Agriculture-wise, there are two papers I’m familiar with that discuss evidence for attempts as subsistence farming long before such attempts had a stable result - one attempt is 35,000 years old, and the other is 23,000 years old.

I never really learned about these attempts until recently - I thought that mostly subsistence farming (as opposed to people who had similar cultivation practices but didn’t rely on them) was something that started all at once and didn’t stop. That made me wonder how many other things that I assume happened all at once had more gradual starts, and I landed on writing. Were there ever any prehistoric attempts at writing or proto-writing or other very abstract graphical representation besides the Vinča Symbols in Old Europe?

Another thing that I think is true, based on what I’ve read and heard, is that what was once considered the “civilizational package” of monumental architecture, powerful hierarchies, large settlements, plant and animal domestication and writing is no longer thought of as a package. There have been multiple times where one of these things has shown up without the others and has lasted a long time. The only one I’ve never heard of springing up independently is writing. Has this ever happened?

The two papers on agriculture:

https://www.persee.fr/doc/paleo_0153-9345_2013_num_39_2_5519

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422

Let's assume they agreed that slavery was bad but they didn't have our technological knowledge (or it didn't apply in the world they settled in). Could they industrialize without relying on slave labor or alien technology (in the case of our industrial revolution that was cotton)? And if not, could they use a system like conscription for labor-intensive tasks to get around it?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268120300913

How hominin dispersals and megafaunal extinctions influenced the birth of agriculture

IdeenRiahi

Corresponding author.

ideen.riahi@baruch.cuny.edu

Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, the City University of New York, USA

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.03.025Get rights and content

Abstract

The agricultural revolution is a significant turning point in human history. Its effects are still deeply felt on many aspects of humankind’s social, political, and economic development. For the first time, this study empirically examines the birth of agriculture and identifies the global extinction of megafauna (large mammals) in the past 100,000 years as a paramount related event. During the ice ages, humans and plants heavily depended on megafauna for survival. Megafauna’s decreased abundance shifted human subsistence strategies toward more control over vital common resources. These strategies, in turn, underpinned the type of coevolutionary interactions between humans, animals, and plants that eventually resulted in domestication. The severity of extinction varied considerably in regions occupied by hominins (different species of humans) at different times over the past seven million years. Extinctions were negligible in Africa, moderate in Asia, and severe in the New World. Regression analyses of these exogenous differences reveal a non-monotonic effect of extinction on agriculture. Agriculture was most likely to emerge independently in the lower latitudes of Asia. All other regions experienced suboptimal extinction events, which had varying effects on the birth of agriculture.

Full 24 page PDF Link: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268120300913

Source: https://twitter.com/bendormiki/status/1268584017437360136

Sorry if this seems stupid, but I don't understand how one family could possibly farm enough to survive a full year. Plants take quite a long time to grow and harvest, so I don't see how 1 family can grow enough to feed themselves and live off. I googled before hand but couldn't find much. Assuming little to no surplus for trading.

I'm interested in whether depression (especially Major Depressive Disorder) is more or less common in relatively high-technology societies compared to "traditional societies." If you're not an anthropologist, then please only reply with peer-reviewed sources. Thanks!

Also, could it have arisen that the 'disaster' of the agricultural revolution resulted in the extinction of our species? I suppose it still could in a sense but I'm talking a pre-civilisation era extinction.

Below is a commentary on Dwarven agriculture, food products and diet.

​Underground Food Sources

Dwarven cities and towns are almost exclusively underground. While they will make what they can of the agriculture and herding opportunities that are available on a mountain-side or in lower mountain valleys, by and large Dwarves have needed to subsist on what food they can maintain underground. This has led to a unique set of food traditions in among the Dwarves.

​Underground Farming

The most important element of farming underground is having a light source that will allow plants to grow and flourish. Dwarves have harnessed the power of Earth Magics to create sunlike lighting for their farms. During their mining, Dwarves occassionaly find the rare Diadine crystals. Diadine is an interesting and somewhat valuable yellow/orange gemstone when found in small sizes, as it usually is. In this small form, it can be made into jewelry, but has not special magical properties. Very rarely though a large Diadine crystal is found. These fist size or larger crystals can be implanted in a cave wall or ceiling, and pumped with Earth Magics to produce lighting that is equal to the sun for the purpose of growing plants. Only the Dwarves have the secrets of how to use these specialized Earth Magics.

