h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just adding link to a new report which suggests that farming may have started in the Golden Crescent as early as 23,000 years ago. If true, this is a fascinating new piece of evidence which indicates that farming really did develop over very long timescales.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3826731.stm

Woodpigeon

That doesn't surprise me all that much, 10 000 years seem rather little considering that to people who gathered wild plants the idea to influence population density would come naturally, wouldn't it? For years now archeologists keep finding older and older food stashes. If one couls extrapolate from change of natural conditions, one would probably find still more. And a lot must be under water, what with rise of the sea level after the ice age.
Hello to Cork again!

Hello Delicia! Good to hear from you - have you been back to Cork since we last spoke?

You raise an interesting question - I guess the idea of increasing population densities of wild plants in one area would be obvious, but would it have been so if people had to follow the annual movements of large animals across vast areas of land? The theory often presented is that the rise in farming co-incided with the decline in large animals at the end the last ice age. Obviously its a bit more complex than this.

Woodpigeon

No I haven't been to Cork since, and am gettin serious withdrawal symptoms. If you get to Coal Quay, step into Dennehy's and drink a pint o' Murph's for me, will ya!

The idea that agriculture derives from a shortage of game doesn't sit well with me. For one, it seems that numbers in nomadic people are fairly stable, as women have long breaks between children, for obvious practical reasons, so the pressure on animal populations shouldn't increase. There were lots of large animal species dying out at the end of the ice age, that's true, but did the quantity of meat on the land decrease for that? If one species dies out, another takes the niche, so i would expect an increase in deer, for instance, way easier to hunt than a mammooth too.
The incentive for keeping animals in my opinion would be that it's the easiest way to acquire a more secure meat supply, same reason really as growing crops.

The common idea is that nomadism means people wander sort of haphazard, but that is mostly not the case, they have very specific routes leading through their territory, and they go to the same places each year. And some do sow in spring to wander back in autumn for the harvest. They can't protect that crop in the meantime though. And there is an interesting special form of nomadism, where only the men wander with the animals, while the women stay in one place and...work the fields.

Yerra girl, you haven't lost the Cork accent, like!

It seems logical that people would do exactly what you describe, but what most research seems to indicate is that sedentary farming practices seem quite recent. Even 20,000 years is recent given that modern man has been moping around for at least 100,000 years. I share with you some bewilderment why this would be the case, and maybe it is just as you describe: the fact that so much evidence has been lost and submerged. There is no doubt that the Fertile Crescent was the perfect place for it all to start, but even still the right conditions for farming to begin would have been around for a long time before 10,000 years ago also, I would think.

Another idea, and this is more a hypothesis than anything, is that if sedentary lifestyles did predate the 10,000 year threshold, they must have been on a relatively small scale. What seems apparent is that once large-scale sedentarism took hold, society began to change at an exponential rate to where we are today.

I've always liked the Irish pronunciation of English best for some reason, and therefore am no end delighted bein' accused of an Irish accent, which sometimes happens. Although there was a buddy who always had me say "I'll be back" just to piss himself with mirth, so there must be plenty German accent left.

"What seems apparent is that once large-scale sedentarism took hold, society began to change at an exponential rate to where we are today."
You're dead right there, i sometimes forget to account for that im my zest. thanks for reminding me!

So where was the threshold, at which the exponential development began? Which exactly is the causality chain there? When people begin settling in villages, is it inevitable that there will be towns someday? It seems so, as settled agriculture always produces a surplus of food and people?
Or maybe the exponential development shifted away from technology and economy to a different field, and then looked like stagnation to us technologically minded Europeans, China comes to mind?

What where the climatic conditions 50 000 years ago, was the Fertile Halfmoon fertile then? I ask you, for i don't know at the mo.
If it wasn't the Near East, was there a different fertile area? Was it the place where those people came from who arrived in Australia about 50 kyears ago, and most probably in South America too? Nice area of speculation openin' itself up, before you know I end up with Atlantis or the Antarctic civilisation. Well Däniken is still worse, a lot worse, so that should serve as my redemption.

But the oldest pottery in the world is about 25 000 years old, and was found in Europe, Slovakia to be precise, and pottery implies settlement and agriculture, in my opinion, what you think? Nomads usually have wooden and leather and bark vessels, for obvious reasons. Was the pottery method evolved in that place, or did it come from Africa with the rest of the humans? Is the prize question, what?

I think the fact that there was technology much earlier than 10,000 years ago is undisputed. There are implements dating back 70,000 years I think. Hunter gatherer societies had the ability to make things like arrow-heads, ornaments, pottery and food, but only on a very small scale. People were good at lots of things other than finding food, but there were few specialists, if any.

Because of the way exponential curves work, things tend to start very slowly, almost imperceptibly, at first. So it would be very difficult - impossible even - to define the exact threshold. Everybody would be right! Casual gardening co-existing with hunter-gatherer lifestyles might have gone on for thousands of years with relatively small changes taking place the whole time.

I'm not sure if surplus immediately follows sedentarism - an example would be Ireland in the last century, where farmers grew just enough potatos to feed themselves and their families. Most early farming would probably have been subsistence farming of this type. Big efficiencies would have to be created before surpluses would start to appear.

As to your question about the fertile crescent - wow, no idea. 50,000 years ago would have co-incided with the previous warm-spell, wouldn't it? It could possibly have been something like today - a rather barren area.

The thing that makes the Cresent special was not simply its fertility, but the range of animals and plants suitable for domestication, ie. sheep, goats, wheat, barley etc.. Most animals and plants are not at all suitable for this.

Gets you thinking, doesn't it?

oh i wasn't saying the hunter gatherers couldn't make pottery, only if they lived as nomads, then it would be a quite hazardous method to keep things, not to mention weighty. That's why i think pottery belongs to settlements. Unless it was used to hiding stores, bit in the way of the bushmen storing water in eggshells...

