The idea of agriculture being one of the worst human developments along with the car isn't something I'd ever thought about before starting university. One thing I find interesting is that once the shift from a nomadic or hunter gatherer to sedentary lifestyle began, we began to find traces of this in the bones of remains. What we begin to find is evidence of malnutrition from the low protein high carbohydrate diet focusing mainly on grains. If I remember correctly from my early archaeological classes, agriculture, or crop growing began around 10,000 years ago.
While cruising an archeological website, I came across a really short article stating that early Andeans ate corn 5,000 years ago. Within the short article, which is about a paragraph and a half long, it states that Andeans ate corn for survival and possibly for ceremonial purposes. The evidence was found in pollen samples in teeth and tool analysis. Originally, it was thought that people of the Peruvian Andes depended on marine life for survival but now it is fair to assume that those people were also farming corn. I suppose the point I am trying to reach with this article is that I don't like the way they portray corn as being a "survival food" when ocean resources are available. I just find it interesting how human food culture shifted from a relatively high protein and fibrous diet (mind you, difficult to find/catch/kill) to a diet that we have become to rely on such as crops and fields of wheat, grains and corn. I often think about whether or not humans would turn back time 10,000 years and never change the foraging patterns or keep them how they happened to develop. The skeletons found during times of severe agriculture reliance are evidence that maybe it isn't the best thing to be "surviving" off of and maybe we should look back to our roots and see where we took a wrong turn.
http://www.archaeology.org/news/603-130226-peru-andes-corn
No comments:
Post a Comment