What principles do humans use to select food sources?
We will discuss a few more details below. This involves a book called "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Society" by the famous American scholar Jared Diamond. I have only excerpted the smallest parts of the series of facts he listed in this book and made some subtle explanations. Diamond said in the book that there are 148 species of large herbivorous animals in the world, and 5 species can be cultivated by humans as candidates.
First of all, pay attention to herbivory, which is what we usually call herbivory. Why do we humans always cultivate large herbivorous animals as our own source of meat? I would like to emphasize that dogs are an exception here, because humans have not yet entered agricultural civilization. In the past, humans were in the age of hunting and were driven by collecting plants. Therefore, humans wanted to cultivate wolves as hunting assistants. Therefore, this carnivorous animal was cultivated by humans. It was cultivated very early, long before the civilization of agriculture and animal husbandry. Therefore, dogs have never been the main source of human meat. As for dogs, how humans domesticate them is a very complicated issue. It is absolutely impossible for humans to directly breed wolves into dogs. The process of breeding dogs still has a strange natural process. Some scholars have studied that it has to go through the ape-dog stage before entering the human structure. This process is a process of semi-natural selection and unconscious semi-artificial selection. This topic is a bit complicated. I will only talk about it here. Interested students can pursue some biological research.
Why did humans domesticate herbivores? This is because herbivores have the lowest cost. Think about it, if humans breed carnivores and herbivores, assume that the herbivores eat ten pounds of grass to obtain one pound of meat, and the carnivores have to eat ten pounds of meat from herbivores to obtain one pound of meat. . So if humans want to use carnivores as their food source, the cost will be at least ten times greater. This is why most of the cattle, sheep, and pigs bred by humans are herbivores or omnivores. Why do humans only cultivate 14 species? Please note that only 14 species of herbivores, the main large carnivores cultivated by humans, are cultivated out of 148 species, and their distribution areas are uneven. For example, cattle mainly occur in Southwest Asia, North Africa and India. Goats and sheep mainly come from Lianghe, horses mainly come from Central Asia and Ukraine; donkeys come from Egypt; pigs, buffaloes and small animals, chickens, are products of East Asia and may have been the first to be cultivated by the Chinese; yaks are produced in Tibet; so far, only large animals are left in the Americas Herbivore alpaca. Its global distribution is uneven.
Why do humans breed different herbivores in different areas? It is because the occurrence process of human civilization is a natural and spontaneous connection process. I always emphasize this point because when many scholars discuss this issue, they believe that human civilization is accidental, and that accidental conditions brought about by the natural phenological conditions in different regions contributed to the occurrence of civilization. They came to the completely opposite conclusion to me. He believed that human civilization is an accidental phenomenon, or a combination of accidental phenomena. If our civilization always has to connect with nature, and if the process of connecting our civilization with nature is an involuntary and spontaneous process, then not only does it not show that our civilization is accidental, but it is more conducive to proving that our civilization is a A natural, spontaneous process that is non-selective.
Let me give you an example. First of all, let’s take a look at this place in America: 14,000 years ago, modern sapiens migrated there, but at this time, human behavioral capabilities, or the state of intellectual development, were already very advanced. For example, when humans first arrived in the Americas, they already had the ability to use javelins, which caused the rapid extinction of a large number of large herbivores originally distributed in the Americas. Human beings on the Eurasian and African continents could not wipe out large herbivores because their early behavioral abilities were stone tool abilities. Before large herbivores became extinct, they had begun to gradually cultivate these herbivores as livestock, so they had the conditions for large domesticated animals to be used. There used to be these large herbivores naturally in the Americas, but when they migrated to that place, they suddenly became highly capable hunters. In a short period of time, they wiped out all the large herbivores on the European and American continents, leaving only the alpacas in the mountains of South America, which had serious consequences.
As we all know, on November 16, 1532, a man named Francisco Pizarro in Spain led only 168 Spanish soldiers. They rode war horses, held firearms, and faced Against the Inca Empire's 80,000 legions, they actually scattered the legions, and then captured the Inca King Atahualta alive, causing the Inca Empire to collapse instantly, known in history as the Cajamarca Conflict. Why? It was because the Spaniards at that time were riding war horses and holding firearms, but the Americans had never seen war horses. They thought that these people riding mythical beasts and holding thunderbolt firearms were simply heavenly soldiers. The 80,000-strong army was frightened and dispersed. The Incas The imperial king was captured alive, and the Inca Empire fell. What does it mean? An abnormal connection occurs in the middle of a natural process, which will cause a huge collapse of the civilization process. It shows how high the requirements for the connection between the process of civilization and nature are.