Dwarven farms tend to be located deep within their mountain complexes, to ensure the safety of the food supply in the event of siege in times of war. The farms takes several forms:

• Diadine-lit caverns for farming grains, root vegetables, non-root vegetables, and fruit that grow on bushes or small trees. Dwarves tend to use root vegetables as their staple food – in particular potatoes and turnips, but with a lot of variation from city to city. Because of the indoor environment, Dwarves are able to grow crops year-round, rotating crops frequently for variety and to renew the soil.
• Standard-lit (non-Diadine) caverns for growing mushrooms. These caverns tend to be on the small side, and packed with vertically stacked boxes. Dwarves are renowned for the variety and quality of the mushrooms they grow.
• Standard-lit (non-Diadine) caverns with pools (usually fed by mountain spring waters) for harvesting fish (primarily). The fish tend to be stocked from outdoor lakes, but can be sustainably harvested to maintain stocks over long periods of time when needed.
• Diadine-lit caverns for holding herds of animals: primarily goats, sheep, rabbits and chickens. The Di

I know a tiny little bit about the history of business in ancient China, ancient India, etc. I don't know enough to call myself a historian of economics.

So here is my problem. I want to be able to talk about economics from the ancient world up to the present day. (Although at the moment I am particularly interested in the naval Arsenal of Venice, founded 1104.) I see a lot of claims that are widely accepted that seem unreasonable to me, such as "Adam Smith invented capitalism when he published The Wealth of Nations in 1776." I see a lot of unscholarly claims like "capitalism was invented in the 16th century and immediately capitalists intensified slavery."

Many people seem to agree that mercantilism dominated in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century. I can't find any widely recognized term for what merchants did prior to the 16th century.

When I try to say things like "12th-century Venice had capitalism" people usually remind me that "capitalism" means "relatively modern capitalism that avoids mercantilism." Apparently the definition of "capitalism" is tied up with colonialism. To summarize:

>The practice of colonialism dates to around 1550 BCE when Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, and Phoenicia began extending their control into adjacent and non-contiguous territories. Using their superior military power, these ancient civilizations established colonies that made use of the skills and resources of the people they conquered to further expand their empires.

https://www.thoughtco.com/colonialism-definition-and-examples-5112779

>World history is full of examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. ...Colonialism, then, is not restricted to a specific time or place. Nevertheless, in the sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of technological developments in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world. Fast sailing ships made it possible to reach distant ports and to sustain close ties between the center and colonies. Thus, the modern European colonial project emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across the ocean and to maintain political sovereignty in spite of geographical dispersion. This entry uses the term colonialism to describe the process of European settlement and political control over the rest of the w

Disclaimer: This is a slight wall of text. I go into a lot of technical stuff here, but at the end I give my explanation as to why we need vertical farms.

So something I have seen dotted around some posts on this sub is a general bias towards low level permaculture over other methods of food production to replace the monstrosity that is modern horizontal monoculture.

While vertical farms can be inefficient in their design, it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. For example, traditionally, vertical farms use grow lights to provide adequate lighting for plants to photosynthesise. This means the whole structure requires relatively large amounts of energy to power. This can come from solar panels, but then you have to produce the solar panels to provide electricity for the farm. There's nothing inherently wrong with producing solar panels. Silicon, the bulk material, is the most common metal on earth, and the dopants that are needed to make the semiconductor more effective, of which aren't exactly the rarest elements either, are used in negligible amounts.

Nevertheless, there's a better, simpler way to approach this, and I think it's really cool.

We already use fibre cables all over the world for things like long distance communication, where electrical signals (through copper) are insufficient. Optical fibres carry no current, and all they're really doing is converging light put into them and "transporting" it to where it needs to go.

