Human Domestication, Ft. Saint Andrew

Truman shoe, solid reference, well done, Thank you. I wanted to spend today's episode discussing a concept that has been brought up in the work of James C. Scott and Christopher Ryan, the idea of human domestication. And before people start clicking off, I'm not going to go all and pri him or anything, you know, It's just I think

it's an interesting thing to think about. I think that Scott explores it in a very interesting way in chapter two of Against the Green, and so relating as I guess to the Truman Show, because I mean, why did I bring it up? Truman lives in a suburban picket fence American dream dome of a world that's meant to keep him, you know, contained and content and ignorant about

the fact that he's on a TV show. Truman has trapped in this wound that he kind of conformed too, but he can't escape, at least initially, and so you could tell that you know, there's something wrong, and he probably felt that way for a long time. It's only over the course of the movie that he develops a sufficient awareness of his condition to leave home and become a true man, Thank you very much. Holy alright, alright,

good episode, guys. Um and humans like Truman have been stewards and cultivators of the natural environment for a long time, right, one of the only creatures who do that. By the way, I see a lot of people who see who kind of like adopt this assumption that he wants just like imposing our will on the environment that is otherwise unscathed by our presence and all that. And I mean, yeah, we do a lot of very very terrible stuff the environment,

but a lot of our actions are also beneficial. And we have the only creatures to shape and sometimes harm and sometimes benefit the natural environment. I mean beavers, elephants, prairie dogs, bees, and tom not to mention the networks of trees and other plants that all manipulate the environments to soothe them and there comfort and their survival. You know, but there's no nature as we know it as we see it um that sort of untouched wild idea without

the activities of humans. You know, humans have been planting seeds and tubers, shaping the evolution of many plants species, burning and desirable flora, weeding out, competition, pruning, thinning, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating, bark, ringing, compassing, watering,

and futilizing. And for animals, you know, we have hunted even selectively, you know, spared females or reproductive age, or hunted based on life cycles, or fish selectively managed streams to promote spawning and shellfish beds, you know, transplanted the eggs and young of birds and fish, and even raised juveniles in some cases. That's kind of how we ended up domest skating a lot of animals. And I'm gonna

get into that. So through fire, through plow, through hunting, through a whole array of different activities, humans have domesticated whole environments. You know, well before you know the full the full society is based on you know, fully domesticated wheat and barley, and goats and sheep. The spectrum of subsistence moods that we have utilized, whether we're hunting, foraging, pastoralism, or farming, have existed and complemented each other, you know,

sort of harmony. Millennia and I mean those of you who have read don't have everything. You kind of see that picture coming into shape as it progressed through the book. But of course James C. Scott also discussed it years before in Against the Green so as he says, enter the Domas, just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves.

The Domas was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and green stores, people and domesticated animals and hangers on like mice and rats and covids, all co evolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen. You know, dogs and pigs and cats, all of them. Their entire evolution was shaped by their relation to this dom and

humans are not the exception. Of course, there's some animals that easier to domesticate than others, which is why you don't see people commonly riding or hooding zebras and gazelle um they will make the best cattle or ride um

and probably knock your brains out if you tried. So it's probably best to stick to the ones that we have sort of who evolved with, like you know, llamas and goats and sheep and pigs and over generations, you see the domesticated creatures, unlike their wild counterparts, developer level

of submissiveness and a decreased awareness of their surroundings. Right, So that emotional dampening is basically a condition of life because when you're in that domas you know, yeah on the human supervision, that instant reaction to predator and you know, pray they no longer the most powerful pressures. Because you're in this sort of cultivated environment, your physical protection and nutrition is more secure than it would be in a

more wild environment. So the mestigated animal is less allude to its surroundings, less away of its surroundings than its cousins in the wild. UM. And we could see as well, you know, with human sidenters, there's also been a reduction mobility UM and that of course had consequences for health. To be very honest with you, I was actually kind of consumed about covering this and I was trying to figure out how to cover this um in a way that doesn't make me look like I'm trying to like

retire into the deeps of Amazonia or something. Yeah, I just I find it interesting to think about her environments shape us. Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can think about these things without becoming a hermit and hiding in the woods. As as as attractive as an idea as that, well, yeah for sure, for sure. I mean like I have this like kind of canon in my head, you know,

