Posted on 05/23/2016 4:55:48 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
"The Spaniards were much impressed with the productivity of manioc in Arawak agriculture in the Greater Antilles," historian Jonathan Sauer recounts in his history of crop plants. "[A Spanish historian] calculated that 20 persons working 6 hours a day for a month could plant enough yuca to provide cassava bread for a village of 300 persons for 2 years."
By all accounts, the Taíno were prosperous -- "a well-nourished population of over a million people," according to Sauer. And yet... lacked the monumental architecture of the Maya or the mathematical knowledge of the Aztec. And most importantly, they were not organized in the type of complex, far-reaching, hierarchical social structure that is considered one of the hallmarks of civilization and was far more widespread in Europe and Asia...
...the staple crops associated with less-advanced peoples -- like manioc, the white potato, the sweet potato and taro... are superstar crops, less demanding of the soil and less thirsty for water. These plants still feed billions of people today.
Now, a provocative new study suggests the fates of societies hinged on a subtler problem with these plants. And if it's right, it could dramatically complicate the popular theory of the agriculture-driven dawn of civilization that has appeared in textbooks for generations...
It's not that grains crops were much easier to grow than tubers, or that they provided more food, the economists say. Instead, the economists believe that grains crops transformed the politics of the societies that grew them, while tubers held them back...
But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I’ve had a professional relationship with the WPGA (Wisconsin) and, I can say that, I can’t taste the difference.
Michigan apples, OTOH, are quite special.
But potatoes aren't edible unless they are heated to high temperatures. Does this mean we have to give up potatoes altogether?
Same here.
We all gotta die from something. Unless Jesus returns first.
French fries are worth a little risk.
On a practical note, potatoes can be stored for months. I tried this last fall, as an experiment, and kept some for 5 months. They could have gone longer, I think.
You can eat them raw, they’re just not as good.
It also ignore the role of seasons in middle latitudes. In climates with long cold winters people are forced to plan ahead. They have a limited time to do everything they need to do to survive half the year of winter and early spring when nothing much is available to eat. They have to harvest and store large quantities of not just crops, but fuel and fodder to get them and their livestock through winter. They have to slaughter most of their livestock, only keeping the best animals for breeding. They have to prepare and store that meat by salting, smoking, drying or pickling it. And if they don't they die. That demands a level of planning and organization that isn't there if food is available to harvest all year round, and the weather is always moderate.
Vast amounts of grain would create a more complex society than rotting potatoes.
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True enough but then you’d need pyramids to store all that grain.
Diamond isn’t wrong about everything. There’s a lot of good info in his book, although there is a complete lack of footnotes as to where he gets his “facts”. And of course it works both ways, environment determines culture to a large degree (see my post above). But some of his conclusions are dubious.
“On a practical note, potatoes can be stored for months. I tried this last fall, as an experiment, and kept some for 5 months. They could have gone longer, I think.”
I store the potatoes out of my garden. All that’s remaining from last year’s crop has now sprouted and will be planted back into the ground (hopefully this week).
Eat healthy, exercise, die anyway.
instant mashed potatoes have seriously improved over the years ...
I’ve heard that.
How do potato farmers manage when using the same fields year-after-year?
Gosh, you sure take the fun out of going to the Fair...;-)
-JT
The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen.
Root crops, on the other hand, don’t store well at all. They’re heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times.
interesting proposition that grains advance a people but tubers hold back....... but they seem to miss what I think would be the obvious reason....
in describing grains how it can be stored and transported they’re describing something that’s inherently economically “liquid” like cash.... versus the the tubers
To have of your crop “liquid” with condensed value for trade has driving a lot of things
consider the Whiskey Rebellion which was the farmers then took their grain and concentrated the value into something simpler the transport and store which was alcohol... and that drove government taxation
One of the big problems imho with their whole premise is, the cultures which rely on tubers for much of their food supply, while they are settled in one place, have for the most part never developed writing, or those who have, are yet undeciphered for the most part -- IOW, there's a lack of data regarding how long they've lived there, whom they'd displaced/annihilated, and from whence they'd come.
One could as easily argue that the grain-growing civs are mostly riverine (rather than sprouting on islands or at high altitudes like Peru), which mitigates in favor of grains vs tuber crops, and the culture got started in the same spot much, much earlier, and had time to develop, for example, writing (some writing systems seem to have arisen from a need to keep track of property boundaries, ownership, etc, and then taxation).
Cultures relying on tubers never had either necessity (staying in one place, or property boundaries, as the nutritional output is more dense, and less land is required). If anything tuber storage is much simpler, it just remains in the ground until mealtime today or next quarter. Grain requires more land, and more time for that matter (if one could live on radishes, those go from seed to snack in 30 days; right now I've got a field ouut back of still-immature winter wheat, planted late last fall, and probably to be harvested after nearly a year after planting), and that land has to be kept under control.
IOW, I think the researcher may have benefitted from some conversations with farmers.
Well said.
It has to do with the soil — Idaho is known for potatoes, but as a percentage of the total, I believe they’re a bit short of arable land. Granitic grit in the soil may be of benefit?
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