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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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How Grains Domesticated Us by James C. Scott. This may be of general interest as a history of how people took up farming (a more complex process than you might think), but the thing that I noticed was that there are only a handful (seven, I think) of grain species that people domesticated, and it all happened in the Neolithic Era. (I'm not sure about quinoa.) Civilized people either couldn't or wouldn't find another grain species to domesticate, and civilization presumably wouldn't have happened without the concentrated food and feasibility of social control that grain made possible.
Could domestcatable grain be a rather subtle filter for technological civilization? On the one hand, we do have seven species, not just one or two. On the other, I don't know how likely the biome which makes domesticable grain possible is.
I suspect that developing a highly nutritious crop that is easy to grow in large quantities is a prerequisite for technological civilization. However, I wonder if something other than grains might have sufficed (e.g. potatoes).
One of the points made in the video is that it's much easier to conquer and rule people who grow grains than people who grow root crops. Grains have to be harvested in a timely fashion-- the granaries can be looted, the fields can be burnt. If your soldiers have to dig up the potatoes, it just isn't worth it.
Yes, it's easier to loot people who grow grains than roots, but I don't think that's so relevant to taxation by a stationary bandit.
Hmm, abundant and easily accessible food is also a requisite for the evolution of eusocial animal colonies. I guess that's what cities ultimately are.
Grain is just food that happened to possess two essential features:
Making it was sufficiently productive, that is, a group of humans could grow more grain than they themselves would need;
It could be stored for a long time with only minor spoilage. Having reserves of stored food to survive things like winters, droughts, and plagues of locusts is rather essential for a burgeoning civilization. Besides, without non-perishable food it's hard to have cities.
You left out an important property:
That's a relevant feature for figuring out the consequences of depending on grain production. I'm not sure it's a relevant feature for the purposes of deciding why growing grains became so popular.
This seems somewhat unlikely to me, and we might be able to answer it by exploring "grain." It seems to me that there are a handful of non-grain staple crops around the world that suggest that a planet would need to have no controllable vegetation sufficient for humans to sustain themselves on (either directly, or indirectly through feed animals). Even ants got agriculture to work.
Potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, taro, tapioca, those weird south american tubers related to Malibar spinach, and the tubers of runner beans immediately come to mind as long term storable calorie crops.
Of note, the consumption of flour has recently been pushed back to at the very least 32,000 years ago, probably much longer, even if field agriculture has not:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/14/440292003/paleo-people-were-making-flour-32-000-years-ago
Doesn't that depend on the climate? I don't know for how long can you store potatoes and such in tropical climates -- my guess is not for long. If you are in, say, Northern Europe, the situation changes considerably.
Plus, the tubers you name are predominantly starch and people relying on them as a staple would have issues with at least insufficient protein.
Climate does make a difference, for sure. But there are two things to consider. One, climates that are warmer let things rot easier but tend to have longer or continuous growing seasons. Two, climate control is a thing that people do (dig deep enough and you get cooler temperature almost anywhere on Earth) as is processing for storage via drying or chemical treatment.
Forgot to mention nuts too.
You are certainly right about protein. Something else must be added, be it meat or veggies of some sort or legumes.
Hm, interesting. I don't know of any culture which heavily relied on nuts as a food source. I wonder why that is so. Nuts are excellent food -- fairly complete nutritionally, high caloric density, don't spoil easily, etc. Moreover, they grow on trees, so once you have a mature orchard, you don't need to do much other than collect them. One possibility is that trees are too "inflexible" for agriculture -- if your fields got destroyed (say, an army rolled through), you'll get a new crop next year (conditional, of course, on having seed grain, labour to work the fields, etc.). But if your orchard got chopped down, well, the wait till the new crop is much longer. A counter to this line of thought is complex irrigation systems which are certainly "inflexible" and yet were very popular. I wonder how land-efficient (calories/hectare) nut trees are.
Ah, I just figured out that coconuts are nuts and there are Polynesian cultures which heavily depend on them. But still, there is nothing in temperate regions and there are a lot of nut trees and bushes growing there.
I'm aware of pre-european Californian societies whose main calorie crop was acorns, rendered edible by soaking after crushing to remove irritating tannins and then cooked, and sometimes preserved by soaking in various other substances.
Yes, a good point. But weren't these American Indians mostly hunter-gatherers? I don't know if you can say that they engaged in agriculture. Some other tribes did, but those didn't rely on nuts or acorns.
Eh, to my mind the boundary between agriculture and gathering is fuzzy when your plants live a long time and grow pretty thickly and you encourage the growth of those you like.
Like, there's 11.5k year old seedless fig trees found in the middle east, a thousand years before there's any evidence of grain field agriculture. Those simply don't grow unless planted by humans.
All true. Still, grain very decisively won over nuts. I wonder if there's a good reason for that or it was just a historical accident. Maybe you can just make many more yummy things our of flour than out of nuts. Or maybe nuts don't actually store all that well because of fats going rancid...