In the early years, humans domesticated dogs as hunting animals. Looking back today, we think this was a very stupid choice. Because dogs have extremely poor fighting ability against large carnivores. Everyone knows that when encountering a wolf, a tiger, a lion, or a bear, as long as these animals bark, the dog will retreat in fright. How can it serve as man's most effective hunting assistant? Humans should have tamed cheetahs because cheetahs are the fastest! It is most reasonable to use it as a domesticated hunting assistant. But why didn't he tame the cheetah? In fact, the reason is ridiculous, because the courtship process of the cheetah is too complicated. When a male cheetah woos a female cheetah, he has to run at least hundreds of kilometers or even 200 kilometers, and it takes three months to complete the courtship process. Therefore, cheetahs cannot breed under human breeding conditions, so humans have to use that terrible dog as a hunting assistant. What does it mean? It shows that as long as you cannot connect with this natural docking point, civilization cannot become a budding point of expansion in this place.
Let me give you another example. Humans have domesticated horses, but we have never seen any nation riding a zebra. Why? In Africa, and actually in Eurasia in the early years, zebras have never been domesticated by humans, and it is because of a very small reason. Although zebras are very docile like horses, in the process of artificial breeding, if a zebra gets angry and bites you, it will not let go. Therefore, all zebra owners eventually have to give up on domesticating zebras. Such a small reason leads to the failure of zebra domestication.
Let me give you another example: why humans have bred sheep and goats, but have never been able to domesticate antelopes. Antelopes are found all over the world, and they still exist in large numbers in Africa today because their sensory sensitivity is too high and they are too fragile. In captivity, it will start a group at the slightest vibration. Everyone knows that swarms of animals raised by humans can cause large-scale abortions in pregnant female animals. For such a small reason, antelopes have never been domesticated by humans. Human civilization appears to be a selection process, but in fact selection does not hold. It is just a continuation of the natural process.
Let’s look at human agricultural civilization next. In fact, humans give plants with larger particles among herbaceous plants another name. Please note that this is an artificial name for grasses. Humans cultivated and domesticated these plants into food. The distribution of grasses is extremely uneven. For example, only in the north of the Mesopotamia Mesopotamia, there is a crescent-like area, which is called the Fertile Crescent by historians. It is a fertile land like a crescent. Only in this area More than 33 of the 56 species of large grasses appear locally, which makes the Mesopotamian civilization the most abundant species cultivation sequence and base among human agricultural civilizations.
Many scholars want to use this to prove that human civilization is all accidental, but I want to explain that this just shows that human civilization is strictly limited by natural processes. Let me give you a few examples. Everyone knows that the earliest leguminous plant cultivated by humans is called chickpea. So why was the chickpea the first leguminous plant cultivated in the Mesopotamia? This is because for all leguminous plants, their beans are their seeds. Once their seeds mature, their pods must burst open and spread their seeds, otherwise this species will become extinct. Only a very small number of chickpea pods do not open when the inner beans are ripe. Only when the pods do not open and the seeds are not scattered all over the ground can humans focus on picking. Because of such a small difference, the origin of leguminous plants, the leguminous family cultivated by humans, and the origin of plants, started with chickpeas.
Let me give you another example, almonds.
All fruit cores are inedible. Try biting into an apple seed. So why do humans eat almonds? Be aware of all fruit pits, it must be poisonous. Because the reason why it grows very sweet fruits is to attract animals to eat it and help it spread its seeds. If animals chewed up the seeds, the species would become extinct. Therefore, the cores in all fruits are poisonous and cannot be eaten. They will taste bitter in your mouth. Only almonds undergo very few mutations, and their cores are actually sweet. So in the early years, humans would collect wild apricots with sweet cores and apricots that were too small to eat, just to collect their cores and use them as breeding objects. Let me give you another example, cotton. The flocculent fiber of all plants is used to carry seeds over long distances. Therefore, once all catkins mature, they will fly all over the sky and cannot be picked by humans. Only cotton, which is also a very rare species among cotton, still does not float for a considerable period of time when its seeds mature. Therefore, humans cultivated this variant part and formed the source of human cotton plant fiber utilization.
