One morning, years ago, when I had a management job with the Queensland sugar industry, I received a phone call from a fellow in the Department of Environment. He wanted to run an idea past me. He started explaining how they had a problem with wastewater at the abattoirs in Innisfail and there was funding available if the local sugarcane growers would consider taking this water to irrigate their crops. He enthusiastically suggested that it was potentially a win-win with the abattoir finding a use for this waste product and the farmers a subsidised source of water to irrigate their crops.
Before I had a chance to respond he was quoting irrigation costs for the total Queensland industry, and what a 25 percent reduction could mean locally.
When I finally got a word in, I said, but Innisfail is not an irrigation district. The problem for the farmers in Innisfail is how to get water off the paddock, not onto it. Innisfail has an average annual rainfall of more than 3 metres each year – it is a wet place, even though Australia is generally considered a dry continent.
People tend to generalise and extrapolate from the little they know and understand.
This bureaucrat thought that all sugarcane farmers irrigated their crops. I explained that this only happened in the irrigation districts; that life was easier for farmers in places like Innisfail – they had a lot more time for fishing. In fact, sugarcane farmers harvest just once a year, they only plant the crop once every 4 – 6 years with the ratoons growing back after each harvest, and efficient farmers hardly need to weed if they have a good mulch layer. And outside of irrigation regions they don’t even water their crop.
We have this idea that the dutiful farmer is sedentary, and ever present planting, weeding, watering, harvesting.
But it could be that those Australian Aborigines who planted and harvested where absent in between – gone walking and fishing for extended periods of time. I have not problems with the idea of a nomad who returns just occasionally to harvest not too concerned if the crop fails. Does this mean they are not really a farmer, and certainly not an agriculturalist.
The first chapter in Bruce Pascoe book Dark Emu begins with comment that he is writing specifically to refute the notion that ‘Aboriginal people were only hunter-gatherers.’
Indeed, the book is a polemic, and should be read as such.
Bruce Pascoe unashamedly sets out to challenge traditional notions of what it was to be an Aboriginal – pre-European settlement of Australia. He provides example after example of Aborigines harvesting yam, and example after example of them harvesting grains.
He does include a whole section on the ‘domestication of food plants’ and concludes that ‘Australian grains became dependent on the intervention of Aboriginal peoples, and the wide grasslands, monocultures of grains, were the result of this deliberate manipulation’.
He goes on to discuss the propagation of other bush tuckers.
He clearly states on page 58, that ‘It may be that not all Aboriginal people were involved in these [agricultural] practices.’
It seems that those who have become obsessed with proving Bruce Pascoe wrong can’t image what life might have been like for a people who liked to both wander and plant – they can’t image anything beyond the traditional concept of the farmer who keeps everything within cages and fence lines on land that they own or lease. That they have control over.
I move a lot and I like planting things. I’ve a chilli bush, lemongrass, basil, and tomato growing in pots on the veranda of this rented apartment that gives me a view to the horizon. I’ve already planted, without first asking permission, some of the chilli seeds in a communal garden along one of the walkways to the beach. I know there are chilli bushes growing in the garden where I last lived, and I planted them. I like to know that should anything happen to the bush on my veranda I can find replacements – that I would grow again from seed.
I like to plant things, but I don’t have a garden of my own. Over this summer I grew 15 tall Russian sunflowers for my elderly mother – in her garden. The flowers were enormous: we harvested so much seed. She thinks we should work out how to de-husk it and then eat it. I suggested instead she give it all away, in little envelopes to neighbours, friends and family for them to plant – and there will still be much left over. I grew the plants from very few seeds bought at Bunnings to make my mother happy – for the flowers – and to see how tall they would grow, which was more than 2 metres. I haven’t the patience to now shell the seed. If we worked out how to shell the sunflower seeds, and if we then sold it, rather than giving it all away, would that make us farmers?
There has been some criticism of Bruce Pascoe confounding the spreading of seed as part of ritual with planting of seed for food – with the former apparently meaning they weren’t really agriculturalists.
Before Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu it was not generally known that there existed Australian Aborigines – pre-European settlement – who harvested grain and made it into a bread. This now seems to be accepted, though the argument is whether they planted it, and if they did, whether they hung around to irrigate and weed it.
