The Food of History, september 2010 (original) (raw)
Origin and Spread of Domestication and Farming
Origin and Spread of Domestication and Farming, 2021
So far, the Harvard historians and their British counterparts have chosen to present fake archaeological information, to establish the antiquity of West Asian Neolithic and domestication. In this book, original excavations reports have been compared for India on the one side and Syria, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Turkey on the other. This gives a completely different direction to history. The examination of ancient DNAs of the skeletons from the different parts of Eurasia, confirms an out of India migration, which can be demonstrated by means of archaeology as well as ancient DNAs. The white skin colour gene originated in India and with time it migrated to the north, where it increased in frequency due to strong selection pressure.
The Geography of Crop Origins and Domestication: Changing Paradigms from Evolutionary Genetics
2019
Chapter 11 11.1. Burn mark above the waterline after experimental cooking of liquid-rich food. 11.2. The style of Jomon and Yayoi major cooking pots. 11.3. Removing excess water after boiling rice (Central Thailand). 11.4. Steaming stage of the yutori boil-and-steam rice-cooking method reconstructed with Yayoi pots. 11.5. Cooking pot styles of the Tianluoshan site. 11.6. Shift of proportions of cooking-pot styles in Hemudu culture. 11.7. TLS round-body pots characteristic soot and burn mark. 11.8. Layered burn deposits formed after experimental porridge cooking. Chapter 12 12.1 Photographs taken at the Refugee Camp in Idomeni, Greece, March/April 2016. 12.2 An example of a 'Mediterranean Diet' meal. 12.3 A Guernsey occupation-era kitchen, complete with food-related objects. Chapter 13 13.1 Locations of key millet sites across Eurasia. 13.2 Harriet Hunt visiting the Vavilov Herbarium, St Petersburg. 13.3 Martin Jones at a broomcorn millet field near Lanzhou, Gansu Province, western China. 13.4 Visiting millet sites in Gansu Province, western China.
Agriculture Beginnings in West Africa,a re-evaluation of the Evidence
There are two schools of thought on the beginning of agriculture in West Africa. The first school is predicated on the idea of diffusion while the other believes that agriculture beginnings in West Africa was an independent development.The former believes that the knowledge of domestication of plants and animals is an 'alien culture'' to West Africans hence it got to them at a later date.Scholars as Childe,Clark,Robbins,Coursey,Dalby,Bakker, Suttons and Livingstone had at various times attempted to rationalise the nature of processess through which the idea of domestication of plants and animals spread to West Africa.
Introduction.: Agricultural origins: where next?
Farmers at the Frontier, 2020
At a 2009 Wenner-Gren symposium attended by many of the key players researching the origins of agriculture worldwide, a remarkable consensus was reached that there
Origin and Spread of Domestication and Farming Chapter 1
Notion Press, 2021
The archaeology of the first farming cultures has been bungled has been orchestrated and manipulated in such a way as to show that Anatolia and Levant were the first Neolithic sites of the world. However the authors have used concocted dates to prove the antiquity of these areas. On the other hand the original excavation reports and original radiocarbon dates say something else. On the other hand, in case of the Indian Neolithic sites like Mehrgarh, uncalibrated dates have been mentioned as calendar dates, thus reducing the antiquity of the Indian sites like Mehrgarh be 2000 years. This whole scandal has been presented in this book.
Agricultural Origins from the Ground Up: Archaeological Approaches to Plant Domestication
The timing, geographical locations, causes, and consequences of crop domestication have long been major concerns of archaeologists, and agricultural origins and dispersals are currently more relevant than ever to scientists seeking solutions to elusive problems involving food insecurity and global health disparities. Perennial research issues that archaeologists continue to tackle include (1) thinking outside centers of origin that were based on limited and insuffi cient past knowledge; (2) distinguishing between single and multiple domestications of specifi c crops; (3) measuring the pace of domestication; and (4) decoupling domestication from agricultural economies. Paleoethnobotanists have expanded their toolkits to include analysis of ancient and modern DNA and have added increasingly sophisticated techniques in the fi eld and the laboratory to derive precise chronological sequences to assess morphological changes in ancient and often fragmentary archaeobotanical remains and to correctly interpret taphonomy and context. Multiple lines of archaeological evidence are ideally brought together, and whenever possible, these are integrated with information from complementary sources. We discuss current perspectives and anthropological approaches to research that have as their goals the fuller and broader understanding of ancient farming societies, the plants that were domesticated, the landscapes that were created, and the culinary legacies that were passed on.
