California, the Pacific Northwest, the central/northern Rockies. At a guess, this area is at least as large as Australia.
Is biodiversity an indicator of when hunter-gatherer cultures can survive in a given area? Talking to the entomologists working on indigenous use of insects, that is certainly high in the Australian Aboriginal cultures.
My husband is just back from four weeks archaeological survey at Lake Mungo - 45,000 year old site - no lake there for over 10,000 years. The complexity of the archaeological finds is apparently extraordinary, in the use and reuse of the site and of tools. There is no doubt the issues that Flannery raises with rapidly changing climate makes any attempts at agriculture short lived. It is suggested by some working in the field that there may have been many attempts to develop agriculture, but these were ultimately unsuccessful due to the rapidly changing climate. At Lake Mungo, there is evidence of very short term inhabitation periods. Therefore only those tribes highly skilled at adapting to a variety of environments could possibly survive in Australia. Could the knowledge of exploiting a wide biological variety enable them to survive by being constantly mobile?
Is the real question, how did they survive a all, more then why did they not develop agriculture?
Yes, yes, and yes, except it’s “large animals who could have been used for farming and domestication (mostly massive forms of modern mammals) became extinct around 20,000 years ago”. There is no evidence human hunters did them in, that’s just a hypothesis without any supporting documentation.
As had been said- no good grains, no good domestic animals.
Blake, thanks for your postings, very informative.
Everyone seems to agree that (surviving) native Austrailan animals can’t be farmed/domesticated. Why? 
Emus are farmed all over the world. I’ve also seen some talk about farming kangaroos.
The consensus of most scientists working in the field is that the extinction of most of the North American megafauna (which took place mostly around 10,000 years ago, not 20,000), like the megafauna elsewhere in the world except Africa, was in large part due to the effects of human acitivity, whether hunting or other influences. Hunting almost certainly played a significant role.
I doubt emus can be herded effectively, and certainly not by humans on foot. Modern emu farming depends on fencing them in and supplementing their diet with grain. It would probably have been impossible for aboriginals to fence in enough land to support a flock of free-range emus without providing additional food. Modern emu farming is made possible by agriculture; the species probably could not have been domesticated beforehand. The problems with kangaroos would have been even more severe under primitive conditions.
I’m sure herding emus is hard, but surely the same applies to most (all?) animals before they’re domesticated?
And obviously you don’t need grain to feed an emu. You could grow or collect whatever it is they eat in the wild.
Most domesticated animals are herd or pack animals (the exception being the cat). Humans have exploited that social behavior in taking the place of the dominant herd or pack leader, enabling groups to be controlled. Emus primarily travel in pairs (although they may flock when travelling to food). They would probably not be as easily controlled during the incipient stages of domestication as true herd animals.
The benefit of most domestic animals is that they can live on grass, which we cannot utilize, and which is usually in abundant supply. Emus on the other hand eat various plants, fruits, seeds, and insects. It would be quite difficult, and very inefficient, to spend your time going around collecting food for a captive emu, especially since much of its food would be edible to humans.
I did not know that. Who were the agriculturalists they were in contact with for 5,000 years? What are the theories on why the aborigines didn’t catch on? And were there not other societies that required aggressive and/or long-term contact to adopt agriculture? Are the Australian aborigines unique in this?
It stands to reason (IMO) that many did not discover agriculture on their own; that they learned about it from others. I think the necessary information could be exchanged even with only casual contact. In my first post I mentioned trading and conquest as two ways that contact may come about. There are probably others.
I know that agriculture was developed independently by some societies, I just think that some other societies did not develop it on their own; did not have the know-how until they learned it from others. Like in Australia. Except that I did not know that the Aborigines had been in contact with agriculturalists for so long and still didn’t catch on (as I said above). Again-- I wonder why this is?
Off the top of my head I can not name one. But in the part of my post your respond to here I was speaking about “joining the modern world”-- e.g. gaining modern technology–not about living on arable land and not discovering agriculture until the 20th Century.
