Not in the Pacific North West, not in the Natufian, not in Incipient Jomon Japan…
The Indians in the Pacific Northwest were technically nomads. Some of them did have houses along the rivers or shore, but they didn’t stay in them all year long. They moved around on a more-or-less fixed cycle based on when various food sources were available. I seem to remember the term “advanced hunter-gatherers” applied to them.
Of course there are always exception to any generality - but in general, pottery is to difficult to make (properly) and to heavy and fragile for serious use by nomads. except for a cooking pot or two, hauling around a dish collection would be heavy - and the trouble with nomads, you have to pack up and carry everything every so often. One could argue that once incentive for nomads to settle and have large quantities of stored food would be a seasonal pause. A major use besides cooking is that it can be sealed to keep vermin out of your food. That only makes sense when you have a large cache of food in one spot, which means you’ve stumbled on a really big herd of something or you have a large field or orchard of something.
Presumably too, it wasn’t that one day a switch flipped on and people stopped wandering. There were probably plenty of overlapping causes that led a tribe or occupants of an area to move less while still managing to eat.
i.e. they learned about the life cycle of plants - early humans weren’t stupid, they’d have plenty of opportunities to see seeds germinate. So they’d figure out to plant some of their gatherings and come back at harvest time… then to come back a bit early to chase away the pests when the crops were almost ripe. To seal some food in clay jars to keep the mice and insects away, and find it when they arrived back. To heat the contents before sealing to dry it out, which would preserve it. Clear a bigger area to plant more crops. Spare time waiting for the crops - build a better roof… And so on…
The Pacific Northwest and similar cultures were lucky in that the food came to them, so they did not need to move around. That perhaps too is a missing piece to the development of advanced and specialized tool-making, what we call civilization - fishing would be an easy source of food. Before the advent of large ships and giant nets, sea life (and river life) would be abundant in many places. Humans obviously had decent sea-faring technology by the time Indonesia and Australia were inhabited, about 50,000 years ago give or take a few millennia. The latest theory is that the interior ice-free land bridge down from Alaska and Yukon to central North America was not suitable for human habitation (no wildlife) and most likely the earliest inhabitants of the Americas originally came by boat along the Pacific rim.
Another interesting question I’ve not heard a good answer for - what’s so special about modern humans? There’s an evolutionary bottleneck for modern humans about 70,000 years ago. about that time, modern humans started out from Africa, spread across the world mingling and or displacing previous human(oid) inhabitants, and were all over the Eurasian continent also by 30,000 years ago. But agriculture only developed in the fertile crescent, Egypt, and China about 10,000 years ago. Yet humans who had migrated from northern Siberia before then (General thought, subject to dispute, about 15,000 years ago) still also developed agriculture not long after settling down, about 5,000 years ago, despite no contact with agricultural old world inhabitants.
If we are to believe Diamond, the major factor was the availability of the right crops, the right proto-plants. yet, we have no precise idea what the precursor to corn was, except that it was nowhere near as productive a food crop as the latest iteration. (Fun fact - modern corn is so dependent on humans, it cannot spread to survive without their help) Was growing early corn really that productive? Was it originally a supplement to a nomadic lifestyle?
This misrepresents Diamond’s thesis which includes external economic and military factors among the list of reasons for societal collapse, and also considers the positive and negative effects of cultural factors. There is no requirement in Diamond’s worldview for ecological factors to be implicated in the demise of any particular society.
Keep in mind that corn (maize) started in Mexico, not the Fertile Crescent.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/selection/corn/
Much of the corn grown these days has been genetically modified so farmers cannot save seed corn from year to year but must buy seed each year from companies like Monsanto.
Thanks, MrDibble. It seems there are plenty of exceptions to the supposed rule, and that pottery is not so unusual among nomadic pastoralists. Would it still be true to say that it is unusual among hunter-gatherers, and that the Jomon case remains an exception?
It’s still relevant, since Mexico is one of the places where civilisation (and agriculture) independently developed.
Not all their food came to them. As I indicated in a post above, they did move around to havest various plants and do some land hunting too. If they had a plant that was good enough to domesticate, I’m sure they would have done that.
As far as I’ve been able to find out, the two main staple plants they gathered were camas and wapato. Wapato is an aquatic plant, growing in marshes and shallow water. Not very domesticable with the tools they had. They did do some horticulture with camas and eventually they may have been able to domesticate it. Don’t know how easy that would have been.
(Missed the edit window)
Wapato could also be this plant which is related to the other one.
I don’t think this is anywhere as true of Mesoamerica and Peru. Central Mexico (around where the Aztec / modern Mexican capital is) and large parts of the South American high plateau have no river access to the sea.
For that matter, there are large parts of Eurasia with a long history of civilization (Central Asia and northern Iran) that don’t have river access to the sea either.
Lest anyone misinterpret this, saving may violate a license agreement or infringe on Monsanto’s IP, but they’re not using technology to make the next-gen seeds sterile.
I will never get this image out of my head. I picture Ma and Pa Kettlerthal sitting on the front porch of their log cabin smoking their corncob pipes!
They also do not breed true, typical for F1 hybrids. From Wikipedia:
“In 1960, 99 percent of all corn planted in the United States, 95 percent of sugar beet, 80 percent of spinach, 80 percent of sunflower, 62 percent of broccoli and 60 percent of onions were F1 hybrids.”
Note: 1960.
Those aren’t logs, and that isn’t a cabin.
What is your definition of “civilization”, again? If all it takes is to arrange trees for a purpose, then beavers are civilized.
I think so, the San didn’t make any (they used ostrich shells instead) But then again, the Jomon *were *sedentary not nomadic. And they likely based their pottery on mainland precursors (China) so I don’t think it says too much about the evolution of civilization as a whole. Anyway, the Jomon cultural stage who were HGs were *not *civilized. Yet. So even as an outlier, I think it’s safe to say pottery isn’t a mark of civilization.
Right you are. Bt hybrids went commercial in the 90s, but the issues/features of seed saving for f1 hybrids are much older.