[AHC] Wank African Pygmies

So honey harvesting and notions of ownership of retrieved honey already exists among mbuti.
I don't believe the cutting of any tree much less fruit bearing trees will be necessary as wood is not the main burned substience. If anything the use of bark cloth that's closer to the trunk than crown can be used since its of lower quality to the crown.

There is with paracultivation an understanding of tending and improving stands of calorie rich foods.

I suggest reading the PDF Baka Pygmy managment of wild yams.

Also I wouldn't be so quick to attach a particular range of development until you know more about these cultures or else you're essentially be making say an Amazonian ATL with a pygmy veneer.

You'll also be dealing with high rates of a number of diseases that will hinder them and I suggest you restrict or taboo primate and bat meat to reduce chances of Ebola and similar outbreaks that would inevitably occur once any real population density is reached.

Good points. Yeah don't want to ape Amazonian development to much, it's just that terra preta is so damn fascinating.

And yeah, some really scary diseases lurking around if you have much higher populations than IOTL. Iron Age AIDS anyone?
 
For being anachronistic what I meant is "there's no real word aside from pygmy to describe those populations." Of course the ancestors of the current people are going to have really different cultures and names for themselves.

One of the biggest errors I see cropping up in pop anthropology is "look at these primitive people, living in exactly the way that their ancestors have for thousands of years." Which, like you say, is bullshit people of all sorts have their way of life shaped profoundly by history and by interacting with others. Which makes reconstructing what life was like before the Bantu showed up really damn hard and reliant on a lot of wild guessing for any TL with a POD that far back.

For the specific points you bring up, I'm looking at them being pushed back by farmers on the really macro level. Thousands of years ago the hunter gatherers were spread across the whole Congo area and now they have a few enclaves. Of course that retreat is spread across such a massive timescale that you don't need that much negative interaction in any one slice of time but looking at the really really big picture the pygmies have been pushed back a lot and are now pretty marginal.

For the flowering if not so many species flower then you should still get a good bit more bees than now if you increase the prevalence of those species by slowly culling the many other species that don't out bit by bit much like what happened in the Amazon where the prevalence of fruit trees is quite high due to pre-Columbian people encouraging that.

And the yams! Can't believe I forgot the mention the yams! When I was researching this I had ideas like "what if we had yams be the POD like in The Lands of Red and Gold" and I read about them already having yams that were prime candidates for domestication. A good system to set up would be maybe culling some trees that don't produce flowers/fruit/nuts and planting some yams in the clearing while you wait for other trees to grow up.

The breadfruit and the other stuff are interesting as well. I didn't really research this in depth, mostly poking around a lot academic papers about potential domesticates and getting really frustrated at contradictory information about when the Bantu hit the Congo. One thing I noticed about amazing book about potential African crops ("Lost Crops of Africa" go look it up if you haven't it's free and just phenomenally interesting) is how many potential rain forest crops came from West Africa rather than the Congo which leads me to think that there are probably some potential domesticates in the Congo that were overlooked because of where farming developed in Africa.

Will definitely check out your TL and you notes would be of interest.
Looking at the material culture of middle and later stone age societies really can give you a good lens on the cultural aspects of the tool makers, I cant recommend enough the research around cultural expression in the forms of cave painting for example.

Congolian forests are not like most tropical forests in that they are often already monodominant, this along with the dry season (which leave about 5 months of carb scarcity the whole dry season) is the main hindrance in honey production. Overcoming the hunger season is a challenge because even today such a time of scarcity is present for farmers in the region in spite of the fact most of there crops aren't from Africa.
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The issue is not that the forests lack flowers, the issue is the forests lack flowers during the dry season and meat alone cannot sustain a people neither can yams because "fat starvation" is very real. People rarely figure in the nutritional content of bee larvae which is very rich in perishable fats that quickly rancidify.



That sound very interesting. As for the Congo not having many flowering trees that seems like something that could be changed via very long time horticultural practices. But that does make things harder. All the more reason to focus on the wild yams.



