How similar were the proto-Mapuche of 3600 BC to the Mapuche of modern times? Do we know what kind of society they had or what their customs were? (This is a real question - as I said above, I'm shamefully ignorant of the prehistoric Southern Cone.)
Land of araucaria, potatoes and salmon
- Thread starter atlatl
- Start date
Potatoes are the single best crop, but having just them and guanacos does make a poor agricultural complex.
Relying on a single crop for most of your calories is quite bad. Growing a single crop makes it much more vulnerable to diseases and pests, such as blights, insects, and particularly build-up of nematodes in the soil. (Being able to rotate crops is very important for stopping nematodes.) Nutritionally, it also means that their diet will be quite deficient in a range of nutrients, particularly protein and iron. And potatoes are also difficult to store for long periods.
So yes, I'd agree that it qualifies as a poor agricultural complex. Even the maize and beans agricultural package of Mesoamerica was better than that in terms of variety, though not yield per acre. The Andean agricultural complex will change much of that, especially quinoa, which stores better and is a decent protein source.
Colour me interested too.
As an addendum, there is a native domesticated cereal from the Southern Cone. This is the mango brome (Bromus mango), which was domesticated within parts of Chile and Argentina. It was only a minor crop and went extinct within the historical record, being largely displaced by other cereals. Its wild form still exists (see image here for the range).
But I suspect that in your timeline it may well become much more important much earlier.
But I suspect that in your timeline it may well become much more important much earlier.
I think like Jared : one crop is not very reliable, he can suffer for pest like the potatoes blight in Irland in the XIX century.
[/QUOTE]Finally, an observation - you've attracted my attention, Twovultures, 9FangedHummingbird, HueHuecoyatl, Johnathan Edelstein, Cuāuhtemōc, etc., it's like a who's who of this board's "Civilization Builders" take a look at our timelines. We're all intrigued by your project and very supportive. If you feel that you are being criticized, please don't take it personally. We're all rooting for you, criticisms are intended to be constructive and a whole bunch of very smart people are rooting for you and hoping to be able to offer useful advice and help.[/QUOTE]
I understand this constructive criticism.
After some research (tank for the first step Jared) I have found OTL farming by the mapuches :
According to this
Potatoe (native)
Mango brome (native, biennial)
Chilean tarweed (native, oïl seed)
teca (native unknow, a cereal who seem to have been desappared in the XVIII century, maybe Bromeus araucanus, if so it's also biennial)
Chili (imported from Mesoamerica via Peru)
Maize (imported from Mesoamerica via Peru)
Bean (imported from Peru)
Quinoa (imported from Peru)
Squash (imported from Peru)
Savage plant
Araucaria seed (wild but very important)
Cochayuyo, (Durvillaea antarctica), seaweed
Animal
Dog (native)
Llama (imported from Peru but can be remplaced by a domestication of Guanaco)
Chicken (maybe imported from polynesia or adopted after the european contact)
Minor crops
Chilean strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis, native)
Potential ITTL
Oca (imported from Peru)
Guinea Pig (imported from Peru)
Pig (imported from Polynesia)
The Mapuches seem to be originating from their region of Chile and OTL the peoples of the southern cone appear to haven't move much before the XVI century. In the east side of the Ande there were the Chonan languages and on the west side there were isolated languages : mapudungún, chono, alakaluf, yagan.
A thirty year maturation of the araucaria seems to preclude domestication as we understand it. But that's the key 'as we understand it.'
Even before agriculture, hunter/gatherers developed a variety of practices which in some cases affected the mixture and balance of species. Sometimes they wrecked their environment, but sometimes practices tended to enrich their environment, creating more habitat or fodder for desired prey animals, more opportunities for desired plants, eliminating rivals or predators, etc.
So looking at the araucaria, would your hunter/gatherer Mapuche have been in a position to develop cultural habitats which encouraged the spread of Auracania? Would they become selective in terms of trees that they cut down, avoiding productive Auracania and cutting down non-productive rivals. Would they spread the seeds? Would they start to learn and appreciate optimum densities?
