22 Comments

There's interesting evidence that agrigulture, specifically grain crops, specfically barley were created for their ability to be fermented and more. By more I mean harvesting the ergot 'infections' that would create their religious sacraments.

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We should consider writing about fermented beverages some time!

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No just fermeted.... psychadelic.

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Pffft, you can keep your fancy "agriculture"!

I still prefer hunting for MY food, like a REAL man.

I don't wait for food to come to me. When I'm hungry, I go and get what I need!

The only difference is that my food is now conveniently placed in a nearby supermarket and is neatly wrapped into family-sized packages. But I still do the WALKING and the PICKING FOOD UP FROM SHELVES like all those hunter-gatherers millenia ago.

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Sometimes I'll go foraging in my fridge.

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Really interesting!

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Once upon a time Old McDonald had a farm.

Now Ronald McDonald is the worlds best known fast-"food" franchise.

The ultimate manifestation of mega-scale industrial agriculture.

Speaking of industrialized "food" are you familiar with the book Swallow This, in which among other things the author describes her experience of attending an industrial "food"-fair wherein not a trace of natural food was to be found. It was a showcase for the corporations that manufacture, promote and sell 6000 "food" additives.

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Happy to learn of research that shows ancient women hunted. Gender roles as they relate to hunting and food gathering are not archeological fact at all, but came to be as a result of researcher bias. I love how new pieces of the puzzle shake up our views of who was doing what.

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100%. It really depends on where you look. I love unraveling these threads.

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I wonder if short, simplistic distillations are all that history can remember, and the nuances lost to time. Equally, it is probable that nuances are only apparent with time.

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There's always been a symbiotic relationship between urban and rural areas- they give and take from each other in many different fashions.

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Cities have always managed to exist without agriculture- save for the fact that much of the food in them is imported from agricultural areas...

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I might add: "city" is a nebulous term as well, adding to some of this confusion. Is Çatalhöyük a city? Most would say no, since there appears to have been no bureaucracy or central planning. Are we sure about that, though? Maybe the land was fertile enough so that folks could live there whenever they wanted without agriculture... but at some point, as settlements grew larger and larger (chickn/egg), it was inevitable to need a more sustainable food source.

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Farming was a big step back for human health. You can see it in human stature. As farming spread people got shorter and only in recent times did modern Europeans return to (and go on to exceed) the height of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

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Yes, completely. There was a really, really big dip before we realized the long-term gains from a sedentary lifestyle. Same goes for industrialization.

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12000 years ago. Göbekli Tepe.

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Yes, it does predate language. Excellent point.

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Agriculture was influential yes, but so were the earliest written communications in certain early civilisations? Mesopotamia? The elite controlled the manual labourers. Egypt? It wasn't the elite who built the pyramids. Was this the start of hierarchical society?

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I'm not sure we needed to have writing in order to have a small handful of folks controlling a larger group, but I'm also sure that it doesn't hurt.

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Maybe the earliest evidence of power is who is given the privilege to communicate this way?

Education equals power.

Oral histories are now recognised as powerful and "true" history. Top down history has dominated for centuries but the tide is turning. I'm going off track...and I am not knowledgeable about this subject. So I shall research this a bit more.

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The only concern is that you have these sorts of hierarchies out there in the animal kingdom as well (the "non-human animals"), so I am confident that our own tendency to stratify predates language.

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Millions of yes’s and no’s that eventually have the illusion of darkness and light

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