John Singer says
I am sorry Jennifer but wishing something was so does not make it so. Nobody is suggesting that the aboriginal people were not intelligent or they didn’t know what foods were edible or where they grew. But they were not farmers, they did not plant crops. I do not say that because they did not till the soil, I say it because they did not tend the crop. Masonobu Fukoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He planted rice and other crops without tilling and he knew that birds would eat unburied seed so he painstakingly coated each seed so it was encased in clay and sowed that knowing when the rains came they would sprout. Australian Aboriginal people did not have that type of patience they were not that sedentary. His book “The One Straw Revolution” displays a way of thinking which would be just as foreign to Aboriginal people as it was to farmers of the East and West. Any form of farming without machines or beasts of burden relies on hand tools, fencing, the ability to carry water and the need for a sedentary existence. To my knowledge there is no archeological evidence of these together anywhere in pre-colonial Australia.
Ross Wilson says
Complete drivel… people need to disregard this ignorant nonsense which has been completely disproved by thousands of carefully documented reports
Patrick Donnelly says
Population density creates cities and therefore farming and horticulture.
The initial population of Australia would not support horticulture. It was not needed. Land was free.
The grind has progressed massively in Europe and worse in Asia. Land is closed and owned. Everything is intense.
Agriculture aquaculture is sufficient. Many people simply have no understanding and never will.
George Bernard Shaw, Nobel and Oscar winner, said 2% of people can think. Another 3% can be taught to think.
Publishing is a reward for services rendered and a form of propaganda. It also can be educational, but very few learn
John says
Sad that the only comments l can see are seemingly from white privileged control freak wankers who can’t recall what they look like as soon as they walk away from the mirror let alone have any idea of the lifestyles of any people 300+ years ago. Their opinions are seemingly derived from nothing more than the literature of opposing views rather than direct research of their own having discussions with the elders of “1st nations people” . How blind are the people who argue only that the history they’ve been indoctrinated with is factual when they won’t admit or are completely ignorant of the fact “Australia” was founded on white mans lies and corruption ,continues to exist on lies upon lies and corruption . The winners of wars invent history to suit themselves and their agenda for future control of the nations they invade and this debate about dark emu is quite superfluous in all reality , although if the book jolts the people enough to start letting go of their indoctrinated false reality then it’s doing what the author intends . Shouldn’t you all rather be concerned about the war you’re in the middle of right now against the united nations one world corporate government social credit system control systems and what the future might be like for your children . Thanks for the invitation to come here Jennifer which l readily accepted because lm in fb jail again 😂 l would love to see your hot chilli bush on the veranda one day . Harbenaro or jalapeños . 🔥😱😜
Bruce says
Patrick:
The reverse is more applicable The advent of specialist “agriculturalists” made cities possible.
If EVERYBODY is fully employed locating, acquiring, and “processing” food, including the fabrication of useful and / or “decorative” artifacts from bones and hides, there is not much of a pool left from which to draw builders and so on.
Why did early civilizations arise near large river systems along which there was a distinct “farming culture”.
Another thing usually forgotten is that humans are generally an invasive species and many times have a different “hunting and gathering” strategy: raiding and piracy, which continues to this day. From basic theft, assault and robbery, to national level “nationalization”, regional to global war and conquest, “compulsory acquisition” etc..
Costumes, weapons and modes of transport have changed, but the basic mindset has not.
Lots of historical fables (and modern examples) about “makers and takers”. Modern “communication methods” have been “creative” in muddying those waters, especially the contemporary ones.
All is NOT sweetness and light in this world. If you have something, be it an item, food, just a small plot of dirt or an “attractive” family member, there is likely to be some bozo with a hankering to take it from you, or to “tax” you, or otherwise “make you an offer you can’t refuse”.
Frances Lilian Wellington says
Well, I only plant what we (3) can eat. I tend to overdo things a bit so there’s always actually just a bit more than what we 3 end up eating. I only water the immature seedlings, then leave it to the skies to provide. As a postie I ask for regular rain, but not too much so I can get my work done without stock getting wet and struggling with mud… and I joke with customers who complain about the weather that they might consider ‘praying’ to the ‘rain God’ for what they actually want!
