Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Every so often, I see another media story about how a new kind of nuclear reactor that avoids all the horrible problems of the ones we have now is being studied, or a startup is looking to build one, or whatever. Don't be afraid of nuclear power, these articles proclaim, there is new, better technology that will resolve all the problems with the bad old reactors. The nuclear technologies I've seen mentioned like this make up a venn diagram of fast neutron reactors, molten salt reactors, and thorium reactors.

And these kinds of stories come from a mix of hucksterism and religion. Just as we have a religion of space enthusiasm (where solar power stations or helium 3 or whatever bullshit technology becomes the rallying cry for the religion's real goal, of having a city on the moon/Mars/in orbit, and having people permanently *Living in Space*), and the religion helps sustain huckster snake oil plutocrats who don't really care about space at all except as a way of siphoning off government subsidies and pumping up stock prices for their space technology companies -- so too we have a religion of Nuclear Power (it's the Future!), and nuclear power technology companies whose plutocrats have snake oil to sell. (PS: my data-free impression is that space enthusiasts vastly outnumber space hucksters, but for nuclear power, the ratio is much more even or perhaps reversed).

Some nuclear power advocates have at least half a leg to stand on (solar and wind are not 24/7/365 power sources, and nuclear power plants *are* a carbon-free way to provide round the clock power regardless of weather). But solar has become SO much cheaper than fossil fuel, let alone nuclear, that it leaves budgetary headroom for adding some kind of power storage to a solar farm and still being less expensive than the alternatives - and solar powered storage (like a lake that you pump full during the day and drain through hydroelectric generators at night) completely avoids all the regulatory and PR hassles of nuclear power.

Other nuclear advocates seem to Want to Believe in nuclear because they are right wing and regard solar as tainted by the leftist eco green conspiracy, or something? IDK.

But after encountering another "the new generation of (insert technical descriptor) nuclear power plants will completely avoid all the problems you've come to expect from nuclear power" article, I decided to try and figure out just how much truth there is to such articles. After picking away at the question for a while, I'm finally typing everything up so my time will not have been completely wasted. The rest of this post comes from reading far, far too many web pages (mostly on wikipedia but also elsewhere) devoted to nuclear power. ( Read more... )

Having read far too much and gone down far too many rabbit holes, I think I can say confidently that 90% of the claims in articles touting the bright future of new! improved! no longer dangerous or scary! nuclear power are hogwash. Things those articles tout nearly always involve making proliferation-enabling technologies routine (no one other than members of the Church of Nukes want this), assume that technologies still on the drawing board will work out as advertised (they never do), and/or gloss over many, many hard to solve problems. Meanwhile, right now, we already have the ability to just use renewables paired with energy storage. We soon won't need nuclear power anymore, yet somehow there are still scads of acolytes of the Nuclear Church who refuse to accept that their God has become irrelevant.

I've been having Thinky Thoughts about the racist, colonialist gatekeeping that goes on in archaeology and anthropology around which groups of people get to be called "agriculturalists" and which end up labelled as "hunter gatherers". Sources like wikipedia say the distinction is important because agriculture enables settled living, with higher population densities, and that in turn enables craft specialization, surplus resources, long term infrastructure, having nicer things, and so on.

But there are so many groups of people who did live in permanent or semi-permanent settlements and were able to have some or all of those knock on benefits, but who continue to be classed as "hunter gatherers" because they didn't *farm*. Or they didn't *plant crops*, even though they did maintain and harvest vast stands of edible wild plants. As research continues to turn up more and more examples of people who weren't nomads living sparsely in small groups and collecting only naturally occurring food sources, the "hunter gatherer" category looks more and more like a catch all for "anyone who doesn't make a living like our wheat growing ancestors."

The gatekeeping isn't only about restricting admittance to the sacred precincts of the "agriculturalist" club, it's also about preventing the creation of additional in-between labels to properly encompass the spectrum of strategies humans have used to feed themselves other than farming. Maintaining the dichotomy is vital to preserving the specialness of the agriculturalist in group and the subaltern status of everyone else. Instead, you find half-assed labels like "enhanced," "complex," or "affluent hunter gatherers." Even though the adjective and non-adjective groups share little in common apart from not being farmers. And even though the closer you look, the fewer regular food collecting cultures there were compared to (pick adjective) cultures.

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I originally planned to say something about forest gardens and some of the other people in the world who get classed as (adjective) hunter gatherers instead of farmers or farming-adjacent, but this post has grown too long, so there will be a part 2.

To recap: there was a thread on Twitter by Incunabula that went viral a few weeks ago. In James Burke-ian Connections style, Incunabula says that "Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓." When I re-watched James Burke's "Connections" a year or so ago, in the places where I actually knew some of the history he was covering, mostly I just found myself thinking, "that's way oversimplified and leaving out a lot in order to sound neat." But sometimes, I would think, "that's just not so." This post covers one of the "that's just plain false" parts of Incunabula's highly Eurocentric and inaccurate thread.

