Clever Cavemen Genetic manipulators

a reply to: jellyrev

Perhaps it's a matter of taste? Those things are toxic, but in what amounts?

Ancient people were not book smart, or high tech, but they were intelligent.

For instance, tasting something can tell your body how caustic it is, its general chemical makeup, and give you a rough idea of how nutritious something might or might not be. Now lets dumb it down, because we were animals. We probably tasted everything. We watched charlie die after he ate those red berries. Stacy got sick after she tried cat poop. Jerry feels great and says these berries taste yummy. So on and so forth.

Now, lets say some idiot decided that this is a good tasting food, and these grains don't taste so bad. Maybe, if I grow them together, they'll start to taste like each other.

It's simple thoughts and processes like that happening over hundred of generations that lead me to believe that humans have thought of and probably done everything before. Forgotten and relearned over the ages. Including books and technology.

That's the Wizards view.

Thank you for a fascinating thread.

I enjoy Social Anthropology. How man lived his everyday life.

I think this fits

I personally believe there was intervention.

a reply to: Sahabi

Thank you

From what I've read and been researching it appears our gut has changed little if at all over the years. It is still designed to accommodate almost everything edible so is in effect unspecialised in any way. It seems its our food that has changed rather than ourselves so "evolution" doesn't appear to have been in play in the role of digestion

I'm not sure as to the various alien hypotheses but it is clear (if unacceptable) that the stone age and previous civilisations had techniques and abilities which were lost to modern man somewhere along the line and it appears to me that we de-volved in certain ways and areas. It could be said that the advent of agriculture meant the loss of knowledge of "survival" i.e. toxic plants good plants

The supposition that ancient man watched what animals ate and then ate the item themselves isn't really sound considering there are many plants that kill us but not animals. Yes trial and error no doubt but when it comes to actually modifying foodstuffs for consumption that's a whole different ballgame and to me, either shows some kind of knowledge we didn't know they had, or, a knowledge "given" to them from whatever/whoever. Some of the techniques coming to light through archaeologly and the connected sciences,appear to be very advanced and some only discovered by modern man far far later. Why did these techniques and skills disappear? Surely they should have passed down but it seems despite the successes of early agriculture many techniques such as irrigation etc had to be "reinvented". Always puzzled me has that!

originally posted by: jellyrev
a reply to: Bedlam

Great points. I understand they are not stupid. But how does one start trying preparations on toxic food, feed it to the prisoners and see if they die or not?
That is some ingenuity.

MY question is, how did anyone ever figure out how to prepare chocolate? There are so many steps.

Although my head knows better, my heart personally tends to see them as less intelligent, until you read some of the stuff they wrote a few thousand years back - it can be pretty deep swimming philosophically.

a reply to: PhyllidaDavenport

I am a proponent of the ancient rise and fall of mankind. Natural disasters, climate change, and disease may have wiped us out several times over, as illustrated in the genetic bottle-necks found in our genome and the variant dates for mt-MRCA and Y-MRCA.

We, modern humans, are the product of a collective and global amnesia. We have faced near annihilation one or more times in the ancient past. We develop, we learn, we grow, we face global cataclysm, and we start over. We've had more than one stone age, more than one technological age, more than one aviation age, and more than one nuclear age.

Great Floods, Ice Ages, Volcanic Eruptions and Meteorite Impacts, Great Earthquakes, Nuclear War, and stories of past worlds and destroyed civilizations as described in the various religious texts and in the Homeric, Mayan, Hopi, Aztec, Incan, and Indian-Vedic traditions were influenced by true catastrophes in my opinion. Near human extinction and annihilation wiped out our history and caused our great knowledge to be lost.

Remarkably, the Human Genome Project supports the near extinction of mankind. Scientists and researchers have discovered a few genetic bottlenecks in our gene-pool, such as the Toba Catastrophe Event. This means that on more than one occasion, humans were driven to near extinction, only very few mating pairs survived. And what's even more astounding, is that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam date to different time periods! Meaning, even at our earliest beginnings, there were severe survival problems.

The age of "Modern" man is now estimated at over 400,000 years... hominids and other non-modern humans date back millions of years. Our current academic knowledge of human history only accounts for mankind's last 10,000-12,000 years... that is a LOT of history unaccounted for!!!

