Archaeologica.org

Beagle wrote:Most US consumers don't know it. GM foods comprise at least 25% of the food we currently eat. Honestly, FM, I'm not kidding here. These foods have been trickling in for 10yrs. now. The agribusiness giant, Monsanto, is the Corp. most responsible for it.

I confess, Beagle, I didn't know it was that big of a percentage. The thing that bothers me the most, I feel is the economics of the products. These are not being introduced to fulfil a need, but rather a profit motive, i.e. higher yields per acre. One thing is certain...my grocery bill has not gone down any. I don't think the business is evil, willing to sacrifice health for profit, but I do think caution is in order considering all the health problems americans are experiencing with no clear cut reasons why.

My sentiments exactly.

About the beginnings of agriculture..........

I keep on seeing a mindset, or assumption, that agriculture is simultaneous with, and limited to, the Neolithic.

Not that I would do anything to upset Das Klub,

I will now innerduce the subject of Paleolithic Agriculture.

Hypothesis:

From the earliest days, the survival of H.e depended on maintaining an energy surplus; the old "food, shelter, warmth" adage.

Many of these peoples seem to have followed a seasonal migration route linked to the availability of primary food sources, fish, mammals, birds, molluscs and definitely plants, to name a few. The image of the mighty mammoth hunter subsisting on mammoth meat only is a fallacy. These folks, like us, were omnivores bent on creating an energy surplus any way they could.

So.

Early spring, 28,000 BC, while breaking down the winter camp for the journey to the salmon camp on the river 50 miles away, somebody finds a bag of grass seed gathered the previous autumn buried in the corner of the shelter. The seed doesn't look so good, but the bag does, so the seed is taken outside and unceremoniously shaken out of the bag.

Upon return to the winter camp the next autumn, the same person finds a fine stand of grass laden with seed, where he or she shook out the bag.

An "aha" moment, which in my opinion crystallized like a supersaturated solution, in an instant; that you could do this with any seed.

Mind you, this process could have been going on for the last 50k years with nobody the wiser. There is simply no "archaeological" evidence in the conventional manner. Because it is agriculture without "agricultural implements". You don't need a tractor to successfully plant seed and harvest the resulting crop. The wordwide practice of winnowing seed by beating on the pile with a stick and throwing it up into the breeze to separate the lighter husks from the heavier grain would be almost impossible, archaeologically, to prove. And as for eating the food, grinding the grain is unecessary.

The closest timorous hypothesis seems to be, "Well, maybe paleolithic peoples collected and ate plant foods on an opportunistic basis."

Bullshit. These people were smart, and had a hell of an energy bill to pay every month, only getting worse in the winter when they HAD to have built up an energy surplus of foods to survive. I hypothesize that they also utilized, planted, and stored grains, nuts, vegetables in the same highly organized manner in which they hunted.

Thoughts?

john

Hi John,
In my opinion, there is a semantic issue involved; i.e. farming is not necessarily taking advantage of the cause and effect relationship between seed on the ground and emergent plant growth. Farming, or agriculture in general, is more systematic, and based upon some fundemental knowledge of the principles which contribute to plant growth. Specifically, good soil, water, sun and nuturing to prevent birds, rodents, and herbivores from destroying ones chances of success.

I would be more inclined to believe, early humans maintained domesticated animals long before systematic farming took place and these animals were utlized for milk, cheese, meat, clothing, and the variety of other purposes they continue to be used for today. And animal husbandry and maintenance is a form of agriculture.

The thot that struck me, was when someone observed that the Greenland ice cores show that the climate varied so severely, and so often, that by the time hominid interaction affected the characteristics of a plant, the ice came back and everyone had to move on.

Perhaps some one will enlighten us on the evolution of rice & maize. But in Anatolia, 12,000 years ago, a garden of Eden emerged. Lake Tuz was 50-100 times larger, full if glacial melt water, and became a wintering grounds for myriads of Siberian Waterfowl. So hunters came to the lake.

Nomads, who always run stock from Iraq up thru the corridor between the Black & Caspian in summer, then back in the winter, had, by then alfready created over grazing problems and desertification. Some found the high plain of Turkey had high summer pastures in the Taurus mtns, and then winter on the grasses and marshes around the lake. A seasonal trip of 1500 miles shrank to 50. They musta loved it.

It was the einkorn still growing in the Taurus mtns, that came down in the rumens of the livestock that became wheat. Only *this* time, the climate stayed stable until a period of drought near the end of the 7th mil. But by then, people had already taken livestock, wheat, swine, and other plants north into Europe where the rain was more reliable.

And you can see from the Greenland Ice Cores, how the climate has been much more stable since that 12kya end of the ice age. The mini-ice age of European history was a minor blip compared to the real Paleolithic thing. No wonder agriculture wasnt gettin anywhere.

But also. in "the Children of the Ice Age", Sass argues that the climate shifts broke up communities into small isolated gene pools, and this produced *hominid* evolution.

Interesting find in China.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/n ... 7rice.html

Stone Age Chinese began cultivating rice more than 7,700 years ago by burning trees in coastal marshes and building dams to hold back seawater, converting the marshes to rice paddies that would support growth of the high-yield cereal grain, researchers plan to report today.

They grew rice in seawater?


I just post 'em.....I don't write 'em!

Sounds very unlikely doesn't it? Even if they got rid of the water the ground would be poised with salts.

Dams that kept out the high tide'd be useful.
A spring flood allowed to flow over a paddy would kill all the weeds. That was a big deal in the time before herbicides.

True DB, but based on the Dutch experiences it takes some time to flush the soil of the salts before you can get a crop off the ground.

Using data from the site, it is possible to extrapolate a timeline back to the first attempts at domesticating rice, which would have occurred about 10,000 years ago, said archaeologist Li Liu of La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, who was also not involved. That is contemporary with the development of agriculture in the Middle East.

From this quote it seems pretty obvious that worlwide agriculture started (resumed?) right after the Younger Dryas event.

Also, the article says that this site was found at the mouth of the Yangtze river, and at that time sea level was still much lower. So it may be that the soil was not very salty.

(resumed?)

I bet Hancock would agree with that!

Someone forgot to tell these farmers, sea water poisons the earth.

http://www.championtrees.org/topsoil/Tsunami.htm

I'm not sure why, Monk, but the seawater contributed to bumper rice crops in the link you posted. That's interesting.

What's the natural history of Rice Beag? Is a marsh grass for example?