Andean Crops Cultivated Almost 10,000 Years Ago

[rayofreason]

Archaeologists have long thought that people in the Old World were planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting for a good 5,000 years before anyone in the New World did such things. But fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old. “I don’t want to play the early button game,” he said, “but the temporal gap between the Old and New World, in terms of a first pulse toward civilization, is beginning to close.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/andean-crops-cultivated-almost-10-000-years-ago

[aquart]

1. They didn't believe humans were here 28,000 years ago, either.

And then these...campfire sites turned up. I remember arguing that it was ridiculous to ask a pregnant woman with a toddler to walk across the land bridge. But my professor didn't believe humans knew about boats that early. (Which made the Australian aborigines really good swimmers.)


Everything we know is only what we know today.

[malakai2]

3. Agree with you all the way

I'm really interested in Pleistocene extinctions as they inform our current concept of wilderness in the Americas, because that's a discussion wildlife and land management agencies never seem to have when I'm in various meetings. If the first wave of human colonization happened 30,000 or 40,000 years ago like the linguistic and mitochondrial evidence suggests, then overkill and climate change become the most plausible explanations for most of the extinctions. Add the similar pattern of megafaunal extinctions when humans arrived in Australia (most everything bigger than a thylacine), Madagascar (giant lemurs, elephant birds, etc.), New Zealand (moas, eagles), and Cuba (ground sloth extinction well after the last glacial retreat), and overkill looks to be the best explanation we have. Really throws a wrench in our traditional European way of looking at the American continents.

[ursi]

2. this was fascinating, thanks for posting!

[qazplm]

4. then the real question becomes

why the disparity in technology between the western hemisphere and europe/asia?

Id argue that there was more cross pollination of cultures going on in the latter but then you have Africa's lag in technology.

Id argue cold weather meant necessity was the mother of invention, but it gets pretty cold in parts of the western hemisphere too.

Perhaps there was more war in europe/asia/africa? War certainly leads to technology.

Perhaps also you didnt quite have the variety or dogmatic religious beliefs which may have led to less conflict in the west?

Certainly a much more sparsely distributed population in the west as well.

[Lithos]

5. More people

And fewer barriers of terrain, both of which combined to create a bigger pool of knowledge to share.

L-

[malakai2]

6. What do you mean by disparity in technology?

One person could describe a lack of hard metal tools in the western hemisphere as a disparity in the sense that those cultures were inferior to eastern hemisphere cultures that had hard metal tools.

Another person could describe the limited use of metal as flexible bindings for building construction in the western hemisphere as a disparity in the sense that while cultures in both hemispheres used metal, they used it in very different ways for very different purposes.

The same could be said of different approaches to animal domestication, crop selection and engineering, city layout and construction, cropping systems, and landscape scale forest management, among other things. Keep in mind that New World cultures created unique languages, writing systems, religions, and political systems, most of which were lost (along with most of the population) to smallpox epidemics and European conquest, to say nothing of warfare between cultures in the New World.

I think it's important to not use an ethnocentric view when comparing New versus Old World cultures.

[mainegreen]

7. You should read guns, germs and steel.

A whole book about that one topic.
Damned interesting too.

I learned that evidently the original locals here grew something called 'sumpweed' before corn made it to them, which caused them to promptly stop growing this said sumpweed. Evidently it was such a crappy crop, it made you break out in hives when you harvested it.

:D

[trotsky]

10. The PBS series based on it was terrific.

Couldn't stop watching.

[Xithras]

8. I've always suspected that agriculture is much older than we assume.

At least on a small scale. If you think about it, the only thing that "discovering" agriculture requires is a small sedentary population, and those existed all over the place in game rich regions (and some game-poor regions that happened to be surrounded by game-worse regions). Ug was just as smart as we were, even if he didn't have our level of education. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there's a connection between the new grape plants sprouting out of the rubbish pile, and the basket of spoiled grapes Ug dumped there last winter. While organized, wide scale, irrigated farming may only be about 10k-years old, I suspect that smaller hand-watered garden plots go back significantly further.

[hunter]

9. For goodness sakes, his name was "Ogg."

And when his wife was angry at him she'd yell something like "Ahhhhh-Go! You and your buddies have made quite enough beer today, so get back here RIGHT NOW and clean up the mess you left around the cooking fire!"

"Ug" is what the wretched imperialist proto-Republicans called him -- the ones who would sooner whack you in the head with a rock rather than live in any kind of harmony with the earth or other people.

Unfortunately they are the ones who wrote the history books.