You are drawing too long a bow for me. We shall have to agree to differ.
I can’t accept your argument because I can’t find any support for it in the literature. I can only find reference after reference that says that trade with the Maccasans dates back 100s of years. Not one that suggests thousands. eg. Peter Bellwood, First Farmers, 2004, p. 34. Nor one that mentions pigs or rice.
You then quote oral tradition as evidence. There is a wealth of literature in archaeology and anthropology which talks about the way to use oral tradition as history, and the risks involved. eg. Vansina: Oral tradition as history. Hiscock, in Archaeology of Ancient Australia, 2007, p. 276, specifically rejects this literal interpretation of Baijini.
We can go on trading cites for ever and I don’t think we’re getting anywhere. It is fine to accept oral tradition literally (as in a literate way), and you are welcome to do so. As my work is under the scrutiny of archaeologists, even though I am not an archaeologist, I need archaeological evidence.
Thank you for fascinating input which has led me to some really interesting material.
OK, now you’ve got me really hooked. I need to do the reading. I am working with a linguist who is working in New Guinea, so will start with him. Thank you heaps!
I don’t think a human herder is seen the “leader”. My impression is that herding generally involves chasing the herd/flock where you want it to go. Herd behavior is important since it keeps the group together. (I suppose having a leader might contribute to this behavior.)
As for emus, they do live in flocks some of the time. There is also a dominance hierarchy in a flock. Example (pdf): “The reaction of the males to humans and their position in the dominance hierarchy were the main factors influencing the speed and effectiveness of their training.”
It’s even possible to make emu chicks imprint on humans. (Source) (Though that might be harder if you don’t have a modern commercial incubator…)
Emus eat grass, but it has to be green/fresh. Emus don’t like old/tough, dry or dead plants. Other than that they are notoriously willing to eat just about anything, including animal droppings.
Besides, eating many of the same foods as humans is not always a drawback. It can be an advantage. Pigs are one of the most common domesticated animals and their ability to eat human leftovers have no doubt contributed to that.
As for collecting food for emus, you wouldn’t necessarily have to provide all their food. You could collect just enough to make it worth their while to enter a fenced off area on a regular basis to get “free food”. (And maybe to keep them alive/around during a food shortage in the wild.) You could also provide a reliable source of water.
Once again you’re begging the question. Aborigines, like almost all HGs, were nomadic. They need to keep things portable because they are not settled. Only after the invention of agriculture could HGs develop non-portable tehcnologies
So in short, aborigines maintained portable technology because the lacked agriculture, not vice versa. And, once again, they weren’t special in this regard. HGs who had non-portable technology can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
You are drawing too long a bow for me. We shall have to agree to differ.
I’ve given you the literature. Yo can not dispute that domesticated animals were traded with Aborigines 4, 000 ybp. And you can not dispute that domesticated plants were introduced to Australia within the last few hundred years. IOW your entire position hinges on a baseless belief that this trade for some reason ceased for millenia and then took up again, again for reasons unknown.
The people who traded dingoes with the Aborigines wouldn’t have been called Macassans. That designation didn’t exist 3, 000 years ago.
If you can’t find at least 50 highly reputable references that Macassans traded rice with Aborigines then you are using the wrong search terms. Just putting [macassan rice australia] into Google scholar returns over 200.
Of course the Macassan introduction of both pigs and rice in Northern Australia is pretty much proven by the fact that the local Aboriginal words are identical to the Macassan.
By definition you are not going to find it.
A few kgs of rice and a coup[le of individual pigs can not leave archaeological evidence. Aborigines had access to Macassan rice and pigs without any doubt. Nonetheless no evidence of such has been found because it was never cultivated in Australia long term. Organic material just doesn’t leave archaeological evidence when it is deposited in small, sporadic amounts. The only way you could possibly find it is if Australians had adopted agriculture, but if that had happened you wouldn’t need to find it.
IOW you re asking for evidence which, if you found it, would contradict its own existence.
Never done any animals handling, have you? You never, ever chase animals if it can possibly be avoided. It tires them out and makes them lose condition. Herding involves gently pointing the animals in the direction you want them to go and preventing them straying. Definitely not chasing.
Yep, Colibri just said that. They form loose aggregates converge on a resource, but that’s not social behaviour. Buttterflies do that too.
