African rice domesticated in fourth millennium BC

What is your point in posting like this? I'm all for critique, but the way you do it is just nasty and dissmissive of the work that Jonathon has done.

I think he has successfully outlined his POD as possible, if not necessarily probable, and none of your criticisms seem to exclude that, i.e. that the POD is scientifically impoosible (if, for example, no form of rice was found in Africa, I would question the plausibility of it evolving there etc.).

I for one would be interested then in seeing your take on the timeline, addressing the deficiencies you see as occuring, rather than reading snide comments like 'OMG how dare someone write a timeline without having read the exact same sources I have, or coming up with the exact same conclusions.'
 
@Revachah Well why not post the details on that "one other option for an earlier rice timeline"? I'm sure we'd love to hear about it and discuss it. Yeah we on the forum don't know much about Africa but the people in this thread are willing to listen and discuss.

On another note, I have no idea if the PoD is plausible or ASB or what. Even if it is though, there's nothing wrong with having a "hard" ASB thread. We still have Vinland threads all the time in this sub-forum and I personally think those are ASB. Still very interesting to discuss once the initial PoD is past.
 
What is your point in posting like this? I'm all for critique, but the way you do it is just nasty and dissmissive of the work that Jonathon has done.

I think he has successfully outlined his POD as possible, if not necessarily probable, and none of your criticisms seem to exclude that, i.e. that the POD is scientifically impoosible (if, for example, no form of rice was found in Africa, I would question the plausibility of it evolving there etc.).

I for one would be interested then in seeing your take on the timeline, addressing the deficiencies you see as occuring, rather than reading snide comments like 'OMG how dare someone write a timeline without having read the exact same sources I have, or coming up with the exact same conclusions.'
He hasn't though, thats the problem with this forum sadly because no one seems to have the knowledge to say why or why can't some African ATL occur and the result is a lot of stretching and brushing aside important factors.

That was the point of my writing in detail why he is wrong rather than just say "lol you're dumb". I'm direct, I'm over coddling and I haven't said anything that can be seen as anything more than "read more and research before doing another African ATL"

It's not like I went on his other Africa atl and spent hours critiquing how it was incorrect and inaccurate. It's firmly stating that to really provide readers African ATLs that are rooted in known fact one must know the facts.

I have always admired Revachah, but I agree with CarlAlbertForPresident this time around.
Eh, I'm not popular. I do my best to be accurate and make no apology for it. Try to be inaccurate about really anything having to do with white men past 2k years in this forum and be steadfast about it and see what happens on here.

It just gets slapped down, ignored or outright attacked.

So why shouldn't any other subject? Why is the onus on anyone other than the person asking why then being told why not "read more"?

@Revachah Well why not post the details on that "one other option for an earlier rice timeline"? I'm sure we'd love to hear about it and discuss it. Yeah we on the forum don't know much about Africa but the people in this thread are willing to listen and discuss.

On another note, I have no idea if the PoD is plausible or ASB or what. Even if it is though, there's nothing wrong with having a "hard" ASB thread. We still have Vinland threads all the time in this sub-forum and I personally think those are ASB. Still very interesting to discuss once the initial PoD is past.
The reality is if you're going to act like somebody who knows about Africa (or anywhere for that matter) or acts as though they can speak on say African rice then why isn't the broader ethnobotanical research around Oryza and African populations mentioned? Why am I'm having a discussion with someone who could find this out if they've read in depth on the subject? If they do not know and I show them why it's inaccurate and they ask for more information then of course that creates the space for that shift in conversation. But when someone posts ASB as not ASB and just outright brushes context out of the situation why must one coddle?

If someone asked a question of the same calibre on again the constantly rehashed 2k years of European history on this forum the reaction would and actually is responded with dismissal (or the even louder non-responses).

But also again this wasn't an open question, it was "this is what I want to do and this is what I think is right. Agreed?"
 
@Revachah , I'm done coddling you either. You are not some glorious Anti-Racist savior. You are just an insulting and condescending ass who thinks that because he comes from the oppressed community, that he is okay to belittle anyone he sees fit.

I don't care about your facts. I care about your conduct.

Any more I can say would get me banned.

Edit: And yes, people are permitted to openly accuse other people of being, well, bad if they can come up with evidence that they are factually correct. The evidence is right above my post.
 
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@Revachah , I'm done coddling you either. You are not some glorious Anti-Racist savior. You are just an insulting and condescending ass who thinks that because he comes from the oppressed community, that he is okay to belittle anyone he sees fit.

I don't care about your facts. I care about your conduct.

Any more I can say would get me banned.

Edit: And yes, people are permitted to openly accuse other people of being, well, bad if they can come up with evidence that they are factually correct. The evidence is right above my post.
I'm not an anti-racist savior. I'm an African.

Tbh you can call what you're doing as coddling but I'm basically saying if someone is incorrect I'm going to tell them how they are wrong and if they continue to disregard data and information I'm going to show how their sense of knowing is unfounded.

History and historical data still matters in African ATLs.
 
My final post on this thread, at least for the time being:

It's not like I went on his other Africa atl and spent hours critiquing how it was incorrect and inaccurate.

You complimented it, as I recall, though finding some errors in it - and if you've read that thread, you should know that I don't just casually throw stuff out there with regard to Africa. I'm wrong sometimes - even if I were writing a timeline about 45-year-old American Jews living in Kew Gardens, Queens, I'd be wrong sometimes - but I don't casually throw stuff out there.

I think part of the disagreement here may be different definitions of what's possible. You don't appear to dispute that there were no physical obstacles to earlier rice domestication; the obstacles you cite are cultural. Cultures can change and adapt to pressure, and they're also subject to stochastic effects - a divine omen here, a randomly appearing genius there, etc. So a POD involving cultural change is a matter of finding the right conditions and inflection point. If the change in foodways involved in early rice domestication is too radical for a fourth-millennium POD to work (I could argue some more about that - for instance the theory of a Levantine migration to Egypt remains controversial - but you're more steeped in the paleobotany than I am so I'll accept that proposition for purposes of argument), maybe, say, a seventh-millennium POD with the 8.2-ky event as impetus would provide enough time for cultures to adapt and changes in food production to cascade, and might also allow some of the obstacles that exist in the 4th millennium not to arise. I'm very wary of saying that anything is impossible when the obstacles to it are purely cultural - if I'm wrong about a particular inflection point, maybe there's a way to get it right.

But it's probably not worth continuing the discussion now, because on the evidence of posts 121-29, this thread has become a conversation about personalities rather than about rice or the Niger Valley. Sometimes discussions recover from that, but not often, so it's probably best to call it a day. If you ever do a timeline about Oryza sativa in Africa via an Austronesian-Madagascar vector or one about O. barthii in the upper Nile Valley (and there's a very simple reason why neither were mentioned here, namely that my focus was on exploring what a dawn civilization in Mali might be like rather than discussing rice and Africa in general), I'll follow it with interest as I did your Malagasy timeline earlier this year, but for now I'll leave you the floor.
 
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