Think domesticating ostriches to ride would be really damn hard. On the other hand if you could have people show up in areas outside of tsetse fly range (pushing east to the coast?) they could have a lot easier time riding horses than other populations if they could get their hands on them. The wild ancestors of horses are pretty small which is one reason why you see so many chariots in the Bronze Age, if you put a guy in full armor with supplies and weapons on the back of a Bronze Age horse then that horse is going to have real problems carrying all that since they weren't anywhere near as big as Medieval war horses. Pygmies would have less of a problem with that.

For bird domestication I was thinking more parrots as we know the ancient Egyptians traded for parrot feathers from the Congo (although probably not very much because of the distances involved). They grey parrot would be interesting due to its intelligence and ability to learn how to speak simple human phrases.

I'm imaging them being important in religion. This is a bit fanciful but maybe you could have people think there's a spiritual connection between a person and his pet grey parrot so after he dies you can communicate with his soul by trying to get his parrot to answer questions. Of course the massive lifespan of grey parrots make them really hard to breed so probably more semi-domestication or widespread taming along the lines of elephants in Thailand.

Ostrich aren't forest animals.
 
Looking at the material culture of middle and later stone age societies really can give you a good lens on the cultural aspects of the tool makers, I cant recommend enough the research around cultural expression in the forms of cave painting for example.

Congolian forests are not like most tropical forests in that they are often already monodominant, this along with the dry season (which leave about 5 months of carb scarcity the whole dry season) is the main hindrance in honey production. Overcoming the hunger season is a challenge because even today such a time of scarcity is present for farmers in the region in spite of the fact most of there crops aren't from Africa.
4287932241_c8c57f522c.jpg


The issue is not that the forests lack flowers, the issue is the forests lack flowers during the dry season and meat alone cannot sustain a people neither can yams because "fat starvation" is very real. People rarely figure in the nutritional content of bee larvae which is very rich in perishable fats that quickly rancidify.

Ostrich aren't forest animals.

Fascinating. Thanks so much for this information.

High fat bee larvae will help as will high fat domesticated rats.

But in general main hurdle isn't so much food production as food preservation. Let me brainstorm methods of preserving food:
-Honey: honey doesn't rot. So that's one source of calories you can store if you get enough of it and you have vessels to put it in. Can you preserve food by dunking it in pots of honey?
-Drying: you'll need to dry the food in the wet season. Drying food in the wet season poses obvious difficulties.
-Smoking: lots of the same problem as with drying the food. But maybe marginally possible. Also you can't really smoke fruit.
-Roasting: roasted nuts are pretty high in fat and keep well. The African oil bean (Pentaclethra macrophylla) looks really promising but it's in West Africa...
-Canning: can't can stuff with neolithic tech.
-Pickling: hmmmm?
-Fermentation: Congolese kimchi? Making kimchi is pretty damn low tech and last freaking forever. I know that the Icelandic people traditionally fermented shark which sound terrible but maybe fermented fish would keep into the dry season?
-Preserving in lye like with lutefisk. Luterat anyone?

For ostriches of course they're not going to be domesticated in the Congo, they'd be later for groups that moved out of the Congo, perhaps a Congolese/San hybrid culture with dogs and ostriches?

For early Congolese domestication rats filling the rabbit/chicken niche seems really easy to justify and taming (but not domesticating) parrots seems easy to justify. If you could eventually get people in contact with early Sudanese cultures parrot feathers would be a great light weight high value trade good to send into the Sudan and Egypt.
 
Do we know whether the stature of modern pygmies was typical of most of tribes displaced by the Bantu expansion?
 
Fascinating. Thanks so much for this information.

High fat bee larvae will help as will high fat domesticated rats.