I wonder now, might the surplusses have started appearing in some locations with the ongoing selection of foodcrops? At the start these varieties were no more than edible weeds, but there was of course a gradual improvement of yield...so one might look at the foodcrops of an area and extrapolate from the development of pre-green revolution) varieties the age of agriculture in a certain area ... you've given me an idea there!

You see there are some crops that have primary genecentres in Africa and secondary in India (cotton), and what's more weird, vice versa, some barley types i think! Btw, there are ancient cotton varieties in the Americas as well, i don't think anybody knows exactly how those got there.

The reason why i think we can still glean a lot of history from agriculture is that i have the impression, that very few historians ever bother with looking at agriculture, mostly seenm to look at towns! This is dashed interesting, in fact i've spent many waking hours wondering how much water our current ideas of history hold.

It's a real hot topic at the moment, so I guess there's a real likelihood that in 10 years or so from now, we will have a much changed picture of what the circumstances were.

Have you read Jared Diamond? It's an incredible book - there's so much in it you could write a hundred EG entries on all of the topics he discusses in it. His main thesis is that it is geographical differences rather than racial differences that have given rise to the huge inequalities in the modern world. He spends a lot of time on the agricultural revolution.

No I haven't read anything of him, i'll look out for that book.
But to be fair, anyone who were to find racial differences at the bottom of anything, wouldn't be able to publish it, no matter the quality of his her or it's data. I doubt that even a black woman would get away with that.
But I'm really holding my breath about the human pre-history, look at how the history of the settling of the Americas is currently being rewritten. The way the study of that has been going over the last couple of centuries might serve as indicator how much we mightn't know or simply "know" all wrong about the histories of other people. Our own for instance. I for one can't wait to see that indo-european thought construct demolished. Care for a wager, maybe?

>> I for one can't wait to see that indo-european thought construct demolished

Sorry D, I'm not sure what you mean. What is this thought construct?

the idea that European originate from a sort of Völkerwanderung of a people called indogermanic that came from the area of India and pushed out (what an euphemistic term)the original inhabitants, whoever those were suposed to be, esquimeaux? The linguists are the worst, with their insisting that the word for bread is the same and that's supposed to be the proof.

I'm not denying that there might have been a migration to Europe from the East, there always have been such events, till rather recent times, and vice versa. But to think they came in such masses they wiped out all the original inhabitants is in my opinion nonsensical.
Well at last there is a rather little know study, that shows that about 70 % of Europeans are related to those jolly ancient potters in Slovakia.

Don't mind me, nor my somewhat regrettable choice of words, that's a little crusade of mine.

Ah, I got ya. A lot of the gene sequencing projects on the way at the moment might show up some big surprises, then.

I'm off home now - I'll catch up with you tomorrow!

What's most amazing is that in many places in America and even Australia they keep finding bones that apparently have no genetic relationship to anyone living there today. America I wasn't a bit surprised, but Australia i had thought the issue clear.

I wasn't aware of this: do you have any links? I heard some reference to the discovery of cocaine (derived from an American plant) in an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus but I'm not sure how true it is. There's a lot of people making good money from the misreading (deliberately or not) of environmental data, and coming up with fantastic conclusions.

I tried to read one of Hancock's books but I just found it rather barmy.

I have a friend who dotes on Hancock, she keeps me informed about those theories, so i don't have to buy those books, thank goodness, because i think most of it baloney, but on the other hand one must keep informed.
And there are cases like Robert Graves, whose books on Claudius i think the world of for research and lucidity, so what am i to make of his White Goddess? I honestly don't know.

About the genetic evidence and newest archeologial finds I only saw it last week in a television broadcast from one of our 3rd programs, which are channels dedicated to science, education, arts, movies that some might consider highbrow, and absolutely no commercials, very restful. I had heard about the finds in South America of a skull resembling the aborigines of Australia, and i heard there were a few descendants still in Fireland until the beginning of the 20th, but other finds they mentioned in the Americas i had never heard of despite searched high and wide for a long time.
What's very confusing is that apparently radiocarbon years are apparently somewhat longer than astronomical years, and that leads to a terrible confusion in publications how old something really is. It seems 12000 RCY are something like 14 k AY.
When i come back from my hols in two weeks time i intend to start another in debth research, and you'll be welcome to all i find.

That would be great D, thanks. As you can see I am fascinated by this, even though it is way outside my comfort zone as it were. I have just dug up some stuff on the discovery of cocaine (and nicotine) in those mummies. Its worth a read:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/webcourse/lost/coctrans.htm
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Entomology/courses/en570/papers_2000/wells.html

About RC dates - don't they have a pretty accurate way of correlating these to true dates, given corroborative dating techniques such as dendrochronology? But you are right - I have done a few entries in H2G2 on old quaternary events, and I get very confused by the vast differences in dates!

The scientists can do the calculation pretty straight, but you know how slapdash journalists are, so if one really wants to know, it might be better to go to the original scientific paper each time. Hello back!

Hello again!

Apropos of nothing, I have just seen that a major ocean research project has just concluded off the coast of Ireland - they have found cold-water corals, large gas-hydrate reserves, canyons and all sorts of stuff - I must check the link. Interesting stuff!

Woodpigeon

Thanks for the links, btw, i never knew what to think of that story, but unable to miss it out of hand. Seems pretty consistant to me, to find coke AND nicotine. It does all tie in with some of my pet theories about a more continuous exchange with the Americas.
Cold water corals, fascinating, ain't it! If you have good link, hand it here, please! The hydrate is supposed to be a bit of a timebomb I heard. In comparison to the greenhouse effects that might have, humanities efforts might pall. And maybe will one day.