like the whole idea of multi verses. Yeah. I figured somewhere in the multiverses a version of myself we have retired into the forest and gone through this whole kind of like anime training arc and emerged as this like one punchman beast of a human. I would I would. I would also like to be that tipeline. I think that would be very interesting, like a train so either all my hair falls out, able to snap trees with just a breath. It is like, yeah, the the the

the quintessential wildman. That's yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's also multiverse version of me where I'm president or something. It would be pretty interesting to see, Like I should be kind of cool. I just had an idea of like this, um, this team of versions of oneself that team up to like fight the evil versions of themselves across the multiverse. It's kind of like kind of the Conqueror, except I think in most versions of the multiverse, he

is evil. Yes, I have, I've definitely, I've definitely read that comic before of the good Ones fighting the bad Ones. I mean, the Injustice comics and video games are pretty pretty pretty big, pretty big staples of that genre. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course an Injustice it's different characters, Whereas it will be interesting to see like a cast that's all just one person, just like the same dude, the exact same person,

but they all grew up in such different environments. Even though they share the exact same DNA, they're like different people. It would be an interesting commentary on society because we do live in one. After all, we do live in a society for better for worse. Yeah, But anyway, like

I'm saying, you know, environments shape us. We shape environments, and to me, we need to start shaping our environments again, so we could either shape up or chip out of existence as a species, right, Um, you know, because the

way the trajectory were on is not sustainable. Um. So we can see, of course, in this transition to domas um, the sedentary, green growing sort of community that you know, in archaeological studies of the bones of the inhabitants, you could see like repetitive stress injuries shaping their bodies, you know, like the skeletal signatures of like grinding grain and you know, like ah, cutting and sewing and kneeling and bending and

moving in you know, very repetitive ways, you know. And of course with these concentrations of people, we also see like epidemics and stuff and parasites starting to fester not just within humans or just not just within species, but also like cross species pathogens and stuff. Yeah, you know.

And so as we all on this kind of same arc, sharing this micro environment, sharing our gyms and parasites, you end ups getting more and more brutal versions of like wild diseases, you know, because they basically go through the the iron quantlet of you know, like that the disease thunder doom, We're only one could come out as Victoria's and so they battled out and became these more refined and more severe forms, which is why you see in

Europe where they had this high population densities, they the diseases that developed there when they were introduced to the coote and quote New World. You know, the really ravaged population that didn't really live on that level of density. Not to say they didn't have cities, because they did. The had cities and villages and collaborations and such a people spanning across like large areas, but it wasn't organized in quite the same way. It wasn't generalizing quite fairly.

But you know, it's two whole continents. UM. We also see that like ye, nutritional stress starts to develop in the bones and teeth of um more quote domiciled humans. UM. You see like I and deficiency anemia in people whose diets were consisting increasingly of grains and you know, as I said told, you know, their diets became narrower, you know, less variety UM in both plants and proteins. And so that ended up leading to you know, like declining tooth

size and reduction in statue and skeletal robustness. And of course this change and like our physiology and dimorphism as a history such as like a lot fool of the pact than just in ulithic, but sidentis um and crowding definitely left and immediate and legible mark on the archaeological record. I do find it interesting. Um. I read this book I think last year called Botany of Desire, and in it the guy um what's his name? And in it Michael Pollan talks about all the plans we thought we

were domestigating. Domesticated us too, you know, because if you think about it, you know, you up in the garden on your hands and knees, day after day, sun and rain, reading and fertilizing and untangling, protecting and reshaping an environment just to suit you little tomato plants. He'll potato plant, and I mean the plant kind of hasn't made you know, Um, they don't have to worry about the sort of things they would usually have to worry about outside of the domas.

You know, you were there to make sure that their competitors are weeded out. You were there to make sure they get all the nutrients they need. You're there to make sure that do insects and stuff come and like ravage them, and you even help to fuutilize them as well. And so you know, it's kind of like I want to say, uh, mutual relationship because as you know, these domesticated plants have continued long this path of domestication. A lot of them can no longer thrive without our help.

