WUWT reader Susan Corwin writes:
Because it would work as CO2 became plentiful!
All the academic articles say: “and then agriculture happened”.
The “accepted wisdom”/consensus is:
….here was no single factor, or combination of factors, that led people to take up farming in different parts of the world.
But It is simple: it occurred because it Started Working.. 13,000 years ago.
People are clever, resourceful, adaptive, looking out for the best for their kids.
If it doesn’t work, it won’t happen.
If it will work, someone will figure it out and their kids/tribe will be successful
The Greenland Ice Chart for 9000 to 21000 years before present shows why agriculture arose:
(as presented on WUWT by Andy May)
So, my conclusion is that over 4,000 years or 160 generations, things improved and they tried, and tried, and tried again until it worked: people are smart.
…and animals actually could be pastured.
Starting 14,000 yag, the sparse, scraggly growth started getting thicker and slightly more abundant. It wasn’t very good, but is was much better than 16000 yag.
=> and clever people could keep various animals alive in a herding lifestyle.
Source: http://www.mochaexpress.com/Commentary/Elucidate/AgricultureBecamePossible/
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some bright spark decided to plant a crop rather than gather it in the wild, and tend an animal rather than chase it, and the idea of private property was thus invented.
Lotta lotta palaver here, and arcane theorizing. As a career farmer, I can tell you why agriculture started. It has nothing to do with CO2 levels, or shifting weather patterns. It’s because people don’t like wondering where their next meal is coming from. They’d rather KNOW.
It started like this.
Oog returns to camp with, “Honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?”
“You’re asking me? I thought you brought a sack of fruits & nuts, and some meat.”
“Didn’t find anything today.”
“Well, that’s just GREAT!”
“I’ve got a swell idea for next year, though.”
Lisette, the wife, is getting exasperated. “Next YEAR? The kids are hungry now.”
“Hear me out,” sayeth Oog. “Wives in the next village downriver have fenced-in patches. Grain, figs, stuff like that. Guys build pens; keep the hogs & chickens in there. Dogs guard everything. Villagers don’t have to crawl around in the dirt or run down wild game for every lunch date.”
“Sounds great. FINALLY you come up with something that actually sounds great.”
“Yeah. Doncha love the idea?”
“I do,” says Lisette. “Now GET CRACKING.”
Since the NSF is making “Climate Change” musicals, I thought we could come up with one of our own.
‘Till CO2 (‘Till There Was You)
—————————————
There were trees, on the hills,
but you never saw them swaying.
‘Cause they didn’t grow very tall,
’till CO2.
There was grass, in the fields,
but it was much too sparse to gather,
enough grain to make a good brew,
’till CO2.
When folks had meat, enough to eat,
They’d no cilantro-parsley garnish,
to grace chewy mastadon stew
’till CO2.
There were deserts, and glaciers, ’round the whole world
so they tell me,
in that long-ago, long-vanished when,
and then
The Fields are lush and ripe with grain
Too much for human hands to gather.
Harvest now needs a diesel tractor.
Since CO2!
What I find amusing is the number of people praising CO2 for the invention of agriculture but totally denying that the rising CO2 causes any of the warming of the Holocene. Apparently CO2 only has one effect. It makes for bigger plants
Coincidence is not causation. Especially not when the rise of temperature came BEFORE the rise in CO2.
The rise in temperature is the cause, the rise in CO2 is the effect. Now, that does not deny that there exists a feedback cycle which keeps the ball rolling once it starts.
I find it revealing, but not amusing, that you have to imagine the thinking of others in order to rationalize your own position.
The question I find most interesting is why not til then? Research indicates that anatomically modern humans existed 190,000 years ago, living in small groups as they slowly spread. Nothing changed for the first 177,000 years, which included the coming and going of an earlier ice age. But man didn’t do anything different until 13,000 years ago – why then?
But man didn’t do anything different until 13,000 years ago
============================
who says? agriculture was probably tried thousands of times, until the process could be repeated and passed on to future generations.
Perhaps the knowledge was lost during each ice age, when the old timers would talk of the legend of magic seeds that could be planted in the ground, that would grow food.
Perhaps 100 thousand years from now, our ancestors will come out of their ice age, and will also have forgotten how to farm. Eventually someone will re-invent the internet and ask why it took so long to develop farming.
This book gives an interesting explanation of the beginnings of agriculture as a matter of degree for a very long time, instead of a matter of kind all at once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthals,_Bandits_and_Farmers
Whatever the reality was, we can be certain that all flora and fauna around today survived the conditions of the previous several hundred thousand years.
I also appears that a warm planet is a happy planet, so I’m not worried. The danger is green fascism.
Um…the numbers are off. With the new textile historical evidence in place, humans were cultivating textile plants long before 12,000 years ago or 10K BCE. And if they were cultivating textiles–mainly flax and cotton (silk has yet to be revealed), they were growing food too.
There is evidence of cultivated cotton bolls in MesoAmerica that date to 28,000 BP and they just found dyed, spun flax (linen) in Georgia that dates to 30,000 BP. So that’s 26K BCE and 28K BCE.
For those that don’t know, flax has to be retted (rotted on the outside) to get to the inner fibers that are spun or even spliced to make linen. That requires the plant to be ripped up from it’s roots, stacked in stooks (cone shaped piles), turned to complete the breakdown on each side and then the stalks are ready to be peeled with a sharp knife, and the inner fibers combed straight with sharp pointy combs–called hackles. Given how long it takes for flax from seed to harvest to usable fiber, that means that the humans that spun that dyed linen they found 30,000 years ago were not hunting/gathering in the traditional manner. Also given that flax leaches the soil and can only be planted every other year—the mere fact they found it dyed and spun means there was cultivation and agriculture going on.
Cotton on the other hand has to be collected, it’s seeds removed and the fiber rolled into a tight tube called a puni for spinning. The differences between the wild ancestral plant and the one they found show cultivation because the ancestral plant looked more like a milkweed than the cotton boll we know today. And the one they found looks like something in between.
Just my 2 cents. If you really want to track human civilization, you need to track our primary invention and most important invention besides the discovery of fire–spinning fiber to make rope, cordage and eventually cloth.