Emus can’t survive on grass. that’s the point. Pigs will eat grass too. that doesn’t make them grazers like sheep or geese.
Ahh, no. In early HG societies the concept of “leftovers” didn’t exist, or at least not at a level that would sustain an animal.
Pigs are either fed on surplus agricultural material (which by defintion they can’t have if they are the first dometsicate) or, more commonly in early agricultural societies, they are allowed to roam semi-freely and find their own food.
And how is a pre-agricultural person going to do this with anything approaching a net calorific return?
That’s the trick isn’t it. Patterson drily noted that “When the kangaroos in their thousands die, it’s tough on the travelling sheep”. That goes doubly for emus and humans. If things are so tough that the emus are dying there is no way a human is going to be able to find a surplus of food.
Many (most?) HGs linked myth and legend to landscape locations, many artificially enhanced, which are considered to be a mnemonic technology. Non-portable. You are totally missing the point of my linking orality to portability. I credit that I didn’t explain it, and I won’t bother until I can justify it being relevant to the OP, which I certainly can’t at the moment. It is only this debate which has started me thinking this way.
And I am not interested in a debate on the definitions of ‘technology’. Google Scholar with orality and technology will show you the academic resources which use technology the way I do in this context.
You can cause an animal to “depart” (aka “move”) without starting a panicked flight. Though I suppose “drive” would have been a better word. Either way, the point is that the animals are not led by a trusted human “leader”, they are “pushed”, “chased” or “driven” in the desired direction.
An excerpt from an article on herding cattle: “In cattle that have had no previous experience with herding, the “stimulus” is a person who simulates predator “stalking behavior”, which elicits predatory “avoidance behavior” in the cattle.”
(The same article does say that really tame cattle can be led, but this involves food rewards.)
That’s not what I meant. Emus don’t just happen to end up next to other emus when feeding or travelling in the same direction, they form groups (flocks) with an established dominance hierarchy.
See my previous post for a cite on the dominance hierachy.
I suspect the reason they are sometimes described as solitary or living in pairs is that pairs will move away from the group to breed, and the emu flocks will split up for a while to cover a larger area when feeding.
Cite that emus can’t survive on grass?
But yes, emus are not as effective at eating grass as some other domesticated animals. Fortunately, “must eat the same food as a cow” is not a requirement for domestication.
Not true. HG societies tend to spend surprisingly little time on the hunting and gathering. They can usually afford to gather and/or kill more than they eat. Unless they’re starving they are not going to force themselves to eat everything technically edible just so they don’t waste anything. There’s bound to be leftovers.
(So why don’t they multiply like rabbits and cover the land in people? Presumably malnutrition and periodic starvation plays a big part.)
How do you know there wouldn’t be a net calorific return? Have you tried it?
Anyway, there’s more to domestication that “net calorific return”. Meat is usually a luxury, and people will put in extra effort to get it just because it tastes better. Meat also has valuable nutrients (notably protein) beyond the basic number of calories. Finally, the “emu calories” can potentially be eaten when you really need them.
A human can collect and store food in times of plenty in a way an emu can’t. Especially since the emus do eat some foods inedible to humans. Humans are also better equipped to dig for water. (Emus can survive for a long time on little or no food, but they need water.)
And as I mentioned above, one obvious source of food when things get tough is … emus. You know, the emus you’ve been using to “store” excess food. Keep the best animals alive and eat the rest.
Just to follow up on this, I agree with Blake that higher diversity will probably make it more difficult to locate resources when you are comparing ecosystems, such as rainforest vs forest-savanna ecotone. I was talking about a comparison between tropical forests, in that a monodominant forest such as those found in Africa is going to have less variety in available resources such as nuts and fruits than a more diverse tropical forest would have.
Dude, Colibri is an authority of tropical birds in real life. Good luck arguing with him.
See my previous post for a cite on the dominance hierachy.
:rolleyes:
Between 10 and 16 hours a day on average is spent in finding food and associated activities. I suspect that you, like many amateurs, have misunderstood the oft quoted fact that HGs spend 4 hours a day actually obtaining food. But you forgot to read the rest pf the study where the authors add in the time you add in tool making, travelling etc that are necessary to obtain food and come up with the 10-16 hour figure.
:rolleyes:
Nonsense, the majority of a HG diet is meat. Meta only became a luxury after the adoption of agriculture.
