Check out perennial grain production for the first time in the 10,000 years of human agriculture at https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/ According to their literature I recently received from them through the work of their partners in China, perennial rice production has jumping from zero a decade ago to millions of acres ten years later. They say switching from annuals to perennials is repairing agriculture's 'original sin', to use biblical metaphor.
Hey Patrick, Happy new year. Love your pod and appreciate these posts. I was especially struck by what you said in this episode about the non-inevitability of gender hierarchy (go Jomon!). Related issues in an opinion piece in today's NYTimes, link here: https://nyti.ms/3rM2OTl
I too am fascinated by non-agricultural larger scale, more "developed" societies of the past, as a twist on the fall from Eden that the agriculturally driven Neolithic revolution seems to have been, replacing the relatively flat hierarchy and radical autonomy of pre-agricultural small scale societies with the evils of kings, armies, wars, inequities, malnutrition, misogynistic patriarchies, etc. That's a simplistic way to put it, but not without a fair sized grain of truth. Modern anarchistic politics seems to be most akin to those old paleolithic social organization - which isn't that old in much of the world where ppl lived that way right up to the past century. These have been mostly implicit aspects of the story you've presented so far in your prehistory series. An episode digging into them explicitly would be very interesting.
Great series. Could you list in the substack books you referenced or liked? I would like to learn more about the topic, especially the Japanese non agricultural groups that neverless were fairly sophisticated.
Check out perennial grain production for the first time in the 10,000 years of human agriculture at https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/ According to their literature I recently received from them through the work of their partners in China, perennial rice production has jumping from zero a decade ago to millions of acres ten years later. They say switching from annuals to perennials is repairing agriculture's 'original sin', to use biblical metaphor.
Hey Patrick, Happy new year. Love your pod and appreciate these posts. I was especially struck by what you said in this episode about the non-inevitability of gender hierarchy (go Jomon!). Related issues in an opinion piece in today's NYTimes, link here: https://nyti.ms/3rM2OTl
I too am fascinated by non-agricultural larger scale, more "developed" societies of the past, as a twist on the fall from Eden that the agriculturally driven Neolithic revolution seems to have been, replacing the relatively flat hierarchy and radical autonomy of pre-agricultural small scale societies with the evils of kings, armies, wars, inequities, malnutrition, misogynistic patriarchies, etc. That's a simplistic way to put it, but not without a fair sized grain of truth. Modern anarchistic politics seems to be most akin to those old paleolithic social organization - which isn't that old in much of the world where ppl lived that way right up to the past century. These have been mostly implicit aspects of the story you've presented so far in your prehistory series. An episode digging into them explicitly would be very interesting.
Great series. Could you list in the substack books you referenced or liked? I would like to learn more about the topic, especially the Japanese non agricultural groups that neverless were fairly sophisticated.