Posted on 04/06/2019 11:55:47 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The reason that humans shifted away from hunting and gathering, and to agriculture -- a much more labor-intensive process -- has always been a riddle. It is only more confusing because the shift happened independently in about a dozen areas across the globe... One theory posits that in times of plenty there may have been more time to start dabbling in the domestication of plants like squash and sunflowers, the latter of which were domesticated by the native peoples of Tennessee around 4,500 years ago. The other theory argues that domestication may have happened out of need to supplement diets when times were not as good. As the human population grew, perhaps resources shifted due to reasons such as over-exploitation of resources or a changing climate...
Weitzel tested both hypotheses. He did this by analyzing animal bones from the last 13,000 years and taken from a half-dozen archeological sites in northern Alabama and the Tennessee River valley, where human settlements and their detritus give clues about how they lived, including what they ate.He coupled the findings with pollen data taken from sediment cores collected from lakes and wetlands, cores that serve as a record about the types of plants present at different points in time.The findings are ... mixed.
Weitzel found pollen from oak and hickory, leading to the conclusion that forests composed of those species began to dominate the region as the climate warmed, but also led to decreasing water levels in lakes and wetlands. Along with the decreasing lakes, the bone records showed a shift from diets rich in water fowl and large fishes to subsistence on smaller shellfish.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
Thanks greeneyes for posting the link over in the weekly gardening thread, it's about time I got off my duff and post the topic though. :^) Sounds like some academics have a bigoted opinion about farming and farmers.
No football to watch.
Yes, it is better to have goals. I think that was discovered by people who were outstanding in their field.
:)
Reason? Farming leads to beer and wine.
There is a LOT of work that went into trying to figure out why.
Seems the things scientists were expecting weren’t the cases sometimes.
I agree that when meat was plentiful they dabbled
And then some said “Hey, why don’t we grow a lot of this in case it gets harder to find meat”
:)
How else are you going to make beer?
I hate eggplant...
Only way to eat it is by making little medallions of them. Entrusting them in corn meal and frying it in a cast iron skillet
Simple. Beer.
Eggplant parmesan, baba ganoush, even those bags of 60 second Indian food, all good. I'm happy to concede that it isn't a taste that everyone likes. :^) Fun to grow, probably the weirdest line of edibles from a very important group that includes eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, and potatos, along with non-foods like tobacco, various other poisonous plants (datura, oleander, nightshade, poinsettia, and various other flowering plants. [example]
Questions not asked: How did early people know what to plant? Where did they get the seeds? How many times did they fail?
Oldest whisky still in the world dating back to 1494 is discovered at a medieval abbey in [tr]
UK Daily Mail | November 28, 2018 | Phoebe Weston
Posted on 11/28/2018 6:26:35 AM PST by C19fan
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3709008/posts
“Bear and fear”... the basis of civilization.
Why not?
I’m going with the “obvious” hypothesis ... people have always been lazy
Gathering plants means walking big distances, which uses a lot of time & energy, yet with no guarantee of finding anything; with agriculture, people knew what they had, had it close-by, and could use that freed-up walking time for other things
Plus, there’s also dangers from wild animals involved in plant searches, which agriculture helped reduce
How did they figure out that seeds are, well, seeds? They were careful observers, probably of their own latrines -- seeds are often sources of food, but sometimes the plant is just eaten whole, and the seeds would be observed to sprout. This fits with my favorite anthropological idea -- that most of our major arts and inventions came from teenaged boys foolin' with stuff, or trying to gross each other out, play pranks, or double-daring each other. And they'd be likely to carve all those naked women images as well.
That’s my wheelhouse...
While the men were out chasing animals, and no doubt trying to bag the largest mammoth of them all - and then getting into fights among themselves about which mammoth was bigger (”Oh yeah - well mine has bigger tusks!!”) - all the while waving their dicks around (again - who’s was biggest).....
The women left behind (and getting paid 30% less than the men, mind you) were peacefully figuring out a way to become less dependent on their brutish male counterparts. During their times of quiet observation and reflection they noticed the seeds that they could plant and the food they could grow.
From those early days of cultivation the women created civilization. Somewhere along there they invented beer, in order to keep the men subdued.
(I like your teenage boy version better!)
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