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(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Crop rotation is absolutely not obvious. It needs observation and experimentations with the very basic food production ones lives depends on.
Buddy...
They weren't idiots, it's not hard to figure out if you grew the same crop in the same place it worked out worse than before.
Not to mention this isn't a hypothetical, archeology exists bro
Don't think people thousands of years ago were dumber than us, humans have been unchanged for over 300k years.
300,000 years ago ancient humans were born just as intelligent as any of us born today. And they dealt a lot more with plants, anyone that grew the same crop on the same land for multiple seasons would (and did) figure this out.
I never said they were dumb. But it takes a long time of observing and reasoning to get such a result. And yes, archeology shows that between alternating crops and non-use as the early version and the "modern" three-crop-rotation is a four-digit gap.
That's good logic, but you're using it wrong...
You're saying it took a long time for them to figure it out, but also that they figured it out almost immediately after the last ice age.
Now think about that...
Even if you say it took a thousand years after the last ice age, we had ~200,000 years as a species before the last ice age started, and we've been thru multiple.
If we figured it out right after the last ice age, why didn't the group of humans between the last two ice ages figure it out?
The most plausible answer is that they did, and that anyone expecting to find evidence from before the last ice age even started doesn't understand anything about archeology.
I'm not saying they had modern society, but statistically speaking they figured out agriculture because virtually every human population this cycle was able to figure it out independently real quick after the whole ice age thing blew over.
This is incorrect. All populations are always changing and being selected, even if the overall variation in a population is much larger than the change over time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution for more details.
The earliest evidence we've found of agriculture is from no more than 15,000 years ago.
The Roman Empire appears to be the earliest evidence we have of formal crop rotation, but that doesn't mean they were the first to do it.
Letting fields lie fallow to replenish the soil was so important to ancient cultures that it's recorded in the Torah as instructions received directly from God.
Leviticus 25:1-7
Uhhh...
What evidence of agriculture do you think lasts longer than 15,000 years?
Like, most recent glacier period may have ended as recently as ~12,000 years ago, what evidence of agriculture do you think can make it thru one glacier period? Let alone the multiple that humans have lived thru as a species?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
Why don't you understand that the most likely explanation is this is something we kept inventing over and over throughout 300k years?
And that glaciers are basically very slow bulldozers that erase pretty much everything.
If we want to find evidence of agriculture more than 15k-20k years ago, we need to be looking at the Sarrah desert, because that was fertile farmland back then. They weren't hit by a glacier, but they're on a 21k year cycle and have been for over 8 million years.
If you think the Torah is "ancient history" you're nowhere close to the right timescale to have this discussion...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/File:CLIMAP.jpg
I don't know why, but that image won't upload.
Glaciers didn't get nearly as far as you seem to think. Sure that map just shows the last glacial maximum, but even prior to that Ice Age, they weren't going much further north and south than what is indicated. The last time that The Earth was a snowball predates not only humanity, but, IIRC, multicellular life.
The evidence of it being invented that far back in human evolution would be very apparent in Africa, though you may have to do some scanning to find it as it would be buried by this point.
I think you may be giving ancient humans a tiny bit too much credit. Sure they weren't stupid, and you are correct that our evolution physically seems to have slowed a lot, if not stalled, but our brains are a very different story. We really don't know how fast the brain developed, and I suspect it wasn't until around 12,000-15,0000 years ago that we finally stopped having a disconnected left and right brain. There's actually a fair bit of evidence that our brain's default setting was having the left and right hemispheres disconnected, which would explain why all our "gods" went silent worldwide around the time of the end of the bronze age. Heck that may have been a contributing factor in the collapse of the western world at the time. The Green Sahara period ending certainly didn't help things.
Uhh...
That's a picture of temperature changes, not glacier movement...
Up to 25% of land was covered by glacier ice sheets during the last one. And it's not like it was a solid thing, it was a giant plow. A plow doesn't cover the whole road at once, it moves down a road.
Just like glaciers didn't just expand like a snowbank in a blizzard, they moved which means they stopped being where they were...
You really just said "we don't know, but we know"...
Like, even tho I personally believe the whole master/slave hemisphere thing, there's no actual evidence that existed let alone when it stopped. We sure as shit don't know if master/slave hemisphere was what it was always like, or if that was the unusual period bro...
The grey in that map which covers Antarctica as well as a ton of the southern oceans, as well as a significant portion of North America, and Europe shows the known glacier expansion of the last ice age. 25% doesn't come close to Africa, there wasn't a bulldozer in most of the world.
