|
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesWhile 157 species sounds like indiscriminate collecting, many more species growing wild in the vicinity were absent from the charred remains. The 15" selected species fall into three categories. Many of them have seeds that are nonpoisonous and immediately edible. Others, such as pulses and members of the mustard family, have toxic seeds, but the toxins are easily removed, leaving the seeds edible. A few seeds belong to species traditionally used as sources of dyes or medicine. The many wild species not represented among the 157 selected are ones that would have been useless or harmful to people, including all of the most toxic weed species in the environment. Thus, the hunter-gatherers of Tell Abu Hureyra were not wasting time and endangering themselves by collecting wild plants indiscriminately. Instead, they evidently knew the local wild plants as intimately as do modern New Guineans, and they used that knowledge to select and bring home only the most useful available seed plants. But those gathered seeds would have constituted the material for the unconscious first steps of plant domestication. My other example of how ancient peoples apparently used their ethno-biological knowledge to good effect comes from the Jordan Valley in the ninth millennium b.c., the period of the earliest crop cultivation there ...» |
Код для вставки книги в блог HTML
phpBB
текст
|
|