The foundation of Mapuche agriculture might have been the slow development of silviculture cultural knowledge, along with spreading auracania stands and an auracania dependent subsistence economy, which makes a leap to practical application to smaller faster growing plants.
How productive is auracania? What kind of volume of edible material is produced by the trees, and how do you reasonable generalize that to a measurement by acre?
Remember that an average human being requires about 700 pounds of food a year. So you can do some neat ball-park estimates based on that. For instance, if you determine that an acre can produce 10,000 pounds of potatoes, you can then generalize that an acre of potato farming will feed about 15 people.
Now that's something of a thought experiment obviously, because fifteen people fed nothing but potatoes will not be healthy people. But underlying it, is an ability to estimate the density of population a potato economy might be able to support.
So, for purposes of estimating your potential, what's the productivity. Given that this is allohistory, you're not required to have detailed estimates. We operate by analysis, analogy, extrapolation and guesstimates.
Even before agriculture, hunter/gatherers developed a variety of practices which in some cases affected the mixture and balance of species. Sometimes they wrecked their environment, but sometimes practices tended to enrich their environment, creating more habitat or fodder for desired prey animals, more opportunities for desired plants, eliminating rivals or predators, etc.
So looking at the araucaria, would your hunter/gatherer Mapuche have been in a position to develop cultural habitats which encouraged the spread of Auracania? Would they become selective in terms of trees that they cut down, avoiding productive Auracania and cutting down non-productive rivals. Would they spread the seeds? Would they start to learn and appreciate optimum densities?
The foundation of Mapuche agriculture might have been the slow development of silviculture cultural knowledge, along with spreading auracania stands and an auracania dependent subsistence economy, which makes a leap to practical application to smaller faster growing plants.
How productive is auracania? What kind of volume of edible material is produced by the trees, and how do you reasonable generalize that to a measurement by acre?
Remember that an average human being requires about 700 pounds of food a year. So you can do some neat ball-park estimates based on that. For instance, if you determine that an acre can produce 10,000 pounds of potatoes, you can then generalize that an acre of potato farming will feed about 15 people.
Now that's something of a thought experiment obviously, because fifteen people fed nothing but potatoes will not be healthy people. But underlying it, is an ability to estimate the density of population a potato economy might be able to support.
So, for purposes of estimating your potential, what's the productivity. Given that this is allohistory, you're not required to have detailed estimates. We operate by analysis, analogy, extrapolation and guesstimates.
Is your PoD that Oncorhynchus made it to South America iTTL? Or did it, and then it died out? If the former, how on earth did it get past the tropics?
Yes.
They have domestic dog. But in Tierra del Fuego the Ona may have domesticated the Andean fox. The yagan dog according to Charles Darwin serve to hunt otter and as living blanket. The Tierra del Fuego's subpecies of this animal is the largest. Perhaps it's and hybrid of the domestic dog and the local subspecies of the Andean fox.
katchen
Banned
My understanding is that it's almost impossible to hybridize dogs and foxes to interbreed. From Naked Scientist: According to Wikipedia:
Quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canid_hybrid#Genetic_considerations
The red fox has 34 chromosomes (17 pairs) and from 0 to 8 small B chromosomes.
The grey fox has 66 chromosomes (33 pairs).
The fennec fox has 64 chromosomes (32 pairs).
The Bengal Fox has 60 chromosomes (30 pairs).
The kit fox has 50 chromosomes (25 pairs).
The Tibetan sand fox has 36 chromosomes (18 pairs).
The Bat-eared Fox has 72 chromosomes (36 pairs)
The the raccoon dog has 42 chromosomes (21 pairs).
Some animals with different chromosome numbers can breed once if they are similar enough, but generally the offspring are infertile.
For example, Horses (64 chromosomes), Donkey (62 chromosomes), and zebras have 32 to 46 chromosomes. They can interbreed, but their offspring are always sterile due to inheriting an odd number of chromosomes.
Apparently no verifiable dog/fox hybrids have occurred.
Quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canid_hybrid#Genetic_considerations
Members of the dog genus Canis: wolves, dogs (both common dogs and dingoes), Ethiopian Wolves,[1] coyotes, and golden jackals cannot interbreed with members of the wider dog family: the Canidae, such as South American canids, foxes, African wild dogs, bat-eared foxes or raccoon dogs; or, if they could, their offspring would be infertile.
Just looking at chromosomes, Dogs, Wolves, & Coyotes have 39 pairs, or 78 total chromosomes.The red fox has 34 chromosomes (17 pairs) and from 0 to 8 small B chromosomes.
The grey fox has 66 chromosomes (33 pairs).
The fennec fox has 64 chromosomes (32 pairs).
The Bengal Fox has 60 chromosomes (30 pairs).
The kit fox has 50 chromosomes (25 pairs).
The Tibetan sand fox has 36 chromosomes (18 pairs).
The Bat-eared Fox has 72 chromosomes (36 pairs)
The the raccoon dog has 42 chromosomes (21 pairs).
Some animals with different chromosome numbers can breed once if they are similar enough, but generally the offspring are infertile.
For example, Horses (64 chromosomes), Donkey (62 chromosomes), and zebras have 32 to 46 chromosomes. They can interbreed, but their offspring are always sterile due to inheriting an odd number of chromosomes.
Apparently no verifiable dog/fox hybrids have occurred.
The problem with domesticating Araucaria is that the genus is dioecious. Half of the individuals will be unproductive males when you grow Araucaria from seed, and there is no way of telling them apart until they reach coning age 30 to 40 years later. They can apparently be propagated by cuttings, but not very easily. Having separate male and female plants poses several problems when it comes to selective breeding. The seeds are the desired part of the plant, but their production requires plants of both sexes. Selection is likely to be based on increasing seed size and productivity, but with no way to determine what effects the male's genes will have on the productivity of his female offspring, selection will be a very long, slow process.
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The lifespan suggests that there's no real way to domesticate Araucaria. At least not without a fairly advanced culture.
But if you acquired a cultural trait which identifies the Araucaria as holy or spirit-laden trees, you might end up with preferential habits. Non Araucaria trees are chopped down, or chopped down more regularly. Araucaria seeds are carried and planted as signifiers of good magic. Either way, you might get a situation where the Araucaria trees are the dominant or at least much more prevalent tree population in many areas.
The more trees, the more mature trees producing edible seeds, the greater the volume of edible seeds, and perhaps a larger more stable population. It'll certainly impact the subsistence economy, over four or five hundred years.
Please do not confuse south american canids with "true foxes" just because of silly english terminology. Lycalopex closest relatives are canids of genus canis (wolves, jackals etc.). However, I doubt culpeo could interbreed with dogs, they have 2n=74 chromosomes.
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The Spanish page suggested it was, so IDK what's up.atlatl said:
Thx, tho.By no means expert, but to make the change to agriculture would seem to need finding an area where seeds are plentiful most of the time, or perhaps to finding seed that can be carried & transplanted readily--perhaps both.DValdron said:
DValdron said:
That suggests a potentially very different *potato becoming common TTL. The ones we preferred OTL were selected for particular environments; TTL, they could be very different, indeed.
One thing: what happens if (when?) the potato reaches as far north as OTL New Mexico, & is used by Navajo? Does it supplement maize? Or supplant it? Or pre-empt it?
True. Even reducing the number of predators can impact the ecosystem substantially. Look at Yellowstone: fewer wolves equals more deer equals more grazing on trees equals more grassland...DValdron said:
And then there's Nature: if there are more grazers of a given crop/tree, this may evolve either resistance or a way to use the grazer as a seed carrier--& possibly both. (I confess I'm unaware of a plant doing both, but...)
Apparently easier than many thought. I saw a TV doc suggesting coyotes, where the wolves have seen diminished pops, are interbreeding with wolves, producing an intermediate species: larger than coyote, smaller than wolf.katchen said:
You can add me to that group, too. I know next to nothing about this subject, & constructing society from scratch is too daunting for me. I am, however, liking the idea a lot.DValdron said:
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