Researchers Discover First Use of Fertilizer 71
sciencehabit writes "Europe's first farmers helped spread a revolutionary way of living across the continent. They also spread something else. A new study reveals that these early agriculturalists were fertilizing their crops with manure 8000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought."
Fertilizer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even native americans knew burying a fish next to a corn plant helped it grow faster (assuming a raccoon didn't dig up the fish first)
What's really surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is that people were convinced that fertilizer was a modern "invention" in the first place. I'm sure it didn't take the genius of a particle physicist to notice that the grass grew better where the animals took a shit, but then I'm not an archaeologist. Kind of like the conspiracy theorists who claim that there was no way human beings could have build the Pyramids without some kind of advanced technology or alien intervention...people seem to seriously underestimate the wisdom of their ancestors, almost to the point of arrogance.
The funny part is that essentially nothing has changed beyond our level of technology. People believed in crazy, stupid shit in antiquity, how is that any different from today? Our ancestors had wonderful things like white make-up made from lead, they drank "radium water" to CURE illnesses. I can't imagine that worked out like it said on the tin. We're much more advanced now though. Now we have people drinking homeopathic remedies containing exactly zero molecules of often poisonous compounds like arsenic, we have walking pairs of tits like Jenny McCarthy telling people not to vaccinate their children...and for all of our wondrous technology, even despite "putting man on the moon," we still have people killing each other over what imaginary friend they've bonded with. Just like the good old days.
Re:Fertilizer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead it was disturbed by 12000 years of warfare and reworking of the land in the Americas. It is a shame though that most of the Amerindians didn't have writing. There are so many things we could learn, for example, about the Mississippian culture, the spread of maize agriculture northward and its effect on how people lived, ecological problems they encountered in say the Southwest and Ohio Valley, etc. etc., etc. Not to mention the eternal riddle of why they tolerated those hairy smelly invaders from across the Atlantic.
P.S. Great book on the pre-Columbian Americas is 1491 [wikipedia.org] (there's also a good "sequel" called 1493).
Well, actually no. There were no major wars on North America prior to the arrival of Europeans. Minor tribal skirmishes, but no enduring structures overlaying prior structures. In fact the only enduring structures of any kind were in the desert southwest. Natives did not heavily work the land, and practiced slash and burn for their agriculture more than anything else. This is why early viking settlements stand out so obviously.
The net result is that many (thousands) of native north american settlements were discovered in undisturbed state, even in heavily populated areas of the north eastern states. Even Clovis and pre-Clovis sites, when found, don't show the heavy disturbance of plows, later civilizations, or buildings. Mound builder's mounds are virtually always intact. The history of the land was very different.
Middle american indigenous people did build extensive structures which were also more or less abandoned intact after the Spanish.