[aidenn0]

This is the second post on HN to Gwern's site recently with fairly dubious assertions about the late development of something.

If he reads the comments here, that's good, but I'm going to have to take everything he writes now as "X doesn't exist" to "I don't know about X, but people generally familiar with the field might"

[pixodaros]

To be fair, he does notice that Roman historians are saying things about antiquity which are different than what this specialist in 18th/19th century said in 1986 (footnote 11). There is a famous passage by one of the ancient Greek poets that cobbler competes with cobbler and singer with singer and this leads to excellence.

Many medivalists suspect that monasteries and abbeys drove scientific agriculture in medieval Europe because they had capital, literacy, and education. Some berries seem to have been first domesticated in monastery gardens with nets to keep the birds out. Medieval people may not have had good theories of how to breed animals for traits but they could make it work with enough time and effort.