Oh and one of the reasons biosphere II failed because their ocean was the relative size of a postage stamp and the idiots didn’t bother consulting a marine biologist on the integral part the ocean plays in the Earth’s Atmosphere. JMO but seriously, if you ever looked at the size of that, “ocean” which was by the way built like a saltwater aquarium instead of a real ocean, you’d laugh your head off. I remember when they were building it and all the emphasis was on the ‘tropical rainforest’ because that is where all the O2 would come from…..sure…..and I’ve got some beachfront property in Yuma for sale too. 🙂
“x” ppm CO2 for plants keeps being debated. Here is some C3 plants (300 different soy bean varieties same trial of seedlings & 19 other C3) relative response to 10, 45, 100 & 320 (1969 level) CO2.
Data (1 week later) for leaf test used on soy bean = at 10ppm chlorophyll had dropped from 15 units (OD units measured for 320 ppm CO2) way down to 1.5 units chlorophyll & leaves were on way to die. At 45 ppm CO2 leaf still only had 1.8 units chlorophyll & on way to falling off (die). However, at 100 ppm CO2 chlorophyll was 12.8 units & these leaves were not senescent (falling off/dying) prematurely. Soybean’s actual
tipping point (CO2 compensation point) was suggested to be
74 ppm CO2 when leaf senescence becomes overpowering.
Sugar content of those respective ppm CO2 living seedlings
went down progressively from 590 micrograms/sample size used at 320ppm CO2 all the way to 442 micrograms at 10ppm
CO2. But there is a very distinct relationship in protein to CO2.
100 ppm CO2 seedlings’ leaf sample had 1,766 micrograms of
protein (+ 188 micrograms of RNA), while 320 ppm sampling only
had 1,582 micrograms protein (+ 183 micrograms RNA). Protein plummeted at 45 ppm CO2.
I have elsewhere detailed a fair amount of how elevated CO2 results in lower protein. Early farming at low CO2 provided much
higher content protein diets & those women who ate a bit of that
grain possibly noticed it improved breast feeding outcomes.
Source of data cited available if anyone requests. Am typing on
small tablet & family waiting for me right now.
Gringojay, that post made it worth the time reading down to the last comment. Bravo.
See soybean seedlings at 100 ppm CO2 looking fine in 1969 photo line-up in Fig.4 of Wilholm & Ogren’s research “Photorespiratory- induced senescence of plants under conditions of low carbon dioxide”, originally published in a Proceedings of National Academy of Science available on-line
as free full pdf. Data I cited above is from Table 3; Table 6 indicates which other C3 plants tested (many being human food crops) showing similar tendency as soy bean.
I wish to add that this study did not follow the seedlings through to their reproductive maturity & , as such, am not able to state how long/if the +/-4.5 week comparative values play out.
My comment is mainly to Crispin in Waterloo, though I admit that I read only a short way after I read your addition. I rather thought that predators had eyes that looked forward and prey animals eyes looked sideways to watch for predators.
This is a response to E.M.Smith, with tongue firmly in cheek I apologize in advance.
I think that I shall never hear
A poem as lovely as a beer
With golden base and snowy cap
From Joe’s barroom barrel tap
The foamy stuff I drink all day
Until my memory melts away
Poems are writ by fools I fear
And only breweries can make a beer
Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s way to man.
A. E, Housman
Why did agriculture start 13000 years I don’t know but I don’t think we were meant to be meat eaters our bodies are adapted to eating plant life supplemented with a little meat probably scavenged originally because we are not natural hunters. I have recently lost four and a half stone with weightwatchers , when I started I had type two diabetes but now I no longer have type two diabetes. I follow a points system which penalizes fat and carbohydrate but not protein or fibre, I think that if we only ate meat we would have to eat less than we as vegetable etc. high fibre food consumers are used to and we would not feel full.
Eating animal flesh and fat is what made us human.
The modern diet suffers from a surfeit of highly processed carbohydrate, not from too much animal protein or (in most cases) fat.
We have large brains because our ancestors invented stone tools to crack open the large bones of dead animals to get the nutritious marrow, and their skulls for the fatty brain tissue. That would include the brains of other humans.
Now it’s too easy to get fat, starch and sugar. Our ancestors had to walk and run far and wide to obtain these resources. We pile on the calories because now all we have to do is open a bag of Doritos while sitting in front of our monitor or TV screen
Spot on Gabro!
The fat-dependent evolutionary development of humans is a fact.
Even decades ago, Vegenaz!s lied, trying to convince the public that human ancestors were strict herbivores. Nothing could be farther from reality.
Even chimps, our closest relatives, get 20% or more of their nutrition from meat and animal fat. They are ferocious, smart hunters. Our ancestors, living on the grasslands instead of mixed forest and savanna, would have been even more reliant of killing and scavenging animals to eat.
The Killer Ape, as it was put fifty or more years ago.
Took us 13,000 years to invent the most powerful kitchen appliance, the telephone. And Doritos can be used a fire starters.
Why did agriculture come about?
Because it had to in order for man to congregate in larger groups at the most desirable areas to live. A community is much more defendable and the larger the community the more resources it will have to offer/share and the stronger defense it will be capable of. Hunting/gathering simply cannot sustain large numbers of people concentrated in one place and so those that learned agriculture had many advantages that would allow them to dominate those that did not.
I want to remind everyone:
1) We don’t know when agriculture started. Gobekli Tepe was a complete surprise for how ancient it was. Also, it hasn’t been excavated fully yet. It may yet be older. We don’t know.
2) We don’t know what ancient plants could do. We don’t have their genomes. We don’t know if there was symbiosis. People are very surprised when mildly ancient seeds are germinated to produce interesting “new” plants. Even with the seeds, we have to grow the plant to find out how it works. So, we don’t know.
3) We don’t know what made us human vs. primate. We weren’t there. Everything is speculation and could be just as wrong as 19th century speculation. We don’t know.
Other than that, hell of a discussion.
Beer.
Folks, this has been known for some time among paleo botanists and hard evolutionary theorists.