Most fibres are made of doped glass, but polymers such as PMMA (Acrylic) work quite well also. Acrylic can actually be pretty sustainable, as it's monomers, although currently not so much, can be derived from renewable sources, and it's quite recyclable (being a polyester, iirc it can be hydrolysed into it's monomers and repolymerised when needed). Also, being amorphous, it's very transparent and thus transmits light very well; this makes it ideal for optical fibres.

The advantage of capturing sunlight and redistributing it throughout a vertical farm is that it requires far less input energy, and the light coming through is also completely natural light.

This solves what I think is the biggest concern when it comes to vertical farms, and the solution isn't too complicated in principle.

So, we have a light source. Containers can be made out of many things, from card to recycled PET to aluminium trays (wouldn't use card for hydroponics though). Racking can be made out of, well, aluminium or steel, and then there's

It's been a few generations since the humans joined the wider group of sapients of the galaxy, and among the many previously thought "laws" of species development they've upended, none are more significant than their breaking of the so-called Chain of Self-Civilizing.

Initially proposed by a long-dead xenoarcheosociologist, the proposed Chain says that certain benchmarks must first be met before a proper war can take place. To have a war, you have to have a group capable of gathering the required resources & people to wage it. To have a group capable, they should necessarily need to support the group in the first place, which means agriculture of crops and/or domestication of livestock depending on the diet. And interspersed through these steps are some form of energy harvesting, be it fire, gravity, or eletricity, and some sort of intoxicant. If there's one thing most sapients can agree on, is thinking all the time & existence in general aren't fun all the time, and you have to take the edge off somehow. Each of these steps takes an exponentially shorter time to move to the next, since the benefits of all previous steps compound, with the first often taking millions of orbits to get to the second.

The first & oldest species, now translated as just Us/We, went the most so-called logical route: agriculture, booze, fire, civilization, then war. Their wars were infrequent and brief, no more than skirmishes compared to most others, and quickly saw the cause of war was scarcity and so expanded to the stars so they would never want for raw materials again.

As they expanded, they encountered other sapient life, and the pattern in general held true. Mixed around depending on the species in question, like how a carnivorous species would often find their intoxicant first with spoiled meats and fungus, then fire, then domestication, etc. A very small handful that experienced a cataclysm in their early pre-history were forced to make civilization & organization their priority to survive at all, then eventually harnessing agriculture and the rest. But all of these needed those initial Links of organization and sustainability before population growth and competition for resources necessitated the end of the Chain, the first war.

After the usual first contact hiccups were resolved was it truly realized that the humans had done things differently. Their world is fertile and vibrant with near a unheard-of diversity of life, while extremely hostile to al

I love Rimworld, but I find that my playthroughs all die out around the time that food production is stable and large raids/infestations become the only meaningful obstacle in the game.

I've been looking to play with some mods, and I'm wondering if there are any good mods that address these things:

• Agriculture: Food production, IRL, is hard. It takes a lot of manpower to grow food (at least without the use of machines). In Rimworld, it's pretty trivial to get a large corn crop that only takes a few days of labor at planting time and at harvest to manage. I feel like there's an opportunity for agriculture to be a real limiting factor. I would love mods that make food harder to grow, either by making the planting/harvesting process take longer, or adding new mechanics.

• Construction: It doesn't take very long to build pretty long-lasting structures in Rimworld. IRL, it's a major task to build shelter.

• Research: It does feel a bit weird that in Rimworld you can discover how to manufacture highly advanced technology with just a few days of dedicated research work. I'd love for research to feel more like a luxury long-term task, something that rewards you for having a well-running colony with excess labor.

• Manufacturing: You can manufacture pretty advanced items just from steel and components. Once I realized how quickly I could start making high-quality assault rifles, the sense of satisfaction from doing so wore off. Same with electricity: I would prefer a playstyle where electricity is a much later development, something that takes lots of dedicated work to get running.

Overall, I would love to try a modded playthrough that requires more time to get the survival basics of food, water, shelter, and security up and running. I have already weathered the storms of large raids and toxic fallout, and I'm hoping there's a way to get more of a survivalist/subsistence experience.

Let me know what you think!