Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2024 June 20

= June 20 =

Are scientists sure that agriculture only started with the Holocene?
Could there have been agriculture hundreds of thousands of years ago before the last ice age?Rich (talk) 08:12, 20 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Some group of dinosaurs could have had agriculture millions of years ago before they were all wiped out for all we know. But see the big box at he top of this page, one of the things it says is "We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate" NadVolum (talk) 08:19, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Very unlikely. I suggest you read or similar. Agriculture depends on the domestication of crops and animals and its main centres were in areas of the world that were not covered in ice. Hence we would see archaeological traces whenever that had occurred. Mike Turnbull (talk) 09:29, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Ant–fungus mutualism is often considered a form of agriculture, and it developed millions of year ago. --Amble (talk) 17:23, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Humans were slow starters. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:28, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Scientists can never be sure about their theories. A good theory explains the patterns they observe. But errors can creep in, both in the process of obtaining observations and in recording them. Also, in a laboratory experiment one can perhaps make direct uninterpreted measurements, but in the field observations require interpreting the raw data, and the interpretations themselves depend on theories whose validity can also be subject to doubt. A pattern may be manifest while not being due to some underlying process but emerging by pure chance. And, finally, there is always the possibility of new observations uprooting a generally accepted theory. As to human agriculture, the currently best available explanation of the observations is that sedentary agriculture was an innovation that emerged in a few places and spread out from these during the Neolithic. --Lambiam 19:46, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * There may have been some earlier domestication attempts in the warmer periods on either side of the Last Glacial Maximum. I recall hearing that Zohary wondered if wheat didn't go back 20,000+ years, and lately there's been some talk about olives and pine nuts, which of course wouldn't show much in genetic studies as they are long-lived trees. I myself wonder about Vicia palaestina (whose stub I created). What makes this hard to tease out is that if it occurred, it occurred in the same area as the successful domestication events, thus masking the clues. Abductive  (reasoning) 06:16, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

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