Challenge=Agriculture 10000+ years early

ASBeans (well, grasses) from the future

I would have thought most efforts to teach people in a simple society inventions that take a more complicated society with greater specialisation and a greater concentration of population and more security to maintain would be doomed to failure, but why is that's what's coming to everyone's mind, trying to teach people things they're inevitably going to forget and abandon?

Wouldn't it be better to dump huge quantities of hardy, productive seed from the future on a river basin somewhere and let people congregate and multiply there, developing agriculture by themselves? Remaining there for the time the stuff is edible would be natural. People would start trying to store the grain at some point, and they'd become sedentary in time. Skipping domestication (or half-skipping it) would be weird, but they should learn it elsewise.

Or was there some rule I missed where you can't take things back with you?
 
I would have thought most efforts to teach people in a simple society inventions that take a more complicated society with greater specialisation and a greater concentration of population and more security to maintain would be doomed to failure, but why is that's what's coming to everyone's mind, trying to teach people things they're inevitably going to forget and abandon?

Wouldn't it be better to dump huge quantities of hardy, productive seed from the future on a river basin somewhere and let people congregate and multiply there, developing agriculture by themselves? Remaining there for the time the stuff is edible would be natural. People would start trying to store the grain at some point, and they'd become sedentary in time. Skipping domestication (or half-skipping it) would be weird, but they should learn it elsewise.

Or was there some rule I missed where you can't take things back with you?

Precisely, you can't take anything back with you aside from what you need for your own survival. That makes everything rather hard. If you were an agronomist, you might be able to seed an area with some decent starter plant (something you observe they eat regularly, is an ancestor of some domesticated species, and grows reasonably fast), though, while letting them know what you're doing; the next time they come around that area, they'll see that there's, say, fruit there where there wasn't before, and in the same place you planted your seeds. Hopefully, they'll make the connection; if not, hopefully the area itself will do what you describe, build up a sedentary population that goes ahead and skips forward themselves.

Admiral Matt said:
Lactose intolerance is the genetic norm for humans. The mutation that allows easy consumption of cow's milk has offered a large advantage to humans who have it. It has, therefor proliferated where milk consumption became common. The gene for tolerance has spread to include most of Europe, Africa, and India as cattle herders of Indo-European and Bantu origin have replaced intolerant peoples.

Look it up. Places that only recently had access to cow's milk have upwards of 90% lactose intolerance. That's not an indicator that intolerance comes from being around milk too much! The intolerance is there or it isn't, it just shows up when you drink the stuff.

Yeah, I know that. The point was that the cattle-herder cultures obviously haven't been cattle-herders forever, and at some point they must have started drinking cattle milk without, for the most part, being lactose tolerant (as you point out, most people in most societies are lactose intolerant if there isn't an ancestral milk-drinking culture, which early cattle-herder societies don't by definition). So obviously merely being lactose intolerant doesn't mean you won't start drinking milk if there's some overriding reason to do so. Perhaps I expressed it badly.
 
Yeah, I know that. The point was that the cattle-herder cultures obviously haven't been cattle-herders forever, and at some point they must have started drinking cattle milk without, for the most part, being lactose tolerant (as you point out, most people in most societies are lactose intolerant if there isn't an ancestral milk-drinking culture, which early cattle-herder societies don't by definition). So obviously merely being lactose intolerant doesn't mean you won't start drinking milk if there's some overriding reason to do so. Perhaps I expressed it badly.

Nah. My bad. Didn't read close enough.
 

Stephen

Banned
Everyone starts out life lactose tollerant they just lose it at some point as they grow up. So fresh milk can still provide a good source of nutrients to young children and early weening increasing fertility. While the adults can eat cheese and yoghurt.

Realistically none of the hunter gatherers are going to folow any of our advice. Studies of modern hunter gatherers show they only spend about 20 hours a week gathering and catching food, 40 if you include the cooking. In the age of megafauna where a single kill could last the whole tribe weeks probably "worked" even less. Whle the skeletons of early farmers show all the sighns of overwork disease and malnutrition. All we have to offer them is days filled with hard labor and poor health to produce an uncertain source of food for the promise that eventually they will have numerous decendents in the distant future that will conquer the world. Agriculture was only able to start OTL the same way you boil a frog via the Malthusian ratchet. It was only the much higher population density from this which alowed a select few to become specialists and idle aristocrats.
 
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