I understand cycles and respect these things, as I like the randomness of it all. I jokingly have a deal going with the ‘weather God’… to ask to be rained upon as acknowledgement of expanding my actions to the benefit of others. Wandering in the rain is so exquisite, calming. As is sleeping on rocks. Although I am ash blonde fair skinned nearing 60 in this lifetime, I sense that during my previous lifetime I wondered what it what be like to be a girl who could then live inside a white skinned body with blonde hair. Same spirit. Opposite ‘appearance’. Yin/Yang.
One of my friends is a very young aboriginal girl. We grin a lot and have a great rapport. I instinctively know that my ways come from within and have been inside my mind for way way longer than just this particular half of a century.
Mike+Burston says
The term should be “gatherer hunters” night more aptly describe the Aboriginal lifestyle.
I think Aboriginal Agriculture is a bit of stretch. The Macadamia is the only Australian plant i know of that’s become a food crop. Agriculturalists would be expected to select for ever better varieties. Corn, cereals and just about everything else started from virtually nothing
Tony Trousdell says
Dark Emu Exposed – The Myth of Aboriginal Agriculture?
MAY12
Whose Theory Do We Believe? – Mr Bruce Pascoe’s or Mr Jared Diamond’s?
ABORIGINAL AGRICULTURE, ACADEMIC REBUTTALS
Mr Pascoe, when discussing the progress of civilizations relies on the thoughts of the “theorist” Jared Diamond to support his contention that most ascendant civilizations, including our current Western Civilization with its obsession with growth, eventually run into dead ends (Dark Emu 2018 reprint, p181).
Mr Pascoe would seem to agree that Jared Diamond, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a credible enough source to include in Dark Emu – (see boxed text below), so let us look at some of Mr Diamond’s other work. It just so happens that Jared Diamond is one of the world’s top authorities on the study of human societies, including hunter-gatherer ones. He had done field-work in places such as New Guinea and Australia.
We have selected a few quotes from his international best-selling book, “Guns, Germs and Steel – The Fates of Human Societies”, published by W.W. Norton & Co. 1997, to show that he completely disagrees with Mr Pascoe’s conclusion that the Australian Aborigines were agriculturalists who did sow, irrigate and till the land.
Jared Diamond writes :
“Australia is the sole continent where, in modern times, all native peoples still lived without any of the hallmarks of so-called civilization – without farming, herding, metal, bows and arrows, substantial buildings, settled villages, writing, chiefdoms or states. Instead Australian Aborigines were nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, organised into bands, living in temporary shelters or huts and still dependent on stone-tools.” – (ibid. p297).
“Compared with Native Australians, New Guineans rate as culturally “advanced”…most New Guineans …were farmers and swineherds. They lived in settled villages and were organised politically into tribes rather than as bands. All New Guineans had bows and arrows, and many used pottery.” – (ibid. p297-8).
“While New Guinea…developed both animal husbandry and agriculture,…Australia…developed neither.” – (ibid. p308).
Mr Pascoe not only does himself a great disfavour when he refers to Mr Jared Diamond, in an apparently casual way, as a “theorist” (Dark Emu, 2018 reprint, p181), but in some ways he reflects badly on all of us Australians – how could it be that an Australian best-selling author seems to dismiss an intellectual giant such as Mr Diamond in such as casual way, and without including the results of Mr Diamond’s other work on the Australian Aborigines? What does that say about Mr Pascoe’s research methods and the adoration of his supporting readers? Mr Pascoe would do well to reflect on the other work, opinions and “theories” of Mr Diamond, described by some as a polymath due to academic diversity in medicine, geography, ornithology, ecology and environmental history.
Positions Held and Awards*
Professor of Geography at UCLA, Editorial board of the Skeptic Magazine, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. regional director of the World Wide Fund for Nature 1975. 1985 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel, 1999 National Medal of Science, 2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, 2004 A foreign holder of honorary title of Academician in Academy of Finland, 2005 Elected Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, England, 2005, Diamond was ranked 9th on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals, 2006 Dickson Prize in Science, 2008 PhD Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, 2013 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, 2016 American Humanist Association Humanist of the Year
* Wikipedia
Photocredit – Diamond on a field study in New Guinea. – National Geographic Television
We wonder whether possibly Mr Pascoe, on reading Mr Diamond’s work and selectively quoting from it, may have realised the bind he was in – he quotes the “theorist” Jared Diamond, but doesn’t actually provide a reference to Mr Diamond’s work in the bibliography of Dark Emu. Maybe, it is because Mr Diamond comes to the completley opposite view of Mr Pascoe regarding Aboriginal agriculture, despite using the same evidence as Mr Pascoe?
