Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker

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Plants

      What do nonagricultural people know of the life cycles of plants? Do they know that flowers lead to seeds and that seeds can be sown to produce more plants? Is this something that must be learned or discovered to commence the domestication of plants or is this a part of the general botanical knowledge of gathering peoples?

      A look at the ethnographic evidence shows that some gatherers do plant seeds. Seven of 19 groups studied by Steward (1941) in Nevada sowed seeds of wild plants (Downs, 1964). No tillage was practiced; the seedbed was generally prepared by simply burning the vegetation the previous fall and seeding in the spring. The seeds sown were of entirely wild plants; the most frequently mentioned were species of Chenopodium, Oryzopsis, Mentzelia, and Sophia (Steward, 1941).

      To the Andamanese, the goddess Puluga symbolizes the southwest monsoon that brings violent winds and rains from April to October (Coon, 1971):

      Puluga owned all the wild yams and cicada grubs that the people ate, and all the beeswax that they used in hafting, calking, and cordage. Women who dug yams had to replace the tops to fool Puluga…

      Indeed, if Puluga caught the people misusing her property she would get angry and send bad weather. Here we see the practice of planting reinforced by a religious belief. The practice is useful to the people, but does not of itself prove understanding.

      An early observation of Sir George Grey (1841) concerning Australian Aborigines is more revealing:

      The natives have, however, a law that no plant bearing seeds is to be dug up after it has flowered; they then call them (for example) the mother of Bohn, the mother of Mud‐ja (Haemadorum spp.), etc.; and so strict are they in their observance of this rule that I have never seen a native violate it, unless requested by an European, and even then they betray a great dislike to do so.

      The practice is confirmed by Gregory (1886):

      There seems to be little doubt that the life cycles of plants were well understood by native Australians. The Aborigines were equipped with all the knowledge necessary to practice agriculture, but did not do so.

      Klimek (1935) recorded 11 tribes of California peoples that grew a local species of tobacco, but no other crop. Some tribes in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia followed the same practice (Drucker, 1963). The tobacco was usually either N. attenuata or N. quadrivalvis Pursh. Harrington (1932) made a very detailed study of tobacco among the Karuk, and found the extent of botanical knowledge remarkable. The Karuk burned logs in the forest and sowed seeds in the ashes. A tobacco garden was called “to plant” or more literally “to put seed.” The Karuk had terms for cultivated tobacco, wild tobacco, roots, stems, bark, leaves, branches, leaf branches, pith, gum, flowers, buds, seedpods, flower stem, clusters of flowers, sepals, and calyx. No standard word was used for petal, but descriptive terms were used, for example, the white‐flowered N. quadrivalvis was said to have “five white ones sticking out.” The stamens and pistil were described as “sticking out in the middle of every flower where the seeds are going to be.” Stamens are “flower whiskers,” “flower threads,” or “flower hairs.” Pollen is “flower dust.” Nine stages of flowering to seed setting were recognized with descriptive terms. There was a classification of seeds, grains, seeds in the midst of a fruit (pit), seeds inside a shell (nut), and so on.

      The translation of an informant's description of germinating tobacco seed is botanically accurate and detailed (Harrington, 1932, p. 61):

      Its seeds fall to the ground. The dirt gets over them. Then, after a while, when it gets rained on, the seed sprouts. Sometimes all the seeds do not grow up. They say sometimes some of the seeds get rotten. Its sprouts are small white ones, pretty near the size of a hair. Whenever it is just peeping out, its seed is on top of it. Then they just have two leaves, when they first peep out of the ground. They grow quickly when they grow; in a little while they are tall ones.

      We should not be surprised if gathering peoples know a lot about plants. They are the real “professional botanists”; for them, life depends on an adequate knowledge of plants. We have seen that gatherers are familiar with hundreds of species and their uses for food. We have noted that many are poisonous and must be detoxified before they can be eaten.

      Since “ignorance” is part of the stereotype developed by agricultural people about gatherers, I would like to call attention to an episode described with some apparent pleasure by Sir George Grey (1841). Some of the crew of Captain Cook's expedition of the 1770s observed the Aborigines eating seeds of Zamia (a cycad). The crew tried some of their own harvest of Zamia and became very ill. They concluded that the Aborigines must have very strong constitutions to be able to live on such food. Later, on shipboard, they fed Zamia seeds to some pigs, and a few died. Their admiration for the physical stamina of the natives increased substantially. The Aborigines, of course, had removed the poison before eating their seeds, and were, no doubt, amused at the “ignorance” of their European visitors.

      Detoxification is required for a considerable number of plants used by the native people of North American, the Australian Aborigines, and gatherers in tropical zones. Some plants are deadly poisonous without treatment, others only unpleasant. Several acorn species are sweet and need no treatment, while others contain various amounts of tannins. Among California Native Americans, some of the bitterest oaks were the most popular; when properly leached, the original tannin content did not cause any harm. Tribes on the edge of the “acorn belt” were often more selective since they did not depend much on acorns and did not want to go to the trouble of leaching. Leguminous seeds, Solanaceous fruits, Dioscorea spp., and Aroid tubers are still among the more common poisonous foods consumed by gatherers.

      Gatherers

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