Yam, cultivate and cook
primitivetechnology.wordpress.com
primitivetechnology.wordpress.com
Yams always make me think of Gone with the Wind. The climax of Act III (not labeled as such, but stories are stories) is Scarlett O'Hara at her family's plantation. Yankee soldiers have come through and taken every scrap of food, but they didn't recognize the yams as food, because it's a Southern thing (yams in the South came over from Africa with the slave trade). So after they leave, she goes outside, digs up a yam with her bare hands, and starts eating it raw. And then she gives this amazing speech... (edited for book-quoted text)
"As God is my witness, as God is my witness they're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
And that's the Scarlett O'Hara of the rest of the book/movie, the relentlessly resourceful one who will never allow herself to be victimized by anything or anyone.
Also I disagree partially, I do think the modern world creates smarter and/or more educated people, but that's thanks to education. Lots of education. And access to information of course.
That's what the person you're replying to said ...
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10966.long
Analysis of stone tools suggests that a wide range starchy foods were being systematically gathered and prepared for much of the Middle Stone Age (~280,000 BP to ~25,000 BP) although it is unclear whether these foods were being actively cultivated.
http://www.academia.edu/426173/Middle_Stone_Age_Starch_Acqui...
A friend of mine linked me your comment, expressing disapproval. He said it "reads like some fever dream", and that hacker news is "supposed to be all software engineery". I don't see what the fuss is, but my experience with sites like this is mostly confined to reddit where 97% of comments are twaddle.
edit: apparently sweet potatoes are from the new world: https://piedmontmastergardeners.org/article/sweet-potatoes/
I'm guessing maybe the issue is that yam can refer to sweet potatoes as well as tubers from unrelated species. Did she have a sweet potato or some other tuber in Gone With the Wind?
Doing a little more checking on what Twitty has to say (he's the authoritative source as far as I'm concerned), it looks like both interpretations are true:
"The yams of West Africa are not sweet potatoes, however sweet potatoes did fit well into cultures already used to relying on root crops. When Africans encounter sweet potatoes as enslaved people they utilized them in ways similar to tropical yams. Later, African varieties of sweet potato, like the Dahomey sweet potato, cross the Atlantic ocean and come to America."
https://afroculinaria.com/2016/10/05/crops-of-african-origin...
edit: One thing you learn from reading Twitty and other modern voices on the subject is just how extensively whitewashed even "scientific" history can be, and how much African contribution gets erased.
Related: if you like this and want more I recently read a book series called Bonesetter that has a protagonist who lives in primitive times and it tells the story of a person kicked from their tribe, but who prospers by building Primitive Technology type inventions.
https://www.amazon.com/Bonesetter-Book-1-Laurence-Dahners-eb...
There's more 'wonder' this way.
It's fun to "play along at home" and try to figure out why he's doing something without the captions.
I was pleasantly surprised, as well.
Fire making, clay pots, mud huts, stone axes, rope, hunting weapons -- these are what kept people alive for eons, and ironically in our modern high tech era, many if not most of these skills are largely forgotten by all but a few remaining primitive tribes and archivists like him.
These videos are worth watching not just to celebrate these high achievements but also to disseminate and preserve the knowledge. Should you find yourself stranded in a forest hundreds of miles from civilization, you may indeed need to build a friction fire, knap a stone knife, weave some cordage, rough up a shelter, and hunt for food.
As a "primitive survival skills" fan (I'm a viewer, not a doer) I have learned so much that I feel a certain confidence that were I to somehow fall off civilization's ship, and be forced to fend for myself, or to help a group of stranded individuals to survive, we would somehow make it.
It was surprisingly inspirational.
Just when we finally got rid of the useless "Press Escape to exit fullscreen" nag...
But I cannot say it is the best channel for me among Vsauce, Kurzgesgt, CrashCourse, and many others.
It's getting to the point where there is so much quality that discovery of it all is getting hard.
In the spirit of your answer, I would say these other channels are also outstanding in their categories:
Any of Brady Haran's (Numberphile/Sixty Symbols/Objectivity etc)
Fully Charged Show (electric vehicles/renewable energy)
Nick Carver (film photography)
Pine Hollow Auto Diagnostics (watch a few to grok the style)
Kevin Mullins (Fuji users photography and more)
Explaining Computers (hard to categorise, that's why it's good)
There are many many many more but I think most of those are really widely known, perhaps some of the above aren't quite as widely watched and they're very worth it.
(I have no particular connection to the channel or Patreon, I just like that I can support this channel because I also love it!)
We live in wondrous times.
I often think of perception of time when I watch him work. Tens of thousands of years ago, when humans worked like this, their concept of time was completely different than ours. I’ve read comments by the guy that says some of these projects have taken many weeks. With our instant gratification culture, it’s good to reflect on his achievements and timescales.
I’ve also practiced making fire with hand drill and it’s hard. But when it works, it’s awesome. A primal connection to the past.
I recommend watching the video on how he makes lime. Really good stuff.
> ...conventional farming practice of clearing trees to make fields. Instead the yam vine uses the trees as scaffolding to climb on, allowing it to reach the light in the forest canopy.
The vines would have to climb a long way, depending on tree height.
(Obviously unacceptable for "primitive technology", but) cooking in aluminium foil avoids loss to charring, and is reusable,
> Frishmuth proposed that the pyramid be made of aluminum at a quoted price of $75, and if he was unsuccessful in casting it in aluminum he would cast it in aluminum bronze and plate it with gold for a total cost of $50, or, if platinum-plated, for $75. Aluminum bronze was an alloy of 90 parts copper and 10 parts aluminum and was quite abundant on the commercial market in 1884. The principal manufacturer was the Cowles Brothers of Niagara Falls, New York, who used a patented thermal process employing an electric resistance furnace and a raw material containing aluminum oxide and copper. The aluminum produced was always combined with the copper and could not be separated from it.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#Early_his...
For the entire commercial history of aluminum, it's been produced through molten-salt electrolysis (the Hall-Heroult process).
Some salt, paprika, and butter makes a world of difference.
But I was referring to plain potatoes, I've never had a real Yam, my understanding is that sweet potatoes are not the same thing.
Boiled, roasted (as mentioned), as a porridge, fried and pounded.
Boiled - Cut, salted (some add sugar)boiled and eaten with sauce, palm oil, beans...
Pounded - Boiled unsalted yams are pounded into dough form and eaten with soup. It's called pounded yam.
No shit it doesn't scale to feed millions, but it scales in some way to feed more than one guy on youtube.
https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/plantin...
https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/sweet-p...
Yeah, you harvested two yams (less than a day's calories) over a six month period. That doesn't scale up the way modern farming practices do.
> This form of farming is a good way to get around the conventional farming practice of clearing trees to make fields.
It's not a good form of farming, because it's both low density and expensive.
Let's say each enclosure produces three-days worth of yams in six months. To feed one person for a year you need 100 enclosures, and you need to stagger their planting so you can harvest them continously.
Each enclosure takes up about one square meter, so you need a line of them 100m long for each person in your group. You also need space to walk between them, so you need 3m for each two lines of enclosures. For a ten-person group, that's a 100m x 30m yam farm.
Other videos show the guy fishing, among other things.
However, the Irish of the 1800s lived off potatoes and cows butter SOLELY. Of course, they were extremely skinny because they had to stretch a 3 month harvest across 12 months. But they were not malnourished. There were irishmen living into their 100s at this time.
Of course there was a famous potato blight that killed the crop and starved most everyone to death. But I'm talking about nutrition, not epidemiology