Hacker News Reader

Comment by terryf | Hacker News Reader

The article explains well how the knowledge, once learned, is carried on. It's also a reasonable explanation for things that have an immediate feedback loop. Like fire - you start it and boom, you're not cold any more. Great, let's do that again!

But it doesn't explain cassava, or some other foods (lots of mushrooms for example and some nuts) where you have to take n steps, during all of which it's still poisonous and that are completely non-obvious and after that there is a distinct change in the "is poisonous" property.

It especially doesn't explain the "if improperly prepared, will maim you over a long period of time" types of things (cassava!)

Of course there really isn't another option - someone somehow figured it out after all - but the search space is so large it feels like there should be something more to it.

View on HN

One new thing we know is that Amazonians were actively breeding plants at least 10,000 years ago. (The Amazon basin did not experience the Ice Ages the way temperate places did ... which is not to say nothing happened.) Five hundred years ago, the Amazon supported a population of at least tens of, and as many as a hundred, million people, mostly wiped out in a stroke by European diseases.

This was a society that had time and numbers to develop deep sophistication. Did they use our scientific method? Obviously not. But that does not mean they could not have come up with their own, perhaps more-or-less equally effective and reliable system. (Ours is far from perfect; the best that can be said is that it often works.) Theirs certainly established facts ours cannot, and vice versa.

Use of curare embodies a similar mystery, and ayahuasca. Certainly hundreds or thousands more secrets are forever lost. We will never know a hint of what almost all held. It is a loss easily rivalling the fabled Library of Alexandria.

It's probably applying and combining analogous processes.

I.e Food A is toxic and we don't know how to treat it. Food B is toxic and we know it takes n-1 steps to make safe. Someone comes along and applies n-1 steps to Food A and its still toxic. Someone else comes along and applies n-1 and then an nth step and there's progress.

But yeah, the article does not come near to examining the way cultures discover things nor in general nor in the case of the cassava.

Sure, that makes sense, but not for cassava!

The article even says that the natives had no idea why they were getting sick! How did they connect the "can't use legs" to the cassava they ate?

Again, I realize that it must have been the way you describe, but it's still amazing.

It's truly amazing, especially for cassava or say Hákarl[1].

> How did they connect the "can't use legs" to the cassava they ate?

Keep in mind these people are in Africa cassava is native in South America. I am pretty sure people in south America will tell you that cassava is toxic if you don't do all the steps and not just "it's our culture".

The it's our culture response might be the case in places where it was introduced and people were told you have to do x,y,z to eat it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1karl

What he probably meant is that at some point in the past, South American natives were also facing the same "can't use legs" problem, which resulted in the more complex preparation steps.

Right, I think we are kind of wired for that though, as the article also mentions we see connections kind of everywhere, "sacrifice goat -> volcano does not explode". I think people will make the connection "eating x -> legs don't work" very fast in a cultural timescale. In a related example it took us now a couple of months to figure out a certain factory had a salmonella problem[1] and this was a couple of hundred cases out of hundreds of thousands maybe millions of chocolates coming out of said factory.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61041760

> the natives had no idea why they were getting sick

The people getting sick are in eastern Africa, while cassava is native to South America. Stands to reason that the methods of cassava preparation weren't as ingrained to the people who were getting sick.

> It especially doesn't explain the "if improperly prepared, will maim you over a long period of time" types of things (cassava!)

Sure it does.

All you need is for the toxic foodstuff to be sufficiently non-toxic for some amount of time while it prevents you from dying because you don't have better food.

Someone starving may know something isn't good but not have an alternative. Some people perform the standard steps up to step "n". A few people perform an extra step because they know the food is bad for you anyhow--this is step "n+1". If more of the "n+1" people survive, the standard becomes "n+1".

Go through a dozen of such crises and you can get a lot of steps built up one at a time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com