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Eurocentric history tends to be very self-congratulatory. "(European guy) invented (arguably very important technology)," and "(historical change of import) happened because of (thing european or Greco-Roman people did)." It gets very tiresome, especially when the technology in question was actually invented hundreds or thousands of years earlier, far outside of the Euro-Greco-Roman sphere.

Today's example: a thread by Incunabula on Twitter. In James Burke-ian Connections style, he says that "Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓." Sigh. Burke's "Connections" blew my mind when I was eight. Because I was too young to notice how a shallow, facile and simplified, all white, mostly male narrative was being constructed from a far richer and larger history.

Today I'm tackling two of Incunabula's five things: cheese (parchment) and Christianity (the adoption of the codex). My primary source for most of what follows is an online version of "The Birth of the Codex" by Colin Roberts and T C Skeat, supplemented by Wikipedia and lots of blog posts/articles found via google. The online version of Birth of the Codex includes (in green and red text) incomplete edits and updates of the original book

1. "Cheese" (aka, parchment/vellum):
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How much did Christianity's extremely early and wholehearted embrace of codexes have to do with the switch from scrolls to codexes? Not a lot. Christians were a tiny minority in a vast empire until well into the 3rd century. By the time Christianity became a major force in the empire (~300 AD), the switch to codexes was already underway. Clearly the rise of Christianity to the empire's official religion in the 4th century greatly accelerated the transition, but the evidence doesn't point to Christians being the starter of the trend.

Another thinky post. This one has been brewing for a while. Unless otherwise indicated, links are open access/not paywalled. (ETA: see comments for some interesting things/extra thoughts that didn't fit in this monster of a post)

I started googling articles about the origins of cities and agriculture due to my disaffection with the opening parts of Karen Armstrong's "Fields of Blood," where she assumes that military violence and structural inequality are necessary ingredients to creating a civilization, and links "civilization" (ie, inequality and warfare) to the invention of agriculture. That didn't sit well with my memory of Catal Huyuk, one of the earliest known cities, 6,000-ish people living in a town on the south coast of Turkey about 9000 years ago. Catal Huyuk had no city wall or other signs of military defences. It also had no temples or palaces, with minimal signs of social inequality. Just a community of thousands of people living in peace, trading obsidian tools for luxury goods from distant communities.

And then more recently I read an article about Gobekli Tepe, the oldest megalithic site yet found. It's a large worship complex in Turkey near the border with Syria that was built starting 11,500 years ago, by people who did not yet have domesticated plants or animals. And that turns the conventional model of the history of cities on its head.

The traditional model of prehistory, which Armstrong hews to, holds that hunter gatherers had extremely low population densities, with bands of 40-ish people occupying a large home range. In places like the fertile crescent, wild precursors to crops provided them with enough food that they could settle down and begin the process of inventing agriculture. That process is supposed to have begun around the end of the ice age, when human-influenced mass extinction of megafauna made big game hunting no longer a viable survival strategy, and when the climate became warmer, wetter, more stable, and generally congenial to the invention of gardening. Farming started out in small communities, and only over time as the total food surplus increased and trade fostered more specialized crafts did hamlets become villages, towns, and cities. But Gobekli Tepe was a fair sized community of (technically) hunter-gatherers existing before plant or animal domestication.

Which made me go pull Jane Jacobs' Economy of Cities off the shelf. Jacobs's book is a pro-urbanist argument that cities are central and primary to the economy of the surrounding lands, contrary to the tendency of urban planners, architects, economists, and other thinkers from the 19th and early 20th century to regard cities as a bad thing, an aberration of capitalist development that should be done away with when creating planned communities. But Jacobs starts the book by arguing that cities existed before agriculture, that it was urban living that created the necessary conditions for the development of agriculture - on the one hand, providing the necessary gathering of minds needed to spur intellectual ferment and technological progress, and on the other, creating a logistical problem of feeding an ever-growing urban population, to which animal husbandry and agriculture were the solutions.

Archaeologists dismissed that part of her book, and urbanists that praise the rest of it tend to glide in embarrassment over the first section. But now we have Gobekli Tepe. A community of hundreds (judging by how much work was required to build the megalithic temples) of settled, non-nomadic people who didn't have domesticated crops or animals.

Exactly how large the community was isn't yet clear - until very recently no houses had been found, and it was thought that people didn't live there full time, but just came together from the surrounding lands to build shrines, worship, and then dispersed to nomadic hunter-gathering again once a shrine was completed. Which makes little sense, of course, but archaeologists are very good at swallowing camels and straining at gnats when those camels and gnats are inconvenient to their preconceived ideas about what early people did and did not do. A few years ago, in the process of constructing a visitor's centre at the site, including a big permanent tent to shelter the excavated megaliths, they finally dug deeply enough to find houses, and the picture changed from a collection of temples in the wilderness to a more sensible one of a town of people who devoted a lot of resources to building worship spaces.

