Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

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There's a lot of sophistication in "primitive" agriculture. Humans have always been as intelligent and ambitious as they are today; they just didn't always have today's tools.

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.

Does anyone have an idea when these procedures by humans could have been done? The techniques this guy used could have been done 7000bc? (Super recent) They look advanced requiring: passed down knowledge, seasons knowledge, plant knowledge, fire creation, pot making etc. Doing this would have also created villages since you need to stick around to tend plots of land - which would have invited attacks from other tribes.

The earliest clear evidence of the cultivation of crops is about 11,000 years old. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A culture of the Levant lived in small mud-brick huts and had purpose-built granaries.

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...

I haven't read the book, but reading this excerpt now, and given my Indian context of vegetables, this initially comes across as masochism. What we call "yam" in India has the full name "elephant foot yam", and is full of calcium oxalate crystals that will seriously hurt the mouth. We boil the vegetable quite aggressively to destroy the crystals.

In the US a yam is just what people call certain larger varieties of sweet potatoes, and are unrelated to true yams. Having had both, I can feel where you’re coming from!

Interesting, in the movie it's changed to a radish.

Is that yam/africa thing actually true?

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?

I'm basing it off a recent reading of The Cooking Gene, by Michael Twitty, which is ostensibly a history of African-American cooking in the South, but is in practice a very deep and well-researched history of the slave trade, by way of its food.

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.

Humans have always had the same/similar capacity for intelligence, but the modern world creates people with IQs significantly higher than the median would have been only 150 years ago.

Because IQ is a measure of abstract analytical and pattern-matching intelligence, our economic shift towards more analytical/intelligence-driven work causes us to practice those skills more. I could say that FQ (factory-production quotient) has decreased over the last 150 years, but that doesn't mean that people are more or less intelligent, only that they practice different things.

It's interesting how this simple truth is not obvious to most people, and we somehow think that people with skills or knowledge have some special quality we don't, when really they're just experienced.

I think, if I'm practicing the principle of charity, the GP meant the difference in nutrition and sanitation standards, i.e. general health, rather than some sort of "now is the pinnacle of humanity" sense.

Is IQ still considered important? I've not seen it around other than people bragging online about having a high IQ, which they take to mean they are very smart (when usually they're not, more like, average).

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.

> 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 ...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Source?

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