Its about net primary productivity. And NPP is really about plant rate of growth. Plant rate of growth is readily parameterized based upon CO2, air temperature, soil temperature, and moisture. These equations are quite easy to find on the net. Most equations are linear BTW based on T and sigmoid based on CO@ur momisugly assuming water is present..
Herbivore NPP is based upon fruitfulness of grazing strategy and NPP of plant species. As plant NPP per acre rises, herbivores will go from solitary or small groups to massive herds. This is readily parameterized.
Predator success is based upon herbivore NPP and hunting (search) strategies. AS herbivore NPP per acre increased, then animal husbandry became possible. As did the ability of hunter-gatherers to commit to taking care of a plot of planted seeds. Predator numbers has been parameterized for some time.
I cannot buy the suggestion that cultivation did not exist pre 130,000 BP. Too often these topics are approached from a European and Nth American perspective. “Agriculture began in the Middle East” – really?
What of potatoes that ‘migrated’ West from Sth America into the Pacific Islands, and rice throughout the tropics? Through natural selection, plants adapt very quickly (be it into a changed form). CO2 starvation @ur momisugly 100 ppmv and extinction of most species does not gel for me
We should bring tropical Africa into the mix too. There are a range of root crops to be considered
Oops, Typo – 13,000 yrs
Hello Michael,
Ancient history has typically been a reflection of what we can see. Temples and other stone structures tend to last much longer than wooden ones. We also know that weathering, decay and especially continental glaciers do a very thorough job of erasing evidence of previous history.
So we surmise that civilization began in the last 10,000 or 15,000 years,
We just do not know what happened before then…
Regards, Allan
Susan: If crops agriculture began because of rising CO2, how come is started 10,000 years earlier in Asian than in the Americas? More importantly, why didn’t agriculture during the Eemian interglacial when CO2 was 260-280 ppm (and briefly higher)?
Coincidenses abound. What factors do scientist think where important to the development of crops? Probably unintentional selection of superior varieties in the vicinity of permanent settlements.
Frank,
1) the human species changed 50,000-70,000 years ago.
…what, we don’t know, so it was different people 13000 years ago
….people as smart as Washington, Newton, Einstein
2) the ice age was really, really tough.
…even in the tropics, things did not grow well, 180 ppm is grim, really grim.
….Yes, I know the Urban folk don’t have a clue
….It isn’t just “growing” it is “rate of growth”, and 180 is slow, slow, slow.,
3) people are very, very creative, even if there are only few
…..struggling to survive the sparse ice age environment.
….the problem is food and water.
Susan: Many things happen by coincidence. CO2 steadily rose as the planet warmed after the end of the last ice age, presumably because CO2 is less soluble in warmer oceans. Agriculture developed during the same period. If one looks for a minimum CO2 level that permitted the development of agriculture, you are very likely discover a threshold level in the record. You found 240 ppm. From a scientific perspective, you have found a coincidence, but you also have formed a hypothesis: Agriculture requires a minimum level of CO2 rose to 240 ppm and therefore began when it reached this level. Now you must TEST your hypothesis. The best test of any hypothesis is whether makes useful predictions about new experiments or about phenomena that were unknown when you developed your hypothesis. Scientific rigor in climate science is low and worse in climate science skepticism, but we should always make an effort to test our hypotheses.
If I remember correctly from Jared Diamond’s influential book “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, agriculture developed INDEPENDENTLY over about 10,000 years in at least five different areas of the world: China, India, the Fertile Crescent, Africa (Nigeria), and New Guinea. The development of agriculture clearly required more than just a CO2 level above 240 ppm.
The last interglacial period also demonstrates that something more than a CO2 level above 240 ppm was required. You responded that the human species changed 50-70,000 years ago. I could reply that the human species change between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago and that change was responsible for the development of agriculture, not CO2. However, arbitrary choices like 240 ppm, 50-70,000 years ago, or 10-20,000 years ago don’t provide any scientific support for a particular hypothesis. To be honest, there is some evidence that the FOXP2 mutation occurred in humans about 50,000 years ago and that this made speech more practical. That could have been the key difference between the current interglacial and the previous one.
Diamond’s book (definitely worth reading) attempts for explore why the development of advanced civilization in the Americas lagged behind Eurasia and he believes the earlier development of agriculture in Eurasia was a key factor. He (and the sources he cites) believe that agriculture developed when humans were able to survive mostly in one location, brought the biggest seeds to that location, and purely by accident bred superior strains we now call crops. He claims that Eurasia contains more species that required few mutations to become productive. If this hypothesis were correct, the key factor would be the development of semi-permanent settlements where accidental breeding of superior strains occurred by chance.
If your hypothesis were that rising CO2 levels made it marginally easier to agriculture to develop, that would make some sense to me. If you think there is a sharp threshold below which agriculture was impractical consider this scientific publication, which quantifies the “slow, slow, slow growth” of plants at 180 ppm:
“The climate of the late Pleistocene involved a series of pronounced glacial/interglacial cycles, with glacial periods characterized by low temperatures and reduced atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) (1). During the last glacial period, minimum [CO2] occurred between 18 and 15 thousand years (kyr) B.P. (radiocarbon age) at values of 180–220 ppm, and modeling efforts suggest that such glacial values were among the lowest that occurred during the evolution of higher land plants (2). Modern plants with the C3 photosynthetic pathway exhibit major reductions in photosynthesis [by 50–75% (3)] and growth [by 52–92% (4, 5)] at glacial versus modern [CO2], and may fail to reproduce as a result of carbon limitations (6). These stress responses are due to limiting CO2 availability, which decreases net photosynthetic rates as a result of reduced CO2 substrate and increased rates of photorespiration (3). At higher spatial scales, Francois et al. (7) modeled global net primary productivity (NPP) between the last glacial maximum and the recent preindustrial period. The authors estimated that NPP values were only 38 gigatonnes (Gt) of C per year during the glacial maximum and increased to 53 Gt of C per year during the preindustrial period. Francois and coworkers attributed much of the reduction in NPP for the last glacial period to the effects of low [CO2] on vegetation. Furthermore, Harrison and Prentice (8) modeled changes (BIOME4) in global vegetation between the last glacial period and modern times and found that, when climate change only (temperature and precipitation) was considered, the extent of forest cover in temperate, boreal, and, especially, tropical regions was greatly overestimated without the inclusion of low-[CO2] effects on plant physiology.
