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Topic Summary

Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: December 29, 2022, 06:36:07 pm »

https://assamtribune.com/assam/why-assams-neolithic-site-needs-governments-attention-1454672

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The lesser known, Bambooti excavation site, in the foothills of Goalpara, is the last neolithic age cultural site in Assam. The new stone age site in the region reflects the cultural and historical aspects of ancient Assam, but has remained unidentified since ages.
...
The discovery of the site was based on a research which was carried out by Ali, along with young researchers where some major objects could be discovered. This includes, axes, celts, shouldered axes, scrapers or abraders. The geomorphology of the site, along with the material content, clearly indicated that Bambooti is a Neolithic habitation site which was clearly based on intensive food collection and dependent on farming activities.

The other tools recovered from the site were used for domestic purposes, predominantly for the purpose of cooking which included items found in kitchen like pitchers, cooking pots, platters, lids, earthen pots. Research stated that the objects existence can be dated back to 3000-3200 years ago, during the stone age. Besides, the discovery of the platters confirmed that the concept of making rice-cakes has been prevalent in the region since the Neolithic age.

Background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asura_Kingdom

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Asura Kingdom (Sonitpura Kingdom) is a mythological kingdom that is mentioned in a multiple of Hindu epics[1] which later came to be associated with modern-day Tezpur in central Assam and Banasura Hill in Kerala.
...
In Assam, the name of the legendary kingdom might be applied to the local inhabitants who were outside of the Hindu fold.[3] In Kalika purana, Banasura, the last ruler of the asura kingdom is represented as an anti-Brahminical character.[4]

Related?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/indian-attitudes/msg2159/#msg2159
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: December 09, 2022, 09:47:28 pm »

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221207163043.htm

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A new study analyzing stone tools from southern China provides the earliest evidence of rice harvesting, dating to as early as 10,000 years ago. The researchers identified two methods of harvesting rice, which helped initiate rice domestication.
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Wild rice is different from domesticated rice in that wild rice naturally sheds ripe seeds, shattering them to the ground when they mature, while cultivated rice seeds stay on the plants when they mature.

To harvest rice, some sort of tools would have been needed. In harvesting rice with tools, early rice cultivators were selecting the seeds that stay on the plants, so gradually the proportion of seeds that remain increased, resulting in domestication.

"For quite a long time, one of the puzzles has been that harvesting tools have not been found in southern China from the early Neolithic period or New Stone Age (10,000 -- 7,000 Before Present) -- the time period when we know rice began to be domesticated," says lead author Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. "However, when archaeologists were working at several early Neolithic sites in the Lower Yangtze River Valley, they found a lot of small pieces of stone, which had sharp edges that could have been used for harvesting plants."

"Our hypothesis was that maybe some of those small stone pieces were rice harvesting tools, which is what our results show."

In the Lower Yangtze River Valley, the two earliest Neolithic culture groups were the Shangshan and Kuahuqiao.

The researchers examined 52 flaked stone tools from the Shangshan and Hehuashan sites, the latter of which was occupied by Shangshan and Kuahuqiao cultures.

The stone flakes are rough in appearance and are not finely made but have sharp edges. On average, the flaked tools are small enough to be held by one hand and measured approximately 1.7 inches in width and length.
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The findings from the use-wear and phytolith analyses illustrated that two types of rice harvesting methods were used -- "finger-knife" and "sickle" techniques. Both methods are still used in Asia today.

The stone flakes from the early phase (10,000 -- 8,200 BP) showed that rice was largely harvested using the finger-knife method in which the panicles at the top of the rice plant are reaped. The results showed that the tools used for finger-knife harvesting had striations that were mainly perpendicular or diagonal to the edge of the stone flake, which suggests a cutting or scraping motion, and contained phytoliths from seeds or rice husk phytoliths, indicating that the rice was harvested from the top of the plant.

"A rice plant contains numerous panicles that mature at different times, so the finger-knife harvesting technique is especially useful when rice domestication was in the early stage," says Wang.

The stone flakes however, from the later phase (8,000 -- 7,000 BP) had more evidence of sickle harvesting in which the lower part of the plant was harvested. These tools had striations that were predominantly parallel to the tool's edge, reflecting that a slicing motion had likely been used.

"Sickle harvesting was more widely used when rice became more domesticated, and more ripe seeds stayed on the plant," says Wang. "Since you are harvesting the entire plant at the same time, the rice leaves and stems could also be used for fuel, building materials, and other purposes, making this a much more effective harvesting method."

Wang says, "Both harvesting methods would have reduced seed shattering. That's why we think rice domestication was driven by human unconscious selection."
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: March 02, 2022, 12:10:06 am »

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/944163

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How humans in middle-late Neolithic China process plant food
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Recently, researchers discovered that the combination of grinding slabs and rollers in the middle and lower Yellow River reaches declined gradually after 7,000 years BP. In the meantime, more efficient mortars and pestles were frequently used by prehistoric humans with the rapid development of agriculture and a transitional lifestyle from hunting and gathering to farming. 

