All theories of emergence of agriculture I’m aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.
Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn’t develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?
Any explanation involving “selection effects” is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule—it’s second coming of “scientific racism”).
Should I take this to imply that what I learned in high school and wikipedia is wrong, or very poorly understood? From what I know, throughout the paleolithic populations started developing the knowledge and techniques for sedentary lifestyles, food preservation, and growing plants, while at the same time spreading out across the globe. Then came the end of the ice age, and these populations started slowly applying this knowledge at various points in time, with a difference in the 10^4 order of magnitude between the earliest and slowest populations.
That looks very much like the human species had “already been selected” before it was completely split into separate populations, though admittedly that alone as described in my previous comment isn’t enough to explain how close they came to one another on the timeline (I would have expected a variance of ~50-80k years or so, if that were the only factor, rather than 10-11k).
Edit: I only realized after posting both comments that I have a very derogatory / adversarial / accusational tone. This is not (consciously) intentional, and I’m really grateful you brought up this point. I’m learning a lot from these comments.
Backing up a step from this, actually… how confident are we of the “no contact with each other” condition?
Speaking from near-complete ignorance, I can easily imagine how a level of contact sufficiently robust to support “hey, those guys over there are doing this nifty thing where they plant their own food, maybe we could try that!” once or twice a decade would be insufficient to otherwise leave a record (e.g., no commerce, no regular communication, no shared language, etc.), but there might exist plausible arguments for eliminating that possibility.
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other’s technology if it wasn’t already similar to what they’ve been doing.
Agriculture probably initially expanded because farmers pressed north through the continent, not because hunter-gatherers adopted the practice on their own, Scandinavian scientists say.
If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn’t spread, it’s a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.
All theories of emergence of agriculture I’m aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.
Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn’t develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?
Any explanation involving “selection effects” is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule—it’s second coming of “scientific racism”).
Hmm. The more you know.
Should I take this to imply that what I learned in high school and wikipedia is wrong, or very poorly understood? From what I know, throughout the paleolithic populations started developing the knowledge and techniques for sedentary lifestyles, food preservation, and growing plants, while at the same time spreading out across the globe. Then came the end of the ice age, and these populations started slowly applying this knowledge at various points in time, with a difference in the 10^4 order of magnitude between the earliest and slowest populations.
That looks very much like the human species had “already been selected” before it was completely split into separate populations, though admittedly that alone as described in my previous comment isn’t enough to explain how close they came to one another on the timeline (I would have expected a variance of ~50-80k years or so, if that were the only factor, rather than 10-11k).
Edit: I only realized after posting both comments that I have a very derogatory / adversarial / accusational tone. This is not (consciously) intentional, and I’m really grateful you brought up this point. I’m learning a lot from these comments.
Backing up a step from this, actually… how confident are we of the “no contact with each other” condition?
Speaking from near-complete ignorance, I can easily imagine how a level of contact sufficiently robust to support “hey, those guys over there are doing this nifty thing where they plant their own food, maybe we could try that!” once or twice a decade would be insufficient to otherwise leave a record (e.g., no commerce, no regular communication, no shared language, etc.), but there might exist plausible arguments for eliminating that possibility.
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other’s technology if it wasn’t already similar to what they’ve been doing.
See this for example:
If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn’t spread, it’s a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.
(nods) Yup, if that theory is true, then the observed multiple distinct onset points of agriculture becomes more mysterious.