For Homo sapiens around the world today, we have a common home, africa. The ancestors of mankind who came out of there may have dreamed that a small group of people would become one of the most successful species on earth. In order to survive, our ancestors first chose to walk upright, learned to use fire, and studied plant seed processing techniques, making wheat and rice the food we are accustomed to.
Next, with the abundance and stable supply of plant-based foods, human ancestors had a foundation for settlement. Thus, the pattern of our life today began to take shape— and human beings really began to settle down. So, does humans choose to stay and sow specific crops, or do crops force humans to stay and work? In Shi Jun's view, human form, food, writing, trade, and social organization structure actually come from related plants, and human beings change plants for my use, and human beings are also changed by plants, from wheat and rice that promote human settlement, to peppercorns and potatoes that change the world, to soybeans that affect the nerves of world trade, the power of plants is obvious.
The following is selected from the "Human History of Plant Shaping", slightly abridged and modified from the original text, and the subtitle is added by the editor, not owned by the original text. It has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
"The Human History of Plant Shaping", by Shi Jun, Modern Publishing House, April 2021.
The original author 丨 Shi Jun
Excerpt 丨An also
Why do people have a hometown? This in itself is a question worth exploring. The basis for having a hometown is to settle down in one place for a long time. For today's people, settling is a habitual way of life. But for the ancestors of humans who came all the way from Africa, chased prey through Eurasia and into the American continent, suddenly choosing a place to build a shack and no longer migrate was not a natural result.
Why do our human beings settle down and stop migrating, and must it be a beautiful thing to settle down? This has to be found in the plant.
Those who first entered the agricultural stage,
Mostly malnourished
In the view of previous anthropologists, humans settled to obtain a more abundant and abundant food – a stable food supply by cultivating crops and raising livestock. Simply put, farmers eat better than hunters. But in recent decades of research, much of the new evidence has completely disproved this theory, and the nutritional levels of early farmers were significantly lower than those of their contemporaries, hunters and gatherers.
Through the analysis of nutrient sources in existing populations that are still in the gathering and hunting stages, scientists have found that fishing and hunting methods can not only obtain more energy, but also significantly better than primitive farming groups in terms of nutrient mix. Early farmers had to rely on limited food to survive, and most people could only eat monocroppers such as wheat, rice, corn and potatoes. Eating meat was an extreme luxury for these early farmers, and there was not enough food to feed the animals.
Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, are more abundant, with young leaves and berries from plants, meat and eggs from animals, and various mushrooms (edible fungi) on their menus, with plenty of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and a variety of vitamins.
A lot of archaeological evidence supports the above research, and those who first entered the agricultural stage are mostly malnourished, and the wear and tear of teeth is also very high, which is the scourge of crop simplification.
What is more troublesome is that the working hours of farmers have not been shortened by farming, but have been greatly increased. In A Brief History of Mankind, the author cites the average working hours of people in different living conditions, the average working hours in developed countries is 40 to 45 hours per week, the working hours in developing countries is 60 to 80 hours per week, and those who engage in hunter-gatherer activities in the Karahadi Desert only need to work 35 to 45 hours a week, although the natural resources in the desert are already quite barren. But hunter-gatherers apparently enjoy much more leisurely rest than those who choose to farm.
In other words, the earliest farming people actually actively chose a lifestyle that was almost masochistic.
So why are there any people willing to choose to settle down?
The answer is still efficiency. In a given living environment, choosing an agricultural life increases the probability of survival. And it is still plants that make humans stop.
In the above comparison, the researchers actually ignored one of the most critical factors - the timing of food provision. Is it possible to collect delicious berries on the go? Is it possible to catch wild beasts by going up the mountain? This is actually a huge test for human survival, and if there is an empty window for obtaining food, it will pose a great risk. To this day, there are still some groups on the earth that rely on gathering and fishing and hunting, but most of them live in the tropics, or adjacent to the ocean, and of course, there are some people living in temperate areas, and they need a very large mountain forest area. In fact, the reason is very simple, in order to live a stable hunter-gatherer life, you need a lot of resource support, or you need to occupy a certain area of forest, grassland or ocean per capita, and these areas can provide a stable source of heat throughout the year.