But it’s merely a hypothesis, not a Theory. (Which is a testable hypothesis back with evidence and experimentation) . No one doubts humans played *some *part, but only a very few think that humans killed all those species by hunting alone.
There are some Australian animals that can be herded, but there are no draft or riding animals.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...8e9fbedc2a60bc
*Pleistocene Extinctions: Haunting the Survivors
Between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, most genera of megafauna (animals exceeding 44 kg) went extinct, including such spectacular animals as mammoths, giant ground sloths or sabre-toothed cats. This Pleistocene extinction has been puzzling researchers for a long time [1]. Several explanations have been proposed, such as climate change as well as direct and indirect human impact — by hunting or deforestation; however, none of those explanations is widely accepted, and different causes may have been important on different continents [1]. Many analyses, however, have focused solely on the extinct species, while implicitly assuming that the surviving species remained largely unaffected by the Late Pleistocene extinctions…
Before humans emigrated from Africa some 60,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world within the following 50,000 years [6], all continents were inhabited by a variety of large animals, ranging from the herbivorous mammoth, giant deer or woolly rhinoceros to carnivores such as sabre-tooth cats and the giant short faced bear and birds like the giant Australian thunderbird Genyornis, to name just a few. However, 10,000 years ago, only about 50 of the original 150 genera of large mammals were left. The extent of the extinctions ranged from nine genera in Eurasia to as many as 50 in South America. Despite extensive research over decades, the reasons for these extinctions remain largely elusive…
However, the situation is more complex on other continents. In particular for the North-American continent there has been an extensive debate about the possible causes of megafauna extinctions [8] and [9]. Given that the key issue is the role of humans, the debate has sometimes been fierce. The views range from an exclusive human responsibility 10 P.S. Martin, Prehistoric overkill: the global model. In: P.S. Martin and R.G. Klein, Editors, Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, University of Arizona Press, Tucson (1984), pp. 354–403.[10] to a total absence of human influence on the extinction of these species [9]. Analyses of island faunas convincingly show that humans have driven species to extinction in the past [1], but it is unclear whether island analyses can be extrapolated to continents, where species usually occupy much larger habitats and come in greater numbers…
Impact on Surviving Species
While understanding the causes of species extinction seems to be complex enough, the picture is further complicated by recent studies indicating that surviving species may also have been affected by the Late Pleistocene extinctions, albeit in rather unpredictable ways. In 2002, Barnes et al. [2] found evidence that a local population of brown bears had become extinct in Alaska some 35,000 years ago and that the region was subsequently recolonised by genetically different brown bears about 20,000 years ago…
As shown for bisons, most of the genetic diversity of megafaunal animals may have been lost at the end of the Pleistocene, even in surviving species [4]. Moreover, most of this diversity seems to have accumulated during the 100,000 years between the last two glacial maxima 130,000 and 30,000 years ago, respectively. Both the genetic diversity and the ecological adaptations of populations may therefore be much more ephemeral than previously believed. While the results by Leonard et al. [5] do not immediately help in deciphering the causes of Late Pleistocene extinctions, they show that the ecological and population changes occurring at that time were rather complex and cannot simply be explained by the survival of some species and extinction of others.*
Your definition of a theory is a bit off, but I’ll let this pass.
But few doubt that hunting played a significant role, and perhaps a critical one. We’ve been through this before in a number of threads. I’ll link to them, if you like, so you can read them over and refresh your memory.
Such as?
Yes, we have. And the debate goes liek this:
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I claim the Overkill Hypothesis (aka “the humans killed them all by hunting”) is discredited. I give cites that show this.
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You reply that Human activity played a major part, and that my cites show this.
Except that I never say that human activity did not play a significant part. What I say is that humans did not cause all the major (mammalian) megafauna extinctions solely by hunting, i.e. that the “overkill hypothesis” is completely discredited.
I agree humans played a part. What is unknown how much of a part humans played and how much simple hunting was part of it. You think both are significant and thats fine. But there is no direct evidence to support this. So, I simply say “it was A part”, and let it go until we have more evidence as to how much of a part human activity played and how big a part hunting played in that role. It is likely that humans played a significant role and that hunting was a good part of that. But we don’t really know.