In a study published in Archaeometry, Prof. YANG Yuzhang's team from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made an investigation into the plant food processing tools in the Shuangdun site. The team conducted damage characteristics analysis of excavated artefacts dated back to the middle-late Neolithic period and for the first time provided solid evidence for the rise of mortar and pestle for their high processing efficiency in that period.

Researchers extracted plant starch grains from six stone artefacts, including two grinding slabs, two pestles, one mortar, and one special cake-shaped artefact, which were made of sandstone, diabase and crystal tuff. A widely used micro-remain analysis method was adopted to probe into the similarities and differences between two sets of food processing tools: slabs and rollers, as well as mortars and pestles.

The results indicated that based on their morphology and size, various plants such as Triticeae, Job’s tears, lotus root, and bean were found in both types of grinding tools. However, starch grains of rice (Oryza sativa) only appeared in mortars and pestles, suggesting this set of tools was particularly adopted to process rice in middle-late Neolithic China.

The damage type analysis of a variety of starches showed that mortars and pestles were also used for grinding plant foods in the same way as grinding slabs, while some roughly made slabs might not be used for grinding but only for pounding specific plant food.

All statistics demonstrated that with the rise of mortars and pestles, they were frequently used to hull plant seeds and to process plant foods into small pieces or powder. Grinding slabs and rollers, however, were gradually replaced, and began to decline in human economic life.

This study pioneered the research of mortars and pestles in prehistoric China. It not only deepens the understanding of the processing approaches of grinding tools, but also advances exploration into prehistoric plant food processing tools. Additionally, it provides a full picture of the evolution of food processing tools and reflects abundant details of lifestyles in prehistoric Eastern China.

I have liked the mortar and pestle ever since the first time I saw one as a young child.
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: April 01, 2021, 05:54:05 am »

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-evidence-neolithic-people-salt-seawater.html

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Archaeologist Stephen Sherlock, an independent scholar, has found evidence of Neolithic people extracting salt from seawater 5,800 years ago at Street House, Loftus, making it the oldest salt production facility ever discovered in Britain.
...
In addition to charcoal deposits, there was a hazelnut shell and pottery, all of which was dated back approximately 5,800 years.
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it appears the seawater was captured in jugs from the North Sea, approximately 2.5 miles away. It would have been distilled onshore before transport to the salt-producing facility near what is now Loftus. Sherlock suggests the briny water was dumped into a pit where it was stored for use. To retrieve the salt, workers would collect a quantity of the brine using pots and heat it over a fire for up to seven hours. Doing so removed most of the remaining water. The pots full of salt cake would then be set aside to cool or would be taken to other places. When people wanted to use the salt, they simply broke the pots.

Recall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#History

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There is more salt in animal tissues, such as meat, blood, and milk, than in plant tissues.[11] Nomads who subsist on their flocks and herds do not eat salt with their food, but agriculturalists, feeding mainly on cereals and vegetable matter, need to supplement their diet with salt.[12]

So yet again the same pattern: the Aryan lifestyle requires more labour, not less, to maintain.
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: March 28, 2021, 04:11:13 am »

https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/textile-tools-dating-back-8-600-years-found-in-denizli-157783

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Archeologists in western Turkey have discovered textile tools nearly twice as old as Egypt’s Great Pyramids.

Bone needles and round stones used for spinning thread dating back some 8,600 years were found in an excavation site in Ekşi Höyük, one of the oldest settlements in western Anatolia, located in the present-day Denizli province.

"During excavations carried out in this Neolithic-era settlement, we discovered some of the first tools used for textiles in history," Ege University’s Fulya Dedeoğlu, head of the excavation team, told Anadolu Agency.
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She stressed that Denizli is known for its history in textiles and that many bone needles used in textiles were found at the excavation site.

"The findings here prove that the textile tradition in Denizli dates back to earlier times. We've discovered them in a building that we think was built in 6400 B.C.," Dedeoğlu added.

Again, think carefully. Making fibre cloth from scratch by hand requires a lot more labour than turning animal hides into garments which are also likely to be more durable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hide_materials

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Tanning of hides to manufacture leather was invented during the Paleolithic.

Similar to subsistence farming (see first post in topic), why would the Aryans bother to put in the additional labour to produce less durable clothes if (as non-Aryanist archaeologists posit) the Neolithic Revolution was motivated purely by ergonomic interests?
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: February 23, 2021, 01:23:52 am »

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/neolithic-grooves-found-in-krishnagiri-district/articleshow/81133715.cms

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"We have discovered 16 grooves used by Neolithic people to sharpen stone axes and other tools. The approximate length of the grooves was 15-20cm, and width 5-8cm,"
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: December 27, 2020, 11:11:27 pm »

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/neolithic-axe-dated-4000-2000-bc-discovered-in-nagarkurnool-district/articleshow/79982865.cms

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A Neolithic axe, made out of solarising stone, was discovered at Somasila village, Kollapur mandal in Nagarkurnool.
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The tool was found in the agricultural field of Telugu Pentaiah of the same village from which Neolithic tools like discoids, pestles and grinding stones were recovered two decades ago by Dr Reddy and are now kept in the local museum.