Nomadic HGS do not and can not.
Establishing agriculture in an environment where there is no surface water. :rolleyes:
Uh huh. So your feeding the cats to the rats and the rats to the cats.:rolleyes:
I honestly can’t be bothered arguing this with you. It’s all way too silly to give further consideration.
Emus can digest fiber to some extent, but they lack the dietary specializations present in cattle and some other herbivorous birds. This article says:
It’s unlikely, given this, that they would be able to supply 100% of their maintenance requirements from grass alone, let alone be able to come into breeding condition. Furthermore, chicks would require enhanced levels of protein in order to grow to maturity.
And “eat the same food as a cow” is pretty much a requirement for domestication as a meat animal before the establishment of agriculture. The only animal domesticated before agriculture was the dog, which was primarily used for hunting, and which would have been able to survive on the leavings from kills. The other early domesticates were ruminants and the horse, all of which process cellulose well. Pigs, which are omnivores like emus, were not domesticated until after the development of agriculture.
We know that the emu was not domesticated by native Australians. Blake and I have provided several reasons based on social structure and diet why it would difficult to domesticate under pre-agricultural conditions.
If you think it actually was domesticable, you need to come up with an alternative hypothesis as to why it was not domesticated, since we know this was the actual case.
Let me move the bolding: The request was for an example of where, and I quote, “an Australian indigenous species was domesticated elsewhere as a crop”. Rice is not indigenous to Australia, and to the extent it grew wild here those species were not then domesticated elsewhere. The request was clearly for a plant that originated in Australia, was not domesticated here but was elsewhere. That is, that was a local domesticable food crop that the Australian aboriginals failed to domesticate.
I already gave one in post #31: Bananas (genus Musa) of a species that is the same or very close to one that gave rise to the cultivated one elsewhere are native to Australia but were not domesticated there.
ETA: and I see that Blake also mentioned this example in the post you quoted (#30), which was posted a couple of minutes before mine. Did you miss that?
Boy, that sure showed me. What crushingly logical arguments you have.
Wait, I know…
:rolleyes:!
Ha! Now I’m winning!!!
Cite! Even Google is unable to find a source for your 10-16 hours per day estimate.
People who have actually worked with (sort of) HG peoples do not report that they spend almost all their time on survival activities. There is a fair amount of “laying around” or “playing” going on. If nothing else it is clear that HG societies have free time for songs, dances, storytelling, religious rituals, painting, beadwork and so on.
Besides, getting back to the original issue of leftovers, any real-world example of time use would include time spent on getting food people want and enjoy eating, not just “sufficient calories if we force down everything even remotely edible” food.
The percentage of meat in a HG diet differs from group to group and depends heavily on availability.
It is often a luxury (“something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary”) in that HGs prefer it over other food and will make an extra effort to get it beyond simple calorie calculations. (Example from Australia: “… Aborigines prefer meat over anything else …”)
Your point?
What are you talking about? I didn’t mention agriculture. Emus need water. Humans can find water where emus can’t.
No.
Times are hard. There is less emu food to go around. There is less human food to go around. You kill some of the emus. There is now more emu food for the remaining emus and the humans have more food as well.
Yes it bloody is. Read the bloody reference. "The progenitors of O. sativa are… O. rufipogon and O. nivara… Four Oryza species are reported to grow naturally in Australia. These are … O. rufipogon.
The fucking progenitor of domestic rice is an Australian native species. It has been there since before humans arrived.
Is this really that difficult to grok? Why do people who clearly don’t have a clue feel the need to debate this shit without bothering to read the references?
Bananas form the basis of countless agrarian cultures. Bananas are a wet tropical crop, and wet tropical agrarian cultures often don’t store food to any great degree, instead practicing year round harvest.
And I’m not sure why you’re asking for one, since I’ve never made that claim.
They can and do eat grass though, and it can be an important part of their diet. Cite: *“In autumn, as those foods become scarce, they graze on young grass which sprouts after summer rains.”
*
As far as I can tell the part you quoted only involves fibres (?), and the article points out that this is a “significant level of digestion of fibre”. The conclusion is actually that “[t]he Emu, … , may be capable of gaining a significant portion of its daily energy requirement from the digestion of plant fibre,…”
Add to this that the young grass and grass sprouts emus like to eat contain plenty of nutrients beyond hard-to-digest fibres, and it seems to me that emus may actually be able to survive on grass for extended periods of time. You probably have a point with regards to breeding and chicks though.