To show the reader how nuanced this area of study is, and how difficult it is for the “Intellectual Elites” in their attempt to re-write Australian history and weave a narrative that Aboriginal societies were agricultural, we quote from Mr Diamond’s book, “Guns, Germs and Steel -The Fates of Human Societies” below, which seems to support many of Mr Pascoe’s points, but ultimately says this Does Not constitute an agricultural society :
Jared Diamond writes :
“During the last 13,000 years less cultural change accumulated in Australia than in any other continent.
Yet, as of 40,000 years ago, Native Australian societies enjoyed a big start over societies of Europe and other continents. Native Australians developed some of the earliest stone tools with ground edges, the earliest hafted stone tools (that is, stone ax heads mounted on handles), and by far the earliest watercraft, in the world. Some of the oldest known painting on rock surfaces comes from Australia. Anatomically modern humans may have settled Australia before they settled western Europe. (ibid. p297).
The Aboriginal Australian substitute for food production has been termed “firestick farming.” The Aborigines modified and managed the surrounding landscape in ways that increased its production of edible plants and animals, without resorting to cultivation. In particular, they intentionally burned much of the landscape periodically. That served several purposes: the fires drove out animals that could be killed and eaten immediately; fires converted dense thickets into open parkland in which people could travel more easily; the parkland was also an ideal habitat for kangaroos…and the fires stimulated the growth of both new grass on which kangaroo fed and of fern roots on which Aborigines themselves fed.
We think of Australian Aborigines as desert people, but most of them were not. Instead, their population densities varied with rainfall (because it controls the production of terrestrial wild plant and animal foods) and with abundance of aquatic foods in the sea, rivers, and lakes. The highest population densities of Aborigines were in Australia’s wettest and most productive regions: the Murray-Darling river system of the Southeast, the eastern and northern coasts, and the southwestern corner. Those areas also came to support the densest populations of European settlers in modern Australia…”
“Within the last 5,000 years, some of those productive regions witnessed an intensification of Aboriginal food-gathering methods, and a buildup of Aboriginal population density. Techniques were developed in eastern Australia for rendering abundant and starchy, but extremely poisonous, cycad seeds edible, by leaching out or fermenting the poison. The previously unexploited highlands of southeastern Australia began to be visited regularly during the summer, by Aborigines feasting not only on cycad nuts and yams but also on huge hibernating aggregations of a migratory moth called the bogong moth, which tastes like a roasted chestnut when grilled. Another type of intensified food-gathering activity that developed was the freshwater eel fisheries of the Murray-Darling river system, where water levels in marshes fluctuate with seasonal rains. Native Australians constructed elaborate systems of canals up to a mile and a half long, in order to enable eels to extend their range from one marsh to another. Eels were caught by equally elaborate weirs, traps set in dead-end side canals, and stone walls across canals with a net placed in an opening of the wall.
Traps at different levels in the marsh came into operation as the water level rose and fell. While the initial construction of those “fish farms” must have involved a lot of work, they then fed many people. Nineteenth-century European observers found villages of a dozen Aboriginal houses at the eel farms, and there are archaeological remains of villages of up to 146 stone houses, implying at least seasonally resident populations of hundreds of people.
Still another development in eastern and northern Australia was the harvesting of seeds of a wild millet, belonging to the same genus as the broomcorn millet that was a staple of early Chinese agriculture. The millet was reaped with stone knives, piled into haystacks, and threshed to obtain the seeds, which were then stored in skin bags or wooden dishes and finally ground with millstones. Several of the tools used in this process, such as the stone reaping knives and grindstones, were similar to the tools independently invented in the Fertile Crescent for processing seeds and other wild grasses. Of all the food-acquiring methods of Aboriginal Australians, millet harvesting is perhaps the one most likely to have evolved eventually into crop production. Along with intensified food gathering in the last 5,000 years came new types of tools. Small stone blades and points provided more length of sharp edge per pound of tool than the large stone tools they replaced. Hatchets with ground stone edges, once present only locally in Australia, became widespread. Shell fishhooks appeared within the last thousand years”. (ibid.p309-311 and our emphasis).
