So I am a bit confused about these apparently conflicting statements.

I never said that. I said that people came to Australia and practiced agriculture at times in the past. In the case of the Macassans they would construct trepang processing stations along the northern coast and the women would live there during the fishing season while the men went out fishing and trading with the Australians. When the season ended they all went home. According to oral tradition they often made a gift to the locals of any pigs or grain they had on surplus at this time. Agriculture was never “established”, but it was certainly practiced. So claiming that Australians never had access to domesticated plants and animals and never saw agriculture practiced is provably not true. Agriculture was never established in Australia because it was never praticed by the established Australians. This despite a knowledge of it and access to the starting material. The question becomes one of why.

I do need proof we have an indigenous species which has been an early domesticate in another culture.

Well rice is the obvious one. But you appear to be unaware that most domesticated plant species are not natural, and are polyploids, hybrids and so forth that have been produced precisely because of domestication. Bananas, maize and wheat for example don’t exist in the wild in any form. The wild ancestors are far less amenable to productive cultivation than numerous Australian natives. People put a lot of time and effort into turning really unpromising plants into agricultural crops.

I can’t think of any extinct indigenous animal species which is in the same family, even, as a species which has been domesticated elsewhere.

Well Australia had its fair share of mallards, but I take your point. Australia is a different biogeographic zone so of course it doesn’t share many species with other zones. However to claim that the Diprotondontids, for example, were undomesticable is begging the question. Based on all the evidence we have of them they were social, large, herbivorous and stupid, which should make them ideal candidates. Unfortunately they were also slow and tasty.

There is no way you can claim other hunter-gatherer groups had the ‘same knowledge’. Nor can you make such assumptions about the comprehensiveness. It just isn’t known.

Nonetheless you just stated that the knowledge of Australians was special and the reason why they didn’t need to adopt agriculture. Australians were people, not special in any way. All people adopt as much useful knowledge as they can, and there’s no reason to believe that Australians were any better at this than anybody else.

None are documented fully enough that anyone could make such a sweeping generalization on hunter-gatherers.

Like you did when you said that the knowledge of Australians was special amongst HGs and the reason why they, amongst all the world’s HGs, didn’t need to adopt agriculture?

. I’d be delighted if anyone can point me to resources which give this sort of detail for other hunter-gatherer cultures.

Given that the cultures we are discussing have, by definition, been extinct for 10, 000 years you’re unlikely to find this information on DVD.

… you can’t replicate an oral knowledge system in writing…

You can’t replicate any knowledge system in writing, even written knowledge systems. There’s nothing special about oral systems.

What you can do for any knowledge system is to replicate any actual knowledge contained therein.

[Askance]

Jared Diamond also points out that the Australian aboriginals were the only culture to move straight to aerofoils (boomerangs) and skip wheels entirely.

[Askance]

@Blake

Does rice fit your criteria?

Did you read your own cite? The maps in that PDF are of wild rice distributions, not cultivated. As far as domestication goes it says “Rice may have been introduced to Australia and grown by Chinese gold miners … in the 1850s”.

[lynne-42]

Thanks for starting this thread, Quartz.

Colin Renfrew, in Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind talks about what he calls the sapient paradox: why was there a gap of up to 100,000 years between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the development of agriculture and the subsequent rapid change?

He considers the answer is in cognitive archaeology, not just the material angles we are predominantly talking about here. He suggests a need for human society - we are essentially a very social creature. Maybe the ‘imperative to settle’ I am searching for is to do with the need for some form of social feedback. Maybe - and this is just throwing it out for comment - the hunter-gatherer groups - such as Australian Aboriginal cultures - which had extensive and involved social interactions and inter-tribal bonds, had less imperative to settle? No idea if that stands up to cross-cultural analysis. Nor even if we could do the analysis because we can’t get the comparative data.

I suspect looking for a single answer is oversimplifying. It is probably a combination, because all of the factors we are talking about here were present for a long long time before agriculture, yet it didn’t happen then. There may need to be a combination of factors to trigger settlement and then agriculture to develop. In many cultures, hunter-gathering and agriculture run parallel for a long time.

