Loss of fat mass and lean mass

[santaman2000]

Funny though how the native American population is much smaller, despite the availability of the bison herds, than comparable average where people farmed.....

So what about the farming Native Americans? (basically the entire continent east of the Mississippi River and all of Mezo-America as well as a good portion of South America) Remember, it was the native peoples that taught the early European colonists how to farm here. It was also them who gave us one of the worlds oldest cultivated crop (corn has been domesticated for over 10,000 years) as well as most of today's basic foodstuffs (corn, potatoes, most beans)

 

[Toddy]

They did, and their populations were of the greatest numbers in the North Americas, but the bit we were discussing was those who lived on the herds within the prairies. Similar comparisons could (are) be made with other peoples who rely upon either cattle, goats, pigs, or reindeer.

Mid continental climates make for difficult agriculture until the advent of mechanisation, then the open grasslands are ploughed up (dustbowl when it goes wrong) and the soils are impoverished and need both watered and feeding. Riverine lands are refreshed with seasonal innundations and silt deposits and are habitats to both wild fowl and fish.

Legumes were well known elsewhere. They are amongst the earliest crops. Thing is too, if you mix grains and legumes you get complete proteins it's how the old fashioned vegetarians thrived. Similarly grains and nuts or nuts and legumes. If you have dairy too, and fresh green crops, then it's a very, very good diet.

Humanity has a wonderful ability to change their environment to best suit themselves, to make it more suitable for their chosen foods. (burning for instance, known right back to pre homo sapiens) They also have the ability to make an awful lot of otherwise indigestible food edible simply by cooking it. Other processes, the 'souring' the drying and grinding/pounding etc., (of both grains and meats) help too though.

M

 

[Laurentius]

I would theorize that early farmers worked much harder physically than modern farmers, and were probably just as fit if not more so than hunters.

 

[santaman2000]

....Mid continental climates make for difficult agriculture until the advent of mechanisation, then the open grasslands are ploughed up (dustbowl when it goes wrong) and the soils are impoverished and need both watered and feeding. Riverine lands are refreshed with seasonal innundations and silt deposits and are habitats to both wild fowl and fish.....

Indeed the riverine areas are exactly like that. The Mississippi Delta in northern Mississippi comes to mind.

That said, farming on the mid continental area (by those of European descent) has been large scale since the Homestead Act of 1862. (long before true mechanization) Pre-Columbian problems there were more related to the lack of iron tools to plow through the fibrous mat of the grasses than to weather.

 

[santaman2000]

....Legumes were well known elsewhere. They are amongst the earliest crops. Thing is too, if you mix grains and legumes you get complete proteins it's how the old fashioned vegetarians thrived. Similarly grains and nuts or nuts and legumes. If you have dairy too, and fresh green crops, then it's a very, very good diet....

Yes, legumes were well known before the New World was discovered. Particularly fava beans. That said, the largest number of varieties in today's food supply (Great Northerns, Navy Beans, etc.) are from the new World.

 

[Robson Valley]

Plowing technique, or lack thereof, creates dustbowl conditions. Drought is a single factor.

Once the tall grass and short grass prairie had been plowed under once, you are no longer plowing native grassland.
The outwash plains from the receeding ice cap made soil depths as good as or better than river deltas.
The Regina plains averages 8-10' depth of nutrient rich soil. That region is still rebounding from the ice pressure.
I lived on it.

Maize is the cereal crop of the Americas. But in cultivation, be careful to specify exactly which sort
you are growing in pre-Columbian times. Flint corn, flour corn, dent corn, pop corn and sweet corn.
Pick and name one as their best growing conditions are all different so the regions of cultivation are different.
The shere productivity is hard to match by any other crop.

I'm not so old that even as a kid, we were taught how and when to do the paleo planting of corn (flint and dent corns in our case.)
When the oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, make little hills each with 3 seeds and a dead minnow fish. We did that.

Humans are ingenious. They have explored the values of practically all plants on earth.
There are no new and popular valuable plants utilized within recorded history. All are much older.
Have you seen the recent gentic map for the heritage of apples yet?

 

[Janne]

xxxxxxxxxxxx

 

[Toddy]

Ah, by mechanisation I did mean iron ploughs, even horse drawn ones are very much more effective than the old cas chrom/ footplough.