A town, but not really a town of hunter-gatherers, except technically. They didn't have domesticated animals and the bones of animals found in their kitchen waste show they hunted extensively, but Gobekli Tepe is in the middle of the part of the fertile crescent where agriculture was invented, and it flourished in the immediate pre-agricultural era, when people were perfecting their skills at raising and harvesting edible wild plants.

But first we need to backtrack. The myth of "man the hunter" refuses to die. Early people were not hunter gatherers but gatherer hunters - if they are anything at all like modern non-agricultural peoples, meat from hunting was only 20% of their diet. But because bones don't decay like plants, archaeologists see the evidence of hunting first, and evidence of plant gathering second and only if they use microscopes to examine the dirt adhering to stone tools and containers for tiny fragments of seeds. 19th and early 20th century archaeologists washed their finds, which eliminated the clues needed to verify what plants the people who used those tools had been processing. Archaeological techniques have advanced, and an article from 2010 reports that unwashed grinding stones from diverse sites in Europe showed signs that the owners has used them to process grass seeds and cattail roots, as far back as 30,000 years ago. That's deep in the depths of the last ice age.

We also know that ice age humans were harvesting the wild ancestors of modern domesticated crops. At Ohalo II, a cluster of 23,000 year old huts and hearths on the shore of what is now the Sea of Galilee (back then a single body of water encompassing the Dead Sea, Jordan River, and Sea of Galilee called Lake Lisan), stone sickles were found, as well as remains of wild wheat, barley, and other grains (the site burned, then quickly afterward flooded when the level of the sea rose. Charring followed by anaerobic conditions led to excellent preservation of organic material like plant parts. The site was discovered when a drought temporarily lowered the lake level several meters in the late 80's). Furthermore, a genetic analysis of plant parts found in archaeological sites across the Fertile Crescent indicated that humans had started to select against the genes controlling seed dispersal (genes dealing with the shattering of ripe ears of grain) up to 25,000 years ago for emmer wheat and 32,000 years ago for einkorn wheat.

Which throws the entire "agriculture happened when it did because the ice age was over" meme in the trash heap. Contemporaries of the people hunting mammoths were practising agriculture in the wetter fringes of the harsh desert that filled the middle east during the last glacial maximum. During the LGM, roughly between 31,000 and 16,000 years ago, the entire planet was much colder and much dryer than today (check out the vegetation map, and note that "Extreme desert" means less than 2% plant cover - basically like the dry parts of the Sahara desert today).

But, and a big but: that map is rather coarse grained and doesn't allow for rivers or microclimates. The Nile still existed, at a reduced rate of flow, and the upper Nile backed up behind sand dunes to create lakes in the desert where people lived and fished on the shore. The Tigris and Euphrates also still existed. Lower sea levels meant the Persian Gulf was a dry river valley surrounded by harsh desert. While the homes of the people who lived there are now underwater, the sudden appearance of people (paywalled) to either side of the gulf immediately after the sea level rose suggests that humans made their homes in the bottom of the gulf, then were forced to migrate into the less hospitable surrounding deserts when it became flooded. And in Palestine, the shores of Lake Lisan were fertile enough to support humans despite the entire area being "extreme desert" according to the map.

So, agriculture (in the sense of humans planting and harvesting grains like wheat) got its start not in the fertile Holocene after the ice had melted and the planet warmed up, but during the worst, most brutal parts of the last ice age. Forests were a lot sparser and more limited in extent during the ice age, but I don't doubt that where there were forests, humans were creating forest gardens back then as well.

And at this point we're starting to get far enough back in time to tangle with another mental block archaeologists have, and another extremely racist myth that I was peeved to see Karen Armstrong perpetuating: that "cognitively modern humans" got their start much more recently than anatomically modern humans. Something was lacking, the myth says, in Homo Sapiens before 40-50,000 years ago (Armstrong says 20,000, which is even more ridiculous, since we do have widely accepted and extremely well dated examples of "modern" tools, art, etc from well before then), something mental that suddenly changed, "coincidentally" around the time they started spreading out from Africa. Believers in the myth point to the seeming explosion in the diversity of human tools and artefacts around that time. Sceptics patiently dig up examples of "modern" tools from much older sites, and defend their reality as artefacts, their dating, and their interpretation against vehement attack. Eventually, one hopes, the mental block will be discarded for the racist claptrap that it is, the refusal to see early, mostly African humans as qualified to be counted as "human" in the same way as their descendants who left Africa.