One can’t help but think that these extracts above from Mr Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel -The Fates of Human Societies”, might have been written by Mr Pascoe himself, so closely do they fit the narrative and theory of Dark Emu !
But even after all this, Mr Diamond still concludes :
“…Aboriginal Australians never acquired it [ food production] at all.” (ibid. p86).
“Aboriginal Australians who never reached the stage of farming yams and seed plants nonetheless antipated several elements of farming. They managed the landscape by burning it…In gathering yams, they cut off most of the edible tuber but replaced the stems and tops of the tubers in the ground so that the tubers would regrow. Their digging to extract the tuber loosened and aerated the soil and fostered regrowth. All that they would have had to do to meet he definition of farmers was to carry the stems and remaining attached tubers home and similarly replaced them in soil at their camp.” (ibid. p107).
“…my [Jared Diamond’s] thesis is not that…Australia…[was] devoid of domesticable species and would have continued to be occupied just by hunter-gatherers indefinitely if foreign domesticates or peoples had not arrived…[It] is that… food production had not yet arisen independently in some fertile regions as of modern times…[Australian] Aboriginal societies in recent millennia appear to have been evolving on a trajectory that would eventually have led to indigenous food production. They had already built winter villages. They had begun to manage the environment intensively for fish production by building fish traps, nets and even long canals. Had Europeans not colonized Australia in 1788 and aborted that independent trajectory, Aboriginal Australians might within a few thousand years have become food producers, tending ponds of domesticated fish and grown Australian yams and small-seeded grasses.” (ibid. p155).
So there you have it, Dark Emu is some 3000 years ahead of its time ! – it is still a wonderful and compelling story. But we do not have to lie to ourselves and speak on behalf of Aboriginal people when we try to re-write our, and their, history for our own modern, political ends. It can only lead to harm to pretend that their pre-colonial society was something it was not. The real story is of pre-colonial, Aboriginal Australia as a hunter-gatherer society on the path to an agricultural future, and this is something all Australians should read about. It is not Australia’s history that needs to be re-written, but instead the book cover blurb of Dark Emu :
“Pascoe puts forward a compelling argument for the understanding that pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians were on a trajectory from their hunter-gatherer existence towards food production and agriculture within the next 3000 years. The evidence shows that the first beginnings of an agricultural way of life were starting in isolated parts of the continent. It is the story of mankind and a story that we will all admire and find fascinating as Australians.”
Main photograph – hat-tip to Matt Ridley
Update on 8/7/2020 – INTENSIFICATION DEBATE
Archaeologist Sue O’Connor, from the Centre for Prehistory University of Western Australia, has written (Ref 1),
“In an oft quoted paper that Lourandos (Ref 2) wrote in 1983 he made the statement,
‘By all indications intensification of social and economic relations would appear to have been increasingly taking place during the Holocene period on the Australian mainland, the process being nipped In the bud by the coming of the Europeans’.
Although it was not Lourandos’ intention to imply an inevitable evolutionary spiral of the sort that gives rise ultimately to complex societies, some subsequent authors have imputed a one to one social evolutionary correlate.
Ironically, in an effort to escape from the environmental determinist paradigm we may have unwittingly embraced evolutionary determinism.
For example Williams (Ref 3) in a recent paper on the Victorian mound complexes states ‘Harris’ model for the development of agriculture indicates a strong possibility that, in time, the groups of the Western District would have gone on to develop agriculture. All the preconditions for the development of food production were there’.
Williams later qualifies this to some extent and admits that this trajectory is not inevitable.” -[our emphasis]
This hints at ‘political intervention’ in that some academic groups do not want to support the idea that Aboriginal Society was on a trajectory to a ‘higher’ more complex, agricultural society by a process of evolutionary determinism – or more crudely, some societies and peoples appear to be more ‘evolutionary advanced than others’. We will blog on this subject, once we have studied it further.
Ref 1 – O’Connor, S., The Stone House Structures of High Cliffy Island, North West Kimberley, WA Australian Archaeology, No. 25 (Dec., 1987), pp. 30-39
Ref 2 – Lourandos, H. 1983 Intensification: a Late Pleistocene-Holocene archaeological sequence from southwestern Victoria. Archaeology in Oceania 18,p92.
