Lands of Red and Gold #1: Old Land, New Times
Consider, for a moment, the land which in certain times and certain places has been called Australia; smallest, driest, flattest and harshest of the globe’s inhabited continents. Geologically, this is an old land, whose few once-high mountains have been eroded to mere stumps of their former selves. Long ages of weathering have worn down the mountains and borne away most of the soils into the sea. Lying mostly in the desert belts, this is a continent where the sun burns brightly and life-giving rains seldom come.
Life here would seem to be among the harshest on earth. Save for a few of the northern extremities, where monsoons bring seasonal abundance, this is a land where water is scarce. Even in those regions which are not desert, the rainfall is erratic. Some times will see year after year of punishing drought, other times will see the rain fall so quickly that floods wash away ever more of what remains of the thin soils. Every summer, the scorching heat brings the season of bushfires which sweep across vast areas of the continent, consuming everything in their path.
Yet despite the rigours and trials of this harshest of continents, it has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. Aboriginal peoples have made it their home for millennia, adapting their lifestyles to suit the land, while also changing the land to suit their lifestyles. They have not developed farming in a way which would be recognised in most of the world, but they have mastered the use of fire. They have long burned the bush regularly in patterns which fit their needs, creating open woodlands and grasslands to feed the kangaroos which are their prime game animal. The patterns of fire changed the nature of Australia’s flora, burning out some plants and encouraging others. The towering, fire-loving gum trees will become the most well-known of these plants, but there are many others. Regular burning encourages the growth of plants which store nutrients below the ground in the form of tubers, bulbs or tuberous roots, since these let the plants quickly regrow into land which has been fertilised by wood ash and cleared of competition. Aboriginal peoples love these plants, since their underground stores are tasty, easily harvested, and a reliable source of food over most of the year.
For despite living in such a rigorous land, Aboriginal peoples have acquired the knowledge they need to survive here, and survive easily. Fire-created grasslands and woodland allow them to hunt for an abundance of kangaroo. If the hunt fails, one person can spend three or four hours digging for tubers and find enough food to feed a family for a whole day.
Yet for all their extensive knowledge of the plants of this land, the Aboriginal peoples have not developed a full farming society. They manage the land in a manner which sustains their lifestyle, but they have not domesticated any of the native plants. Writers have deemed that the indigenous Australian flora did not include plants with the necessary range of qualities to develop a native system of full agriculture.
Yet this need not always be so.
Consider the Murray River. Fed by rainwater and snowmelt in the highest reaches of Australia’s remaining mountains, this river flows for 2500 kilometres until it empties into a complex system of lakes, sand dunes, saltwater lagoons and sand bars called the Murray Mouth. The Murray and its tributaries drain a seventh of Australia’s land surface, making it by far the largest river system on this harsh continent. Most of the basin is flat and not far above sea level, with the rivers that flow through them flowing slowly for most times of the year, except when rising in one of the irregular floods. After extended droughts, the Murray has been known to dry up completely.
Yet by Australian standards, this is a well-watered land, the heartland of a region which is the breadbasket of modern Australia. It held the same fertility since long before white men first visited this land where water means life. The early white explorers who ventured along the Murray wrote of seeing acre after acre of wild yam-fields encouraged by Aboriginal peoples who burnt the land to suit these plants. These peoples harvested the yam tubers for food, often leaving part of the tubers in the earth so that the plants would regrow and there would be more food next time. In places, the earth was so full of holes from their digging that explorers found it too dangerous to take horses across.
Imagine now, for a moment, what could be if history were to be turned back and allowed to move in a new direction. Look far enough back into the long-vanished past, and you might see a new plant arise along the Mighty Murray. A new breed of yam, a plant much like its historical forebears, but whose qualities have altered in a few ways. The most obvious change is that the white-yellow flesh of these yams has changed to red. Their tubers grow slightly larger than their forebears, and the plants are quicker-growing, with larger leaves. In time, this new breed of yam spreads throughout much of the Murray Valley, displacing the other kinds of yams which grow in this region [1].