The latter are tools used for processing cereals to make flour etc., which constitutes another significant portion of labour back in those days.

The axe itself was probably used for splitting firewood. The good thing about using locally sourced firewood is that it places another strict limit on population, whose demand for fuel cannot exceed the availability of firewood in the immediate vicinity (especially if we limit ourselves to collecting wood fallen by itself rather than chopping it from trees).
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: September 19, 2020, 01:08:48 am »

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191011131858.htm

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Private property, not productivity, precipitated Neolithic agricultural revolution
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A common explanation is that farming increased labor productivity, which then encouraged the adoption of private property by providing incentives for the long-term investments required in a farming economy.

"But it's not what the data are telling us," says Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles, a co-author of the paper. "It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse."
...
Bowles and co-author Jung-Kyoo Choi, an economist at Kyungpook National University in South Korea, use both evolutionary game theory and archaeological evidence to propose a new interpretation of the Neolithic. Based on their model, a system of mutually recognized private property rights was both a precondition for farming and also a means of limiting costly conflicts among members of a population. While rare among foragers, private property did exist among a few groups of sedentary hunter-gatherers. Among them, farming could have benefited the first adopters because it would have been easier to establish the private possession of cultivated crops and domesticated animals than for the diffuse wild resources on which hunter-gatherers relied.

"It is a lot easier to define and defend property rights in a domesticated cow than in a wild kudu," says Choi. "Farming initially succeeded because it facilitated a broader application of private property rights, not because it lightened the toil of making a living."

I will elaborate. In absence of private property, suppose two farmers (each with their own distinct ideas about how best to farm) both cultivate the same field, and the crop fails to grow. Whose fault is it? It would be almost impossible to isolate whose actions caused the failure, which in turn makes it similarly impossible to determine which farming ideas are bad. This is the most important reason why private property is essential for farming: to make it much harder for any farmer to blame someone else for crop failure, and hence much easier for all farmers to learn from experience. (Only then can farmers can pool their experiences and thus improve the entire community's farming skills.)

Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: August 17, 2020, 04:29:23 am »

https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/neolithic-mass-burial-site-discovered-in-xaghra.810723

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“The Xagħra community has no evidence of violence or war, but we see examples of fractures that needed time to heal, where that person would have also required assistance from other people to continue to survive during that time.”
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“The beauty of Xagħra is that the people were very resilient, living to the point of getting arthritis and continuing to do manual labour,” Mercieca Spiteri explained.

“The teeth also have interesting grooves which indicate that there was a common profession in the area that involved holding some kind of string in bet-ween their teeth.”

Any guesses on what this profession might have been?

Side note:

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The results gave an interesting insight into the livelihoods of the Xagħra people and their diets, curiously absent of fish despite being surrounded by bodies of water.

We would expect no less. Reinforcing the first post, just because it would be convenient to fish does not mean we will fish. The Aryan way is to refuse initiating violence although the alternative requires that we do more labour.
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: August 17, 2020, 04:23:33 am »

OLD CONTENT

http://en.brinkwire.com/science/life-was-easier-when-humans-hunted-for-food/

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Switching from hunting to farming made life more difficult and forced people to work longer hours, a Cambridge University study on modern tribes has claimed.

The agriculture revolution is heralded as a major turning point in human history as it ushered in stable settlements and allowed culture to blossom.

But scientists found it was not without its costs as the arduous work was less productive and took longer to make the same amount of food as a hunter-gatherer.

In a study of modern day Agta tribes scattered around remote regions of the Philippines, they found hunter-gatherers spend 20 hours a week getting food whereas those that had recently taken up farming took 30 hours to get the same quantity.

The research goes against the commonly held belief that the advent of agriculture benefited humans and made life easier, and researchers are yet to understand why.
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Dr Mark Dyble, first author of the study, says: ‘For a long time, the transition from foraging to farming was assumed to represent progress, allowing people to escape an arduous and precarious way of life.

Actually, what farming allowed was a less violent way of life than hunting, at the cost of more labour. That it was maintained despite the ergonomic cost fits our conjecture that noble behaviour was what mattered most to the people of the Golden Age (which is what made it the Golden Age!).

---

More mainstream journalists are now using a more accurate definition of agriculture:

riverdalepress.com/stories/without-agricultural-revolution-todays-society-wouldnt-exist,69621

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Agriculture — which is the domestication of plants — began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic period in several different global centers. Wheat, barley, lentils and peas were domesticated in the Near East. Millet and rice were grown around the same time in China.

In Mesoamerica, squash plants were also grown around that period as well as the early ancestor of corn (teosinte). Corn, as we know it today, was only developed around 4000 B.C.

It wasn't that long ago when it was common for the term to be misused to include herding.

Of course, strictly speaking, agriculture is cultivation of plants with or without domestication (ie. mutation such that the cultivated plant is no longer capable of growing uncultivated) occurring. But this is a minor detail.