That said though, it's amazing just how much land a determined individual can turn over using a mattock (pretty much a shoulder blade shaped implement, we know of those and antler picks too, being much used in the past) and a digging stick.
The gardens that Robson Valley mentioned earlier are very much a case in point there.

As for beans….well I know that the ones from the far east, the ones from India, the African ones and those indigenous to Europe have also been exploited over the millennia.
If I recall correctly, the earliest dates we have for cultivated beans are 7000bce in the 'old world (I'm pretty sure that date is from Southeast Asia, and it's later on in Europe itself) and somewhere around 2,000bce in the 'new world'.
Pseudo cereals (millet, buckwheat, etc.,) are also nutritious foods that have been exploited for millenia though.
The figure of 40,000 varieties of beans was given at an ethnobotany lecture I attended years ago.

I know that there are literally hundreds of grains and seeds that were used, still are on occasion, that have never been developed into modern (even for a given value of modern) crops. Their potential is as yet untapped.
A lot of those are the kinds of things that interest bushcrafters though just because they like to know what they can eat.

 

[Robson Valley]

Study wheat. All of the accidental cross-pollinations have been replicated. 14 species in 3 groups.
Of course, they all need only dry storage to be useful for millenia. I met a guy who grows them all and makes up
framed pictures with some of each and every one.

What you will see is that each species represents a handful of useful genetic characters for different purposes.
The diploid Group 1 wheats were single seeded. One species is called 'Einkorn' for that very reason.
However, allowing livestock to graze in the crop meant the stimulation of 'tillering', a multistem, multiseed development.

Among the Group II tetraploid wheats is Durum, the most sought after wheat for it's high protein content for pasta.
Other values? No need for tillering with the spike head of seeds. Greater stem strength so less lodging in the wind.
But, it's tricky to thresh, mechanically without breaking the seed.

Among the Group III hexaploid wheats is Hard Red, the best bread wheat on earth and grown principally in western Canada.
Many varieties now with controlled protein content = the 'strong' and 'weak' flours of the baking world. I use both.
Also, even better stem strength, more seeds in more rows in some varieties. Best? Very easily threshed, mechanically.
You don't have to set the reel so tight to the drum to rub off all the husks without cracking the wheat seeds.

Quinoa is relatively new to my kitchen of just a few years ago. Costly even here but really good to eat for taste.
I guess the bonus is the extraordinary nutritional value, better than any other crop.
What I do read is that supply and demand are such now that the natives on the Altiplano can hardly afford to eat it any more.

 

[Toddy]

Wheat varieties change though through time as technology improves.
The Romans came to conquer Britannia to gain access to the huge grain crops that they wanted, and wanted to deny to Gaulish rebels.
The wheat of the Britons though was harvested by pushing a cart with pointed spokes (making notches) on the front of the bed, through the corn (in the UK corn was/is just whatever crop was grown for bread/ale/porridge) and the seed heads broke off and piled up on the cart bed. The dried seed heads could be more easily threshed than trying to cut the entire corn, stalks and all, and it didn't need so much development from the original wild crop which did give up it's seed to scatter, when humans wanted it to collect.

The apple genetic map is interesting. We know that apples did grow in the British Isles (and Continental Europe) in the Neolithic, but they were the crab apples. The Romans introduced the larger, sweeter apples to Britain later on.
We have such a huge variety of apple crosses in the country now that I think it'd really need a geneticist to work out whether there was any crab within the cultivated ones. There are sweet crab apple around though, and I'm pretty sure that if folks in the past found a tasty apple, they'd spread it's seeds far and wide

M

 

[Robson Valley]

Apple seeds don't breed true. They hybridize and that was the mechanism as they spread both east and west along the Silk Road from Khazakstan.
You're stuck with grafting or some other cloning technique for consistent propagation of any variety. Just to harvest apple seed and stratify that then plant,
there's no predicting what you will get. What we do find is that the technique of grafting is about as old as the varieties of apples, grapes and olives.

Seems what we got in the west are the more tart and harder apples while the preference for soft, sweet apples went east into asia.

Personally, I would now like to see what the DNA analysis would show for olives and grapes!

