Help with Aboriginal adoption of an alternate Polynesian agriculture

I may give away some twists from my next timeline in this thread, but I do need some expert opinions.

For my 3.0 American domesticates timeline, I wanted to create as diverse a world as possible due to butterflies from my agricultural PODs. I figured out how to get the Polynesians a portion of the alternate American crop package, and ITTL they have maize, beans, squash and sheep in addition to sweet potatoes.

Now, I'm wondering if its possible to get this crop package to Australia. An earlier settlement of *New Zealand and expansion from there to Australia may be possible due to a higher Polynesian population. However, without a "Lands of Red and Gold" scenario, how do I get the hunter-gatherer Aborigines to adopt all or part of this agro package and have at least a little population growth before European colonization?

European colonization may be delayed by about a century due to the POD's of this timeline, but when it does occur it will probably be more brutal due to higher population pressure in Europe and more epidemic diseases. I don't want to screw over the Aborigines when everyone else gets a leg up in this world, so please help.

EDIT: I guess I should also specify that I don't expect complete Aboriginal resistance to colonization with this POD, I just hope to get them to be better able to survive colonialism.

Is there a reason no one has replied to this very cool thread?

The famous Land of Red and Gold thread may help you, maybe.

In OTL many Aboriginal tribes used firestick farming and was hinted to use some sort of aquaculture, so they would probably not have a problem adapting either Polynesian nor Melanesian agriculture.

Well, except that polynesian or melanesian agriculture probably depended on more water. Australia is a fairly dry continent. Also, the polynesian agricultural complex is tropical. It was barely working in the north island of New Zealans, and only functioned by fairly heroic measures, and didn't work at all in the south Island. So it probably would not work through all of Australia, but would be confined to the wettest parts of the north.

Danbensen said:

Is there a reason no one has replied to this very cool thread?

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I KNOW, RIGHT?

The Ubbergeek said:

The famous Land of Red and Gold thread may help you, maybe.

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Actually, it has. I'm up to page 25 on it now, and it is a big help. When I do start posting the timeline, I'm going to be giving Jared a lot of credit when I cover Oz.

DValdron said:

Well, except that polynesian or melanesian agriculture probably depended on more water. Australia is a fairly dry continent. Also, the polynesian agricultural complex is tropical. It was barely working in the north island of New Zealans, and only functioned by fairly heroic measures, and didn't work at all in the south Island. So it probably would not work through all of Australia, but would be confined to the wettest parts of the north.

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This is true. However, as Jared himself pointed out, perennial root plants are more hardy in the face of drought than grains (although he has glossed over the fact that root plants tend to be thirstier). This would help the crop package survive Australia.

As for climate, Polynesian sweet potatoes did adapt themselves to New Zealand's North Island, so if those cultivars are introduced to southeast Australia, they could survive the cold weather. Combine that with sheep, and you have a pretty decent source of farmed food for Aborigines. After doing my own research, I figured the Polynesians could also introduce cassava and pigs into North Australia via Melanesia.

DValdron said:

Well, except that polynesian or melanesian agriculture probably depended on more water. Australia is a fairly dry continent. Also, the polynesian agricultural complex is tropical. It was barely working in the north island of New Zealans, and only functioned by fairly heroic measures, and didn't work at all in the south Island. So it probably would not work through all of Australia, but would be confined to the wettest parts of the north.

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I am not sure about adopting Polynesian or Melanesian agricultural practices to Australia, but if the Anasazi in the American Southwest managed to have a workable agricultural model (at least for a while) it could have worked for the Australian aborigines as well.

twovultures said:

As for climate, Polynesian sweet potatoes did adapt themselves to New Zealand's North Island, so if those cultivars are introduced to southeast Australia, they could survive the cold weather. Combine that with sheep, and you have a pretty decent source of farmed food for Aborigines. After doing my own research, I figured the Polynesians could also introduce cassava and pigs into North Australia via Melanesia.

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Parts of the polynesian package didn't work at all. They adapted by domesticating a fern as a support crop. They also practiced a form of raised platform agriculture if I recall correctly to get their sweet potatoes or yams to grow where it wouldn't otherwise grow. Even there, the returns diminished, with the sizes of the plants reduced. New Zealand North Island represented the extreme limit of the package.

Allright, since the Aboriginals in OTL dug channels and made weirs as a primitive form of aquaculture maybe that could be used. More irrigation would probably help with that.

twovultures said:

For my 3.0 American domesticates timeline, I wanted to create as diverse a world as possible due to butterflies from my agricultural PODs. I figured out how to get the Polynesians a portion of the alternate American crop package, and ITTL they have maize, beans, squash and sheep in addition to sweet potatoes.

Now, I'm wondering if its possible to get this crop package to Australia. An earlier settlement of *New Zealand and expansion from there to Australia may be possible due to a higher Polynesian population.

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If the polynesian have maize, beans, squash and sweet potatoes they can colonise some part of Australie. The best territory are Flinders Island, King Island and Kangaroo Island because OTL there were without population. The polynesian IYTL maybe came from New Zealand with ther agricultural package and exterminate the species of emu of the islands. Some years after(perhaps one century) they colonise the coast of Australia and Tasmania (and domesticate emu).