Do you have any new studies?
Here is a 2004 study:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5693/70
"Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents
Anthony D. Barnosky,1* Paul L. Koch,2 Robert S. Feranec,1 Scott L. Wing,3 Alan B. Shabel1
One of the great debates about extinction is whether humans or climatic change caused the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna. Evidence from paleontology, climatology, archaeology, and ecology now supports the idea that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change drove the precise timing and geography of extinction in the Northern Hemisphere. The story from the Southern Hemisphere is still unfolding. New evidence from Australia supports the view that humans helped cause extinctions there, but the correlation with climate is weak or contested. Firmer chronologies, more realistic ecological models, and regional paleoecological insights still are needed to understand details of the worldwide extinction pattern and the population dynamics of the species involved."
Now, see that I agree with. It sez that humans and pronounced climatic change seemed to drive “the precise timing and geography of extinction in the Northern Hemisphere”.
So far as I know, the “Overkill hypothesis” that “humans caused all the extinctions, and only by hunting” is discredited. Do you agree?
If so- then we only differ in how much each played and even there I am simply saying “we don’t know”. OK?
I never claimed Britain was a hunter-gatherer society before or after the Romans.
I find these ideas really interesting, but I can’t seem to find any record in the academic literature. That could well be my searching techniques. I’d really appreciate cites for 5,000 years of annual trading. And reference to Macassans bringing pigs and dometic rice, propogating rice in Australia, with indication that it may have gone on for 1,000 years.
Thanks in advance. This thread is really expanding my understanding of lots of stuff.
Very small parts of California only,those being the parts that weren’t arable using indigenous domesticated species. In most of California however we find
an increasingly strong circumstantial case for the diffusion of native agriculture westward from crop-growing Indian tribes along the Colorado River to various interior Indian groups of the California deserts prior to Spanish contact.’
and that
The indigenous people had practiced agriculture on a wide scale in precontact times. In their valley… the Pauites are believed to have constructed an elaborate irrigation system around AD 1000.
So Californians were practicing agriculture in all area that they could long before European settlement.
The people of the Pacific Northwest certainly practiced less agriculture because they has less need, but some agriculture was used by all groups on arable land.
Can you name a specific group in the central/northern Rockies that you believe fits the criterion? I’m unfamiliar with the region so it’s a little hard to actually verify if what you sat is correct. If you give me the name of a specific group I can confirm whether they did practice agriculture and whether the land is currently considered arable.
DrDeth, we have repeatedly discussed this subject previously. I am well aware of the Barnosky et al. (2004) paper, since I was the one who first cited it in one of our previous discussions (and have cited it in subsequent threads as well). There is no point in rehashing the arguments here and further hijacking this thread. Your questions have all been addressed in previous threads; I would suggest that you do a search and re-read them to refresh your memory.
No, quite the opposite. High biodiveristy usually means that the food resources are dispersed in the environment and takes a lot of effort to locate. In contrast areas of low diversity have the predictable patterns of food distribution and localised abundances that humans favour.
I can;t see any reason to believe that, and it contradicts the evidence from parietal art, which itself is supported by the scant archaeological evidence.
Rather than some groups being skilled at adapting what we find is that cultures vanish over large areas and area replaced by groups moving in from neighbouring areas. IOW groups appeared to go extinct everywhere from time to time, but because the die-off was never continent wide the areas was repopulated once more favourable conditions returned. In many ways this parrlels the experience of agriculturalists, where the population of large areas can only be mainatained by imports from other areas
We know pretty well how people survived. There’s an abundance of ethnographic studies on movements, breeding customs, diet and so forth. Australia is harsh but it’s not impossible to survive in most areas most of the time.
you won’t find annual scale evidence of trade from anywhere in the world prior to the invention of writing. How could such evidence possibly exist?
