And that's it for the First Phase Agricultural complex which emerges over a couple of centuries at most. More work than I planned on. Next time I have to do something like this, I'm just going to say 'they grew a lot of shit and then they ate it.'
But as I've said, the raw counterintuitiveness of an Arctic agricultural package demanded a certain amount of hard detail, and investigation as to the genuine plants and their characteristics, and how such a package might evolve from both accumulated pre-agricultural practices and coalesced cultural innovations.
The second phase agricultural complex isn't going to be as much work. The basic shape and dominant constituencies of Thule Agriculture are developed. What happens is that the package continues to expand geographically, spreading to other Thule communities. The little ice age begins to hit, and this leads to the Thule pushing heavily south, mostly to Dene country. There will be a handful of new domesticates or cultivars which emerge, mostly leaf/stem plants or berries, but they don't amount to a radical change.
But hey, while I've got this soapbox, there are a few points I want to draw out and hammer, because they're critical to the evolution and productivity of the Thule package.
First, I want to shout out to the role of Shamans in Thule Agriculture. I've alluded to this from time to time in greater or lesser detail. But fundamentally, Thule Agriculture is spiritual/mystical in nature and outlook.
Looking back, I think that this might actually be the case for a lot of early agriculture, and its been so long that mostly we've forgotten about it. But if you poke around, you'll find in backwoods old traditions of corn kings, or ceremonial enactments of agricultural cycles, as well as specialty gods devoted to agricultural practices. I suspect that a lot of formative or founding agricultural practices were intensely mystical originally, and that as it becomes widespread and commonplace, this slowly gets lost. Eventually the gods and spirits move on up, get upscale, and start to hang around with and cater to the upper classes, and mostly the crops all just grow as fine without them anyway.
But Thule Agriculture is so young that it's still retained its mystical trappings. If it actually existed, the Thule package would literally be the youngest agricultural package to come into existence and the only one to emerge within shouting distance of historical records. Anthropologists and archeologists would literally be creaming over it, and probably are in the modern era of that timeline.
In writing about this stuff, I'm often writing in very practical and secular terms. But we shouldn't forget that the foundation of this stuff is intensly mystical.
All of the pre-agricultural practices were about catering to or jollying up unpredictable or capricious earth spirits. Things were developed that worked, but these workings were always understood as the product of negotiations with the supernatural.
The supernatural required the intercession of Shamans who could tell you what worked and what didn't, what to plant and where, how to construct mounds, which fields, etc. Again, this is all framed in terms of the supernatural and in terms of mysticism, but the effects were practical. Shamans became an esoteric class whose job was to know these things, and whose observations and understanding transcended a particular farmer's cultivated fields. These were people who were literally seeing the big pictures, whose job was to observe, to know and to transmit that knowledge. Invariably Shaman's taught other Shaman's, at first their own proteges, but also each other, and so information disseminated over a wide distance.
Of course, this is information wrapped in spiritual and mystical terms, and a lot of it is flat out wrong or deluded, but within this framework, there's a very large store of what works, what works really well, and what doesn't work, and there's an ongoing clearinghouse of information in terms of what was or is done by trial and error and how those work out.
As Thule culture increases in complexity, and despite the 'banalification' of commonplace agriculture, the caste of Shamans, particularly the 'plant specialist' Shamans maintains, and you've got a culture that essentially has a 'college of agronomists' working in it. The mystical mumbo jumbo ensures that they keep their job, but they also tend to earn their keep.
The other thing I wanted to touch on, which I've skipped over from time to time, is the effect of plant domestication. Basically, anyone who has ever spent any time comparing wild versions of plants with their domesticated cousins will be struck by often vast differences. Whether it be carrots or onions, potatoes, corn or apples and oranges, almost invariably, the domesticated version tends to be a lot larger, tastier, more nutritious, faster growing. It may appear in steady annual production, rather than occasionally or unpredictably over a few years. Where it appears in clusters, you'll usually see a lot more fruit or berries or grapes per plant, etc. There are relatively few domesticated plants which don't have significant differences from their wild cousins.