In the tropical regions with the highest biodiversity, you can live and work in peace by remembering when the fruits of different regions ripen, understanding the characteristics of the lives of different animals, and making efficient use of each natural resource. If we look at the Dai diet in Xishuangbanna, we will find that many slightly toxic plants (such as the sea vessels of the Asteraceae family) will also be included in the diet, which is that the tropical rainforests that are rich in annual products will show the characteristics of resource scarcity in local and short periods of time.
Ling Xiao (Purple Leaf)
As for the fact that some temperate zones do not have too many animal and plant resources, but a large number of marine organisms provide a basis for human survival, coupled with some domesticated herbivores (moose, etc.), can fully meet the needs of hunters' bellies. So the Inuit survived well in these places.
In addition to the typical natural resource-rich areas mentioned above, there are many places on earth with distinct seasons and accompanied by extreme weather. The drawbacks of the above practices are revealed. Compared with not having enough to eat, the risk of not being able to eat at all is greater, and the impact on reproduction is also greater. For all living things, including human ancestors, it is better to die than to live, which is a golden rule to follow. We see a lot of irrational designs in nature, but this design is also often closely related to low risk.
And, when the population continues to grow, there will be problems with a stable food supply for a period of time, even if the huge herd can supply sufficient protein and calories, but if the herd has the characteristic of migration, then how to meet the food demand in the absence of the herd, not to mention the special climate, the arrival of the herd is delayed. Therefore, the ancestors of mankind chased after the beasts, rushed all the way across the Bering Land Bridge, entered the American continent, and then went all the way south to turn the giant beasts such as the earth sloth into roast meat.
So what's more attractive than a stable, long-term source of heat? And nature has exactly such an option, that is, the seeds of plants. In previous chapters, we've analyzed some of the roles plant seeds have played in shaping human history, such as the use of fire to make nutrients easier to absorb and a stable source of heat. The large number of plant grains is obviously of great appeal to humans.
Early humans will find that some places will grow grain regularly, and those grains that are accidentally scattered will also grow seedlings, which is equivalent to providing a stable food supply for human ancestors, so they choose to live with these grains, and then through human means (pulling grass) to help them defeat other plants and get more grains, can't they solve the needs of food and clothing? However, the will of human beings is only one of the necessary conditions for the emergence of sedentary behavior, not a sufficient condition, and the real reason why human beings began to settle is still in plants, and it is the temptation of plants that makes human beings what they are today. Human settlement is based on the seeds of the unturned family.
For human ancestors,
Seeds that are free from the parent plant at any time are of no value
When traveling to Malaysia, the most unmissable activity is to eat durian. In Malaysia, there is a lot of elegance in eating durian, the best durian should be ripe on the tree, naturally falling, and must be tasted within 12 hours after the fall to taste the real durian delicacy.
In the rainforest, the entire canopy is densely packed with leaves, and each plant is struggling to find its own space to receive the sun, and does not leave much room for flowering and fruiting. And the canopy layer in the rainforest is too high above the ground, which is not conducive to animals spreading pollen and seeds for them. Therefore, many rainforest plants choose to flower and bear fruit on a thick trunk, such as durian, paramite and various banyan trees.
One benefit of old stems that they can tolerate growing large fruits without crushing the branches. So the durian we see can reach 30 centimeters in length and more than 15 centimeters in diameter, so that the fruit cannot be hung on thin branches anyway. Not to mention the huge fruit of the borromeo, some of the gigantic fruits of the boreal honey can be up to 1 meter long and more than 30 centimeters in diameter.
Don't look at the durian and the pomegranate stalk are very thick, but when they are ripe, the whole fruit will fall to the ground. Fortunately, this process usually takes place at night and early in the morning, and coupled with the fact that there are very few people wandering around the durian orchard, there are few stories of durian hurting people. Nevertheless, when I walk past the durian tree, I also unconsciously glance at the durian overhead. Ripe durian falls is a necessary stage for durian to spread seeds, after all, there are not many skilled durian lovers like orangutans in the rainforest, and only by throwing ripe durian fruits to the ground can the seeds be swallowed by animals along with the flesh to start their own journey.
