Fantastic stuff so far. How long did it take for you to research all of this?
I've been working on the background idea off and on for a year or so. That's hardly been continuous, of course, but I kept finding out a few bits and pieces which kept me digging for more.
Fascinating crop package. Actually what's every bit as fascinating, is how you've managed to get us, your readers, interested in agricultural issues in the first place.
Heh. I have tried to show how it's relevant to the later development. It would have been easy enough to say "Australia now has native crops" and move on, but there are reasons behind it all.
It seems that wattles are to Australia what bamboo is to East Asia.
Yes, or date palms to Mesopotamia (where they used to say that date palms had a different use for every day of the year). They are very versatile trees. Incidentally, it's possible that you've seen wattle flowers under another name; they're used a lot in parts of southern Europe as decorative flowers, although they're usually called "mimosas" instead. (I saw some in Nice which were called that). Which gets a bit confusing because mimosa is the name for a related genus of plants, but such is life.
Ah, we were looking forward to this--indication that Aboriginal agriculture generates enough surplus to sustain a complex society
Oh, yes. They will have plenty of food for that.
Yeah. Like I care about native crops from Oz. Oh wait, now I do.
Amazing timeline, with the infodumps being very relevant. I'm interested in how you'll make the civilisation grow more complex and how tech and culture will advance and how this very different crop package will affect all that.
That will all be shown. The effects of the crop package will permeate through society in a variety of ways, some obvious, some not so obvious. Greater and earlier urbanisation, for instance, which is probably the most obvious. But there's also going to be effects on their religion, migration, and even how they plan for the future.
^^^^ this. especially the awe bit.
Merci.
I'm particularly interested, if you chose to cover such things, in how the languages develop. i anticipate that they'd be very different.
not, admittedly, that I'm familiar with the RL languages or anything, linguistics is just one of the things that interests me.
differences in languages can be, depending on the socities and individuals involved, either hugely significant or extreamly trivial. i suspect that, compaired to europeans, this would be an example of the former
I have done quite a bit of mapping of where languages will spread, especially since it's not just languages will spread, but related cultural ideas and practices. Just as there was common Indo-European mythology, for instance, or how the Bantu expanded through southern Africa. There will be some bits and pieces on the development of languages, on areas where the old languages hold on, and so forth. I haven't sat down and specified many individual words or anything like that - I'm not a linguist - but there are a few basic rules which I follow about what sounds are used and the construction of word elements.
Danke schon.
In regards to the Junditmarra, how long will it take for them to recieve the Gunnagal agricultural package?
Sometime in the first millennium BC. Once they receive it, though, they'll do a lot with it.
Also, what of the Warrigal Greens and quandong? I don't think you mentioned them on your latest update, unless it was under different names. But you mentioned them earlier on somewhere.
Both of those will be domesticated, along with quite a few other native species - desert citrus, riberries, muntries, apple berry, native passionfruit, more wattles, and a whole host of spices. But for various reasons, these species won't be early domesticates. Quandong is a partly-parasitic plant which needs the roots of another species to act as a host, and figuring that out will take a while. Warrigal greens don't grow along the Murray except right around the mouth (where the main farming isn't), and so won't really be domesticated until farming starts to expand beyond the Murray.
Well, given the evidence, it looks like the moa would still be screwed.
Sadly, yes. Saving the moa would require rather a different PoD; probably a New Zealand which is uninhabited until European discovery.
Would Haast's Eagle be considered worth domesticating as a substitute for how dogs are used, if dingos are considered unsuitable? In particular, for hunting and warfare purposes; training a Haast's Eagle to take down roos and emu, or alternatively to attack people on command? Maybe even make roos possible to corral to some degree?
Dingos are suitable for domestication, though. Dingos are really just domesticated dogs which have gone feral again. Dingos were often semi-domesticated in OTL, and an agricultural civilization is sure going to domesticate them fully.
And would any of the smaller New Zealand birds, like the kiwi for instance, make adequate chicken substitutes for the Aborigines? Or even pets, for some of the parrots?
The Aborigines already have a pretty decent chicken substitute (the Australian wood duck). The kiwi, alas, isn't really suitable. Maybe some NZ birds would be taken up by the Maori once they have agriculture.
Or would thylacines be domesticable?
Probably not; their social structure (solitary) doesn't seem well-suited to it. We don't know for sure, though, since they were hunted out before anyone got to test the possibility.
Oh, I like the perennial crop package = greater specialization. Double the efficency of annual crops eh?
Double the efficiency of some annual crops, i.e. wheat and related small grains. In classical farming, half of the wheat crop had to be held back as seed grain for the following year. Wattles and yams won't suffer from that. Of course, other crops also have a higher yield than wheat; potatoes, rice, and maize all yield higher than wheat.
You just want to stick it to Jared Diamond dont you?
Heh. He is sometimes sloppy on the details, but the problem isn't really him. It's the fact that what he's written too often gets taken as gospel. If Diamond said that there were no domesticable crops in Australia, then there couldn't have been, could there? And let's not get into the whole north-south axis thing, which is just plain wrong.
Another question- will the Quoll be domesticated in this timeline? They are known to enter human settlements and scavenge, sometimes settling their permanently. As far as I am aware, similar circumstances surrounded the domestication of many other animals, such as wolves. Whats more, they can be domesticated.
Quolls, apart from serving as a form of garbage disposal, could also be eaten. So I could see Quolls being more reminiscent of chickens/cats then dogs, maybe. Especially given the presence of Dingos Australia.
Quolls may be domesticated; I'm not quite sure on that one. Dingos will be, along with a couple of species of birds. *Aboriginal farmers will not have domesticated animals which can be used as beasts of burden, but they will have animals which can be used as a source of meat.