WHEAT AND BARLEY

​​Celiac Disease and the alcohol buzz

The regular cooking of food, along with the formation of tribes and other modern behaviors, has enabled Homo sapiens to occupy almost every ecosystem on the face of the Earth, and when nothing else could be found to eat, it seemed that grass seeds could be cooked and eaten.  Unfortunately, many people, especially infants, were unable to fully digest the seeds of some of the grasses of the Middle East.  Infants, especially, sometimes became sickly, and sometimes even died, from eating cooked grass seeds.  This led to the gradual elimination of such people from the gene pool; but many people even today are not able to fully digest the cooked seeds of wheat, barley and rye, and become sick if they try to eat those cereals.

In spite of this many people started the practice gathering mature grass seeds during the dry season and saving them as emergency food.  This had the unintended side effect of beginning a gradual domestication of some of the Middle Eastern grasses, and also gave humans a new way to make alcohol.

Members of the genus Homo did not like to climb trees, and they weren't very good at it, but they sometimes picked rotting fruit off the the ground and ate it, and they evolved an ability to metabolize the alcohol in rotten fruit to get an extra energy boost.  This had the side effect of giving members of the Homo clade a buzz from alcohol that apes did not get

The Younger Dryas, the comet and the aftermath

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The Younger Dryas was the most recent (the youngest, in a geological sense) of three episodes of cooling that interrupted the warming trend that followed the Last Glacial Maximum.  (The Last Glacial Maximum occurred about 20,000 years ago.)  Volcanism might have played a major part in causing the Younger Dryas, but this episode had a dramatic start, about 12,975 years ago, when a comet shredded into tiny fragments in the Earth's atmosphere and pieces of it smashed into the Earth.

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The dense cloud of tiny fragments from the comet hung in the atmosphere and the stratosphere for many years, and at first virtually none of the sun's light reached ground level.  Gradually, some of the larger particles fell out, leaving a thick haze, but by that time most of the smaller plant life like grasses were dead.  Even the leaves of trees were turning yellow and falling to the ground, and many herbivores were starving to death.

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People who at that time lived by hunting the animals that lived on grasses had seen the fireworks in the sky and knew that the cataclysm had hit them from the sky, and when the air had cleared to the point where they could make out the stars at night they took careful note of the positions of the galaxies.  Two thousand years later their descendants built a series of underground temple/observatory/cloisters (mostly covered by timbers) in southern Anatolia, at the top of a small mountain.  The purpose of these underground constructions was to commemorate the event and to observe the heavens, and to try to discern what the movements of stars and planets meant, particularly with regard to the disaster that had caused grass-eating herbivores to desert the land.

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The ring of monumental constructions were clustered near the highest point on a hill or small mountain that is known to the Turks as Gobekli Tepe, or "Potbellied Hill".  As each temple or observatory was built, the previous one was filled in, and more dirt was piled on top, possibly to prevent occupation of the old site by another team of observers.  In other words, those who operated the new site considered that they still the owners of the site.  This was akin to villagers continuing to claim ownership of a village site after they had abandoned it.

Filling in and covering over the monuments created a mound where the old monument had been.  The total of the filled-in constructions formed a circular mound with a depression in its center which looked like a navel on top of the mountain, and that was the origin of the name, "Gobekli Tepe".

Near this circular mound, archaeologists found the remains of a large cistern and a water collection system for channeling rainwater into it.  hisallowed priestly astronomers to cook meals of processed grass seeds.  This enabled the astronomers to permanently reside at the site, most likely in underground chambers that surrounded the central part of the monument.  Residing underground would accustom the observers' eyes to darkness, so that they could make more accurate observations of the sky.  There is some evidence that the priest/observers may have venerated the skulls of astronomers who had died.  Seed gatherers and other servants may have lived in rectangular structurers that were external to the underground temple.

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Within one of these monuments archaeologists found a pillar, known as the "Vulture Stone", on which had been recorded the positions of the constellations as they had been observed soon after the comet had struck.  This stone tells us when, within about a hundred and fifty years, the comet had struck the Earth.

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Grass-seed consumption

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Climate change also played a part in both the scarcity of grass-eating herbivores and a switch to a sedentary, seed-gathering lifestyle in which people started to domesticate grazing animals and gather grass seeds that were processed and then cooked into mush.  The climate changes included extreme seasonality in which extremely dry seasons alternated with wet seasons, lightning strikes during dry seasons that started massive wildfires that swept through dry grass.  Heavy rains that followed in the wake of these wildfires then eroded the topsoil on hills and slopes, sweeping it into valleys where it was deposited in deep layers of topsoil.

All of this resulted in eroded hills where grasses barely grew and moist valley where grasses grew abundantly.  Human populations that crowded into these valleys, and so did grass-eating herbivores, and the juxtaposition encouraged people to round up the animals instead of killing them.  Grasses grew abundantly in these river valleys, and crowded out other plants; so order to conserve the precious herbivores, people began to supplement their diets with processed and cooked grass seeds.  Gathering of the best seeds and seasonal spillage of seeds on the ground subsequently led to the evolution of domesticated grasses, so this was the genesis of farming.

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Since the gathering of plant foods was women's work, men spent their time chipping stone vessels out of solid stone for storing, cooking and serving grass seeds.  We tend to think that the Neolithic, or "New Stone Age", was a time when people made new kinds of tools (such as composite tools) in order to make or construct new kinds of things (such as structures), but  I think the period is better characterized as one in which time hung heavy on men's hands; their primary function had been taken away from them, first by a massive die-off of the animals that they hunted and then by the domestication of animals.  Even after wild animal populations recovered, men were often more useful for guarding domesticated animals and stores of grass seeds than for hunting wild animals and bringing back the carcasses.  Moreover women, rather than men, often cared for the domesticated animals.

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Even as the Younger Dryas waned, human populations burgeoned because grass seeds were so rich in energy; shortage of energy foods had always been the limiting factor in the growth of human populations

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The chipping of storage and cooking vessels out of stone was not enough to keep men busy, nor did they like to do it, so they often spent their time trying to solve the riddle of what had befallen them.  Men with time on their hands sat in groups at night to watch the sky and report what they saw; those who were very good at this then became professional astronomers, and were paid to watch the sky every night and analyze what they saw; other men were paid by the community to build observatories, based on various designs, to help the astronomers do their work.  Their work was to discover the cause of what had happened.

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Women were no longer dependent on men.  Indeed, men were dependent on women, because men refused to do the women's work of gathering, processing and cooking grass seeds.  Moreover, men lost their main remaining usefulness when women started to make pottery.  Women ruled their households, and women in the village communities ruled the men, rather than the reverse.

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The idealized art of the earliest farming communities often feature women with one arm draped across the back of a man, as she owned him.  The men simply folded their hands in front of them; they had nothing to do.

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Self-domestication and farming

XXXHumans were already super-competitive among the medium-sized species of the Earth when increased consumption of grass seeds and other farm products led to even higher population densities among them.  This, in turn, led to further intensification of self-domestication.XXX

XXXHigh population density and stable societies had prompted modern qualities of mind to emerge, especially along the southern coast of Africa and in other refugia, and the same high population densities had caused these same populations to be strongly affected by self-domestication.XXX

XXXOne result of self-domestication was that juvenile characteristics such as playfulness tended to be retained into adulthood, and this playfulness is an aspect of the modern mind.  Another result of self-domestication was a longer period of immaturity early in life, which prompted more extensive brain remodeling during that period.  This also helped to drive the emergence of the modern mind.  Thus, we can see that self-domestication and the modern mind were (and are) deeply entangled with each other.XXX

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The Great Sphynx

It was thought that perhaps the face that was carved onto the Great Sphynx was that of some Pharoah, but then it was pointed out that the Sphynx shows signs of having been subject to heavy rainfall for a thousand years or so since it was carved whereas Egypt has been very dry since before the first dynasty of Egypt was established.  This means that the immense rock carving in northern Egypt predates Egyptian civilization by a thousand of years, and the Sphynx was certainly carved during the Green Sahara period, when heavy rainfall in the region created a lush savanna stretching across Africa.  (The Sahara Desert is there today.)

The great stone god with a human face attached to a lion's body most likely demanded sacrifices of some kind.  But what kind of sacrifices?  No evidence of such sacrifices has been found, but the answer might be found on Sardinia, where a platform was constructed for just such sacrifices.  Sardinia is a long way off, but pottery found in northeastern Africa matches the earliest Sardinian pottery in style and execution. indicating an early migration from North Africa to the Italian Peninsula or directly to Sardinia.

Evidence of sacrifices has been found in debris that was later  piled on top of the original platform: the remains of sacrificed sheep, pigs and cattle, so it is not unreasonable to presume that similar sacrifices might have ben made between the front paws of the the lion god in Egypt.

An interesting thing about the Great Sphynx is that tablets are carved next to the human ears of the Sphynx, and there are some pictograms carved into the tablets.  Egyptologists are unable to decipher the pictograms, and if the Great Sphynx is as old as it appears to be the pictograms must have been undecipherable even 5,000 years ago -- the pictograms would have been already out of date at that time.

We can guess that the pictograms might have represented and a pronouncement or request of some kind.  The tablets were obviously not placed in a position where they were easily visible to humans, but that wouldn't seem necessary to those who carved the Sphynx -- the messages were meant to have power in their own right, whether they were seen or not.

Genocide

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The alluvial plain of Mesopotamia is much too big and deep to excavate the whole thing, so there is no practical way to determine archaeologically just how ancient Sumer really was; but grasses most likely were domesticated as early on the alluvial plain as anywhere; conditions were often perfect on this alluvial plain, near some of the earliest Sumerian sites and ideal for the growth of gasses and other crops.  Wherever there was enough rainfall, and along riverbanks, agriculturalists could have easily grown crops there without creating an irrigation system.

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The sowing, reaping, processing and cooking of grass seeds was women' work -- the work of men was hunting.  Moreover, as well-fed human populations increased, and it became necessary to travel long distances to find animals to hunt, domesticated sheep and goats (mostly cared for by women) made it unnecessary for men to do anything at all besides the tedious chore of chipping cooking and serving vessels out of stone.

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Consequently, men began to look for other things to do, such as hunting down and slaughtering the archaic Homo sapiens from the southern swamplands who had formed a habit of stealing crops and domesticated animals from the farming communities.

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The hunters, who used bow-and-arrow killing systems, far outnumbered the women and children who had been stealing the crops and animals.  After the thieves had been wiped out the hunters went after those who tried to hide in the swampland.

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Incidentally, a man living in the United States has been found to be a direct descendant, in the male line of descent, of the archaic Homo sapiens who continued to live in or near the swamplands of southern Mesopotamia after others had populated Africa.  His ancestors may have been among those who survived ​by abandoning the swampland altogether and subsequently avoided all contact with modern humans.  (They may have escaped along the shoreline.)

​Power struggle in Spain

The first farmers to come to the Iberian peninsula, where Spain is now located, most likely came by crossing the sea from the Italian Peninsula.  But as the practice of animal husbandry spread on the Italian Peninsula farmers also spread along the coast, and brought with them domesticated animals:  sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.  Meanwhile hunter gatherers retreated to mountainous areas and looked on in dismay.

As domesticated animals had come into the Iberian Peninsula the hunter gatherers must have learned early on that the rules had changed, and that any attempt to hunt the animals would trigger a deadly war with the new masters of the plains.  That was probably when the hunter gatherers had begun to retreat to mountainous areas.

But when the farmers began to bring their animals into the mountains the hunter gatherers had no choice but to confront the encroachers.

When an extended family of Neolithic farmers cum shepherds settled into a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains (in the north of what is now Spain) hunter gatherers ambushed them and killed every man, woman and child.  For good measure they defleshed their bones cooked and ate their flesh.

These farmers had not gone into the mountains simply to grow crops; they had brought domesticated animals with them, so why not just hunt down their animals and let the farmers hightail it home?  They killed the owners of the animals to acquire some of the prowess that had enabled them to take over the plains, just as they occasionally killed such animals as wild cats, badgers and foxes to acquire their qualities.

Otzi the Ice Man

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The Italian Tyrol, where Otzi died. is unique in Europe.  It is a time capsule where little has changed since farmers from Anatolia first arrived there about 7,000 years ago.

Since the farmers first arrived in the Tyrol, which is rugged country just east of Switzerland, farmers have continued to farm in the bottomland while herding their cattle to higher elevations for the summer months.  And few strangers have passed through the region, perhaps because they were not welcome there, and the locals quite effectively kept them out.

Otzi was obviously a hunter.  But what was a hunter doing in a region that was patrolled by cattle herders on the lookout for poachers?  The answer is that he himself had been poaching.

Copper was rare in the Tyrol when Otzi lived, and cowbells, which are made of copper alloys, had not yet been invented.  So, how did farmers who owned the animals that Otzi was poaching find their animals in the fall when it was time for them to be returned to the valley?  The answer is that some of the animals, which were allowed to roam freely through the valleys and hillsides during the summer months, were not found and returned in the fall.

Otzi's community lived on the fringe of this system, poaching during the summer months and finding frozen carcasses during the winter and thawing them out.

Otzi died a hero.  He had led a posse away from where his community was hiding, and he was carefully buried at the bottom of a hole six feet deep that they had chipped out of solid ice.  There he was able to rest in peace for millennia, undisturbed by animals or by people.

MILLET AND RICE

Farming in the Far East

Twenty-three thousand years ago farmers in the valley of the Yellow River in China were using stones to grind foods that they gathered, including grasses, beans, wild millet seeds, wild yams and snakegourd root.  As they gathered, processed and cooked these foods they learned how they could be replanted, and they learned that if they replanted the best ones, such as the largest and most easily processed millet seeds their crops would improve.  As these hunter gatherers improved their plants and began to consistently replant their crops they became farmers.

Consistent access to energy-rich foods caused human populations to expand rapidly, until human populations became so large that animals were overhunted, so the farmers began to trap pigs and keep them captive, so as to ensure access to meat throughout the year.  These 

processes were similar to the ones that led to farming in the Middle East, and farming started about the same time in the Far East as it did in the Middle East.

Anatolian roots of Chinese culture

Ironically the most brilliant stage of this early development of Chinese culture was reached by the Hongshan, who farmed in the West Liao Basin of what is now Inner Mongolia.  It is ironic because it was founded by farmers from Anatolia.  We know that Anatolian farmers formed the nucleus of this brilliant early Chinese culture because simple words in the Korean language, which descended from that of the Hongshan, have Indo European roots.  These include the numbers "one", "two" and "three" and words that identify close family relations.

In spite of its brilliance the Hongshan culture seems to have given rise to no kingship.  This is not surprising, because all of the early agricultural societies were governed by matriarchal elites.  (This includes the early Sumerians, the early Minoans and the early Egyptians.)  However, the Hongshan did seem to give rise to other features of early Chinese society, including burial practices that were intended to ensure a continuing relationship between the living and the dead.  The concept of the Lucky Dragon also had its origin in the Hongshan culture.

The concept of the Lucky Dragon is unlikely to have sprung from a purely fictional creature.  Hongshan models of this creature, sculpted in jade, show a snakelike creature with a head and snout like that of a pig, and this might just be a fairly accurate renditions by craftsmen who haven't actually seen the creature.  Capture of such a creature would be a lucky event if the creature were large enough to feed an entire village.  Capture of a Lucky Dragon could be the occasion for a great feast.

The Hongshan culture ended very unluckily when the monsoon changed its yearly course and their homeland turned into a desert.

Although that was the end of the Hongshan culture as such, the millet farmers migrated to the east, to the region north of the Korean Peninsula, and then into the Korean Peninsula itself.  Those who pushed on still further, across a land bridge to the Japanese Archipelago, combined with fishermen from the Ryukyu Islands to push the indigenous hunter gatherers north, into Hokkaido.  At the same time the new immigrants discarded their Koreanic language for that of the fishermen.

The language spoken by the fishermen who had joined with the new immigrants to the Archipelago was a Ryukyuan language, related to the languages spoken by other fishermen who often built stilt houses on the Ryukyu Islands -- the Ryukyus are strung out between the Japanese islands and Taiwan, and the ancestral language of the fishermen, the ancestral Ryukyuan language, had originally been brought by ancestors who had come from Island Southeast Asia.

This ancestral language had been brought to the northern half those islands at about the same time that the language had been brought to the southern tip of the Japanese Archipelago, and the same identical language had originally been spoken on all of those islands -- until the fishermen became more permanently settled.  The best representative of this original language is that spoken today on the Japanese islands, because the fishermen on the Ryukyu islands had originally had more contact with the outside world, especially with those on the southern Ryukyu islands, where other languages gad been spoken, perhaps related to that spoken on Taiwan.

In fact, there was a great deal of interchange between the people who occupied the northern Ryukyu islands and the fishermen in the southern Ryukyu islands, because they had similar interests and they travelled back and forth while looking for the best fishing grounds.  Many people were bilingual, and eventually those in the southern Ryukyu islands gave up their own languages for one that was closely related to those spoken in the northern Ryukyu islands.

Merging of peoples and technologies

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Millet-growing technology was developed along the Yellow River where the climate was cool and dry, while rice-growing technology was developed along the Yangtze River where the climate was warmer and wetter.  Combined with other crops, these grains fed all of China.  Similarly, sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated in the Middle East while while pigs were domesticated in both Europe and Asia.  Chickens were first domesticated from the beautiful red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, which were at first treasured for their exotic beauty.  Chickens are now valued mostly for their meat and eggs, and the beauty of their ancestors, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, is seldom seen in domesticated chickens today.  Meanwhile, fishing technology which had been developed in Island Southeast Asia was brought to the Japanese Archipelago where it was combined with rice cultivation to feed the people of Japan.

People from the fishing cultures of Island Southeast Asia had been cruising along the eastern coast of Asia for fifty thousand years, fishing in the rich coastal waters there, but they didn't know how to deal with the bitterly cold and wet winter storms that they encoun north of the main Japanese islands -- until they met up with people from Siberia, most likely on Sakhalin Island or the Kamchatka.  From the Siberians they learned how to make all-weather garments and how to survive in the region.  After that they conquered the New World by sailing along the glaciated coasts of Beringia and along the coasts of North and South America.  They left their footprints near the tip of South America.

Self domestication and farming

The Etruscans, unlike the people of the Nuragic culture, developed a written language, but their spoken language quickly died, most likely because the Romans despised the social behavior of the Etruscans, and made the Etruscans ashamed of their own language.  As the Etruscans became assimilated to Roman behaviors and adopted the language of the Romans, they quickly forgot their own language, and almost few place it can still be found is on tombstones.

One peculiarity of these inscriptions is their repetitious nature.  Words, phrases and sounds are repeated, and the repetition of sounds is making it very difficult for linguists to decipher the language, because word ending are basic to the grammatical structure of the language, and Etruscans who composed the text on the tombstones often change the word endings so as to come up with a string of like endings.  These endings are often ungrammatical, but the linguists are so unfamiliar with the language that they don't know which endings are grammatical and which are not.

Whiter skin in Europe and the far north

NMillet was later imported into Europe, and this was probably one reason for dramatic changes there, because millet grew faster and had a higher energy content than wheat and barley.  As a result of a dramatic increase in some European populations, many rootless people wandered about, stealing crops from the fields.  These rootless people had been crowded out by the rising populations in places where millet had been introduced.

These rootless people began to not only steal crops from the fields, but to squat on land owned by the elite that was being farmed by tenant farmers.  The elite, who lived in large villages nearby, whose land was being stolen from them, were unable to stem the tide, and often became rootless people themselves.

The new farmers tended to have very small plots of land which they had to defend fiercely.  Men were forced to do much of the farm work, and they were afraid to leave their land even for short periods in order to go hunting.  Nor did they have extra land on which to raise domesticated animals.

The result was that these farmers with small plots of land were poorly nourished.  In particular, they had little Vitamin D in a diet that consisted almost entirely of cooked millet seeds, and many of the farmers had weak bones, and their children had weak bones and often were unable to acquire and defend even small plots of land.  The survivors often had whiter skin, with less pigment, that could absorb more sunlight to manufacture Vitamin D.  The European population gradually became whiter, and they became better able to endure poor diets.