In Neolithic Britain, the adoption of agriculture was gradual. Julian Thomas, in Understanding the Neolithic, shows the material change which is taken as indicative of the early Neolithic, happening almost instantly in archaeological terms, with the adoption of agriculture being very gradual, over more than 2000 years. Yet there was clearly communication right across the British Isles. It is not a matter of “Wow, this growing stuff is great!” and everyone ditching their spears and starting planting and farming.

Well that’s my interpretation of his graph on Page 16. Let me check if this link will work. OK that gets you to the book. Then search for Figure 2.1, and you will see what I am talking about.

That indicates to me that there are cognitive issues, not just material and environmental factors. Love to hear how others interpret that.

[Blake]

Did you read your own cite? The maps in that PDF are of wild rice distributions, not cultivated. As far as domestication goes it says “Rice may have been introduced to Australia and grown by Chinese gold miners … in the 1850s”

Is this a joke. or have you honestly totally failed to understand the entire thread?

The request was for an example of where, and I quote, “an Australian indigenous species was domesticated elsewhere as a crop”.
Get it? Domesticated elsewhere. Not domesticated in Australia. If those distributions were of domesticated rice then they wouldn’t be an example of rice being domesticated elsewhere.

Do you honestly not understand this, or am being whooshed?

FWIW the wild ancestor of the banana is also an Australian native. First cultivated across the pond in New guinea, it was nonetheless never domesticated in Australia.

So despite having access to (and regularly eating) the two most important wet topical crop species rice and bananas, Australians never developed agriculture. It can’t be attributing to any lack of available species.

[Colibri]

@lynne-42

I am more than ready to accept what you say, if you can show where an Australian indigenous species was domesticated elsewhere as a crop for establishing agriculture.

It’s interesting that while agriculture did not develop in the present day continent of Australia, it did develop in New Guinea, which is part of the same continental land mass, and which was united with Australia when humans first colonized the area during times of lowered sea level. In fact, New Guinea has some of the earliest evidence of agriculture anywhere:

From here.

“People were definitely exploiting plants, including taro, at Kuk Swamp approximately 10,000 calendar years before present,” said Denham. “There is then-evidence of banana cultivation from 6,950 to 6,440 calendar years before present.”

Either the same species or a close relative of one of the species that gave rise to the modern triploid cultivated banana (Musa banksii, or Musa acuminata ssp banksii) occurs in Australia. I’m not sure which species was first domesticated in New Guinea, but it would appear that at least one potential domesticate was present in Australia.

For the Baka pygmies, they say it is exactly the reverse. The slashing of the forest is destroying their natural diet and lifestyle. Cite: http://www.pygmies.info/

The Baka, however, like other pygmies, are not pure hunter-gathers. They trade with and work for their agricultural Bantu neighbors. They are also dependent on agriculture.

[lynne-42]

@Blake

You can’t replicate any knowledge system in writing, even written knowledge systems. There’s nothing special about oral systems.

What you can do for any knowledge system is to replicate any actual knowledge contained therein.

Sorry, Blake, but you are just too aggressive and deliberately misinterpretting me, for me to reply to all this. I have never claimed Australian Aboriginal cultures are better than others. That would be a stupid claim. They are also not the only hunter-gatherer culture around. Those are the resources I am looking for. How do you judge ‘better’? I said their system may have lead to a longevity and success as hunter-gatherers, and if you want to interpret that as ‘better’ then do so. I just see difference, not better and worse.

The Baka have always worked as farm hands? For the thousands of years they’ve been there?

I have no idea what you mean by “There is nothing special about oral systems.” I have no idea what you mean by ‘special’ in this context. Massively different, though, I will argue. The mnemonic basis of primary orality is so different to literate systems that generalizing across the two is meaningless. There is a mass of literature about the difference between knowledge stored in writing to that in oral cultures.

Blake: “What you can do for any knowledge system is to replicate any actual knowledge contained therein.”

This is just not true. Now we are way off topic for this thread. We’ll just have to agree to differ, unless you want to start a specific thread on primary orality.

[Blake]

@lynne-42

why was there a gap of up to 100,000 years between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the development of agriculture and the subsequent rapid change?

Of course “anatomically modern” only means “skeletally modern”, not necessarily anatomically modern. The “great Leap Forward” only occurred ~40, 000 years ago and before that we have no real evidence of art or clothing or ornaments or all sorts of things we consider human. So it’s entirely plausible that the gap wasn’t 100, 00 years, but only 20, 000 years.