It is critical that we understand what effects the low [CO2] that occurred during the last glacial period had on the physiological responses of actual terrestrial vegetation samples, which will then improve our estimates of ancient primary productivity and biospheric carbon stocks (7–9). If glacial C3 plants responded to low [CO2] in a manner similar to modern plants, wide-scale reductions in productivity would have occurred during the last glacial period, particularly in regions that were too cold to support C4 species, which are highly tolerant of low [CO2] (6). Therefore, physiological studies of ancient plants are necessary to determine how vegetation responded to stressful periods of low [CO2] and whether these responses influenced other aspects of ecosystem functioning during the last glacial period.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/102/3/690.long The paper is titled: “Carbon STARVATION in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California”. Growth reductions of 50-90% at 180 ppm don’t suggest to me that agriculture wasn’t practical at 230 ppm and became practical at 240 ppm.
“Starting 14,000 yag, the sparse, scraggly growth started getting thicker and slightly more abundant. It wasn’t very good, but is was much better than 16000 yag.”
It wasn’t just faster plant growth due to increased CO2 in the air. The Chinese did not just invent agriculture. They invented genetic engineering. They created a new species of rice (Oryza sativa) 13,500 years ago from the wild rice (Oryza rufipogon). Agriculture arose from human ingenuity. CO2 made it more productive.
The ancient southern Chinese of the Pearl River valley were using wild rice by that long ago, but domestication and creation of a new species probably occurred between 10,000 and 8000 years ago.
Wild rice thrived in lower CO2 even before 13,500 y.a. If the Chinese were farming wild rice, they could have done it earlier. But there’s no archeological evidence they were farming wild rice earlier than 13,500 y.a. It seems to me their success in agriculture was primarily due to the creation of a new species of rice derived from the wild rice.
The range of wild rice was restricted before 13 Ka. Much of its distribution would have been on the now submerged South China Sea.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the intensive use of wild rice began around 13,500 years ago. This led to domestication, probably both from intentional selective breeding and “self-domestication”. By 10,000 years ago, the wild and domesticated strains had diverged enough to consider assigning them to different species.
If you’re hypothesis is true, then the Chinese were farming wild rice earlier than 13.5 k.y.a. when CO2 was lower in the now South China Sea. So high CO2 was not the impetus for agriculture and early wild rice farming occurred only in South China Sea.
Well, let’s be clear that inventing a new type of rice can pass as a form of basic genetic engineering but it’s not what genetic engineering and GMOs means today where genes are spliced and inserted across different types of species in a totally unnatural way with serious toxicities attached to it that the GMO industry, their government thugs, their blind followers, and their paid trolls deny of course.
The tryptophan disaster in the late 80s was proof enough that the GMO technology should have been curtailed long ago because the true cause of the destructive event was the use of GMO tryptophan supplements. But the FDA ignored the warnings of their own scientists about the serious risks of GMOs, just to protect the business interests of the GMO industry, which the agency has been colluding with for decades – http://www.supplements-and-health.com/l-tryptophan.html
The government-biotech industrial complex wants the public to believe in their lie that current genetic engineering has been basically around for thousands of years, so it’s all good and safe.
It should be noted that there is a more general context change around 13000 years ago. It was the end of the last ice age. One should really consider what would have passed for civilization at that time. Sea level was perhaps 400 feet lower then than today, higher elevations above sea level would have been colder and likely arid with much water locked up in ice. Human populations would have been small, civilizations, if any, would also be small and probably coastal; agriculture would have been limited and populations dependent on fishing.
One might speculate that legends of the flood amount to the inundation by rising sea levels of these small, coastal civilizations. Of course there would be no easily accessible remains in the current day, if any. All now deep under water.
It would seem easy to argue that the lack of agriculture most everywhere then would be due not just to low CO2 inefficiencies but to temperature and rainfall limitations which would have made much of the upland world uninhabitable. I am inclined to think that most people make the mistake that except for their special concern the world was more or less then as it is today. There is no reason to believe that. The world was likely very different in ways difficult now to comprehend. We live in a bubble created by the end of the last ice age.
James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin calculated the world began in 4004 BC. A source of fun in subsequent years, it might be a good idea to revisit the concept in a more secular guise. Geological time is likely not the most significant scale for contemporary civilization. The world we inhabit may have quite literally begun at the end of the last ice age. Then after Archbishop Ussher we might wish to assign the beginning of the world to some date between 13000 and 10000 BC.
So, based on this, could it be that there was (limited?) agriculture, but that all the evidence is 400 feet below sea level, and likely destroyed by the sea?
“It would seem easy to argue that the lack of agriculture most everywhere then would be due not just to low CO2 inefficiencies but to temperature and rainfall limitations”
I disagree. The tropics was ice free during the glacial period. Agriculture could have developed earlier in Indochina, Indonesia, India, Brazil or Australia. Agriculture is a technology. It requires intelligence to develop a technology. I hypothesize that human brain was evolving intelligence in the last 100,000 years. If man started already smart, we would find archeological evidence of art 100,000 years ago. But art (cave paintings) developed later.
There could have been further brain development among anatomically modern humans between, say, 100 and 60 Ka, but IMO agriculture didn’t develop in the tropics before c. 10,000 years ago because the tropics was too rich an environment to need it.
Just as the Pacific NW Coast Indians didn’t practice agriculture, although they were aware of, because their natural environment was so rich, so too did people during the last glaciation living in the tropics not need intensive plant use, leading to domestication. Same goes for animals. Dogs were domesticated in the subtropics or temperate zones of Asia and Europe, not in the tropics, although many canine species capable of domestication lived there then.
The tropical people didn’t farm because their land was too rich yet in the interglacial when the land became richer they started farming? Maybe they were not smart enough until later. Modern humans were already around during the last interglacial 120 kya and CO2 was comparable to 13 kya yet they did not invent agriculture. Not smart enough
James,
I hope you’re kidding, but fear not.
The biblical chronology of 6000 years ago for the beginning of the world is just as ludicrous for the origins of agriculture as for every other observed scientific fact. OK, well less so for the origin of the solar system 4.5 Ga and the universe 13.7 Ga.
