Ethnobotany
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The study of people and their interaction with plants is broadly defined as ethnobotany. The essay further down this page gratefully accepts fact-checking in order to supply the citations, quotations, links and references.
Contents |
[edit] Man's/Wife's best friend (Vegetative Republic)
This essay traces the development of modern Cannabis sativa, starting in the orient millennia ago, as an example of ethnobotany, of great importance to the modern world.
[edit] Primate family tree
A chart furnished by Frans de Wals in his groundbreaking Bonobo: the forgotten ape (1996) indicates that the orangutan diverged from the common ancestor about 14 million years ago, the gorilla 10 million, the human vs. chimp and bonobo 6 million years ago. (Chimp and bonobo divided about 3 million years ago.)
[edit] Primate-predator development
Orangutans, gorillas and bonobos are believed to be almost entirely vegetarian, while studies by Goodall and others over the last three decades show that chimpanzees may eat as much as 20% of their diet from meat sources, mainly monkeys and termites. It is said that humans first began domesticating fire in Africa 1.8 million years ago in order to cook-- and preserve a few days longer-- the meat of large animal carcasses which had been hunted down by groups of men and dogs. This permitted larger population groups to consume meat while reducing waste, as a carcass could be finished off before spoiling. As this technology spread around the world, women went out woodgathering for the cooking fires, and a tree ring, or line beyond which there still was some wood to gather, would begin receding from each human habitation. Eventually each clan or village would exhaust the fuel in its immediate neighborhood and move on to new quarters (slash and burn). In this way desertification began on a hitherto unknown scale, speeding up further about ten thousand years ago with the development of animal husbandry, or captive herds of meat animals.
[edit] Large animal extinction and birth of animal husbandry
Just recently, in December 2008, news arrived of studies showing that a large comet or asteroid struck the earth, possibly in North America near the Great Lakes, about 13,000 years ago as attested by the finding of huge numbers of nanodiamonds in the corresponding geological layer. Missing from higher layers are any remainders of mastodons, woolly mammoths, etc. Perhaps it can be surmised that into the resulting vacant environmental niche in the northern hemisphere somewhat smaller mammals, such as the ancestor of today's oxen or beefcattle, expanded. This enabled northern human populations to expand because these animals were somewhat easier to catch and slaughter. By about 10,000 years ago the fateful change occurred, whereby instead of hunting down animals on an occasional basis, humans, especially in Eur-Asia, learned to lure and feed them, leading to capture and enclosure and a corresponding interest in raising feed grains for the resulting herds, i.e. the famous and beloved agricultural revolution. This greatly accelerated the slash-and-burn process, leading to other developments such as group competition for resources to feed expanding human and animal populations and a corresponding arms race and tendency toward a warlord or despotic social system.
[edit] The cooking revolution
Now the women had more work to do than ever, cooking not only meat for bigger families and villages but also the grains for which humans had acquired a taste. Species such as wheat evolved quickly under dietary use and became the "staff of life". Slash and burn agriculture now required extensive areas to be cleared for planting.
In due order it was discovered that a few woody-stem plant species, particularly the annual herb Cannabis, were able to produce biomass fast enough to keep up with the cookstove depredations, and when the women dragged stalks of cannabis to the house, shaking seeds loose along the way, "plantations" of cannabis grew up, especially in southern Asia, providing stove fuel and other useful products and contributing to the growth of immense human populations such as those in China and India. Cold-climate dwellers found the cannabis stalks useful in housing construction; especially "thatchers" learned to use them for roofing.
[edit] Genetic convergence of human and cannabis species
As a bonus, over the course of time cannabis growing on human-waste dungpiles developed into strains which were sensitive-- and responsive-- to hormone residues in the human fertilizer. In this way the species "learned" to produce answering-hormones which could attach to what are known today as "cannabinoid receptors" in the human brain, and when stalks and leaves containing these substances were burned in the family stove, and smoke inhaled by mom and the kids, profound religiobotanic concepts were protomeditated resulting in today's beautifully bound canon (or cannabin) of Holy Scriptures full of admonitions like "In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread" (i.e. it gets hot and smoky in mom's kitchen).
Within the lifespan of humans living today, a technology grew up breeding strains of (vegetable)Cannabis alias Dagga with the desired characteristic of producing large amounts of the above cited response-hormones, just as humans bred strains of (animal) Canis alias Dog (to the point that today you can get a dog any size from two pounds to 300).Treedesigner 02:14, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
Cranberries... [edit]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080110123918.htm --Remi 01:40, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
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