If we are 400,000 years old and it took us 12,000 years to crawl out of the last stone age and into the space age... let's do some simple math: (400,000 divided by 12,000) That means we could have potentially risen and fallen 33 times! With enough time duration for 33 potential cycles, is it so far fetched to believe that there was at least one such cycle before our current one?


Trade Professional (RE: Ancient Monuments): "I can not build even one wall. Here's a theory."

a reply to: PhyllidaDavenport

This short article is a great intro into genetic archeology, with maize/corn as its focus:

Evolution of Corn

"Ancient farmers in what is now Mexico took the first steps in domesticating maize when they simply chose which kernels (seeds) to plant. These farmers noticed that not all plants were the same. Some plants may have grown larger than others, or maybe some kernels tasted better or were easier to grind. The farmers saved kernels from plants with desirable characteristics and planted them for the next season's harvest. This process is known as selective breeding or artificial selection. Maize cobs became larger over time, with more rows of kernels, eventually taking on the form of modern maize."


"The earliest events in maize domestication likely involved small changes to single genes with dramatic effects. We know the events were early because there is little variation in these genes between maize varieties, suggesting that modern varieties are descended from a single ancestor. That the small changes had dramatic effects also explains the sudden appearance of maize in the archaeological record. These examples show us that evolution doesn't always involve gradual change over time."

a reply to: PhyllidaDavenport

I think the way it happened was 'man proposed, nature disposed.' People bred for the characteristics they wanted, natural selection culled the unviable hybrids.

a reply to: Sahabi

thanks I'll have a read

Excerpts from Brian M. Fagan's;
"World History, A Brief Introduction"

In order that grains could be eaten by humans, most had to undergo at least 14 genetic modifications including those mentioned above.

According to Brian M. Fagan; "Computer simulations have shown that domestic, semitough rachised forms may have been rare at first, but they would have been fully domesticated within twenty to thirty generations—for these cereals, between twenty and thirty years. DNA fingerprinting studies on einkorn in southeast Turkey confirm this brief time frame. There, alterations in just one or two genes transformed wild wheat into a useful crop with a tough rachis."

Through archeology, it appears as though man first farmed ready-to-eat crops that required no change or domestication. Through farming these naturally occurring plants, desirable traits such as larger size and greater yield were noted, which were eventually bred purposefully and selectively. Through the prior knowledge and understanding of selectively breeding animals, and now with naturally occurring plants, perhaps the idea arose to begin the domestication of less desirable plants into more desirable plants. First, those requiring the least amount of breeding, progressing to those requiring more generations of selective breeding.

Mankind domesticated the easy stuff first, and with compounding understanding, more complex agriculture arose.

Ancient Australian aboriginals would gather selected wild seeds and grind them into a course flour with stones. Adding water and cooked in hot coals or earth ovens made a crude bread.

The stone is indicative of grinding stones used in the region for thousands of years. Fragments of grinding stones dating back 30,000 years to late in the Pleistocene Epoch have been found at the archaeological site at Cuddie Springs in western NSW.

australianmuseum.net.au... -south-wales

a reply to: weirdguy

Yup and such grinding stones have been found that pre-date the "agricultural era" by thousands of years. However, there is still no evidence of how the various seeds were modified for human consumption other than grinding for flour etc

The current belief still states that the timeline for agriculture was no more than 10,000 yrs ago in the Fertile Crescent, despite evidence to the contrary particularly with regard to the domestication of wild animals. However in 2015 a combined report from the University of Harvard the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University offers evidence of trial cultivation dated at least 23,000 yrs ago found in a camp by the sea of Galilee. This again points to our very ancient ancestors being far more intelligent and advanced than has been theorised previously

Earlier Cultivation Discovered

What is quite exciting (for me at least ) is the fact that tools were found for processing ready for food together with signs of over 140 plant specimens and sickle blades indicating harvesting

a reply to: PhyllidaDavenport

Great article! Thanks for sharing that jewel. I love anything that pushes back the accepted date of human milestones. From the sound of the initial report, I hope more is revealed about the site.

a reply to: PhyllidaDavenport

Ancient peoples were already grinding wild seed into flour 30,000 years ago or more. They would have accumulated a lot of knowledge of the various properties of different seeds. It would not have taken a very large step to then plant seeds or even tubers such as yams for a readily supply. Selective breeding by using seeds from plants with a particular quality over thousands of years may also be a factor in creating hybrids or modified versions of the original. I think agriculture is very ancient, if only in small yields. Interesting thread.

