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Years ago I watched a documentary about Sago production in Papau New Guinea. It comes from a Palm tree that's cut down before the fruit ripens (otherwise all of
by bane 8y ago
Years ago I watched a documentary about Sago production in Papau New Guinea. It comes from a Palm tree that's cut down before the fruit ripens (otherwise all of the valuable starch gets used up ripening the fruit). The starch is contained in the core of the tree. A single tree can yield hundreds of pounds of starch, but getting it out of the tree and processed to get rid of the wood pulp and such is incredibly labor intensive. The starch is then cooked into various kinds of pancakes and other dishes to eat.
Traditionally (and for all I know) the trees weren't farmed. Somebody just walked around until they found a suitable tree and then cut it down. So...hunting and gathering. But IIR, people track the growth of individual trees to make sure they're harvested at the right age, but they aren't specifically planted or cultivated in a "farm" sense.
It's not a terribly different notion from what's being written about here I think. I would guess that humans have found starches of various kinds throughout their environment, extracted and processed them, and then made simple flatbreads or pancakes almost everywhere.
It doesn't even have to be obvious. The line from palm tree to sago is not clear at all. Why even consider eating the core of a tree? Why invent a long, multi-part, labor intensive process to make it more edible? Nobody really knows how it started.
But I think the important point I got from this was that agriculture is not a clean cut-off. You aren't digging out root vegetables one day and then planting wheat the next. There must be some kind of transition period that depends on the local plant life and many of the things that we think of as indicative of post cut-off agriculture societies probably aren't that at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfGxm8canXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfGxm8canXg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VomE4GN9Z6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VomE4GN9Z6I
- yesiamyourdad 8y agoWell, if you're starving, you'll try anything. If you survive, hey, that worked, let's do it again! People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced with death, you'll try anything.
- jopsen 8y agoAnd we keep forgetting just how common starving to death must have been in prehistoric tribes..
- tamizhar 8y agoIs that true or an assumption we make? How do we know for sure that this was the case for prehistoric tribes? I mean, most habitats aside from the desert are teeming with edible items.
- fifnir 8y agoThere was this documentary about a first contact with an amazon tribe. I remember an interview with the (very young) leader of the tribe who was talking about how life was in the jungle and iirc he described it as very miserable, they wouldn't eat for days at a time, bugs everywhere ++ it's the documentary talked about here, I highly recommend it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-makes-first-contact-with-outside-world https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-m...
- kaycebasques 8y agoYes, but you have to put this in historical context. These modern tribes have been pushed into corners by the industrialized nations all around them. Modern hunter-gatherers do not necessarily equal ancient ones.
- fifnir 8y agoGood point!
- pharrington 8y agoMost habitats indeed are full of living organisms compatible with human dietary needs. The problem is, sometimes you're so good at killing that you just kill all the food before the food has time to reproduce itself. Or maybe it just doesn't rain for two months. Or myriad other contingencies that make nomadic life precarious. edit: and as bad_user pointed out, thats a huuuge reason itself to even be nomadic
- weberc2 8y ago
- specialist 8y ago"...agriculture is not a clean cut-off." Even today. There's a lot of taper along the spectrum: hunting, foraging, gardening, farming, manufacturing. Trees, fish, mushrooms... Ditto non food stuffs.