Durian chooses to flower and bear fruit on a thick trunk, and the old stem bears the benefit of tolerating the fruit to grow very large without crushing the branches.
Almost all Chinese elementary school students will learn a text - "Plant Mother Has a Way" - the ear mother gives the child a thorny armor, can hang animal fur to travel far away; dandelion mother prepared a parachute for the child, as long as there is a gentle breeze, the child can go far away. In fact, when the plant seeds are ripe, their plant mothers will eagerly sweep the children out of the house. A term we are familiar with is called melon ripening, which means that when the fruit of the plant is fully ripe, it will naturally leave the plant body and let the plant seed go on a wonderful journey.
The act of spreading seeds by bitter melons is very special, and when the seeds of bitter melons are not ripe, the skin of bitter melons is really bitter. This is actually a warning to animals that intend to steal their mouths not to harass our seeds. When the bitter melon seeds have grown and have a hard seed coat, the bitter melon will change into another face. The fruit of the ripe bitter melon will crack, and each seed will be prepared with a red, sweet, juicy coat, and the birds that like sweets really can't give up, so the bitter melon seeds begin to travel on the wings of the birds.
Momordica charantia
Not to mention the spray melon, which belongs to the same family as the bitter melon, the fruit of this plant changes after ripening — the flesh turns into liquid, and the whole fruit becomes a pressure pack. At the slightest touch, the fruit will be separated from the stalk and the seed will be sprayed with the liquid pulp. As for the crops of the grass family, not to mention, under normal circumstances, one grain of maturity falls off one grain, and one batch of mature one falls off one batch. This brings up a very troublesome problem, as a collector to choose an appropriate time to collect has become a troublesome thing. If you were to harvest a little bit every day, the collector would probably pay more calories than the harvest. To this day, we still encounter such troubles, that is, green beans. Friends who are familiar with the market will definitely feel that the price of mung beans is much higher than that of soybeans, kidney beans and peanut beans. This difference does not come from yield and planting difficulty, but from the picking characteristics of mung beans.
In order to facilitate storage, farmers must pick mung beans when they are fully ripe, but once the mung beans are ripe, the pods will burst open and the beans will not be collected after they have landed. What's more troublesome is that even for the same mung bean plant, the ripening time of different pods is not the same. Harvesting mung beans does not use large machinery like harvesting soybeans, but must rely on manual selection, which is one of the reasons why mung beans are expensive.
For human ancestors, seeds that were ready to leave the plant mother were of no value. Fortunately, there are some plant mothers who are inseparable from their children, and their seeds are difficult to fall off after maturity, and this change gives the earliest farmers the opportunity to settle.
dandelion
The seeds that remain on the branches have prompted humans to settle down to more than 10,000 species of grasses in the world, why did humans choose only a few plants such as rice, wheat, millet, barley, oats, rye and corn. Although the grains of these crops vary in taste, size, and yield, they all share a common feature, which is that the ripened grains are honestly on top of the ears of grain, and it is this characteristic that led to the birth of primitive agriculture.
As mentioned earlier, wild plant mothers are struggling to spread their seeds, and wild rice is no exception. When their seeds are ripe, they automatically fall off and drift along the current to a great distance to expand their territory. But this is clearly not a trait that humans like. During the long-term harvesting process, some of the grains willing to stay on the branches of the rice were noticed by our ancestors, and from then on the domestication process of rice from the perspective of reduced selection of grain drops.