Maybe - and this is just throwing it out for comment - the hunter-gatherer groups - such as Australian Aboriginal cultures - which had extensive and involved social interactions and inter-tribal bonds, had less imperative to settle?

Two masssive problems with that.

Firstly you’ve already acknowledged, there is absolutely no reason to think that they did have social interactions and inter-tribal bonds that were any more extensive and involved than any other HG group. We know for example that stones and shells were being traded across Eurasia in the palaeolithic on trade networks comparable to those used in Australia, so the inter-tribal bonds were probably the same.

Secondly the indigenous people of PNG are Australoids, the same as Australians. Mainland Australians, as you note above, maintained approximately stable cultures for 40, 000 years in isolation.There’s no reason to believe the NG Australoids would have had developed significantly different social networks in the mere 10, 00 between being isolated from the mainland and the advent of agriculture.

IOW for this thesis to be correct we’d need to see Meganesians maintaining stable a complex networks for 30, 00 years before the last glacial maximum, then the mainlanders (and Tasmanians) maintaining them for the next 10, 00 years while people isolated on NG for some reason didn’t. You end up having to invent even more reasons why this happened in order for the original thess to be supportable. Occam’s razor should be wielded at this point.

No idea if that stands up to cross-cultural analysis. Nor even if we could do the analysis because we can’t get the comparative data.

Well we could certainly get some data form the HG peoples of NG. If they have social interactions comparable to those of the Australians we can rule the whole thing out

I suspect looking for a single answer is oversimplifying.

Yes an no. All unhappy families are unique and all that. IOW I suspect that there are multiple reason why agriculture did develop elsewhere, but one single reason why it didn’t in Australia.

There may need to be a combination of factors to trigger settlement and then agriculture to develop.

Yes, but only one needs to be absent to prevent it. And the only one that seems absent in Australia is a reliable climate.

In many cultures, hunter-gathering and agriculture run parallel for a long time.

Not sure what you mean by this. Certainly there are plenty of places whereHG groups exploited marginal environments beside HGS. The Baka are one example, others existed in NG rainforests and on the great plains of North America. But that is easy to explain because the HGS invariably occupy land that can not physically support agriculture.

It is not a matter of “Wow, this growing stuff is great!” and everyone ditching their spears and starting planting and farming.

I don’t think anyone believes that anymore. Agriculturalists win out for two reasons.

Firstly the breed far faster because they have far more food and far more reliable food. They simply expand to occupy all the best land and the HGs are displaced as a result. When you realise that “early” agriculturalists were like the NorthAm farmers and supplemented thir food heavily form hunting and gathering it’s inevitable they will displace HGs even if their is no warfare.
Secondly Agriculturalists are able to assimilate HGs simply because they have something to trade. As a result they trade brides and slaves and they attract young people who want status and they assimilate the HGs by attrition.

It’s not that anybody necessarily sees agriculture as offering great benefits, it’ s more the fact that it simply does offer great benefits if your goal is to produce more people.

That indicates to me that there are cognitive issues, not just material and environmental factors. Love to hear how others interpret that.

You must be signed in to view this page.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Blake

Is this a joke. or have you honestly totally failed to understand the entire thread?

The request was for an example of where, and I quote, “an Australian indigenous species was domesticated elsewhere as a crop”.

Are they naturally occurring species or did they occur as a result of mutation cultivated strains? It doesn’t say how long they’ve actually been present in Australia.

It also doesn’t say whether those particular species are suitable for cultivation.

[Blake]

@lynne-42

Sorry, Blake, but you are just too aggressive and deliberately misinterpretting me, for me to reply to all this.

Yeah, sure.

I have never claimed Australian Aboriginal cultures are better than others. That would be a stupid claim.

In that case I have no idea what you are claiming. This thread is addressing why agriculture never developed in Australia, of all the world. In that context you state that "The… highly efficient knowledge system of the Aboriginal cultures was extremely effective … I guess there was no imperative to settle.

If that wasn’t intended as a claim that Australians didn’t need to develop agriculture because of their knowledge systems then I honestly don’t know how to read it.