And in the same way, you know, we can't just not go on without them. You know, we also are dependent on like a handful of domesticated cultivars. Like we can't just certainly switch and just be like, oh, we're not gonna grow wheat and corn and potatoes anymore. But I mean that's been the foundation of all diets for

too long. Now. That's what you know, most of our food production back you don't have percentages, I won't say most, or just say a lot of our food production is like centered around that, and so um, you know, we can't just jump out to that, especially with the population increases, so you just have grown increasingly reliant on a few like grains and cereals, um and starches. So yeah, we do we need them more than they need said a

lot of senses. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, because I mean a lot of them they do still have like wild counterparts that can always you know, take over. It's just a wild counterparts generally less appetizing than the ones you've gotten used to. I'm sure a lot of people have seen that picture of the different types of bananas out there, um, or you know, the different types of cooling out there. Um. Of course, a lot of corn species that are edible

because you know they were cultivated in massive America. UM. I would like to try them, be because the corn that I've grown up with gotten used too much of what it's called. But I don't like it. Um. I find the texture and taste of it to be kind of lack of a vet would revolting. So I mean, like, and I've been this way for like a long long time, right, Like I growing up used to be refusing to eat like an entire plate of food because it had corn

in it. I didn't like one. And if people used to point out the irony and the fact that I would readily eat like corn pie, what would eat popcorn? What would eat like corn bread? Yeah? But to me, it's it's not the same, you know, like corn on the cob and and stuff is it's not the same. And so like I've tried some some different types of corn, Like I've tried it was kind of like soft baby

corns that they're get in like soup songs. Oh yeah, and those delicious you know, I wouldn't such your sights too much on those various corn varieties because one of the oldest ways of eating corn before we had really nice soft kernels. One of one of the oldest ways is we would we would take we would take the heart the hard corn kernels, um pop them inside a inside like a frying pan to make this tart expand then crush that up and mix it with like a

liquid to have a very disgusting, starchy gruel. And that was the way that we ate corn for a long time. And eventually that was eventually we were able to to like um like tortise and stuff. But for a long time it was just kind of corn rule. Yeah, this was this was a problem. This was a major problem during the Irish potato famine because in short, the potato crops failed um and so the British government imported a bunch of what they called Indian corn at the time,

which was corn grown in the Ad States um. And this was even though Irish people were growing plenty of corn to feed themselves, but that corn was being exported um, and the Indian corn was seen that it was harder, so it was seen as of lower quality. So they had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down, and eventually the government was just like, hey, just soak it for like several days and then boil it in water for hours and add some milk or some grease

if you have it. And some of the problems that costes that, like the Irish people were starving to death, and because when you're starving to death, your your stomach is not as hardy as it is when you're not starving to death, and so the corn, even after being boiled, would cut their stomachs and there is some feel lining and cause like in some cases people would like die. Um. So yeah, corn, see I could I could add that's my reasons to despise corn, like anti Irish violins. I'm

gonna I will briefly ranch about corn subsidies. People think I've actually done that on the show. Yet there's there's there's there's a there's a thing about that'll be high

traffic domess. That's like like in terms of sort of domestication, in terms of human domestication, you know, and in terms of the the extent to which we're being shaped, you have to be I think, very careful to make sure that you're attributing agency to the thing that actually has agency, because there's there's a tendency to sort of attribute stuff too, you know, Okay, well, this is just a way the

technical process works. And because this is the way the technical process works, here are the social structure is that inevitably results out of it. And that's true to some extent. But you know, for example, like if if we're talking about like whose domestic and whom we look at corners like, well, yeah, because we growing and grow an enormous amount of corn. But it's not because of sort of like like that that's the reason we have so much corn is entirely political.

