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Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

arstechnica.com

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Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#31

Post by adrianratnapala »

Here's enough TLDR so that my comment makes sense: In the tropics, the distinction between agriculture and hunter-gathering less sharp than in temperate climates. Thus early signs of tropical agriculture (from 20-30 kyears ago) pre-date the traditionally understood rise of agriculture about 9 kyears ago).

This confirms my Sri Lankan bemusement at the term "temperate climate". The tropics can be a PITA in many ways, but they have no shortage of biomass. Subsistence gardens abound and are productive. Even more than in other gardens, the issue is less to make things grow, but to stop the wrong things from growing. It's hardly surprising if ancient jungle dwellers long ago to tilted nature's bounty in their direction.

But I do take exception to the somewhat hippy-dippy claim that ..."colonial, industrial societies" came from outside the tropics and tried "to practice monoculture, pastoralism, and urbanism within them." Those "evils" took place in the tropics for thousands of years before western colonialists turned up.

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#32

Post by frankter75 »

zebraflask wrote: post #11
Ologn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, some of the things mentioned as new ideas were discussed years ago. Like the idea that some primitive form of plant domestication may have been happening prior to the agricultural revolution of 9000-10000 years ago.

I hate to break your bubble, there, but the concept of an agricultural revolution was also disproved quite a while ago.

Gobekli tele is between 12000 - 9000 ac

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#33

Post by zebraflask »

frankter75 wrote: post #32
zebraflask wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break your bubble, there, but the concept of an agricultural revolution was also disproved quite a while ago.

Gobekli tele is between 12000 - 9000 ac

That's fantastic for them, I guess. It doesn't mean it was unique. It might just be me, but the idea that ancient peoples were so dumb that figuring out how to grow some plants was a miraculous idea that only happened once in one specific part of the world . . . come on. The ethnocentrism with that idea is glaring.

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#34

Post by Retric »

fsloth wrote: post #27
Retric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure your digging deep enough? I have seen plenty of cases where different fields seemed to share a theme. But, the details always diverged on closer inspection, limiting the value of the comparison. To stretch an analogy stacking blocks seems like you can add the heights, except the weight of the stack deforms them, so addition is misleading.

Human themes (archaeology, art, architecture, urban development, etc) share the commonality of the human. As we learn more about general themes driving our psyche and human groups general themes start to emerge. Of course, the emergent behavior of human societies is really complex. I like Noel Harari's "Sapiens" as he really strives to find the high level themes in humanitys development. IMO, if a topic sounds overtl…

Urban development really is it's own thing dominated by transportation systems, wealth, waste management etc. The complex math is vital and independent from other human constructs. Architecture was often influenced by the tax code, climate, material property's etc so again the details really are important and separate from everything else.

Now, sure the boundarys around a field gets fuzzy and sculpture and architecture are both influenced by the human visual system so there is overlap. But, that's not a shared theme that's D.C. and Baltimore being next to each other and sharing a few suburbs at one end, but not all suburbs.

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#35

Post by mcbits »

Will_Parker wrote: post #7
photon-torpedo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, absolute statements like "the science is settled" are rather unscientific. Good science must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, and leave the door open to being proven wrong.

Every point of knowledge has a degree of certainty or uncertainty around it. It certainly isn't a point that is taught well enough in education. "The science is settled that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old" is a perfectly fair statement, for instance.

The known universe was 13.7 billion years old until a couple years ago. Either way, we're still talking +/- tens of millions of years with 68% confidence. At 95%, the interval is something closer to a billion years. Unless they've tightened it up since I last read about it when the 13.8 figure came out...

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#36

Post by ykler »

zackabaker wrote: post #2

> "Anthropologists are simply realizing that early cities took extremely diverse forms. "Clearly, urbanism is different in different parts of the world, and we need to be more flexible in how we define this," he explained. The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and urbanism can be very difficult to determine." It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural histo…

It has happened in the history of science that people found an elegant theory unifying seemingly disparate phenomena. Or, while learning a subject, it may seem really complicated and confusing, and later, once you have learned it, it may seem simple. But I'm not sure if you would count either of these examples. Can you provide a description of what a counterexample might look like even if it is made up?

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#37

Post by imesh »

RodericDay wrote: post #28
zackabaker wrote: post #2

> "Anthropologists are simply realizing that early cities took extremely diverse forms. "Clearly, urbanism is different in different parts of the world, and we need to be more flexible in how we define this," he explained. The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and urbanism can be very difficult to determine." It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural histo…

Sort of. While I studied engineering, it was common to get in spats with lefty liberal-arts types, who always brought everything around to talk of class, rich vs. poor, and so on. I mainly read The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on, so I thought this perspective was reductionist and overly simplistic, when reality was much more complex, a mostly net-beneficial process where foul-play was a rela…

My experience coming from very disenfranchised community and going to a good school was that there is class warfare and it is a big deal, and the amount of people I know who got jail time for car and housing fines is depressing and disgusting yet the college liberal group still go overboard with thinking everything is racism and classism.

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#38

Post by Mikeb85 »

This isn't exactly news. Archaeologists have known this for awhile, though it's maybe not part of popular thought. We have populations on earth that live as Paleolithic peoples elsewhere once did, and they cultivate plants.

The importance of the Neolithic Revolution was the population explosion that came with easily harvested grain in a hospitable environment and the resultant freeing up of labour to create more complex societies and technologies.

Re: Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought

#39

Post by coolaliasbro »

shardinator wrote: post #19
sverige wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is much more complex than we thought it was. > it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary? This is the very tension between Platonism with its emphasis on unity and Aristotelianism which sees complex diversity everywhere. How can we get these two systems to work together? Ho…

>> How can we have both unity and diversity? I've always seen things as having a 'level of abstraction'. At one level of abstraction things can have unity, but as you 'zoom in' and change the level of abstraction you'll see the differences and have diversity. From a distance stars and snowflakes all look the same, but not on closer inspection. Similarly in a foreign country, at first people will all seem the same, bu…

Superpositions!
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