I said their system may have lead to a longevity and success as hunter-gatherers, and if you want to interpret that as ‘better’ then do so.

It’s not a case of interpreting it as better. It’s case of interpreting it as addressing this thread.

If it’s not addressing this thread topic it shouldn’t be here.

If it is addressing this thread topic then it is saying that Australians didn’t need to develop agriculture because of their complex knowledge systems, but that the knowledge systems of other HGs did require them to adopt agriculture.

I honestly can not read it any other way. If you would care to explain what you did mean then I will make a bona fide attempt to engage what you meant. But at the moment I just don’t see any other interpretation open that actually addresses the topic at hand

The Baka have always worked as farm hands? For the thousands of years they’ve been there?

As far as we can tell, yes. Certainly for as long as the oral traditions of the Baka and their neighbours go back.

I have no idea what you mean by “There is nothing special about oral systems.”

Special, different, unique. There is nothing uniquely difficult about replicating oral systems in writing that isn’t equally difficult for written knowledge systems.

I have no idea what you mean by ‘special’ in this context. Massively different, though, I will argue. The mnemonic basis of primary orality is so different to literate systems that generalizing across the two is meaningless. There is a mass of literature about the difference between knowledge stored in writing to that in oral cultures.

All perfectly true, but in no way indicative that transcribing oral systems is any more difficult than any other systems.

This is just not true.

Yeah, it is.

[lynne-42]

@Colibri

It’s interesting that while agriculture did not develop in the present day continent of Australia, it did develop in New Guinea, which is part of the same continental land mass, and which was united with Australia when humans first colonized the area during times of lowered sea level. In fact, New Guinea has some of the earliest evidence of agriculture anywhere:

From here.

I agree this comparison between New Guinea and Australia is fascinating and may be a great one for clues as to why some cultures developed agriculture and others didn’t. One of the only examples I know of for New Guinea knowledge documented reasonably well from its original form is the book, Birds of My Kalam Country, which only does the traditional bird classification and associated knowledge, but that links to the way calendars were done for taro ‘gardening’, as it is called there. I’d love to be pointed to more references at that level, but the linguists working on languages there claim that’s about the only one.

I am finding that the role of maintaining the cultural calendar is absolutely critical to the way an oral culture behaves. That is well documented for hunter-gatherers, early chiefdoms and larger states. Some references claim calendars become much more critical in agricultural societies, and hence the power in the hands of those who maintain the calendar. The Kalam people timed the taro planting according to a combination of the position of the sunrise over a particular mountain range and the arrival of the migratory bird, the rainbow bee-eater, from Australia.

By the way, my doctorate is not about early farming. It is on primary orality and the storage of knowledge in traditional cultures, especially hunter-gatherer and chiefdoms. And then, in particular with the way knowledge of natural history is preserved. I am more than happy to be educated on everything to do with early farming. I claim no expertise on it. Knowledge systems change markedly in their methodology with settlement.

[Colibri]

@lynne-42

The Baka have always worked as farm hands? For the thousands of years they’ve been there?

What evidence do you have that the Baka lived in rainforest prior to the development of agriculture by Bantus? They are certainly an ancient group; but they could have lived in savanna or some other environment thousands of years ago. You are making some assumptions here.

[Blake]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Are they naturally occurring species or did they occur as a result of mutation cultivated strains? It doesn’t say how long they’ve actually been present in Australia.

If you are asking how long the ancestors of the plant have been present in Australia, then since before it was Australia. It’s as good a bet that bananas evolved on land that is now part of Australia Australia and migrated out as it is that they evolved elsewhere and migrated in.

It also doesn’t say whether those particular species are suitable for cultivation.

Of course they are suitable for cultivation. That is why they are major food crops around the world. How could they be cultivated by billion sof people if they weren’t suitable for cultivation?

[lynne-42]

@Blake

All perfectly true, but in no way indicative that transcribing oral systems is any more difficult than any other systems.

Transcribing means ‘making a written copy.’ Are you seriously trying to tell me that making a written copy of a written system would be no easier than making a written copy of an oral system? I can’t comprehend where you are coming from. Sorry.

Thank you for what you have taught me. And that was not sarcastic. I am sorry that I have been unable to return the favour.

[Quartz]

Lots of good info here. Thanks, guys.