The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.
It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere.īut the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten.
Android civilization v background full#
They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. These can be stored for long periods of time, and are easily transported - or stolen. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Instead, the economists believe that grains crops transformed the politics of the societies that grew them, while tubers held them back. It's not that grains crops were much easier to grow than tubers, or that they provided more food, the economists say. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro, and manioc. The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. The study, published last year by economists at the United Kingdom and Israel doing novel work on archaeological and anthropological evidence, attempts to explain a strange pattern in agricultural practices. And if it's right, it could dramatically complicate the popular theory of the agriculture-driven dawn of civilization that has appeared in textbooks for generations. Now, a provocative new study suggests the fates of societies hinged on a subtler problem with these plants. These plants still feed billions of people today. In fact, manioc and the potato are superstar crops, less demanding of the soil and less thirsty for water. And more productivity led to more advanced civilizations.īut the staple crops associated with less-advanced peoples - like manioc, the white potato, the sweet potato, and taro - weren't necessarily less productive. "People around the world who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers," Diamond later said on his PBS show. In the Middle East there was barley and wheat in Asia there was millet and rice.
In his 1997 bestseller "Guns, Germs and Steel," historian Jared Diamond argued that the availability of nutritious and easily domesticated plants and animals gave some societies a head start.
The Assyrians and Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, flourished thanks to their fertile farms, which fed an upper class that devoted itself to religion and empire. Why, on the eve of the modern world, were some societies so technologically and politically complex? For centuries, leading intellectuals from Adam Smith to Karl Marx believed that agricultural abundance had propelled the rise of advanced civilizations. Scholars have long puzzled over the different fates of the world's peoples.
And most importantly, they were not organized in the type of complex, far-reaching, hierarchical social structure, which is considered one of the hallmarks of civilization and was far more widespread in Europe and Asia. The Taíno lacked the monumental architecture of the Maya, or the mathematical knowledge of the Aztec. And yet the Spanish, who ultimately colonized and ravaged the people, considered them primitive. By all accounts, the Taíno were prosperous - "a well-nourished population of over a million people," according to Sauer.
0 kommentar(er)