We have a small apple, Malus pacifica, which is native to the Pacific Northwest part of North America. If there was anything in the east, I have no idea.
When YVR was expanded, ground-truthing discovered a grove of dozens of M. pacifica, planted in rows! The entire grove was relocated.

Corn/Korn is a really ancient word which means little lump. Even "corned beef" refers to the size of the salt crystals.
I do recall a famous painting: "The Gleaners."

 

[santaman2000]

Quinoa is indeed a "pseudo" cereal in that we use it as a cereal even though it's botanically a berry. Millet on the other hand is a grass and the edible part is the seed, so it's a true cereal (not "pseudo")


It amazes me how people still refer to corn in those limited varieties (dent, sweet, cereal, etc.) The corn grown in much of South America is still blue corn; the sweet corn grown here in the Southern US is mostly white corn of at least a dozen different varieties; the corn grown and generally preferred up North is usually yellow corn; Mexico has a wide variety and taste for different corns, but white is prevalent; almost all (but not quite) the corn I ever had in the UK or Europe was field corn rather than sweet corn.

 

[santaman2000]

......Once the tall grass and short grass prairie had been plowed under once, you are no longer plowing native grassland.
The outwash plains from the receeding ice cap made soil depths as good as or better than river deltas.....

Yes, but the deltas have the advantage of replenishing spent minerals with every flood. At least they DID. until modern levees and other means of flood control essentially stopped the annual floods.

 

[Robson Valley]

What has to be taken into account is caloric density. Energetically, what do you get in return for your harvesting effort?
For the lone forager, that means approximately all the edibles found in a 15 km^2 patch. Fill your face, stuff your guts and starve at the same time.
Intense cultivation, agriculture, changed all that. That requires a sedentary population and attention to harvest = most crops can't wait.

The 5 basic types of corn are just that: the basic different kinds of corn that the first european explorers encountered. Pre-Columbus.
The color is the surface. The terms refer to the organization and qualities of the starch inside. Within each of those types were groups of regionally derived varieties.

All of the "flour" corns have soft starch and are most easily milled. Moreover, they are the most drought tolerant.
Flint corn has very hard starch and stores well.
Dent corn has outer hard starch and inner soft starch which makes the dimple in the top of each seed.
This is the most productive and tolerates cooler climate and wetter soils.
Sweet corn has a genetic defect in that the arriving sugars are not quickly turned into starch.
Popcorn = see for yourself. Carefully hammer open a popcorn seed. See the white patch in the middle?
Those are the water storage cells that generated the steam for popping.

Since then, even more artificial selection, plant breeding, has expanded the variety and qualities of corn types.
Most corn breeding research now takes place on the Hawaiian Islands. Three crops a year and the excess corn pollen blows out to sea.
The world's leading authority on the genetics of popcorn was the late Orville Redenbacher.

 

[Toddy]

Quinoa is indeed a "pseudo" cereal in that we use it as a cereal even though it's botanically a berry. Millet on the other hand is a grass and the edible part is the seed, so it's a true cereal (not "pseudo")

You're quite right, I meant buckwheat not millet

 

[Robson Valley]

Ah, buckwheat. I'm fond of using 20% buckwheat flour in things such as pancakes and waffles.
Any more is too bitter as the baking textbooks caution.

 

[santaman2000]

Buckwheat (true buckwheat) has the added advantage of being celiac friendly.

 

[Toddy]

On this topic, I knew that I had a set of notes somewhere on the restoration of overexploited and exhausted soils.
I googled one of the authors and found this rather interesting video. Worth a watch if this kind of thing interests you.

Mattjin van Hoekk on the loess soils of the Chinese/Mongolian plateau.
[video=youtube;bjLV_aVRUmQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ[/video]

The link came from a lecture by John D. Lui who also has videos up on the topic.

M

p.s. if that doesn't run here, the original link is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ

 

[sandsnakes]

Read Gary Taubes Good Calories: Bad Calories. He goes into depth about the utilisation of fat and ketosis. Bottom line is a ketogenic diet is more efficient and energy conserving than a glucogenic diet.

 

[snappingturtle]

I have a question for those that know, living through an ice age I guess are main food would be meat, so if we as a being can live by a restricted diet why is the five a day thing pushed at us so much, surly are body's are still set up for restricted diets?