Thanks for a great thread

Some good....ahem...food for thought.

It has me thinking about the entire transition from HG to agriculture. As someone who raises most of my own food, I always have questions when I read about the process of domestication. Sounds good in theory but in practice?

What would possess someone to even begin eating (in this case) what amounts to grasses? Why bother? There is so little juice for the squeeze. Maybe if someone was relegated to some marginal area and that's all there was? The odds are soooo much higher they would simply starve to death before umpteen generations of selection produced a sustaining volume of food from the grains. What would they eat in the mean time?

Granted not every plant holds potential for domestication but some seem a lot more obvious and productive.

Yes, I know milling the grain can produce something edible from something inedible in its natural state. Yes, most of our food seems to have required steps to make it useful for us to flourish. Someone mentioned chocolate. What are the odds all the different steps required from bean to yummy are obvious from one to the next? Sure there is trial and error but in order to put forth the time and effort, some payoff has to be marginally visible.

I loves me some Georgio but I am not entirely sold on aliens either. They would have had to evolve and go through the same process with the same seeming gaps in the theory.

Nor do I buy into text books which rhyme with 'Over 10,000 years, surely "something" happened to get from A to B. Humans are creative.' Yeah, thanks. That explains almost nothing.

I claim no answer to the riddle at this time other than to say, there sure do seem to be a lot of missing pieces to the puzzle.

a reply to: PhyllidaDavenport

The tone of my posts came off as condescending and dismissive, but in honesty, it was only in haste and thoughtlessness, and in no way was I seeking to kill or derail your thread.

Your OP is bursting with excitement and curiosity, and I came along defacing your edifice with my carelessness.

Your thread is truly thought-provoking and the type of content that ATS is in need of at this moment, and I offer my deepest apologies for polluting it with atrophic replies.

a reply to: Sahabi

Hi I didn't take your posts that way at all so not a problem. I'm grateful for the input actually....its a pet subject of mine and finding out as much accurate information as possible is my goal as well as hopefully giving people pause for thought on what they've been told previously

Its curious that in the academic & scientific worlds, despite evidence to the contrary, old habits die hard

originally posted by: jellyrev
a reply to: Bedlam

Great points. I understand they are not stupid. But how does one start trying preparations on toxic food, feed it to the prisoners and see if they die or not?
That is some ingenuity.

Start keeping wild animals in corrals. Watch what they eat and don't eat. Some berries are good, others are bad. Same with root vegetables. Grow those and you can keep the animals in a smaller space, freeing up more land for other uses or for more animals.

With grains, there are varieties that taste awful - sour taste, too gritty, too brittle. Root out the bad ones and let the more palatable ones grow side by side. Then in the next season, there are more crossbred species. Even just rooting out 10%, would be enough to achieve genetic evolution.

a reply to: stormcell

Thanks for your reply.

Except the evidence says that this is not what they actually did. For some reason they chose just 4 from hundreds and hundreds of species available, and these 4 were still not digestible by humans and had to be modified (see earlier posts). It seems too that these grains self pollinate so cross-breeding had to be done by hand. Quite a feat I think 15,000 yrs ago

What wild animals can eat and what we can eat are 2 different things. Some plants & fruits are fine for animals whilst highly toxic to ourselves.

The domestication of wild animals appears to have started with wolves, which makes sense considering that at the time, wolves were one of our main competitors for food stuffs. It is theorised that wolf puppies were taken and "domesticated" although the difficulties in outbreeding their natural instincts with apparently so little knowledge of how these things work, seems monumental. You would have to change their diet and their instincts in order to fully domesticate.

Science is a crock of poop is what you will learn if you look into these things.

Science is an industry. Science is out out to support agendas and sell products and garner control .


Science says my lemon flavoured olive oil doesn't exist. Because if you understood how, science loses money. When harvesting tree resins, we dont look at the trees, we look at the rocks. Science loses out when you realize what soilless hydroponic crops of the future have to offer: an illusion of food.

Science says Cannabis resin grows in glands rather than secretions in order to defend from pests, lol. Reality says these are reproductive fluids to attract pollen, and were selectively bred mutations desired for natural hash production (dry sifting seperation of these now external glands from plant material.)


Ancient man worked with nature.. Not mocked it.