If they came more in the north of Australia yam can grow.

twovultures said:

This is true. However, as Jared himself pointed out, perennial root plants are more hardy in the face of drought than grains (although he has glossed over the fact that root plants tend to be thirstier). This would help the crop package survive Australia.

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You've mentioned that you're working your way through Lands of Red and Gold, so I'll try not to retread too much information which has been or will be covered in that timeline. But there are some other points:

It is true that perennial root crops are more drought tolerant. The problem is that the Polynesians don't practice perennial agriculture. Like most farming peoples around the world, the Polynesians practiced annual agriculture for most crops (except for trees). So this innovation won't really be available to help Polynesian crops in Australia.

As an aside, I didn't ignore the water usage requirements of root crops in LRG. The *Aborigines have 2 native root crops, red yams and murnong. Murnong is used only in moderate-high rainfall areas. Red yams have the advantage of using Crassulacean_acid_metabolism, or CAM, in their photosynthesis. This makes them very water-efficient, despite being root crops. Indeed, it's a game-changer in what makes them a viable founder crop in Australian conditions.

As for climate, Polynesian sweet potatoes did adapt themselves to New Zealand's North Island, so if those cultivars are introduced to southeast Australia, they could survive the cold weather.

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Kumara (sweet potatoes) didn't really adapt to the North Island. The ones which were grown in NZ were tiny - thumb-sized, more or less - and even that required considerable Maori ingenuity in terms of north-facing gardens, platform agriculture and so forth.

The original forms of sweet potato grown in New Zealand have in fact been abandoned. When the better-adapted potato was introduced into NZ in the early nineteenth century, the Maori dropped kumara like a hot potato, if you'll forgive the expression. The only reason kumara survived into modern NZ cuisine is because of the introduction of larger, cold-adapted versions from North America later in the nineteenth century.

That said, the Polynesian forms of sweet potato would do reasonably well in north-eastern Australia - the east coast of Queensland and northern New South Wales. It's warm enough there.

Combine that with sheep, and you have a pretty decent source of farmed food for Aborigines. After doing my own research, I figured the Polynesians could also introduce cassava and pigs into North Australia via Melanesia.

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The thing to remember about farming (and herding) in Australia is that the modern farming here looks productive, but it's not just based on European farming methods, but on lots and lots of fertiliser. Seriously.

Australia's soils are, with a few exceptions, nutrient-poor and sometimes rich in metals (iron etc) which is hard for many food crops to cope with. In particular, Australian soils tend to be low in phosphorus. Modern farming copes with that by copious application of fertiliser to give high yields.

The soils of most of northern Australia (except, kinda-sorta, the east coast of Queensland) are particularly poor in this regard. This is probably part of the reason why Austronesians who did have contact with northern Australia in OTL (and introduced the dingo) didn't make any permanent settlements here.

This will be a problem for farming of cassava, in particular. Again, with the partial exception of the east coast of Queensland, which is broadly speaking warm enough, has enough rainfall, and the soils are adequate in many places for cassava, sweet potato etc.

Pigs, by the way, would be the real game-changers, more than sheep. Pigs can live off almost anything. They'd also be ecologically devastating, but c'est la view.

Jared-Thanks a lot for your help! I do, however have one question. Cassava is famous as a drought-resistant, poor-soil adaptable crop. Why do you think it would have trouble growing in tropical Australia?

I also would like to point out that getting the adoption of crops by the Aborigines involves more than giving them an actually useful crop package. With delayed colonization they could have 500 years between Polynesian contact and European colonization to change lifestyles to allow for a larger population. How would previously hunter-gatherer people take up farming? My idea was to have the peoples who had gathered wild yams adapt the Polynesian root vegetables, which would be familiar. Did yam gatherers live in northeast Queensland? And if not, how could I get them to adopt farming-intermarriage with Polynesian settlers, perhaps?

twovultures said:

Jared-Thanks a lot for your help! I do, however have one question. Cassava is famous as a drought-resistant, poor-soil adaptable crop. Why do you think it would have trouble growing in tropical Australia?

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Because the soils of northern Australia are among the most ancient and eroded in the world. Hardly anything grows there, really, and what does grow there needs to be tolerant of being both low in some essential nutrients (phosphorus and potassium, in particular) and high in some heavier metals (iron etc).

Cassava would do better than most introduced crops at tolerating Australian droughts (although the droughts there can be worse than those even of Africa), but the nutrients in the soil are another story.

Cassava is grown in a couple of places in Australia in OTL, most notably on the Burdekin River in north-eastern Queensland, which has reasonably fertile soil by Australian standards... but even there, the yields are notably improved by adding organic matter (for phosphorus and nitrogen) and potash (for potassium).

There's also some experimental work creating cassava plantations in the Northern Territory for ethanol production, and there are similar outcomes there.

I also would like to point out that getting the adoption of crops by the Aborigines involves more than giving them an actually useful crop package. With delayed colonization they could have 500 years between Polynesian contact and European colonization to change lifestyles to allow for a larger population. How would previously hunter-gatherer people take up farming?

