King of the Americas
Banned
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2001
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- 6,513
By the way, regarding the actual topic of this thread, I've been reading Regenesis by George Church (the book is about biotechnology I guess), and in it he mentions:
"The tetraploid wheat hybrids were adopted by humans possibly as early as 17,000 BCE (based on carbon-14 isotopic dating), in what is now southern Turkey (based on DNA studies), and then spread as far as Egypt to feed the pharonic dynasties."
The date of 17,000 BCE is earlier than I'd heard of previously but is in line with the possibility that the builders of GT were a stone age agricultural society.
As I said earlier in the thread I don't think that's entirely ruled out, and it's much more interesting to me than the ridiculous ideas that GT was part of a global civilization that had developed nuclear weapons and space travel.
I think the date of 17,000 BCE is a very speculative one as actual agriculture instead of the gathering of grains and is probably the same one mentioned in this wikipedia article:
But anyway I don't think we can entirely rule out the idea that there were relatively small scale agricultural societies at the time of GT. It's close enough to the origins of agriculture that it could be an early example. At that stage I'd guess that there wouldn't have been too much of an effect of artificial selection yet either so it might be hard to tell the difference between wild and cultivated grains. It's even possible that it was an early experiment that ended in the collapse of that society and a reversion of hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
What would qualify as large scale advanced agriculture?