Please, at least try to get a little real.
Crispin in Waterloo June 25, 2016 at 11:04 pm
No, human teeth have not evolved to eat fruits and nuts.
Baboons, gorillas, etc have flat surfaces on their molars for just that reason. Human teeth have a 35° “slope’ because we have evolved to be omnivores. Flat teeth work wonderfully to crush fruits and nuts, A sloped tooth like humans have works to cut, sheer, and crush meats.
It has been about 5 years since I have had reason to look that info up, but I will try to find you some links for it later today.
A few points regarding the definition of ‘agriculture’ in the context of the first farming:
1) Archeologists take genetic modification as evidence of farming: http://www.britannica.com/topic/agriculture (This applies to animal domestication as well, and independently of DNA studies, as when female goats lose their horns.)
Such modification originally occured primarily by accident:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/domestications/qt/wheat_2.htm
2) There is evident a continuum between grain gathering and intentional sowing. Sickles were in use in the Levant earlier than any period with evidence of plant modification. Which leads us to philosophical considerations:
3) The farmer has to understand the function of a seed.
4) That understanding leads to the sacrifice of food stores: save grain for planting.
Most seem to take for granted the idea that primitive man understood the function of seeds. We tend to project our basic science onto that of cave men. But there’s no reason primitive man should have had a clue what a pit was, except a nuisance. And if that was the case then we can be confident agriculture coincided with that discovery, by accident and deduction, and definition.
The apparently gradual transition from exclusive gathering to planting and gathering highlights the difficulty of inserting such an intrusive and unnecessary mechanism as enhanced CO2 fertilization into the process. Farming evolved–after a long history of successfully intensive gathering–with the discovery of germination.
Still the notion of spontaneous generation would persist till nearly modern times.
–AGF
“3) The farmer has to understand the function of a seed.”
Agfo: Your assumption is that people did not have the intelligence to observe that a seed immersed in soil re-generates . I don’t buy it . They did not need to know how and why this happens. They only needed to want to spend time in one place with reasonable food security
In terms of human development, 20,000 years is just yesterday. Their intelligence capacity was probably as advanced as ours
As I see it
Cheers
M
MC: How long does it take a cherry pit to sprout? How about a wheat grain? You don’t know? If it were a matter of intelligence and powers of observation how do YOU explain that “spontaneous generation” was accepted until two centuries ago? And how many times while on a camping trip have you watched a seed sprout? And why do you think I posited a sedentary life style as a prerequisite to the discovery of germination (June 25, 2016 at 7:54 pm)? And why does grain cultivation make for a better candidate for such a discovery than fruit trees?
The Tiwi islanders never figured out where babies come from, and this was probably the case for Australian aborigines in general prior to European contact, hence the general case for Homo sapiens in general prior to animal domestication. 9 months was just too long a delay to deduce cause and effect. And no, we aren’t a bit smarter, as our recent ancestors proved with their lingering acceptance of spontaneous generation.
Eventually some sedentary grain gatherer did deduce that this spring’s sprouting grain in last summer’s winnowing arena wasn’t a coincidence, but it wasn’t because cave men spent their days watching grass grow that the connection was made.
By your reckoning we would expect the Maori to undertake some moa population density studies before hunting the birds to extinction.
Cheers, –AGF
“Hello Michael,
Ancient history has typically been a reflection of what we can see. Temples and other stone structures tend to last much longer than wooden ones. We also know that weathering, decay and especially continental glaciers do a very thorough job of erasing evidence of previous history.
So we surmise that civilization began in the last 10,000 or 15,000 years,
We just do not know what happened before then…
Regards, Allan”
Hi Allan
Thanks for the response above . I believe that we have to keep open minded about the ‘consensus’ over such things as when civilisation began. First off, how to define civilisation? Here is where the Northern Hemisphere perspective has historically dictated what is ‘taught in schools’. I remember that way back in the dark ages when I went to primary school we were asked the question: “Who was the first man to discover New Zealand?” – “Abel Tasman” How ridiculous. This mind-set that the European races were more advanced and intelligent than any other still persists to a degree today and taints the ‘consensus’ on history
We are talking about the cultivation of land and planting of crops. One assumes that in this respect a civilised community is one that has become skilled in agriculture and was reliant on it. They were not necessarily building substantial structures. In wooded sub-tropical/tropical regions they did not need to – even throughout the cold eras. As for the influence of sheet glaciation eliminating evidence, this in reality, covered a very restricted global area
The window into this question we are discussing lies in artefacts. It took a 3 minute search to find this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/science/oldest-known-pottery-found-in-china.html?_r=0
If they had the nous to work and fire pottery 20,000 years ago they surely figured out a simple thing like planting seed. Common sense tells me that if Mum can have food security by planting seed while Dad is hunting, why not? I have no doubt that cultivation artifacts exist too. The problem with these is that they will probably be of stone which is very hard to date
Some thoughts
Cheers
Michael C
Now for some real evidence:
https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/4825?show=full
Auckland is at 36 degrees S which is by no means tropical. The vegetation (@ur momisugly 25,000 BP) is described as patches of beech forest surrounded by scrub and grass. The NZ beech is a large evergreen tree and dominates the cooler regions of NZ to this day . Once the inter-glacial kicks in this landscape becomes solid forest including other species. The evidence indicates that trees were still growing at this latitude at around approx 25,000 BP. I suspect that the tropical region would be ideal for growing crops at this time
The first thing a scientific researcher must do before establishing a pet theory is to study what evidence is already our there in its entirely – not just that which supports the theory. We can also begin by using common sense and general knowledge to ask ourselves, “what is likely?” There are usually exceptions in nature driven by adaptability
Now those of you that delight in truth may like to correlate this information with what we know about CO2 concentrations at that time
Michael Carter,
I agree that the tropical regions were warm, fertile, had plenty of sun, etc.
The problem is at 180 ppm CO2, photosynthesis is slow, very slow, grimly slow.
Yes, the trees were there, likely very old as they slowly, oh so slowly grew.
We are spoiled by tremendous ability to grow things now.