barley
In 2015, researcher Han Bin of the National Genetic Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his doctoral students Zhou Yan, Lü Danfeng and other researchers introduced the fourth chromosome of wild rice W1943 into the body of cultivated Rice Guanglu Dwarf No. 4 and obtained SL4, a rice material that exhibits extremely easy to fall grain. After that, researchers used irradiation breeding technology to γ suspected of irradiating SL4 rice. In these mutant rice, two completely non-granulated mutants shat1 and shat2 appeared. Neither mutant can form a detached layer, so a lot of pulling is required after the seed matures to separate the seed from the twig stem. SH4 promotes the expression of shat1 in the stratification, which in turn also plays a role in maintaining the expression of SH4 in the stratosphere, and the common continuous expression of the two in the stratification is necessary for the correct formation of the stratification. qSH1 acts downstream of SH4 and shat1, promoting the formation of stratigraphic layers by maintaining the continuous expression of shat1 and SH4 in the decossole.
The study used an ingenious method of looking for suppressors to discover new rice drop grain regulator genes and link them to known fall grain regulator genes. Humans have a new understanding of rice falling genes, and it is a similar genetic mutation that keeps the grain on the rice ear, and ultimately retains humans, making humans the service provider of these plants.
human skin color transformation,
The director behind it is wheat-led food crops
In 716 BC, the Egyptians welcomed their new pharaoh. The same dress, the same majesty, no different from the previous pharaohs. But the crowd of people who greeted the pharaoh on the side of the road could see at a glance the characteristics of the new pharaoh, whose skin was black. The new pharaoh from Nubia began the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in Egyptian history, the only dynasty in ancient Egyptian history to be run by a dark-skinned ruler.
The conventional wisdom is that the difference in human skin color is the result of adapting to the intensity of sunlight in different areas, and to put it more bluntly, it is to apply pigmented sunscreen with different indexes. Melanin in human skin is a top-secret weapon against ultraviolet rays in the sun.
Our close relative, the chimpanzee, actually has white skin. That's because thick hairs act as their sunscreen, and humans have evolved to abandon their hairs, resulting in having to rely on melanin to protect themselves from sunlight near the equator. To this day, in areas such as Zambia and the Central African Republic, the skin color of the locals is still very dark.
30,000 years ago, when our Homo sapiens ancestors left the equator and headed for high latitudes, we were all black-skinned. As the human footprint gradually extended to the high latitudes of the north, the intensity of the sun became weaker and weaker, and the sun became more and more gentle. Sun protection is not a problem that needs to be solved, then the skin color is casual. If that's the way it is, the dark skin we have won't disappear, just as the appendix we don't need remains, and eventually the dark skin color becomes a trace organ.
But things are not so simple, skin tone is not only affected by the problem of sun protection, but also the synthesis of vitamin D. This vitamin has an irreplaceable effect on human development, especially bone growth. Some scholars believe that the reason why humans turn white is to get enough vitamin D. However, this explanation is still far-fetched, because food contains a lot of vitamin D, and even if you don't sunbathe, you won't be deficient in vitamin D. After all, the main reason for the change in human skin color is that humans settled down under the lure of wheat.
By analyzing human skin color genes, scientists found that european skin finally turned white 19,000-11,000 years ago, and another paper in the American journal Science set this time 6,000 to 5,300 years ago. This time coincided with the beginning of agriculture, the era when mankind changed from hunter to farmer. Many friends may have the illusion that farmers have a fixed harvest, hunters rely on luck to hunt, and the farmer's table is naturally more stable than the hunter's table, and the food is more abundant. But the actual situation is just the opposite, the early farmers are watching the sky to eat, not only there is no stable harvest, the harvest of grain is also very single.
While hunters were eating stewed pheasants, roasting hares, and tasting wild fruits, the early farmers had to find a way to make the wheat grains a little more delicious so that they could eat them. More troublesome things followed. The simplification of food, especially the scarcity of animal foods, led to an extreme lack of vitamin D among early farmers. Fortunately, God gave us a backup solution, which is to bask in the sun. As long as the skin is exposed to sunlight, vitamin D can be produced, so the skin color of these peasant wives begins to become lighter and lighter.
In the final analysis, the director behind the change in human skin color is actually a food crop led by wheat. Malnutrition in farming and a lack of vitamin D are the real causes of the skin color shift in human ancestors.
