We celebrated the evolution of the first flowers on Amborella Day, March 17. Now we can finally celebrate people having pots to put flowers in. The earliest pots in the world come from the Jomon culture in Japan. (Although they were more for cooking and storage than for flower arranging, of course.)
The advent of pottery defines the beginning of the Neolithic (New Stone Age). In some places, the Neolithic coincides with the inception of agriculture. But not everywhere. The Jomon are hunter-gatherers, ancestors to Japan’s Ainu. They live in villages, harvesting marine and arboreal resources (e.g. shellfish and acorns), which are rich enough that they can settle down and develop an increasingly elaborate ceramic tradition. A pot like this one was not thrown on a wheel, but made by hand, from coils of clay. Jomon means “cord marked,” from the patterns marked on the pots with cords.
The Younger Dryas Cold Event, last hurrah of the last glaciation, is over. In the Near East, people are once again settling down in villages, harvesting wild grain, and hunting. Tomorrow on Logarithmic History comes the first generally recognized human domestication of plants – wheat and barley specifically. So to commemorate, here’s a recipe – one of the most popular ever from the New York Times – for no-knead bread that you can make overnight (although early farmers may have favored porridge and flatbread.)
Jared Diamond took a dour view of agriculture, calling it the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” And fans of the paleo diet claim that you should try to eat like our ancestors did before the invention of farming. But there are counterarguments: Many hunter-gatherers ate more starch and sugar (in the form of honey) than paleo proponents assume. Also, human populations (at least populations of farmers) have evolved since the beginning of agriculture; many of us are no longer quite genetically adapted to a hunter-gatherer diet. Finally, feeding most of the planet on a meat-heavy paleo diet may be impossible.
In any case, studies from the They Institute (“They did this one study …”) show that bread won’t make you fat if you only eat bread you bake yourself. So indulge.
No-knead bread
Ingredients
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1 ¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed
Preparation
In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.
Luzia, an adult female Homo sapiens fossil from central Brazil, died about 11.5 thousand years ago. Her skeleton narrowly missed being destroyed in a fire in the 200 year old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Here’s a story about the fire.
Luzia is named after Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis from Laetoli, but she’s no relation, or at least no more relation than the rest of us. When Luzia was discovered (1975) she presented quite a puzzle. She’s one of the earliest known South American human fossils. Her skull, well-preserved, looks nothing in particular like the skulls of later Indians. It’s more similar to the skulls of modern Australian aborigines and Africans. She’s also short, under five feet.
There hasn’t been any analysis of Luzia’s DNA but we now may have a better idea who her relations are. Southeast Asia was occupied for tens of millennia by hunter-gatherers of the Hoabinhian culture, which persisted through melting ice caps and rising sea levels, up to the arrival of farmers originally from South China. Scattered groups of foragers in the region are remnants of this population. It is likely that the Hoabinhians, or nearby Melanesians, or related folk, traveled up the Pacific coast and were the first human arrivals in the New World. (A direct trip across the Pacific is another possibility, but seems less likely.) These early Americans were largely replaced (they may never have been very numerous) by the ancestors of modern Indians, making a modest contribution to the DNA of the latter.
We noted earlier that there seem to be linguistic traces of this early migration in some of the languages of South America. It’s also worth mentioning that early twentieth century anthropologists thought Melanesia and native Amazonia show some striking cultural similarities, especially relating to men’s houses, all-male cults, myths of matriarchy, and sacred flutes. Some anthropologists have coined the term “Melazonia” to capture the similarities in social systems in the two places. Here’s from a recent book.
One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male-female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men’s cults, and rituals of initiation.
Note that “40,000 years” may be too big by a factor of 3. The usual assumption has been that these similarities result from parallel cultural evolution – easier to imagine for cultural evolution than for language history – but maybe there is an ancient historical connection too.
Logarithmic History 