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America’s lost crops rewrite the history of farming
- hinkley 4y agoWild rice in the Great Lakes, and a whole bunch of things on the west coast.
- CSMastermind 4y agoIt's interested to see this presented as new information. When I was taking Anthropology classes 15 years ago I was taught this.
- unnamed76ri 4y agoI read this article late last night and was thinking that I had seen some of these plants in my garden. Sure enough I found goosefoot and amaranth growing out there. Might try harvesting enough to make something.
- Retric 4y agoIt’s interesting that plant domestication was so widespread, but to me it suggests farming may have been independent of the crops used rather than being independently invented that many times.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago> farming may have been independent of the crops used rather than being independently invented that many times. Could you please expand on that? I'm not sure I parsed it correctly - I read that as "people were already looking for useful plants they could encourage the growth of, rather than they discovered useful plants and decided to encourage their growth", but I'm not sure that's right.
- Retric 4y agoThere are several cultures that include some versions of tossing a portion of a meal away in thanks from tossing salt over your shoulder in luck to burning meat as a sacrifice to the gods. I could easily see such a tradition developing around foraged food independent of conscious knowledge that doing so directly causes them to grow. It might start as simply as never harvesting all of any one plant in an area. With more effective versions of the traditions eventually getting closer to farming as we would think of it.
- ch4s3 4y agoIt seems like simple farming would be obvious to hunter-gatherers, who in many cases practiced limited cultivation like intentionally planting fruit trees.