However, nobody (or not me at least) are advocating feeding emus nothing but grass. (Though that could conceivably be a long term result of domestication.) Clearly the emu’s ability to eat many different kinds of food in addition to grass (at the cost of optimal fibre-digestion) has been an advantage in nature. I don’t see that it would suddenly become such a huge disadvantage if humans tried to domesticate them in the environment the emus evolved to survive in.
This all seems rather circular.
“Why didn’t the Australian Aborigines domesticate any animals?
The animals were impossible to domesticate.
How do you know they were impossible to domesticate?
The Australian Aborigines did not domesticate them.”
The grass-eating argument seems to be based on similar reasoning. “It wasn’t done so it must be impossible.”
Yes, and I have provided evidence that the social structure-based argument is faulty, and I’m questioning the diet argument.
There are other possible explanations for why no Australian animals were domesticated, such as the genetics or memetics of the Aborigines or the climate/weather in Australia. I don’t have to pick one. I can doubt the claim that Thor, God of Thunder, causes lightning, without simultaneously delivering a thesis on the physics of thunderstorms.
Y’all are claiming that no native Australian animals could possibly have been domesticated by hunter-gatherers. The burden is on you to substantiate that, not on me to prove you wrong.
Agreed, but I was thinking of the climatic problems mentioned earlier. You cannot harvest year round if the crop is not growing. You cannot store bananas against a drought, can you?
Not really. Dominance relationships are not the same as herding behavior.
You have not refuted it in any way.
In other words, you have no alternative hypothesis to present, but are merely arguing for the sake of arguing. We didn’t make any claim equivalent to Thor causing lightning here, but cited valid scientific information. Very well.
No I’m not. I am not claiming that it would have been absolutely impossible, just that there are significant differences in emu diet and social behaviors from animals that were domesticated elsewhere that would have made it more difficult to domesticate them. (I will however point out that even emus have not been domesticated in modern times, that is bred to have substantial genetic, physical, and behavioral differences from wild stock. Emus that are farmed today are essentially wild animals kept in captivity, rather than being true domesticates.) If you want to contend they were domesticable, you actually need to provide a alternative hypothesis why they were not.
As I understood it (?), your argument was that emus could “probably not be as easily controlled during the incipient stages of domestication as true herd animals” because:
“Emu flocks have no ‘leaders’ (dominant animals)”.
“Humans control herds/flocks by taking the leader’s place”.
[1] is not true, and [2] generally isn’t true either as far as I can tell.
If you’ve now moved on to claiming the emus aren’t as … herdy … as “true” herd animals, well, that might be true but you’re going to have to explain how.
(The most obvious problem would be if they scatter in response to a perceived threat instead of herding together. I’ve seen no mention of this while researching emus. One page did say they can sometimes be difficult to drive [no details], but presumably most wild animals are “difficult” compared to animals that have been undergoing domestication for millennia. )
And what would it take to refute it?
(“It” being the assertion that emus are extremely hard to domesticate because of their diet.)
Questioning an unsubstantiated claim is not “arguing for the sake of arguing”. This thread topic is a good example. If Australian animals can in fact be domesticated, then assuming otherwise based on scanty evidence will seriously hamper any discussion about, or research on, why Australian Aborigines didn’t develop a civilization. You need good premises to make good conclusions.
(I entered this thread asking a question: Why does everyone agree that native Australian animals can’t be farmed/domesticated? When you replied to that post I assumed you believed that it would have been effectively impossible to domesticate the emu.)
Domestication is a process. Emus are being domesticated.
Example: " "Most of our breeder birds were hatched from eggs laid on our farm, have been microchiped and their genetics are listed in our computer database for tracking purposes. Other breeder birds on our farm are outstanding egg layers with known, good genetics that were acquired several years ago, from emu farms leaving the industry. We have culled our breeding stock for years, retaining only those breeders that consistently produce large emu eggs and healthy chicks. "
This is happening on farms all over the world. It will probably lead to distinct domesticated emu breeds in a fairly short amount of time.
I am not contending they were domesticable. I am contending that we don’t know if they were domesticable.