Agriculture, Evolution, and Paradigms

Rindos, David

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-589281-0.50006-3

Cited by 24 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…The origins of agriculture in the Levant have been explored in detail (for example, Vavilov 1926;Braidwood 1951;Childe 1952Childe , 1956Sauer 1952;Braidwood and Howe 1960;Bender 1975;Mellaart 1975;Cohen 1977;Rindos 1984;Hayden 1992Hayden , 1995Hayden , 2003Cauvin 1994;Winterhalder and Kennett 2006;Gremillion and Piperno 2009), but the longterm developments of the transition to plant food production Phytoliths (microscopic silica 'casts' of plant cells) are now bridging the gaps in the archaeobotanical record and providing a useful long-term dataset. The phytolith evidence from Epipalaeolithic sites in the southern Levant emphasizes the importance of wetland-based plant resources (Rosen 2013;Ramsey et al 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological-cultural inheritance in the wetlands: the non-linear transition to plant food production in the southern Levant

Ramsey

2023

Veget Hist Archaeobot

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The paper discusses a multi-proxy archaeobotanical dataset from the published macrobotanical and microbotanical research of 19 Epipalaeolithic sites over a period of 13.5 ka (ca. 25-11.5 ka cal bp) in the southern Levant. The archaeobotanical record includes over 200 phytolith samples extracted from sediments of 11 sites, macrobotanical evidence from seeds, plant tissues and wood charcoal from 11 sites and other microbotanical data from starches and starch spherulites from three sites. Phytolith assemblages show that Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherers relied on wetland plant resources, and the macrobotanical evidence demonstrates the cultural importance of wetland resources to Late Epipalaeolithic foodways. The paper assesses the archaeobotanical data, using niche construction theory (NCT) to argue that human impacts in the wetlands over generations increased wetland productivity and created long-lasting ecological and cultural inheritances that allowed for the evolution and proliferation of a wetland-based system of wild plant food production. This paper proposes the idea that wetlands provided Epipalaeolithic people with a ‘domestication laboratory’ that allowed them to interact and modify their environment and also to experiment and gain new knowledge to build the long-lasting ecological-cultural inheritances necessary for the transition to plant food production. Importantly, the ecological-cultural inheritance of wild plant food production in the wetlands enabled the non-linear transition to cereal-based wild plant food production and domestication that took place in the southern Levant.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological-cultural inheritance in the wetlands: the non-linear transition to plant food production in the southern Levant

Ramsey

2023

Veget Hist Archaeobot

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“…Humans were likewise impacted as they adapted to the managed ecosystems on which they increasingly depended. Not only did humans domesticate grains and cattle, but cattle and grains domesticated humans, binding us to their need for nurture. ,, …”

Section: Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Earth Systems to Anthropocene Systems: An Evolutionary, System-of-Systems, Convergence Paradigm for Interdependent Societal Challenges

Little

Kaaronen

Hukkinen

et al. 2023

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Humans have made profound changes to the Earth. The resulting societal challenges of the Anthropocene (e.g., climate change and impacts, renewable energy, adaptive infrastructure, disasters, pandemics, food insecurity, and biodiversity loss) are complex and systemic, with causes, interactions, and consequences that cascade across a globally connected system of systems. In this Critical Review, we turn to our “origin story” for insight, briefly tracing the formation of the Universe and the Earth, the emergence of life, the evolution of multicellular organisms, mammals, primates, and humans, as well as the more recent societal transitions involving agriculture, urbanization, industrialization, and computerization. Focusing on the evolution of the Earth, genetic evolution, the evolution of the brain, and cultural evolution, which includes technological evolution, we identify a nested evolutionary sequence of geophysical, biophysical, sociocultural, and sociotechnical systems, emphasizing the causal mechanisms that first formed, and then transformed, Earth systems into Anthropocene systems. Describing how the Anthropocene systems coevolved, and briefly illustrating how the ensuing societal challenges became tightly integrated across multiple spatial, temporal, and organizational scales, we conclude by proposing an evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence paradigm for the entire family of interdependent societal challenges of the Anthropocene.

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“…Figure 1 is a representative example of that perspective, designed by J. Weisdorf (2005), based on prior proposals developed by Sauer (1952), Braidwood and Howe (1960), Rindos (1984). Where 𝜇 0 is the contribution of agropastoral resources to the diet in a specific time considering the relative increment of their availability (𝑒 𝜆𝑡 ) compared to a previous time interval.…”

Section: Past Socioecological Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is a typical challenge of social systems, they are highly correlated and, most of times, multiple factors affect the same variable in different intensities and with different consequences. For example, D. Rindos (1984) suggested that domesticated resources increased because they were available in the…”

Section: Enhancing the Nonlinear Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causal Networks and Complex Systems in Archaeology

Palacios

Barceló

2023

Preprint

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Difficulties surrounding the reconstruction of social systems in past communities have propitiated the development of multiple social theories and a variety of approaches to explain archaeological remains. The Bayesian Network approach has proved to be a crucial tool to model uncertainty and probability to estimate parameters and predict the effects of social decisions, even when some data entries are missing. This paper has the principal objective to present a research study centered on exploring how prehistoric early farmers survived in their environmental context by suggesting a causal complex model of a socio-ecological system. To achieve this, two different causal models are proposed, both based on probabilistic Bayesian Networks, one built from expert knowledge and the other learned from ethnoarchaeological data. These models are used to define what variables would have been relevant to the socioeconomic organization of early Neolithic communities and to predict their behavior and social decisions in hypothetical case scenarios. The ultimate outcome is exploring the use of the Bayesian Network for investigating socio-ecological systems and defining its potentialities as a research method.

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Agriculture, Evolution, and Paradigms

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Ecological-cultural inheritance in the wetlands: the non-linear transition to plant food production in the southern Levant

Ecological-cultural inheritance in the wetlands: the non-linear transition to plant food production in the southern Levant

Earth Systems to Anthropocene Systems: An Evolutionary, System-of-Systems, Convergence Paradigm for Interdependent Societal Challenges

Causal Networks and Complex Systems in Archaeology

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