Worldwide interconnections of Africa using crops as historical and cultural markers
Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, G., Schiavo, M., Caron, E., Ongwen, D., Kamau, J.I., Rono, B., Leclerc, C. 2019. Worldwide interconnections of Africa using crops as historical and cultural markers. Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est, 52: 7-41. The historical, social, and economical importance of precolonial connections between Africa and the rest of the world has been undervalued. In the present study, we use crops as historical and social markers to analyze intercontinental connections from the perspective of Kenyan and Ugandan regions northeast of Lake Victoria. Crops were inventoried in 148 small farms from 74 localities, using successively free listing, to reveal their socio-cultural salience, and a closed list method, for a more complete picture of the agricultural, environmental and social diversity. The total sample included 75 crops (30 African, 21 Asian, 21 American, and 3 European). Among farms, crop richness varied from 6 to 32. It was higher in Uganda than in Kenya, and lowest around the Winam Gulf. The 12 American crops introduced at Renaissance were uniformly distributed, and the observed structure was mostly due to differences in African and Asian crop richness. In terms of crop frequency, exotic crops account for 74%, with 46% for American crops. The 14 most frequent crops included 10 from America, 3 from Asia, and 1 for Africa, with negligible differences among linguistic groups. Consistently, the free listing citation order demonstrated the high cultural salience of American crops. The spatial distribution of minor crops suggest differential diffusion among linguistic groups, which could be further studied using linguistic approaches on crop names.
Food and the Early History of Cultivation
1985
A cultural argument is proposed to explain the origins and development of cultivation in different areas of the world. It is suggested that culturally valued foodstuffs which reflected cultural categories of edibility, taste and other forms of sensory appeal may have had more of an influence on the domestication of plants than the search for staple crops. The role of food processing, cooking and the exchange of foodstuffs in the development of cultivation and the diffusion of plants and animals is examined. Then ideas are examined against the existing evidence of cultivation from archaeological sites in S.
A cultural niche construction theory of initial domestication
2012
I present a general theory for the initial domestication of plants and animals that is based on niche construction theory and incorporates several behavioral ecological concepts, including central-place provisioning, resource catchment, resource ownership and defensibility, and traditional ecological knowledge. This theory provides an alternative to, and replacement for, current explanations, including diet breadth models of optimal foraging theory, that are based on an outmoded concept of asymmetrical adaptation and that attempt to explain domestication as an adaptive response to resource imbalance resulting from either environmental decline or human population growth. The small-scale human societies that first domesticated plants and animals share a number of basic interrelated attributes that when considered as an integrated and coherent set of behaviors provide the context for explaining initial domestication not as an adaptive response to an adverse environmental shift or to human population growth or packing but rather as the result of deliberate human enhancement of resource-rich environments in situations where evidence of resource imbalance is absent. Keywords Agriculture Á Domestication Á Ecosystem engineering Á Niche construction The initial domestication of plants and animals and the subsequent development of agricultural economies mark a major evolutionary transition in earth's history. Small-scale human societies in perhaps as many as a dozen separate world areas independently brought a wide variety of different species under domestication between about 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, and these domesticates provided the lever with which we have transformed much of the earth into agricultural landscapes that feed an ever increasing global population. Over the past several decades, biologists and archaeologists working with different data sets at different scales of analysis, and from a number of complementary perspectives, have employed a range of new techniques that have substantially improved our understanding of many different aspects of the initial domestication of plants and animals (e.g., Doebley et al. 2006; Zeder et al. 2006; Bar-Yosef and Price 2011; Gepts and Famula 2012). Although there is considerable variation in the quality and quantity of information that is currently available from the different independent centers of domestication, these regions provide an excellent opportunity for comparative analysis in terms of the sequence, timing, and rate of domestication of different species as well as the environmental and cultural contexts within which domestication occurred. It is also at the regional scale of analysis that the most interesting and challenging developmental questions can be most successfully addressed, and where most researchers focus their efforts (Zeder and Smith 2009). Along with rapid, if variable, advances in our understanding of the domestication process in different world areas at a regional scale of analysis, there is also a continuing strong interest in formulating and refining overarching models and theories that can help to illuminate the underlying similarities of the domestication process on a global scale. The vast majority of the universal explanations for initial domestication and agricultural origins that have been proposed over the past half century, however, including,
Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters; A Near Eastern Reappraisal
Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, 2010
Understanding the evolutionary history of crop plants is fundamental to our understanding of their respective adaptation profiles, which in turn, is a key element in securing future yield and quality improvement. Central topics in this field concern the monoor polyphyletic origin of crop plants, and our ability to identify the geographic location where certain crop plants have originated. Understanding the geographical pattern of domestication may also assist in reconstructing the cultural processes underlying the Neolithic (agricultural) Revolution. Here we review prevailing views on the geographic pattern of Near Eastern plant domestication, and highlight the distinction between genetic domestication events and independent cultural events.