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To be honest, this is one of the biggest wildcards in any adoption of agriculture scenario. While it's sometimes hard to tell with pre-historical population movements, most of the encounters between farmers and hunter-gathers seem to have resulted in the large-scale displacement of the hunter-gatherers.

See, for example, Bantu in Africa, Austronesians in Indonesia, and to an arguable degree Neolithic farmers moving into Europe too. Diffusion of crops is possible without population replacement, but it seems to have been a less common occurrence. Hunter-gatherers just may not have been interested in farming, or maybe it was just difficult to pick up piecemeal. Instead, they were mostly pushed out by farming neighbours due to the population advantage of farming.

Given this, getting farming adopted by Aboriginal people may not be all that easy. Indeed, while we don't have any direct evidence as to why farming wasn't adopted in Australia even when there was at least some contact with farming peoples (spot the dingo), one possible reason is that the hunter-gatherers who came into contact with the farmers just weren't interested, and the overseas visitors lacked the numbers to force them out. (The population advantage just wasn't there.)

Obviously, there are places where some hunter-gatherers have adopted farming, but they often didn't.

My idea was to have the peoples who had gathered wild yams adapt the Polynesian root vegetables, which would be familiar. Did yam gatherers live in northeast Queensland? And if not, how could I get them to adopt farming-intermarriage with Polynesian settlers, perhaps?

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There were was a species of yam in northeastern Queensland - the pencil or long yam, Dioscorea transversa. I believe that it was used as one source of food. But the evidence of farmers who actually collected and replanted yams (ie almost-farming) is in south-western Australia, at the other end of the continent, and a different species of yam (Dioscorea hastifolia).

In short, getting Aborigines to take up full-on farming may not be all that easy. Intermarriage may be a start - some of the genetic evidence from Europe suggests that more of the pre-farming DNA survived in the maternal line than in the paternal line - but it's hard to be sure.

twovultures said:

I may give away some twists from my next timeline in this thread, but I do need some expert opinions.

For my 3.0 American domesticates timeline, I wanted to create as diverse a world as possible due to butterflies from my agricultural PODs. I figured out how to get the Polynesians a portion of the alternate American crop package, and ITTL they have maize, beans, squash and sheep in addition to sweet potatoes.

Click to expand...

Sheep in the tropics? If they are at all wooly they'd get heat stroke from all that wet heat, and if they aren't, pigs are simply too much of a better food production proposition (not to mention being much less gamy).

Kalvan said:

Sheep in the tropics? If they are at all wooly they'd get heat stroke from all that wet heat, and if they aren't, pigs are simply too much of a better food production proposition (not to mention being much less gamy).

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The African fat-tailed sheep says "bah, sheep can too live in the tropics!" I would admit that they may not be the most efficient domestic animals for the tropics, but neither are cattle and those are still farmed in many tropical areas.


Jared-Once again, thanks for your input. I guess fixing this wildcard will be an interesting challenge for the timeline.

twovultures said:

The African fat-tailed sheep says "bah, sheep can too live in the tropics!".

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But they live in dry desert. Notice that they are not found in Monsoon India, Southern China, Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia, and the places that they've been imported to (Namibia, Australia's Northern Terrirory, and Nevada) are all dry deserts, too.

Sheep in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia are simply more trouble than they are worth.

Goats, on the other hand...

twovultures said:

As for climate, Polynesian sweet potatoes did adapt themselves to New Zealand's North Island, so if those cultivars are introduced to southeast Australia, they could survive the cold weather. Combine that with sheep, and you have a pretty decent source of farmed food for Aborigines. After doing my own research, I figured the Polynesians could also introduce cassava and pigs into North Australia via Melanesia.

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The Polynesians IOTL didn't have sheep, those were a European introduction to the region...

Kalvan said:

But they live in dry desert. Notice that they are not found in Monsoon India, Southern China, Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia, and the places that they've been imported to (Namibia, Australia's Northern Terrirory, and Nevada) are all dry deserts, too.

Sheep in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia are simply more trouble than they are worth.

Goats, on the other hand...

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Could sheep be brought to the taller, dryer, volcanic islands, bypassing lower, moister islands? If they could survive the sea voyage, that could bring them into a suitable enough environment.

Simreeve said:

The Polynesians IOTL didn't have sheep, those were a European introduction to the region...

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Good thing this isn't OTL then

Sheep? How do sheep get there?

twovultures said:

Could sheep be brought to the taller, dryer, volcanic islands, bypassing lower, moister islands? If they could survive the sea voyage, that could bring them into a suitable enough environment.

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The only places wooly sheep can survive within the Polynesian/Melanesian/Micronesian native cultural zone without air conditioned indoor pens for at least part of the day are New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island, and only because they are at the lattitudinal extremes of the zone. Unfortunately, they are also at the absolute frontiers of OTL's settlement, not reached until the 1200s AD.

Goats, on the other hand, have been found on Taiwan, the Phillipines, and New Guinea. They are somewhat less gamy than sheep, can also porduce wool (depending upon the breed, though never quite as much at one time as sheep) and they produce more and somewhat more palatable milk, too.