In the ’50s wheat would something “lodge”, over the years more and more.
Now they have developed “short stalk” wheat to address the rapid growth of wheat here in the 2010’s
Hello Susan,
Thank you for your article.
As I suggested above:
Rice and wheat (C3 plants) are Old World plants, reportedly first cultivated in Asia. C3 plants require CO2 levels above ~160 ppm to survive, and more to thrive. These are the two leading food crops in the world.
Corn is another leading food crop. Corn (aka maize, a C4 plant) is a New World crop, reportedly first cultivated in the Americas. C4 plants can grow and thrive at much lower concentrations of atmospheric CO2.
Although it would not be conclusive to your hypothesis, is there any evidence that corn was cultivated much earlier than rice and wheat?
The question of when humankind arrived in the Americas is relevant, and is discussed in this fascinating article:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-humans-come-to-the-americas-4209273/?no-ist+-=&page=1
Regards, Allan
HI Allan. – I still wonder about root crops. What is their CO2 requirement? These are very important in tropical agriculture
Regards
Michael C
MIchael:
http://www.cropsreview.com/c3-plants.html
C3 plants are those which fix and reduce inorganic CO2 into organic compounds using only the C3 pathway in photosynthesis while C4 and CAM plants employ both C3 and C4 cycles. In other words, the first classification refers to those plants having C3 photosynthesis, C4 plants employ the C4 photosynthesis, and CAM plants the CAM photosynthesis.
Plants utilizing only the C3 cycle are most common in the Plant kingdom. They comprise about 85% of all plant species (Moore et al. 2003). In contrast, only about 3% thereof are C4 plants while about 8% were identified as CAM plants as of 2010 (Simpson 2010).
Examples of C3 plants:
– most small seeded cereal crops such as rice (Oryza sativa), wheat (Triticum spp.), barley (Hordeum vulgare), rye (Secale cereale), and oat (Avena sativa); soybean (Gycine max), peanut (Arachis hypogaea), cotton (Gossypium spp.), sugar beets (Beta vulgaris), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), spinach (Spinacea oleracea), potato (Solanum tuberosum); most trees and lawn grasses such as rye, fescue, and Kentucky bluegrass.
Also includes evergreen trees and shrubs of the tropics, subtropics, and the Mediterranean; temperate evergreen conifers like the Scotch pine (Pinus sylvestris); deciduous trees and shrubs of the temperate regions, e.g. European beech (Fagus sylvatica) (Moore et al. 2003), as well as weedy plants like the water hyacinth (Eichornia crassipes), lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), bindweed (Convolvolus arvensis), and wild oat (Avena fatua) (Llewellyn 2000).
http://www.cropsreview.com/c4-plants.html
C4 plants are those which photosynthesize following the mechanism called C4 Photosynthesis. They are found only in the angiosperms with about 8,000 members in 17 families (see list below), equivalent to about 3% of all land plants. Combined, the grasses (family Poaceae or Gramineae) and sedges (family Cyperaceae) comprise roughly 79% of the total number of C4 species (Simpson 2010).
Examples of C4 species are the economically important crops corn or maize (Zea mays), sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), and millets, as well as the switchgrass (Panicum virganum) which has been utilized as a source of biofuel.
Hi M.Carter, Ipomea Barata sweet potato is an example of edible root commonly grown in tropical conditions. Decade + ago when CO2 was 350 ppm a controlled (water, light, temp. kept ideal) the tuber yield was 1.8 times more at 670ppm CO2 & 2.6 times more at 1,000ppm CO2.
There is a feature of plant life where something originates, termed “source” (here what the extra CO2 leads to in leaves) & where that goes, termed “sink” (here what becomes more mass in root). This is not a simple linear interaction & different plants respond to their environmental conditions differently; meaning this reported ratio for different CO2 levels can not be directly applied to other root crops. However, the trend of more source activity giving more sink action in tropical root crops is what I ‘d expect plays out.
Edit: batata
This is a worthwhile article:
The benefits of increased atmospheric CO2 and the real threat to humanity and the environment of CO2 starvation has been carefully ignored by warmist fanatics.
As I stated in my 2015 paper (see above):
“4. CO2 is the feedstock for carbon-based life on Earth, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient. CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.”
Regards to all, Allan
Photosynthesis and CO2 Enrichment
https://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/photosynthesis-and-co2-enrichment/
Published June 13, 2009
The benefits of increased atmospheric CO2 on crops are so extensive that a long article or book needs to be written to do justice to the subject and to the results of thousands of research trials. The improvement in photosynthesis efficiency at higher CO2 levels does not tell the whole story, but it is a good place to start, since all plant growth relies on this process.
Photosynthesis is the process by which plants utilize visible light energy (e.g. sunlight) to convert aerial CO2 and water (from roots) into plant matter. This process also requires phosphorus and nitrogen. There are three photosynthesis ‘pathways’, known as C3, C4 and CAM. CAM is unimportant for food crops, being the method used by cacti, succulents and agaves. Pineapple is the only food crop of any importance to use CAM, so CAM can be neglected for the present purposes. World food security depends on C3 and C4 photosynthesis.
Less than 1% of all plant species in the world use the C4 photosynthesis pathway. Of the 86 plant species that supply most of the world’s food, only five use the C4 photosynthetic pathway, of which only four are of much importance (corn [=maize], sorghum, millet, and sugarcane) yet these four constitute some 20% of all the food crops grown. Because of their high photosynthetic efficiency, the C4 crops corn and sugarcane are favoured for ethanol production by those who want to produce liquid biofuels rather than food, thus increasing food prices and poverty.
Those crops using the C3 pathway include nearly all cereals (wheat, rice, barley, oats, rye, triticale etc), all legumes (dry bean, soybean, peanut, mung bean, faba bean, cowpea, common pea, chickpea, pigeon pea, lentil etc), nearly all fruits (including banana, coconut etc), roots and tubers (potato, taro, yams, sweet potato, cassava etc). C3 is also the pathway for sugar beet, for fibre crops (cotton, jute, sisal etc) and oil crops (sesame, sunflower, rapeseed, safflower etc), and for trees.