The spread of agriculture across sub-Saharan Africa has long been attributed to the large-scale migration of Bantu-speaking groups out of their west Central African homeland from about 4000 years ago. These groups are seen as having expanded rapidly across the sub-continent, carrying an 'Iron Age' package of farming, metal-working, and pottery, and largely replacing pre-existing hunter-gatherers along the way. While elements of the 'traditional' Bantu model have been deconstructed in recent years, one of the main constraints on developing a more nuanced understanding of the local processes involved in the spread of farming has been the lack of detailed archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological sequences, particularly from key regions such as eastern Africa. Situated at a crossroads between continental Africa and the Indian Ocean, eastern Africa was not only a major corridor on one of the proposed Bantu routes to southern Africa, but also the recipient of several migrations of pastoral groups from the north. In addition, eastern Africa saw the introduction of a range of domesticates from India, Southeast Asia, and other areas of the Indian Ocean sphere through long-distance maritime connections. The possibility that some Asian crops, such as the vegecultural 'tropical trio' (banana, taro, and yam), arrived before the Bantu expansion has in particular raised many questions about the role of eastern Africa's non-agricultural communities in the adoption and subsequent diffusion of crops across the continent. Drawing on new botanical and faunal evidence from recent excavations at a range of hunter-gatherer and early farming sites on eastern Africa's coast and offshore islands, and with comparison to inland sites, this paper will examine the timing and tempo of the agricultural transition, the nature of forager-farmer-pastoralist interactions, and the varying roles that elements of the 'Bantu package', pastoralism, and non-African domesticates played in local economies. This paper highlights the complex pathways and transitions that unfolded, as well as how eastern Africa links into a broader global picture of heterogeneous, dynamic, and extended transformations from forager to farmer that challenge our fundamental understanding of pre-modern Holocene societies.
Domestication and Prehistoric Distribution
2015
This study reports on the current state of knowledge regarding the history of Chenopodium quinoa in four Andean countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru (Figure 1). The cultural environments in which quinoa was domesticated, adopted, exchanged and/or cultivated in ancient times, were reconstructed using archaeological data and, in particular, on the basis of archaeobotanical research by many specialists in these countries, as well as ethnohistorical sources and observations of the cultural continuities in communities that still produce quinoa using traditional methods. The study begins with a review of the domestication of Chenopodium. It has been shown that the morphological features of archaeological seeds are the outcome of human manipulation over at least 3 000 years. This indicates that groups of huntergatherers in the Late Archaic Period (8000–3000 B.C.) in the Andean region subsisted on wild Chenopodium and applied selection, protection, treatment and transplantation pro...
Archaeology of Food - New Data from International Missions In Africa and Asia - Serie Orientale Roma, n.s. 17, Rome, Scienze e Lettere, 2019
Recent research perspectives which highlight the long lasting process undertaken by the Near East communities towards domestication allows us to establish comparisons with similar North African situations. The article starts recalling the main characteristics of plants and animals used by the Holocene groups distributed along the southern mediterranean coast. It then proceeds focusing on the main archaeological sequences, both in the Southern Levant and in the Libyan and Egyptian Sahara which, beginnings from the early Holocene, offer the oldest proofs of domestication and/or management of wild species. In both cases the evidence of the long period elapsed between the first domestication attempts and the full establishment of agricultural/pastoral production, urges us to recognize in this period the intermediate stage that in anthropology is called “LowLevel Food Production”. The consideration of this “middle ground” fully grasps the identity of the North African groups allowing to better clarify its characterizing elements, expression of a complete and autonomous economic and social space that the definition of foragers-herders no longer could adequately describe.