Ref 3 – Williams, E. 1 987 Complex hunter-gatherers: a view from Australia. Antiquity, 61, p310-332
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May 12 No Domesticated Plants or Animals? Then No Agriculture or Husbandry
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jennifer says
Tony,
Bruce Pascoe has quite an extensive bibliography at the back of Dark Emu. It goes from page 249 to 264, with everyone listed alphabetically. There is Davey, Davies, Davis, Dargin, Dawkins, Dawson, Denham, Ditchfield .. but no Diamond.
I have though written about how little Jared Diamond understands, when it comes to Australia and land management. That critique was published some years ago in a journal and can be found at this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237739568_Australia%27s_Environment_Undergoing_Renewal_Not_Collapse
John Singer says
Justa QuietAustralian is obviously not just that. His contribution to this debate is an excellent one.
Henry Rainger says
Pascoe and his distorted and fabricated history of our stone age hunter gatherers in his book, Dark Emu, has been thoroughly discredited by Peter O’Brien in ‘Bitter Harvest’ (2019) and later by Sutton and Walsh in ‘Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate (2021).
One need not look any further than these two books to find that Mr Pascoe has been outed as a fabricator of history.
If however one sought to read more books that categorically state that Aboriginal people in Australia were never farmers but solely hunter gatherers, all they need do is read any of the hundreds of anthropological works written by people who had lived with our nomadic Aboriginals for extended periods up until the latter part of the 1900’s.
Or with those who lived with them for many years back in the early days, shipwrecked sailors etc and runaway convicts like Buckley who spent 32 years with them.
Bruce says
Since Geoffrey Blainey was “unpersoned”, nobody seems to want to mention his book;
“The Triumph of the Nomads”.
“Sources and Note run from page 255 to page 275.
Published 1775
It followed “The Tyranny of Distance”. 1966
Both books are probably on the official “forbidden list” these days. Ray Bradbury obviously knew a thing or two.
More political “science”?
Bruce says
1975, NOT 1775; however that would have really been a work of epic scholarship.
jennifer says
For traditional Aboriginal Australians the concept of ‘Wilderness’ was not a cause for fond nostalgia but was perceived as a land without custodians. Whether we want to call them farmers or hunter-gathers these are whitefella words, and they fail to capture the extent to which all country is central to everything Aboriginal.
The first chapter in Bruce Pascoe book Dark Emu begins with comment that he is writing specifically to refute the notion that Aboriginal people were only hunter-gatherers. Nowhere does he state that Aborigines were an essentially sedentary agricultural civilisation. This is not a claim that Bruce Pascoe makes.
Yet this is the strawman preoccupying many recent articles decrying him.
John Hultquist says
Good morning, Jennifer.
You mentioned you are likely of northern European stock – and so am I. We are related. Uff da.
I now live in Washington State where the early peoples had various life styles and food resources. They also burned repeatedly to manage, if I may use the term of my friend Megan Walsh.
https://www.cwu.edu/museum/climatic-and-human-influences-fire-history-pacific-northwest-free-public-talk-dr-megan-walsh
You seem to have poked a hornet’s nest with a short stick. I applaud you. Why anyone would disown you because of this kerfuffle is a mystery to me.
I already have too much to read and don’t wish to read all the material you and the detractors of the Dark Emu are writing about.
I am slowly working through a 3-volume history:
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, by Fernand Braudel (about 1,500 pages – I’m at p. 223).
Being of northern European ancestry, I was surprised to learn that central and western Europe still used hands as a primary means of eating until the 1700s. Further, our common table fork was not readily accepted when introduce to western Europe.
I’ll end with this:
“There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know.”
― Donald Rumsfeld
– – – – –
Slàinte Mhaith,
John
Max Eastcott says
Thank you Jennifer for a different perspective to consider.
Ian Thomson says
A bit O/T this, but the Rockefeller involvement in Oz history revisionism makes it relevant.
These people are also at the forefront of the plandemic, having released the plan in 2010.
Too many coincidences?
-“In the Russian case, Greenpeace traditionally states that its branch exists on private donations, while providing a funding structure. It shows that 77% of the funding is from foreign Greenpeace funds, which, in turn, are funded by the Turner Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, David & Lucile Packard Foundation and other well-known conductors of the “soft power” of Washington and Brussels.”
https://southfront.org/the-scandal-involving-greenpeace-in-russia/