At present atmospheric levels of CO2, C4 plants are more efficient at photosynthesis than C3: in absolute conversion efficiency of light energy to stored chemical energy they are around 7% efficient, compared to 4% for C3. C4 plants typically use less water per weight of biomass produced, and can tolerate greater water and temperature stress than C3 plants. Accordingly, C4 crops are most often grown in tropical and equatorial regions.
The advantage that C4 plants have in terms of photosynthesis does not always translate into higher harvest yields, however, as only parts of the plant are edible. In terms of ground use, C3 crops can produce some of the highest amounts of edible calories and protein per acre: for example, potatoes and soybeans respectively.
C4 plants show a relatively small improvement in photosynthesis rate with increasing atmospheric CO2 above present levels; however, at increased levels of CO2 the leaf pores (stomata) of both C4 and C3 plants increasingly close up, which also reduces the amount of water lost by the plant (transpiration). Thus C3 and C4 plants significantly improve their water efficiency as CO2 levels increase. This is shown below for C4 (corn) and C3 (soybean).
Water Use Efficiency
C3 photosynthesis is less efficient than C4 partly because of an effect known as photo-respiration, which results in the loss (to the atmosphere or soil) of a substantial proportion of the carbon that has been extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthesis. C3 photo-respiration increases under heat stress and drought, which is a major factor behind the choice of C4 crops for hot dry climates. However, as CO2 levels increase, photo-respiration is suppressed, such that at double today’s levels of atmospheric CO2 the efficiencies of C3 plants (in photosynthesis rate and water use) are as good as or better than C4 plants. Moreover, at higher levels of CO2, C3 plants can maintain efficient photosynthesis rates at considerably higher temperatures than today’s conditions – their optimal temperatures for photosynthesis increase.
The effect of CO2 concentration on photosynthetic rate at constant temperature is shown below for C3 and C4 crops.
Photosynthetic Rates
As CO2 concentrations increase, the photosynthetic efficiency gap between C3 and C4 plants rapidly closes, and at double today’s CO2 concentration (i.e. at 780 ppm instead of today’s 390 ppm), the photosynthesis rates are the same. Incidentally, the majority of the world’s most troublesome weeds use the C4 pathway, and so have a competitive advantage over C3 crops at current CO2 concentrations. At higher CO2 concentrations, competing for the same resources on the same patch (light, water, CO2, nutrients etc), C3 crops increasing out-compete the weeds.
The photosynthesis rate with temperature is shown below for C3 plants at today’s CO2 levels (Low CO2), and at double CO2 level (High CO2).
Photosynthesis Temp
The upper curve is the same for C4. From this it is clear that at double CO2 concentration, not only has the efficiency of C3 crops improved tremendously, but the temperature at which optimal photosynthesis occurs in C3 increases up to that of C4. Thus the vast majority of food crops will benefit hugely by increased CO2, and even more so by increased CO2 coupled with warming.
A dangerous combination would be increased warming without increased CO2. Since there is no proof whatsoever that increasing CO2 is having any significant effect on climate (any climate changes might be taking place by completely natural means over which we have no control), but there is incontrovertible evidence that increasing CO2 is positively beneficial with or without warming, then on the basis of risk mitigation and precaution it is utterly foolish to be reducing carbon emissions. As S.A. Cowling put it in Plants and temperature – CO2 uncoupling (Science, 1999, 285, 1500-1501)
We should be less concerned about rising CO2 and rising temperatures and more worried about the possibility that future atmospheric CO2 will suddenly stop increasing
The article Global Temperature Change and Terrestrial Ecology in the Encyclopedia of Water Science (CRC Press, 2007) has the matter stated correctly:
[It is a] well-established fact that CO2 is a powerful aerial fertilizer, which when added to the air can substantially increase the vegetative productivity of nearly all plants…numerous studies have demonstrated that the percent increase in growth produced by an increase in the air’s CO2 content typically rises with an increase in air temperature. In addition, at the species-specific upper-limiting air temperature at which plants typically die from thermal stress under current atmospheric CO2 concentrations, higher CO2 concentrations have been shown to protect plants and help them stave off thermal death…[and] increase the species-specific temperature at which plants grow best. Indeed it has been experimentally demonstrated that the typical CO2-induced increase in plant optimum temperature is as great as, if not greater than, the CO2-induced global warming typically predicted…Hence, [with] an increase in the air’s CO2 concentration – even if it did have a tendency to warm the earth (which is hotly debated) – …[plants] …would grow equally well, if not better, in a warmer and CO2-enriched environment.
We will set out the full range of benefits of increasing CO2 in future posts, but as an initial summary the following is helpful by Vaclav Smil from China’s environmental crisis: an enquiry into the limits of national development (M.E. Sharpe, 1993)
There could also be important beneficial effects, above all a roughly 30 percent higher crop productivity brought by 600ppm of atmospheric CO2 and higher tropospheric temperatures. And the benefits may not end with higher productivity. As photosynthesis is predicated on a very uneven CO2—H2O exchange, higher atmospheric CO2 levels would significantly boost the water use efficiency of all plants. This reduction [in water use] would also average about 30 percent.
Other notable benefits or a higher CO2 level include lower photorespiration (which would increase both the optimum as well as the upper temperature range for photosynthesis), substantially improved symbiotic fixation of nitrogen in leguminous plants, increased resistance to lower temperatures, and air pollution, and a better tolerance of soil and water salinity. A combination of these responses would mean that all major crops would yield more in their current environments while using less water and, when rotated with leguminous species, less fertilizer—or they could be grown in areas considered today too arid for continuous field farming, or that they may be able to outperform the current yields in those regions where precipitation may decline…
Policies such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions, carbon capture and storage, taking land out of food use for biofuels (or onshore wind farms), increasing energy costs, grossly inefficient and poisonous ‘organic’ farming methods etc all serve to destroy the capability of this planet to support an increasing population. Behind this surely is the stated neo-Malthusian and Green policy to wipe out billions of lives by the sheer force of economics. As hunger increases, it will be blamed on man-made climate change, and the screw will be turned ever more tightly to introduce policies that will accelerate the destruction of mankind.
