domestication

The question doesn't really make any sense using standard definitions of domestication. What would wheat domesticating man even mean? I get that man went from a roaming hunter to a more settled and agrarian life when he starting planting and raising livestock but it's just playing with semantics and inventing a new meaning for domestication to suggest that a plant can domesticate man.

Is which came first, the chicken or the egg, the next topic for discussion?
 
Seattle said:
There is now such thing was "first" so the chicken couldn't come first. The chicken came BEFORE.
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Well the explanation goes like

Eggs are produced internally in the chicken
Later evolution figured out how to protect the egg in a manner (cover it with a shell)
Result - eggs layer which are capable of surviving outside of chicken

Chicken came first

:)
 
Michael 345 said:
Well the explanation goes like

Eggs are produced internally in the chicken
Later evolution figured out how to protect the egg in a manner (cover it with a shell)
Result - eggs layer which are capable of surviving outside of chicken

Chicken came first

:)
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I agree that the chicken came first. There are no eggs without chickens.
 
sculptor said:
Yes

Your thoughts?
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I rather agree with Seattle about wheat. I mean, you can always argue that some plant or animal Man finds useful can be thought of as in a kind of symbiosis, because Man goes to some trouble to cultivate it and that alters how he lives. You might say the same for the horse. But neither the horse nor wheat set out to change Man's way of life from "wild" to "domesticated".

I suppose it is Hariri's characteristically rather hyperbolic way of making the point that it was the cultivation of wheat that caused Man to give up the hunter-gatherer existence. Part of his schtick seems to be that we were all better off as hunter-gatherers anyway and everything has gone downhill since.

Hariri has made a name for himself as a lippy iconoclast, using the perspective of his outsider status as a gay Israeli academic. A lot of what was in that book I found a bit glib and not very well substantiated. It's the sort of book you don't really find yourself going back to again and again for its insights. I found the sequel Homo Deus, unreadable.
 
sculptor said:
I recently read a book wherein the question
"Did man domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate man?" was asked.

Your thoughts?
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I didn't read that book, but have learned some anthropology. Seems like people were pretty much forced to settle down and cultivate crops when game became scarce or there was too much competition from other predators or human migration became too difficult for geographic or climate reasons. If they settled in places where grain was abundant, they were able to increase their numbers faster than they might have by gathering berries and root-crops. Once they did settle to cultivation, they improved the yields by selection, irrigation and fertilization, and in turn, the heavy investment of labour tied a people irrevocably to the land... and thus, to ownership > patriarchy> fratricide > hierarchy > civilization > progress > arms race and all the subsequent shite.
So, it would seem to be a mutual domestication/destruction process.
The more fertile the land, the more fiercely contested, the more nationalism and xenophobia.

As for the chicken, the first chicken(s) were in the egg(s) of jungle fowl, Gallus gallus and Gallus sonneratii as well as one or two other relatives - about 9,000 years ago, but we don't know which ones or exactly when, because there were no biologists present and taxonomy hadn't been invented. Its breeding thereafter was due to human agency.
 
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exchemist said:
...

I suppose it is Hariri's characteristically rather hyperbolic way of making the point that it was the cultivation of wheat that caused Man to give up the hunter-gatherer existence. Part of his schtick seems to be that we were all better off as hunter-gatherers anyway and everything has gone downhill since.

Hariri has made a name for himself as a lippy iconoclast, using the perspective of his outsider status as a gay Israeli academic. A lot of what was in that book I found a bit glib and not very well substantiated. It's the sort of book you don't really find yourself going back to again and again for its insights. I found the sequel Homo Deus, unreadable.
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I concur.
It seemed to me that much of what he wrote was poorly thought out, and often just wrong.
He is by no means the first nor the only one to suggest that we traded quality of life for quantity of our numbers when we took up the plow.
However:
I had never read nor heard it phrased just that way.... ergo this thread.
 
sideshowbob said:
But the dinosaurs laid eggs. And then they evolved into chickens. So eggs came first.
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The dinosaurs did not evolve into chickens - they mostly went extinct. A few eventually evolved into birds and a few of those eventually differentiated into land-dwelling fowl and a few of those eventually branched off into domestic chickens.
It doesn't ask about eggs in general - because in that case, insects would have come first.
The riddle is about a chicken egg. It was (presumably) posed at a time when philosophers didn't know about evolution.
 
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Jeeves said:
It doesn't ask about eggs in general - because then insects would have come first.
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I wasn't suggesting that dinosaur eggs were the first eggs, only that they were before chickens.
The riddle is about the first chicken egg.
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It really isn't though. That would be trivial. It's about making you think about origins.
 
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