No, I really just said "We don't know for sure, but I personally suspect." Try reading comprehension, it helps. The evidence that was the norm comes from our present day toddlers, as well as people writing about it in ancient Egypt, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Mittani, ancient Greeks, and ancient Chinese people. They all had learned scholars that wrote about not being able to hear the literal voice of their gods anymore, and wondered why the gods abandoned us. I suspect that was what happens in us to this day, except it happens when we are 2-3 years old. Most people don't remember that time, and the only reason I know it happened for me is that I told my parents, who later told me. Apparently "Other me" disappeared one day and it was very confusing.
The Sarrah is on a 21k desert/rainforest cycle and has been for 8 million years...
So evidence of agriculture in Africa is under a shit ton of sand. Evidence in South America is under new rainforest from the potassium being blown over from Africa, and itself part of the cycle.
Like, even in rare cases that could support agriculture the whole time, if people lived there 20k years, then that's why there's no evidence.
I grew up on a farm, finding arrowheads, broken pottery, and all types of other shit was normal because that's what happens as you till soil. That land had been worked for thousands of years, which means a constant churn and removal of artifacts from just centuries ago.
If you keep living and working on the same land, you're constantly removing evidence that the land was worked.
On a scale of 20k years, that shit adds up bro.
I already referenced the Green Sahara cycle, I'm aware. The green period only lasts ≈10,000 years per cycle. The entire cycle is ≈23,000 years, and is tied to the Earth's axis wobble. It would be far more likely to find evidence in a more stable area rather than somewhere that causes Lake Chad to become Lake Gigachad (not what it's called, I know, don't care, sounds better.) every ≈13,000 years. There's a fuckton of water moving through that area from what we can tell.
I also have lived on, and grew up on a farm, in the Midwest, tons of arrowheads of you knew where to look. The thing is that archaologists would literally kill each other to find any evidence of modern agriculture that is older than 12,000-15,000 years ago. They've found plenty of stuff to indicate that we spread out well before then, and that there were hunter-gatherer civilisations well before then. Not one of them has yet to find any evidence, even with the latest scanning tech that allows us not to dig, that anyone was farming prior to 12,000-15,000 years ago, and then we all started doing it. If archaologists can find evidence of something humanoid (may not have been homo-sapiens) in the area of San Diego either 125,000 or 250,000, I don't remember, years ago way back in the '90s, and they haven't found one shred of evidence that farming existed prior to 15,000 years ago, I'm gonna have to go with the professionals here.
We've found evidence of ancient cultures that existed in the Green Sahara, and in South America. They've flown ground penetrating scanners over almost all of the planet at this point. Someone would have found the data.
Are you arguing for young Earth creationism now?
Or is it an accident you're using their exact same logic?
Because to quote Donald Rumsfeld:
Especially when what we're talking about is evidence of agriculture over 20k years ago, what the actual fuck do you think would still be there? A rusted out Ford tractor?
There's gonna be the same amount of evidence as for when I farted in 5th grade science class decades ago, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means no evidence survived this long.
Evidence of a stone hoe knapped at that time, like we have found everywhere that there was agriculture, would be a start. Evidence of some sort of tilling, which would still be there even if buried would be better. We have found neither.
Thanks for trying to engage in a good-faith discussion here.
I'd have thought the guy who said, "Archaeology exists, bro," would be interested in what archaeology is actually able to tell us.
Thanks. I'm no where qualified to actually discuss archaeology as it is practiced, but there do seem to be a few common things found at ancient sites, mostly broken pottery and broken stone tools. I'm assuming because we had to make a lot of the things prior to discovering metalworking.
Best of luck pal, but you're gonna have to find someone else now
Not even close to what I said. It would be nice if you would read what I wrote.
This isn't true, and it would have taken you very little effort to verify it before posting.
So… people that work the land know it’s obvious?
You know, like the agrarian peoples worldwide who all independently figured this out almost immediately after starting agriculture....
They're saying no farmers could have figured this out, because only farmers could...
as if by doing stuff, you figure stuff out about that stuff.
I think critical thinking is the most endangered thing out there
It's like Stonehendge and the Pyramids...
I forget what comedian said it, but:
Definitely not.
What would you observe? You plant the wheat where you always plant it, because it is the piece of land that you cleared from trees with hard work. You notice that the plants get worse from year to year.
The first thing was that people started not to plant anything and used the field as meadow to put sheep, goats, or cows on it. Maybe just chicken, if push comes to shove. They do know that plants grow better in places where the animals fertilize the ground.
This just lead to crop alternation: one year corn, one year grass.
The relatively modern idea of rotating three different kinds of crops in a specific order came thousands(!) of years later.
You know, people that work land have cleared the plants on that place specifically, because they know their soil.
No one would waste effort testing if that’s a good patch of land.
I’m sorry, I think we come from very different places of life, we might speak the same language, but you have theoretical, untested knowledge, and I’ve been down in the dirt a few too many years.