This change happens long before the ancestors of the Aboriginal peoples arrive on Australia’s shores. The newcomers reach this land at some time at least forty thousand years ago, when the sea levels are lower, and make landfall on a place which has now been concealed beneath the waves. From here, they quickly spread out across the continent, in time reaching the Murray Valley where the red yams grow. They quickly discover the value of the red yam, and it becomes one of the common plants they gather.
The time when the ancestors of the Aboriginal peoples arrive in Australia is a time of glaciers, lower sea levels and climatic instability. Like humans across the rest of the world, Aboriginal peoples will maintain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle until the glaciers start to melt, sea levels begin to rise, and the climate enters a period of relative stability known as the Holocene.
In this new era, people around the world who are gathering wild plants create changes to many of them, in processes which will end in domesticated plants and independent origins of agriculture. First among these will be in the lands which will later be called the Fertile Crescent, where an abundance of founder crops such as emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, peas, chickpeas, lentils, bitter vetch and flax means a very early development of agriculture. Peoples in other parts of the world will develop agriculture independently, with the speed of their development related to how easily domesticable their founder crops are. In China, in the New Guinea highlands, in Africa, the Andes, Mesoamerica and along the Mississippi, agriculture will develop independently. In other regions, agriculture will spread from its first point of origin, until agricultural societies are spread around most of the globe [2].
Along the Murray, Aboriginal peoples make increasing use of the red yam. Its large, nutritious tubers are a valuable component of their diet. They harvest the yam tubers each year, and leave parts of the tubers in the ground to ensure that there is more food for next year’s harvest. Slowly, they take control of its breeding, until with the passing of generations they develop forms of the red yam which are spread exclusively by human activity. They have created Australia’s first domesticated crop.
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[1] Introducing the red yam (Dioscorea chelidonius), a new crop for a new time. Like most yams, this is a vine with a large, starchy, tuberous root. The vine itself is a perennial plant, with well-established roots. The above-ground portions of the plant often die back in winter, with regrowth in spring or after bushfires. Like many related Dioscorea species, the red yam is domesticable. Like a much smaller number of yam species (such as white and yellow yams from Africa), the red yam is also suitable as a founder crop, i.e. a plant which can be independently domesticated even in a region which has no pre-existing agriculture. Founder crops are much rarer than domesticable crops; OTL Australia has plenty of the latter but none of the former. Indigenous agriculture can’t get started without founder crops, no matter how many other domesticable plants may happen to be in a region.
For those who care, the particular mutation which has happened in red yams is polyploidy. This is a kind of mutation where the entire genome of an organism is duplicated. It is generally associated with lusher and more vigorous growth, particularly in domesticated (or domesticable) plants; many of the domesticated forms of wheat and bananas are polyploid, for example. Polyploidy happens reasonably often, and it can create a new species in one generation, since a polyploid plant is not fertile with its parent plants or old species, but is fertile with other polyploid mutants from the former species. There have been several documented instances of polyploid species arising in different regions and being fertile with the new polyploid plants from different regions, but not with their own parents.
Polyploidy is more likely to create new species in plants which can self-pollinate (like wheat) than in plants which have separate male and female plants (such as most yams), but it can still create new species if a male and female plant both turn polyploid in the same area, and if one fertilises the other. The specific point of departure for Lands of Red and Gold is thus that two yams have turned polypoid near each other, fertilise each other, and create a new species. Polyploid plants also often have other evolutionary advantages, since they have multiple copies of the same genes, which can evolve in different directions. This will lead to a greater range of traits within red yams, when the time comes for them to be domesticated.
[2] While the point of departure for this timeline is far back in the past, Lands of Red and Gold also features an innovative “butterfly trap.” This trap catches butterflies within Australia and doesn’t let them escape the continent until there is contact with the outside world. So the cultures of Australia are considerably changed from OTL long before there is contact with the rest of the world, or even before domestication of D. chelidonius. This is inevitable with the effects of a different plant species bouncing around the continent during the tens of millennia of human settlement of Australia. So the Aboriginal peoples will have slightly different languages, slightly different belief systems, and so on. But changes won’t be spread outside Australia until there is contact between peoples from the various continents.
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Thoughts?