This is basically human selection. We want bigger and tastier carrots. We want bigger potatos, more productive wheat, more and bigger grapes to a bunch, more bunches to a vine, and vines that produce regularly. And basically, we tend to select for specimens that do that, and those specimens tend to reproduce, and we tend not to encourage the ones that aren't as bountiful.
This doesn't require a degree in genetics or any kind of sophisticated cultural practice. Generally, for most plant domesticates, the normal casual evolved practices of farmers - the practices used to propagate plants year after year, do the trick. Or at least, its done the trick for the ones that it worked on.
It's possible that we've lost out on potential domesticates or at least potential improvements because our practices didn't match the reproductive strategies of certain kinds of plant. Instead of advancing a plant to the stage of a really productive domesticate, the mismatch has ended up throwing away potential improvement or even worsening the breed, leaving the domesticate marginal, or even abandoned or never taken up.
But in terms of this timeline, one thing I've tried to emphasize is the significance of genetic diversity, and the potential of agricultural or pre-agricultural techniques to amount to effective selection.
That's the other side of things - genetic diversity. More genetic diversity means more variation in plants. More variation means more expression of different traits - all sorts of traits, faster growers, slower growers, more leafs, fewer leafs, bigger flowers, smaller flowers, bigger roots, smaller roots, cold tolerance, drought tolerance, soil tolerance, etc. etc.
For wild plants, they're basically trading off - their selective pressures are coming from all directions, without special priorities, and they tend to develop as generalists.
Humans apply selective pressures in certain directions. Bigger, better, faster, etc.
Sometimes they reduce other selective pressures. There's less need to be drought tolerant if you've got irrigation topping things up. Less selective pressure to endure short cold growing seasons if you've tweaked microclimates to be generally warmer, less windy and a little bit longer in the growing season. Agriculture often reduces certain selective pressures. Reducing other selective pressures frees up additional biological oomph to go in other directions, directions you'd like.
Sometimes it gets crazy places - you get domesticated plants that require huge investments of labour, agriculture or fertilizer to maintain, or that require humans to even propagate.
Getting back to this timeline, one of the key things that we have to appreciate is that the OTL plants described are mostly wild starting points. Domestication will change most of these plants over time, producing varieties that are on the whole more productive and richer in human terms than exist now.
So what's the timeframe for plant domestication? That's difficult to say, mostly because most of the known domesticates have been domesticated for a very long time, thousands of years. This doesn't necessarily mean that domestication takes thousands of years. Rather, I'd argue that while fine refinement can take a while, the bulk of domestication probably takes place very quickly.
That's because plants grow very fast, and they produce a lot of seeds. What that means is that in growing fast, there's lots of generations, lots of opportunities for traits to express themselves, and with lots of seeds per plant, there's lots of opportunities to spread desirable traits rapidly.
So let's take Sweetvetch as our baseline. The Arctic territories of the Thule are roughly the size of western europe. That's a lot of landscape. Sweetvetch doesn't grow everywhere, but it grows throughout that range, so that's a lot of plants. Let's say a population of a million plants, occupying their historical range. That's a lot of individual locations, a lot of local lineages, a lot of genetic diversity, and a lot of potential expressed and unexpressed traits.
Pre-Agricultural, and Agricultural techniques magnify that diversity. Sweetvetch lines from different areas are brought into proximity to each other by the practice of trading root cuttings and seeds from one community to another or one shaman to another. This encourages more expression of traits, more extreme expressions, previously unexpressed traits start to express. There's more options to choose among.
Particularly productive plants, bigger roots, faster growers, will tend to be valued more than others. They have 'more magic', the 'spirits favour them more.' They're more valued, more sought, more widely traded and distributed. They grow more.
Sweetvetch has for practical purposes a three year cycle. So roughly thirty generations a century. In three centuries, you get a hundred generations. That's a lot of individual plants, a lot of expressed traits, and within that time, a lot of selection going on, particularly if distribution is pushed by Shamans.