It's entirely about the fact that, like there's a corn lobby in the US that is enormously powerful. And because of the way the Senate works and because of the way sort of like the primaries work, you have to

be pro corn. And this means that the American corn industry has billions and billions of dollars and subsidies that like this is this is like the only thing every economist across the entire political spectrum agrees on like you will you will get like the Heritage Foundation agreeing with like Marxists who are agreeing with like like that the

standard LiPo comes. Everyone agrees this is awful to free trade people agree with this, the anti free trade people agree with this, and it just sticks there because of you know, because because because of a very sort of

a very contingent set of political processes. And I think that that's something that's important to keep in mind when you're thinking about stuff like domestication, which is that like, yes, on the one hand, it is true that you are being shaped by the production process, but it's also true like for example, you know, if you go back to the women in the story who you know, you can see in in their bones right that they've been sort

of like bending over like husking crops and stuff. Wells like well, that that it's true to some exat that's that's because of the production process. But the production process works like that because of social reasons, like okay, like

why is it women doing this work? Right? Like there's there's always simultaneously sort of human constructive social systems operating at the same time as you have these mechanical systems, and people love to attribute all of it to the mechanical systems in a way that loses you know it it naturalizes things that are bad and could actually be changed, and loses the capacity for sort of well yeah, I mean our sort of culpability and both the fact that it could be different than the fact that we do

it this way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but it's still I think it's still important to like think about like how reliant we still are on it as a resource in terms of like maze and like you know, corn syrup and like getting like glucose get like, like it's so we rely on it for so many facets beyond just eating like a corn on the cob, and like, yeah, it's kind of it's like it's like a it's like a it's like a figure right infinity loop here that we've kind of we've we've kind of like tied ourselves

into a knot. Um. Yeah, but I'm saying like, like like a lot of this stuff also has to do with the fact, like you know, part of the reason that there's we use corn syrup is they were like taxes on sugar and you could get you can get around and then has all there's all these like yeah, there's all these sort of feedback cycles of like we become dependent on something because of a social process, but now

we're dependent on the physical process. And it's yeah, I mean, so you can you can like tie this into the idea of like, once you switched over to large scale agriculture, we need to kind of have somebody that that governs how it works, because now we're no longer reliant on smaller more like individualized farms or forest farming. We're instead reliant on a bigger you know, like a bigger stake in the land. So if that fails, we're all more

in trouble. Now, agriculture does not equal sieve. That's not that's not an actually sound um and the like like anthropology, Like if if you look at the anthropology, that's actually not a superstand argument. I think you can you can read the the not of everything that makes they make

that point pretty clear. But still when you do have when you do have a large population relying on very few like um, very large crop like like of only a small diversity of large crops, and there's a lot, there's a lot, there's a lot more stakes on it, So you're gonna you know, there's gonna be processes that are going to have like authority, authoritative, hierarchical elements to help organize those crops so that they don't get you know, famines, which of course if you look at Maos China you

can see that worked out very well. Yeah, and I should note for the record, when we're talking about the Irish potato fam and that a lot of people didn't die because the government imported corn, which they stopped doing after the first year of the famine because of TRAVALI. Anyway, what we're doing, we'll be doing an episode on the potato famine. I didn't want to completely shift on the corn that was imported by the government because it was critical.

It's just also eating corn doesn't historically, as as was brought up earlier, eating corn historically does not mean what you you think about now. Yeah, well, and and you know what, we will also do things on on the Mao famines. And part of that also was that the centralization of agriculture was a like epocle disaster in a lot of ways that took like decades to recover from,

which yeah, is a is a fun time. Yes, And when Chris says a fun time here, he is not the end the tru but there was new audias are wondering, thank you, thank you and Drew for that clarification. I was I was slightly I was slightly used. Yes he is. He is slash J. He is not slash SR. Yeah. I mean it occurs to me that I'm not sure I've ever gone back into the record to see if anyone in my family died from the famines. I know people died later, I don't know if people died specifically

from that. Which is a good time again, but Chris has a good time. What they actually made is not a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to against the grain, back to against the green. So as we're talking about, you know, this reliance on this one steep will whether it be corn or green or any cereal, really it kind of brings to mind um. And also we're going to talk about the centralization of farming. Um. You know, we've grown to be so reliant on these single things.