But in general main hurdle isn't so much food production as food preservation. Let me brainstorm methods of preserving food:
-Honey: honey doesn't rot. So that's one source of calories you can store if you get enough of it and you have vessels to put it in. Can you preserve food by dunking it in pots of honey?
-Drying: you'll need to dry the food in the wet season. Drying food in the wet season poses obvious difficulties.
-Smoking: lots of the same problem as with drying the food. But maybe marginally possible. Also you can't really smoke fruit.
-Roasting: roasted nuts are pretty high in fat and keep well. The African oil bean (Pentaclethra macrophylla) looks really promising but it's in West Africa...
-Canning: can't can stuff with neolithic tech.
-Pickling: hmmmm?
-Fermentation: Congolese kimchi? Making kimchi is pretty damn low tech and last freaking forever. I know that the Icelandic people traditionally fermented shark which sound terrible but maybe fermented fish would keep into the dry season?
-Preserving in lye like with lutefisk. Luterat anyone?

For ostriches of course they're not going to be domesticated in the Congo, they'd be later for groups that moved out of the Congo, perhaps a Congolese/San hybrid culture with dogs and ostriches?

For early Congolese domestication rats filling the rabbit/chicken niche seems really easy to justify and taming (but not domesticating) parrots seems easy to justify. If you could eventually get people in contact with early Sudanese cultures parrot feathers would be a great light weight high value trade good to send into the Sudan and Egypt.

you're still ignoring carb scarity, there isn't a single society in the tropics that has in essence a ketogenic or near ketogenic dietary lifestyle. Honey will be the main subsistence of the rainy season with say yam but what about the dry season. Even if you stretch out the honey you'll still need to produce enough calories to sustain a 1600 calorie diet and tbh unless you can find a foraging animal that can subsist off of leaves and you get a conversion rate of about 1:1.5 for fat you'll be SOL. Really I think its best that you figure out carb intake beyond honey, I mean you can take this route but its not based on reality.

you're also gonna be dealing with a society with extremely high rate of toothache and rot which can be detrimental to this society
FIG. 32. No dentists or physicians are available on most of these islands. Toothache is the only cause of suicide.
from Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Do we know whether the stature of modern pygmies was typical of most of tribes displaced by the Bantu expansion?
generally speaking yes
 
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Like someone else said, I feel like the best chance is to have there be some greater domestication of something that can be reliably ridden. Then have there be a population boom, while Bantus end up going around them generally. Then do a Mongolia. They either could head south and try to conquer the whole south, or go north and try for a coast on the Med. All depends on when the Tsetse fly hits and when they run out of food, among other things.

It all depends on when.
 
Like someone else said, I feel like the best chance is to have there be some greater domestication of something that can be reliably ridden. Then have there be a population boom, while Bantus end up going around them generally. Then do a Mongolia. They either could head south and try to conquer the whole south, or go north and try for a coast on the Med. All depends on when the Tsetse fly hits and when they run out of food, among other things.

It all depends on when.
tbh I wanted to hold out because like I have been researching for an atl like this for a bit over a year but given the many early accounts of truly tiny people (like 3'11"-4'2" full grown women) I was reading, I believe red river hog (Potamochoerus porcus) is the best option. They are resistant to tsetse, swine virus and other diseases that kill most livestock.
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I know it seems silly and possibly uncomfortable but people having ridden camels talk about extreme discomfort and even pain from it, yet look at their use as mounts globally. This man even speaks of it been quite smooth.

Forming a Papuan style relationship where women lactated piglets with their baby a level of familiarity and trust can occur unlike that of the West. We also know that in Madagascar Potamochoerus larvatus which was released there long ago shows signs of semi-domestication and old accounts show how readily tame they can become. The limitations of the animals habit is forest lands or grasslands with rivers so the society could stay in Central Africa if the stay committed to swineherding and swine mounts. Using them as beast of burden would be interesting.

I don't recommend eating them though unless they die of old age or as sucklings. BUT the main issue is they eat the same things people do so calorie production will need to be ramped quite intensely.
 
An advantage of Ostriches is that they are dinosaurs. They should scale up much better than mammals if bred for size. I was also thinking about termites/ants as a source of calories?
 
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