<< News >> First Farmers Wanted Clothes, Not Food
Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 25 October 2007 Page Views: 2527
DiscoveriesCountry: Australia People turned to farming to grow fiber for clothing, and not to provide food, says one researcher who challenges conventional ideas about the origins of agriculture.Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, says his theory also explains why Aboriginal Australians were not generally farmers.
Gilligan says they did not need fiber for clothing, so had no reason to grow crops like cotton. He argues his case in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.
"Conventional thinking assumes that the transition to farming was related to people's need to find new ways of getting food," said Gilligan. "That doesn't really make sense for a number of reasons."
It doesn't explain why cultivating plants and domesticating animals only started 10,000 years ago in some areas of the world. Gilligan says a better explanation is climate.
In the northern hemisphere during the last ice age it was roughly 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today, which led hunters and gatherers to develop sophisticated forms of clothing. This included tailored and multilayered clothes, including underclothes, to keep out the cold winds, said Gilligan. Animal hides and furs from hunted animals provided the most suitable warm clothing, he said.
But once the climate warmed, humans wanted lighter and more breathable clothing. Textiles based on fiber crops such as cotton, linen and hemp and woolly animals like sheep and goats did the job.
At the same time, said Gilligan, clothing became important as a form of display and decoration.
But the story in Australia was different. "In Australia, even in Tasmania, conditions were never so cold that Aboriginal people needed multilayered tailored garments," Gilligan said.
In this most severe environment, temperatures were only about 10 degrees lower than today. Aboriginal people habitually went without clothing and when they did wear something it was simple. For example, ... a single layered wallaby fur cloak around their shoulders at the height of the last ice age...
There was no incentive for Aboriginal people to take up farming because all their needs were met by hunting and gathering, said Gilligan.
"The idea that early farming offered humans a more reliable food supply has been exposed as a myth," he said.
Hunting and gathering was a far more flexible, reliable and efficient way of getting food, he argues.
Falvey, a former dean of agriculture at the university, thinks both clothes and food were important in establishing agriculture, which he sees as a product of co-evolution between humans, plants and animals.
Whatever the origins of agriculture, he welcomes Gilligan's contribution. "Keeping the discussion open, like this paper does, is the most important thing," he said.
For more, see discovery.com.
Note: Well-dressed Neolithic people key to agriculture?
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