And not only that, but less people know about the processes that go into a food than before. UM. We see and like as time progresses, UM and as James C. Scott points out, and to gatherers, you know, they had this ghost of natural rhythms that they had to observe. You know, they had like the movement of hoods to season, migrations of foods, you know, the resting and nesting places

of fish, cycles of who holds the different fruits and nuts. Um. And if you in the Caribbean, you would know about things like you know, mango season and plum season and China season, all these different seasons at different times of year. Um. And to keep track of all those plus several more because they had such diverse diets, I mean, the way to attrack the appearance of you know, different mushrooms, um,

the locations of different types of game. You know, it's all these activities that require tool kits, right in, different techniques that have to be mastered, have to be understood, have to be shared from generations generation. You know. They also in addition to that, you know, these foes they had the ability to cultivate you know, a lots of

different stands of you know cereal. Um. They had the different tools they had to make sickles and you know, um what you call those again sling shots and blue dots and all these different tools would have used spears, arrows, and they also would have had to recognize the seasonality of sometimes different ecosystems. You know, they might have been crossing for white lands and forests and savannahs and arid environments.

And so as they understood they had to understand these um these rhythms, and they had to be generalists and opportunists that could take advantage of these different rhythms, all the different episodic bounties that nature may provide or rather provide, but you know, bring their way that they would have to kind of fight four in some cases. But they

have this sort of metronome. Right. Farmers on the other hand, you know, as we sort of moved to that sort of farming dominant, sedentary sort of way of life, you know, you largely can find to this one single food web. Right, your two routine has a particular tempo you s left, observe, observe, you know, different seasonalities and different movements. But it's a bit more limited. You know, you have a handful of crops that you have to bring successfully to harvest every year,

and I mean it's complex. A lot of things have to look out for, whether it be you know, diseases and pathogens and you know different insects and and pests at me UM come at your crops. You know, you have to look out full of different things, but it's usually uh closer less expansive range of activities, at least in comparison to hunt gatherers. On the other hand, farming and the nuances of cereal grain farming um far more complex, require far more skill and much wider range of knowledges

than you know. Working on an assembly line you know UM as believe Adam Smith points on Wealth of Nations. You know, you have all these people on this assembly line making pins. But Alexis they took a Ville asks what can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins? You know, this sort of a restriction in terms of a contraction in terms of the range of knowledges and expert teases that you know one can be expected to take on UM.

And so I guess that kind of links into my whole idea of anti work. It's this idea of moving outside and beyond this kind of restriction to like one or two or a few rigorous activities that you expected to do for the rest of your life, and also opening people up to exploring a wider range of knowledges and expertises and experiences and practices that you know they can we eve into their everyday life rather than you know,

just one minutely choreographed routine of dance steps. You know, there's a bit more expression, a bit more freedom in terms of, you know, how we live, in terms of how we work, in terms of how we educate, in terms of how we build um, are we socialize um being able to sort of much just smashed to one beat but sort of generally took a company of music absolutely, absolutely, because I think no matter whether or not you own a share in the pinmaking factory, I think you're still

gonna face alienation from your environment by just doing the same repetitive taskt hours a day. Like I don't. I don't think that's actually much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And it requires transmission. And so for those who haven't seen, you know, I did a video on anti work sort of discussing it, so we can check that out when

this comes out. I suppose I just wanted to that right now, we live in a society that um, that is governed by institutions that often demand behavior that conflicts with our innate capacities and predilections. You know, the millions of years of us living in these you know, cooperative social sharing environments, you know, where community, communal and individual UM rights and and stuff and such were valued and respected. I mean to sort of draw back to the Truman

Show analogy. It's almost as if, you know, we went from living in the world to living in a zoom of our own making. It were just being well, I guess we're watching ourselves in this suit. Yeah, It's it's like the zoo keeper who lives inside the zoo and is also the attraction exactly. And and so I think that while obviously we can't switch back to like foraging,

you know, that's not necessarily desirable. I do think that we need to we consider our approaches to you know, health and security and work and leisure and the way we relate to the natural world. You have to sort of change the story and changed how we organize. It's going to take Charlione are of course, UM. Anyone who's organized can tell you that it is far from easy UM and is replete with setback and failure. But I

think we have a responsibility to m remique. Yes, it's not as cool to write the wrongs of yesterday to the end tomorrow, nows it? WHOA throw in a couple of air horns here. Make sure they're pitched lower so that it's not horrible to listen to. No, never do that. It could happen here as a production of pool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening