Evidence that ancient farms had different origins than previously thought
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural history, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc we begin to reach conclusions similar to the above. Wow, this is much more complex than we thought it was. I find this in my own life as I explore socio-political topics also - it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?
To stretch an analogy stacking blocks seems like you can add the heights, except the weight of the stack deforms them, so addition is misleading.
We've got a bit of a dialectic:
Thesis -- The map is not the territory.
Antithesis -- There's nothing so practical as a good theory.
Synthesis -- Use a subway map when catching the train, use a topographical map when doing flood planning, etc.
Taking it back to programming, all abstractions are leaky in some way. A good software engineer uses the right abstraction for the task, knowing that it might be wrong for a different task.
IMO, if a topic sounds overtly complex and focuses on a legion arbitrary seeming minutiae and, most crucially, you can't find the empiric or mathematical root cause for this complexity it's likely the direction of study is more or less bogus and based on academic eminence rather than evidence.
Now, sure the boundarys around a field gets fuzzy and sculpture and architecture are both influenced by the human visual system so there is overlap. But, that's not a shared theme that's D.C. and Baltimore being next to each other and sharing a few suburbs at one end, but not all suburbs.
This is the very tension between Platonism with its emphasis on unity and Aristotelianism which sees complex diversity everywhere. How can we get these two systems to work together? How can we have both unity and diversity?
And now you know where the word "university" comes from.
(Who says all those history and philosophy classes were a waste of time? Besides me, I mean.)
I've always seen things as having a 'level of abstraction'. At one level of abstraction things can have unity, but as you 'zoom in' and change the level of abstraction you'll see the differences and have diversity.
From a distance stars and snowflakes all look the same, but not on closer inspection. Similarly in a foreign country, at first people will all seem the same, but as you spend more time there you level of abstraction changes and you start to see greater diversity.
Since you can zoom in/out infinitely there's no correct level of abstraction to start from or accept as a default, therefore things have great unity and diversity, simultaneously.
While I studied engineering, it was common to get in spats with lefty liberal-arts types, who always brought everything around to talk of class, rich vs. poor, and so on. I mainly read The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on, so I thought this perspective was reductionist and overly simplistic, when reality was much more complex, a mostly net-beneficial process where foul-play was a relatively minor factor.
After graduation, when I started working, I had time to read more history and philosophy, learned more about my own domain of expertise, learned how the professional world worked, and also caught up with much more current events. Turns out I now feel like those critics were more-or-less right all along.
I still have issues with the way some issues were introduced to me originally, but ultimately I was just very reluctant to accept that there was basically a full-on class war I was blissfully ignorant of.
This confirms my Sri Lankan bemusement at the term "temperate climate". The tropics can be a PITA in many ways, but they have no shortage of biomass. Subsistence gardens abound and are productive. Even more than in other gardens, the issue is less to make things grow, but to stop the wrong things from growing. It's hardly surprising if ancient jungle dwellers long ago to tilted nature's bounty in their direction.
But I do take exception to the somewhat hippy-dippy claim that ..."colonial, industrial societies" came from outside the tropics and tried "to practice monoculture, pastoralism, and urbanism within them." Those "evils" took place in the tropics for thousands of years before western colonialists turned up.
This was the truths scientists had discovered and it was unquestionable. It was printed in books to last forever.
But you grow up, and you realize that these things are malleable. It's more like as of 1998, Lucy is the oldest human remains we discovered, using x method.
I'm not saying it's a conspiracy or anything, but I think we should leave a little wiggle room in the way we make these statements from now on.
Though I haven't read a history or science book from a school curriculum in years so I can't say if that's already what is being done.
"The science is settled that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old" is a perfectly fair statement, for instance.
As far as I can tell, nobody in this thread is even remotely suggesting that.
One of the benefits of having researchers teaching is that they have a better understanding of both the content and dynamics of their field. This is far different from primary and secondary schools, where teachers are usually teaching outside of their discipline. Even a high school physics teacher with a science degree is likely to be a biologist or a chemist by training.
Of course, there are a multitude of other differences with university educations. For example: governments don't set the curriculum, which is hugely beneficial for fields like history. (Governments have a nasty desire to set the historical narrative.)
The importance of the Neolithic Revolution was the population explosion that came with easily harvested grain in a hospitable environment and the resultant freeing up of labour to create more complex societies and technologies.
Going forward, we'll probably learn much more about the practice of ancient agriculture and hunter-gathering societies in tropical regions.
BTW, Paleontology has a similar problem. Most fossils are found in deserts or as part of construction work simply because they are easier to find in those areas. There are probably as many fossils buried in tropical regions but the difficulty of digging through the tropical forests to find them limits the number of fossils found.
Props for raising awareness of the field, though.
I read about Gobekli tepe. It's a interesting ruins, not only because are very old. Also, shows a very advanced knowdlege about how sculpt stones. Take a look to the animal scupts on the stones. They are very detailed. They look really advanced for being too old.
Another interesting old ruins are :
- Yonaguni Monument . The last time that this ruins was over the water was 9000 years ago!
- Sumerged ruins of Gulf of Khambhat . Very old cities of Indus valley that are from 7000-9000 years. And if I remember correctly there was a urbanized zone big as new york itself!
- Tiwanaku . Where we can found something like a mass produced stones with a really awesome quality. Look like these pre-incan culture discovered Ford's production chain and apply over standarized stones that can put like a gigant lego, and not need any kind of cement to stay together!
The real truth is that we don't know very well these ancient eras. We assume that our ancestors must be more stupid that ours. But this is false. They are equal capable that any actual person. We only, don't know how they did it, or when (exactly) they did something or how many times something was rediscovered.
Just to help those who might be confused