The problem of perpetual co-residence is probed more extensively in stories dealing with the Baijini, another class of trepangers. Said by Aborigines to be a more ancient people, they built substantial stone houses and established their rice-based agricultural subsistence in northern Australia. The word Baijini is derived from a Macassarese root meaning “women” whose presence was a defining difference be- tween them and (other?) Macassans.
And again, you’re not going to find direct evidence that it went on for 1, 000 years. These people came, they went, they left no evidence besides their trepang factories. We know that people came to Australia with domesticates at least 4, 000 years ago because we have the fossils. We know that the domesticates were traded backwards and forwards for thousands of years because we can trace the genetics of parasitic mites, including macropod mites, on dogs in SE Asia. We know that people came Australia in the remote past and farmed rice and pigs. We know the same people introduced tamarinds and other domestic plants hundreds of years ago. We know that the same people were still trading here in the20th century and still building factories and still farming.
The questions then become "when, between 2, 00 ybp and 400 ybp do you think this trade in domesticates stopped do you think this trade in domesticates, why do you think it stopped, and why do you think it started again at some later point?
A more plausible scenario is that the trade never stopped during that 4, 000 year period.
This has got me totally intrigued, Colibri. This is only my very early musing, and hence all open to debate. I need to do a LOT more reading!
I am interested in primary orality - orality in cultures which have no contact with literacy. Orality = oral technologies = ways to improve the memorability of knowledge when all you have is innately fallible human memory and any mnemonics that you might employ to help it. It is generally accepted that most, if not all, oral cultures developed orality to some degree or another. It is best seen in rhythmic chants and ceremonies, dances and songs, which encode all sorts of knowledge, usually all intertwined. The pragmatic aspect of this knowledge, my area of research, is the natural history (in particular) linked with social structures, calendars, astronomy, geology, ethics, rules and regulations, land ownership and so on.
The research in orality has almost exclusively looked at the orality/literacy interface and then into computers (secondary orality). Many oral specialists were very reluctant to adopt writing, even when it was readily available. The oral specialists felt that they lost too much of their knowledge, which was encoded in a performance system, because it couldn’t be written down. Hence Plato’s rant against ‘poetry’ in The Republic and debates with Socrates - Plato was referring to orality, not to poetry as we currently write it.
That’s way down the track from hunter-gatherer orality, but I am (slowly) getting to the point! We know that Aboriginal cultures use a mnemonic system very much based on mobility between sacred places over the annual cycle. Although the Aboriginal cultures vary greatly, they do have a commonality in the way knowledge is encoded in the Dreaming, if not the specific content. There is plenty of evidence of long distance trade in knowledge - Songs and even entire ceremonies.
Using landscape locations as mnemonics for knowledge systems is very widespread globally. Could it be that the New Guinea system was less mobile, or had some other factors which made it less resistant to the more sedentary lifestyle essential before large-scale farming can be adopted?
Peter Bellwood, in First Farmers, (which I’ve only just started to read, so may be missing big points), says:
‘According to some authorities, Australian Aboriginal societies also enshrined behavioural characteristics that would have made adoption of a settled agriculture a difficult process. Nicholas Petersen refers to the lack of materialism, need for portability, and the ethic of generosity in Aboriginal society, regarding these as removing any motivation for the development of labor-intensive subsistence patterns such as agriculture.’ (p. 36).
It is that need for portability which, I feel, is linked to the specific nature of Aboriginal orality. I know that New Guinea cultures used songs as well. Virtually all oral cultures did. But how were they encoded and indexed? Did they use something like the Song Paths, which act as a set of sub-headings to the knowledge, and therefore ties the culture to a broader landscape? Or did they have some other method which enabled critical knowledge to be adapted to settlement?
I am looking at ways of tracing primary orality in the archaeological record, but have not looked at New Guinea at all. Unfortunately, or fortunately, my interest in primary orality has taken me in way too many directions.
New Guinea cultures were extremely fragmented. Perhaps a thousand or more cultures existed there; the island has more than 800 languages, I believe the highest linguistic diversity of any equivalent area in the world. The rugged terrain of the interior highlands isolated many groups in their own valleys. This is the region in which early agriculture developed.