Today, our food is once again diverse. Darker skin tones provide more protection than white skin. The incidence of skin cancer varies significantly among people with different skin tones, especially those with red hair are more likely to develop skin cancer because they lack ultraviolet-blocking true melanin in their bodies, and only substitute brown melanin.
When yellow people are basking in the sun, true melanin and brown melanin increase at the same time, although we will become dark and not slippery, but compared with those who appear white people with wheat-colored skin, the probability of skin cancer is much smaller. Who, you say, is lucky?
In addition, some friends are worried that excessive sunscreen may affect vitamin D synthesis, in fact, this worry is superfluous, a large amount of vitamin D can already be provided in a large amount of food, plus some regular daily activities, there is no need to worry about the lack of vitamin D. As the composition and processing of human food changes, our bodies are constantly adjusting. The most typical manifestation is also beriberi, a disease caused by a lack of B vitamins.
If high-protein rice is a nutritional upgrade, then brown rice can be regarded as a nutritional supplement. How much nutrients does this brown rice have? A long time ago, I heard my grandmother tell a story: "There is a filial daughter-in-law, alone in the empty boudoir, serving her mother-in-law; this kind woman cooks rice every day, and then fishes the rice for her mother-in-law to eat, and drinks only soup herself." As a result, the mother-in-law became skinny, while the daughter-in-law was radiant. ”
So, I obediently drank all the rice soup from the small bowl. Now that I think about it, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law should be the control group of the first pair of B vitamin intake experiments, and have come to a reliable conclusion. Water-soluble B vitamins play an important role in human health.
If the story were based on real events, it would have been much earlier than Christian Aikman, a Dutch physician who discovered in 1886 that rice bran could treat beriberi. Today, the discovery is being hyped up like a myth, and more and more people are paying attention to brown rice. In the mountains of Guizhou, I have specially tasted those rice that are not refined, and that kind of taste will really make people discourage the desire to pick up the rice bowl. It is said that the vitamin B2 content of brown rice is 7 times that of polished rice, which seems to be a huge difference, but the vitamin B2 content of ordinary polished rice is only 0.06 mg, and the content of the same brown rice is at most 0.42 mg. The vitamin B2 of 100 grams of pig liver is as much as 2 milligrams, which is not an order of magnitude at all. If you want to supplement vitamin B2, it is better to come to a bowl of pork liver porridge, the taste is good and sufficient. Fortunately, our food sources are already extremely abundant. The vitamins obtained from vegetable meat and eggs are far more than the little bit of rice bran. We don't have to put up with rice bran anymore.
After human settlement, there was another opportunity to choose higher-yielding food. The problem is that there are more than 400,000 species of plants on the planet, and we humans have chosen no more than 150 conventional crops. A Brief History of Mankind makes a simple point that lifestyle changes are not instantaneous, but in between. In the process of switching jobs, the efficiency of obtaining food will actually be reduced, the reason is very simple, in the case of certain tools and technical conditions, if the time is evenly distributed between hunting and farming, the result is likely to be that the prey is not obtained, and the crops in the field have been flooded with weeds because they have not been adequately cared for.
We can think of different modes of production as a group of peaks, the height of which represents the efficiency of energy acquisition, and although the peaks are staggered and the maximum efficiency of each mode of production is different, there is no doubt that after climbing to a considerable height, few people are willing to return to the efficiency depression, even if the other mountain looks better. Because in most cases, the result of a hasty change in production mode can be fatal. We can only go along the established mode of production, including domesticated crops.
Stills from the movie 10,000 Years Before History (2008).
If you abandon the crops that have been cultivated for hundreds of years and choose a completely new species to start breeding, it is like returning to the depression under the mountain. Even if the previously cultivated crops were not very successful, no matter how hard humans tried, they still could not increase the yield, or even maintained a low yield. But compared, it is still much better than wild plants.
Author 丨 Shi Jun
Edited by 丨 Wang Qing
Introduction Proofreading 丨 Chen Diyan