With three centuries of intensive agricultural selection, and couple of more centuries of pre-agricultural selection before that, I think we'll see a significantly distinct 'domesticated version' of Sweetvetch. More likely, I think we'll see a bunch of local domesticated varieties, in just the way we have varieties of rice or varieties of potatos. Tough hardy cold resistant/short season tolerant domesticates for places like Ellesmere Island. Water tolerant, rich soil, fast growing (two year cycle?) fat rich varieties in places like the McKenzie basin. Dry country varieties, etc.
I'm going to ballpark and suggest 85% of Sweetvetch's domesticable biological potential is achieved well inside this three century time frame (the last 15% might be the tough part), with a domesticated variety that averages 50% to twice as productive as the wild variesties. Maybe much better, who knows.
Bistort, because its historically widespread through the territories has similar potential, and likely a similar trajectory. It goes from a peanut sized edible root, to something onion or small potato sized.
Roseroot and Tuberosa had much smaller distribution ranges historically, and it is subsets of their populations that get distributed across the larger Thule landscape. That's a recipe for dramatically less genetic diversity and less pronounced expression of traits than Sweetvetch and Bistort have.
Within say, a three hundred year time frame (with another two hundred years or less pre-agricultural selections), you will get a significantly different, more productive domesticate. But the difference won't be as huge as Sweetvetch and Bistort. I think you would see the available potential of the population being mostly exploited within that three hundred year span. But over the next centuries, there'd be potential for further leaps from 'super-varieties' developing in the genetic heartlands of these plants, and spreading outwards. By 1700 things might look fairly interesting.
Fireweed, Fernweed and Marsh Ragwort are all widely distributed species with subtantial genetic reservoirs - so lots of potential expression. But their original cultivations were all local, so that limits the initial genetic pool. And their reproductive strategies - particularly Fireweed and Ragwort, who are windblown, leaves a high potential for rebreeding with and back to wild stock. Of course, this allows for more incorporation of potential diversity and traits back into domesticates, so there's opportunity there. With three hundred years, I'd suggest recognizably distinct domesticated varieties will emerge, more productive and more amenable to agriculture than the wild worms. But I'd be hesitant to say how much more productive it would be. By 1700, they would probably be significantly better than their 1400 or 1500 counterparts, but again, I wouldn't want to guess how much.
Berry stocks I'd expect to be the slow learners of the bunch, but again, by 1700, I'd expect clearly domesticated stocks to have emerged, producing regular annual crops and producing much larger more numerous berries per stem. We didn't really see this sort of berry domestication in the south for two reasons - first, berry plants are finicky as hell. Second, southern cultures likely had far more options for fruit cultivation, including easier and much more productive options.
Two other small points. First, getting back to the Shamanic network, I would assume that there's a greater degree of intentionality and deliberateness to at least some of the human selection process, because the Shamans are fairly aware and fairly involved in both selection and making sure positive (ie - spirits approved) plant varieties are distributed much more widely. So there may be greater than average impetus.
The other thing to remember is that the larger part of Thule culture is actually engineering. Microclimate engineering. This is cumulative year after year after year. Over time, with increasing population, and increasing technical knowledge and skill, I would assume that the scale of accumulating works would be bigger, more ambitious, more sophisticated and comprehensive.
There would be negatives, climactic fluctuations, the little ice age, wars, possible plant epidemics and diseases. But I would argue that the productivity of the Thule landscape and Thule agricultural complex and crops would continue to increase steadily at least until 1700.
Anyway, that's it for now. My next round of posts on this will probably be on Pycrete, and the Animal Domestications (and some really interesting stuff there). I'm going to leave the place to DirtyCommie for a while, and maybe catch up on Axis of Andes and Green Antarctica, or even the Moontrap Timeline.
) But I would be pretty serious about TibetWank! And the Andean altiplano.