This is related to the mental block archaeologists have against admitting that early humans could produce art, such that any obvious examples of art found that date before a certain time frame get ignored, attacked as not actually made by humans, or attacked as not actually as old as proponents think. Which brings me to another book (last one, I promise!), "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" in which Richard Rudgley doesn't address the myth of cognitive modernity directly, but attacks it by attacking the refusal to give legitimacy to artefacts and art that are deemed "too old to actually be art/advanced technology."

So, when did agriculture get its start? It's very hard to say, especially since many of the best sites for gardening during the ice age are now under the ocean. But clearly, it wasn't 12,000 years ago, and it wasn't in response to the extinction of megafauna or the moderating of climate as the glaciers melted.

Even if we restrict ourselves to people who had domesticated plants (the last 12,000 years), at least half of the age of agriculture happened before humans invented inequality, wealth hoarding, and empire building, the violence that Armstrong sees as inseparable from civilization. If we include the long period of gardening plants as they gradually became domesticated (and Gobekli Tepe shows that such gardening was productive enough to support towns of at least a few hundred people engaged in major construction projects), then the age of inequality and brutality that Armstrong equates to civilization has been around for only a quarter of the time in which humans had the ability to build towns and have food surpluses.

Inequality isn't inextricable from civilization, it's just one approach that has violently exterminated all the other approaches it came in contact with throughout history.

Another thinky thought post brought on by a video seeking to answer the question why Europeans enslaved Africans specifically.

And while the video didn't contain any misinformation, it felt a bit incomplete because I've recently read David Graeber's "Debt the first 5000 years," and because of a recent post on the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry Blog which talked about slavery in the process of critiquing a world conquest strategy video game

( Read more... )Lastly, have a table from Debt, showing just how miserably poor Europe was compared to essentially everyone else in Eurasia, even when comparing them to nations from centuries or millennia previous. Crappy climate > low agricultural productivity > low population densities > few and small cities > economic backwater.

Copying just one column of data from a table showing population and tax revenue for several ancient and early medieval nations:

Persia 350 BCE, 41 grams of silver per person per year
Egypt 200 BCE, 55 grams,
Rome 1 CE 17 grams,
Rome 150 CE 21 grams,
Byzantium 850 CE 15 grams,
Abbasids, 850 CE 48 grams,
T'ang, 850 CE 43 grams
France 1221 2.4 grams
England 1203 4.6 grams

(note: A lot of this is inspired by the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog's series last fall on premodern subsistence farming, and especially their addendum on rice)

Premodern subsistence farmers organized their farms not around maximizing yield, but around doing all they could to ensure their family did not starve. Extended families of 8-ish people would farm just a couple hectares of land. Over time large farms would shrink as siblings each took their share of an inheritance, until they hit the minimum size farm needed to produce enough food for everyone. This is true of all premodern farmers, from China to Europe. Everything was organized around guaranteeing, as much as possible, that no one in the family would starve between one harvest and the next. Each family would would work several small fields scattered around the village where they lived, with each field in a different terrain with a different microclimate. If one area around the village had too much or too little water in a year, or if one hillside was blighted by disease or pests, everyone in the village would be a little worse off but no families would face complete destruction. Reducing the risk of starvation was the main priority, not producing a surplus of food to feed to non-farmers.

Staying alive was a community effort. If one farm was pillaged (legally by the aristocracy or illegally by bandits), suffered a sudden death, or had an unusually bad harvest despite its scattered fields, other families in the village would help out. It's common to talk about this in capitalist terms, but that projects modern economic concepts of money and debt onto a past that was not capitalist but communalist. Money debt and a market economy existed, of course, but it was imposed on the farmers and the village community from above by the wealthy and by the towns and cities that sold vital speciality goods to the farmers nearby.

All of that is universal regardless of what the farmers are growing. But the requirements of rice and wheat farming produced vastly different social systems and vastly different societies. ( Read more... )

In the rice belt of Asia, farmers did not have to pay their lords a fee in order to keep their families fed. They were self-sufficient in a way their wheat-raising counterparts were not and could not be. And at the same time their communities engaged in multigenerational projects to create more farmable land, projects that were simply impossible for their wheat-raising counterprarts in Europe. I don't know enough about the history of China and other rice-based nations to say much about the impact this had on the very different histories of the two regions, but it does give food for thought.

One last thing: traditional farming in Europe and America is all but extinct. Essentially no one still grows wheat in order to eat it themselves, and all farmers, even the Amish, are more concerned with producing crops to sell than with feeding themselves. Farming families work far more than two hectares, and they don't worry about divvying up fields into small bits to minimize microclimate failure. In the rice belt, on the other hand, modern farmers still farm in the traditional way. They use fertilizer and high yield breeds of rice which let them produce a large surplus to sell, but the essential system - of small fields created with vast amounts of labour, flooded and farmed with even more labour - remains the same.