03-23-2016, 10:19 PM
The thing is, it's really easy for us to say "Oh, we can eat this plant, and we need food, so let's cultivate this plant," but that's because we already know about farming. It's the foundation of our modern way of life.
Farming is easy once you figure it out, the biggest hurdle is figuring it out when nobody's ever done it before or even has the slightest inkling that it's possible. Stone-age avali would have been just as ignorant of the less visible functions of the natural world as stone age humans: they would have had to figure out that plants grow from seeds (or fungus from spores, rather), and making that leap of logic requires specific conditions which I've detailed in previous posts, and the nature of Avalon and the avali make it harder for those conditions to come about.
At least that's what I was taught. I'm trying to find where I got this information from (possibly Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel), but I can't remember and I don't have a copy handy at the moment.
Here's a documentary version of the book, but while it talks about the beginning of agriculture, a quick skim didn't turn up anything about how people came up with farming in the first place.
Of course, Diamond's ideas have been criticized as being overly reliant on environmental determinism (the idea that the possibilities a species has at its disposal are controlled by their environment). He is, after all, a biologist. But it makes sense to me that when you're just barely learning to become more than animals, your environment is going to play a large role in what you can and can't do--not until later do you accumulate the necessary knowledge to overcome the environment.
Farming is easy once you figure it out, the biggest hurdle is figuring it out when nobody's ever done it before or even has the slightest inkling that it's possible. Stone-age avali would have been just as ignorant of the less visible functions of the natural world as stone age humans: they would have had to figure out that plants grow from seeds (or fungus from spores, rather), and making that leap of logic requires specific conditions which I've detailed in previous posts, and the nature of Avalon and the avali make it harder for those conditions to come about.
At least that's what I was taught. I'm trying to find where I got this information from (possibly Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel), but I can't remember and I don't have a copy handy at the moment.
Here's a documentary version of the book, but while it talks about the beginning of agriculture, a quick skim didn't turn up anything about how people came up with farming in the first place.
Of course, Diamond's ideas have been criticized as being overly reliant on environmental determinism (the idea that the possibilities a species has at its disposal are controlled by their environment). He is, after all, a biologist. But it makes sense to me that when you're just barely learning to become more than animals, your environment is going to play a large role in what you can and can't do--not until later do you accumulate the necessary knowledge to overcome the environment.