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Will Tuladhar-Douglas

@yetiinabox@todon.nl · 3 days ago

Remarkable survey of archaeobotanical evidence for early processing of plant foods. Florin and Ramsey emphasize that theirs is a cautious approach to the evidence, but the conclusion is very clear: humans were extracting food from a wide variety of plants in ways that required grinding, leaching, and lots of tool use tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years before the supposed emergence of sedentary agriculture.

Their discussion of crossing Wallacea is fascinating. They demonstrate the prior existence of a early, culturally transmitted bundle of adaptive skills for identifying, processing, and managing plant foods in new landscapes, including stone tools and fire, but equally, a capacity to discover, utilize, and steward unfamiliar food plants.

They firmly upend the assumption that the archaeology of food is just about eating animals, and open up the question of how old agriculture really is.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-025-09214-z

#ethnobotany #archaeology

The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations - Journal of Archaeological Research

Plants have often been considered peripheral to the human story until the relatively recent past, only starting to become significant to human diet in the Epipaleolithic when hunter-gatherers were thought to incorporate a range of previously ignored foods into their diets, including grass seeds. This was argued to have laid the groundwork for an increasingly intertwined relationship between hunter-gatherer communities and cereals, eventuating in plant domestication and agriculture. In this paper, we review the evidence for Flannery’s ‘Broad Spectrum Revolution’ and the early use of plant foods globally. We argue that broad-spectrum plant use, including complex plant processing, is a normal characteristic of early human groups and was a critical factor in the successful peopling of new environments globally, rather than a step en route to agriculture. We are a broad-spectrum species, and the ability to process a wide range of plant foods represents a key threshold in hominin evolution.

Will Tuladhar-Douglas

@yetiinabox@todon.nl · 3 days ago

Remarkable survey of archaeobotanical evidence for early processing of plant foods. Florin and Ramsey emphasize that theirs is a cautious approach to the evidence, but the conclusion is very clear: humans were extracting food from a wide variety of plants in ways that required grinding, leaching, and lots of tool use tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years before the supposed emergence of sedentary agriculture.

Their discussion of crossing Wallacea is fascinating. They demonstrate the prior existence of a early, culturally transmitted bundle of adaptive skills for identifying, processing, and managing plant foods in new landscapes, including stone tools and fire, but equally, a capacity to discover, utilize, and steward unfamiliar food plants.

They firmly upend the assumption that the archaeology of food is just about eating animals, and open up the question of how old agriculture really is.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-025-09214-z

#ethnobotany #archaeology

The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations - Journal of Archaeological Research

Plants have often been considered peripheral to the human story until the relatively recent past, only starting to become significant to human diet in the Epipaleolithic when hunter-gatherers were thought to incorporate a range of previously ignored foods into their diets, including grass seeds. This was argued to have laid the groundwork for an increasingly intertwined relationship between hunter-gatherer communities and cereals, eventuating in plant domestication and agriculture. In this paper, we review the evidence for Flannery’s ‘Broad Spectrum Revolution’ and the early use of plant foods globally. We argue that broad-spectrum plant use, including complex plant processing, is a normal characteristic of early human groups and was a critical factor in the successful peopling of new environments globally, rather than a step en route to agriculture. We are a broad-spectrum species, and the ability to process a wide range of plant foods represents a key threshold in hominin evolution.

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Hiti

हिति , in Nepāl Bhāṣā, is the word for a shared community water tap. Even in modern Newar cities, these ancient structures still pour out fresh mountain water piped through ancient underground filters and conduits. They are a place to wash, to talk, to drink, to meet the locals: a nourishing, refreshing social-ecological place.

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