A critical point that would apply as well to Patrick Moore’s paper as to here is the consideration of CO2 partial pressure as opposed to PPMV. At the elevation of Laguna de Chochos in the Andes (3200m) CO2 partial pressure is 70% that of sea level, so that 200PPMV would have a 140PPMV equivalence. And yet the sediment cores don’t show anything out of the ordinary going on around 11500BP beyond a spike of fern growth (fig.5): http://www2.pitt.edu/~mabbott1/climate/mark/Abstracts/Pubs/Bushetal05JQS.pdf
…not even the YD can be made out with any confidence (p.704). There is no evidence even at high altitude of CO2 starvation across species over 17ky. –AGF
AG:
Not sure what your point is here. It seems highly improbable that the sediment cores from the paper you cited could credibly contradict all the evidence that CO2 starvation is real for C3 plants below a certain concentration of atmospheric CO2.
Do these sediment cores even possess the required accuracy and resolution?
See Fig. 3 here, originally from Taiz and Zeiger “Plant Physiology” (1991)
https://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/photosynthesis-and-co2-enrichment/
You’ll recall the prime assertion here is that the evolution of agriculture depended primarily on CO2 fluctuations. I enumerated a few problems with this thesis in my first post, June 25, 2016 at 7:54 pm. It’s one thing to deduce the efficacy of CO2 fertilization at 400ppm and another to quantify it at historical levels. We have not seen so much here as a plot of CO2 levels between 10 and 15ky. I would have to go to the core data and create my own. And yet we’re taking seriously the notion that a gradual rise in CO2 was the critical criterion in determining the advent of sowing, when it is evident that technologically advanced reaping had been going on for some time before accidental genetic manipulation of crops.
The prime assertion, that sowing success depended on previously insufficient CO2 levels, depends on one of two other assumptions, either that plants in general were previously less successful, or that plants harvested by humans gained a competitive advantage over plants in general due to rising CO2. Such assumptions can be easily dismissed simply by observation–or the lack of observation–of mass plant extinction at any time in the Pleistocene. Can we identify a single plant species that died out due to CO2 starvation?
This is not to suggest that plants have not been competing for CO2 on a global scale since oxygen replaced CO2 in the atmosphere, or that global biomass is not limited by the sum of CO2 in the biosphere. Plants on earth use up available CO2 as fast as they can until their collective growth is limited by its availability. This availability was never as unreliable as during the ice ages of the Pleistocene. And yet we have no record of Pleistocene plant extinction that I’m aware of.
The plants survive. The cereals do fine. CO2 remains a minor component in competition for survival, overwhelmed by problems of water, heat, and shade. Bush et al shows no obvious signs of CO2 limited plant growth at altitude, where it would be expected to show up long before it would affect cereal gathering at low altitude. This whole argument is naive in the extreme. –AGF
Hi agfosterjr, – An old (1991) research team concluded that C3 plants at high altitude actually perform CO2 fixation (carboxylation) more efficiently because of the carbon isotope they are getting to work with. You might find the work of Korner et al. interesting in this regard; try “Carbon isotope discrimination by plants follows latitudinal & altitudinal trends” & can find several earlier published by Korner among it’s references.
Thanks for that and for the rest of your comments and links. The range of sophistication makes tires screech and gears grind as we shift, and we can miss a lot of scenery on the way. Your expertise is appreciated. –AGF
While there can be no doubt that the last glacial and associated low concentrations of CO2 would have severely curtailed agricultural activity I find the perceived impact on general plant growth to be too extreme. Usually we find exceptions to trends. I am still of the view that some agricultural activity persisted long prior to 13,000 years and back into the glacial maximal. Why? Because of geography
Below is a link. By scrolling down we can see vegetation cover in New Zealand during the last glacial maximal @ur momisugly approx 20,000 yrs BP. Note that in the far north up to 34 degrees Nth the cover is described as tall broadleaf podocarp and beech forest. In terms of New Zealand flora the current interglacial has the affect of moving species south by 10 degrees.
This evidence indicates that whatever the CO2 status during the maxima around 20,000 BP vegetation in New Zealand was very similar to what we find today, be it in a different location – a 400 km migration
I am not knocking the OP – only suggesting to keep it in perspective. It holds some truth but is by no means exhaustive. I would not use it as a tool in the CO2 argument
http://www.fergusmurraysculpture.com/new-zealand/southern-alps-and-glaciers-9-pages/ii-the-geomorphology-of-the-fox-glacier-region/
Correction: 34 degrees Sth
Hello Michael.
The response of C3 plant growth to low atmospheric CO2 is too well documented to be controversial.
Note also that the vast majority of plant species and food plants are C3.
I started writing and researching about CO2 starvation in 2009 or earlier, and while I have learned much since then, the basic fact remains:
“4. CO2 is the feedstock for carbon-based life on Earth, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient. CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.”
___________________
EVIDENCE SUGGESTING TEMPERATURE DRIVES ATMOSPHERIC CO2 MORE THAN CO2 DRIVES TEMPERATURE
September 4, 2015
By Allan MacRae
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/13/presentation-of-evidence-suggesting-temperature-drives-atmospheric-co2-more-than-co2-drives-temperature/
Observations and Conclusions:
1. Temperature, among other factors, drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. The rate of change dCO2/dt is closely correlated with temperature and thus atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record
2. CO2 also lags temperature by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
3. Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales.
4. CO2 is the feedstock for carbon-based life on Earth, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient. CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
5. Based on the evidence, Earth’s climate is insensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 – there is no global warming crisis.
6. Recent global warming was natural and irregularly cyclical – the next climate phase following the ~20 year pause will probably be global cooling, starting by ~2020 or sooner.
7. Adaptation is clearly the best approach to deal with the moderate global warming and cooling experienced in recent centuries.
8. Cool and cold weather kills many more people than warm or hot weather, even in warm climates. There are about 100,000 Excess Winter Deaths every year in the USA and about 10,000 in Canada.
9. Green energy schemes have needlessly driven up energy costs, reduced electrical grid reliability and contributed to increased winter mortality, which especially targets the elderly and the poor.
10. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of modern society. When politicians fool with energy systems, real people suffer and die. That is the tragic legacy of false global warming alarmism.
Allan MacRae, Calgary