I am talking about this to explain the process of human beings using that species. It seems to be a man-made choice, but in fact the choice does not hold. It is actually a forced docking of natural processes.
Let me give you an example, such as New Guinea. I talked about this place before. Although humans settled very early, civilization was delayed in that place. When modern Europeans went to that place, they found that they were in a barbaric state of existence and were not civilized at all. However, they had an amazing ability. They were actually able to capture bats flying in the air at night, and they did so on a large scale, using nets to capture them. This was something that European and Eurasian civilized people could not do back then. Why? This is because the islands of New Guinea, the Pacific islands, do not have high-protein foods or natural species with high protein content. They can cultivate the main product of their area, called taro. Its protein content is too low, which forces the local people to People must find sources of meat and protein. So although they were generally uncivilized, they had extremely high skills in obtaining protein sources.
Let me give another example. As you all know, rice was invented by people from the south of China’s Yangtze River Basin, that is, the people with the male genetic code M122 I mentioned earlier. The earliest we know about rice is Tanhuan at the Hemudu site in Yuyao, Zhejiang. It was cultivated by people in southern China 7,000 years ago. We used to think that this was the place where rice first originated, but a few years ago there was a major discovery in Chinese archaeology. A primitive archaeological site was discovered in a place called Jiahu in southern Henan, and actually a beach 8,000 years ago was found. Huan, what does it mean? This shows that the rice crop was first developed by the civilized people of the Central Plains in the Yellow River Basin. But why it did not become the staple food of the civilized people in the Central Plains, and eventually became the basic food source only in the south, is because the protein content in rice is too low. What does this sentence mean? Everyone should know that the protein content of the general grains we cultivate is about 11% or more. For example, wheat has a protein content of 11% to 14%. If humans want to obtain the most basic protein supply in their own food, the content cannot be less than 8%. The protein content of rice is only 4%, which means that if rice is simply used as a food source, serious protein deficiency will occur, leading to severe liver damage and organ damage. So people in the Yellow River Basin had to abandon the rice that was first developed. So why can rice be used as a staple food in Jiangnan? In fact, the reason is very simple, because the place where rivers and lakes intersect is a land of plenty. While eating rice, people can constantly catch carnivorous fish to supplement their protein. So rice flourished in the south.
All civilization processes are the connection between us and nature, as well as our own inner requirements for survival, which constitute the node of the origin of civilization. Please note that I use a word. I call this external natural structure and natural relationship, as well as the overall matching relationship with our internal physiological evolutionary structure, survival structure. I remind everyone to remember the meaning of this word. It is by no means the meaning of the word productivity in the general sense, but a natural term. This concept is key to our understanding of the origins of civilization.
The development process of human civilization is completely a natural process. This natural process includes the synthesis of natural environmental conditions and human evolution's own conditions. We call the process of civilization structure generation formed by integrating natural processes the survival structure of Homo sapiens.
To what extent does this natural process or these natural conditions limit us? Let’s look at another example below. Some cultural scholars have found that when human civilization occurred in its early days, it could only spread in the latitudinal direction. The original human civilization mainly occurred in the Eurasian and African continents, roughly distributed in mid-latitude or subtropical areas, and spread on a latitudinal horizontal axis. On the earth, those continental plates that form a meridional arrangement cannot become a prosperous development area for primitive civilization. Why is this happening? Because of its latitudinal distribution, its natural climate and phenological conditions are relatively uniform. Therefore, human beings have primitive agricultural and animal husbandry civilization. At this stage of relying on the sky, it is more convenient for it to spread in the latitudinal direction without any obstacles. Everyone imagines that the African continent and the American continent, because they are long continents distributed in a north-south meridional direction and run upward, will cause drastic changes in climate and rainfall conditions as the latitude changes. Therefore, in the stage of agricultural civilization, its spread process will be seriously hindered. Such a tiny natural factor actually became a natural defining factor in the scope of the development of early human civilization. From this we can see how important and decisive influence natural factors have on human civilization.