[steve_adams_86]

The unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those crops aren’t around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro climates?

Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well.

I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.

[asdff]

You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).

[hosh]

It doesn't take many generations for selective breeding to show improvements in landraces. Even just making sure that volunteers from seeds that were thrown out as food waste were given a chance to fruit and seed starts that process.

One of the more interesting sources of landraces can be found in local seed saving programs, such as ones hosted by local libraries. They are more likely to be viable seeds that is adapting to the local conditions.

[kasey_junk]

Corn is grown in the UP with current varieties currently. It’s not commercially viable because the yields are too low to compete with southern mega yield growers in a highly connected market with efficient transportation systems. There isn’t anything fundamentally hard about growing lower yield corn crops at that location though.

[masklinn]

It didn’t necessarily need to be highly productive, just more productive than cultivating local stuff, and even if the corn was not necessarily at its most productive it might have been worth it (and with no real replacement) as part of the companion garden, getting just a few ears of corn would still have been worth more than unproductive wooden stakes.

[mapotofu]

Or, they had far advanced knowledge of working and remediating soil to grow food. Peat mosses, charcoal, household compost, are all valid soil additives that we now have scientific knowledge to explain how those benefit soil, but they were practicing it in soil that is otherwise unproductive. Given that no one else farmed it in that time it seems that knowledge was lost, but lines up with regenerative agriculture practices we see today.

[ashoeafoot]

There are several indicators in the south american jungles of civilisation going through booms and busts. If they would have been significant ahead, they would have colonized europe or china.

[mapotofu]

That natives did not colonize Europe or China does not mean they were not highly skilled with plants. What kind of argument are you making?

[acdha]

I think they were just engaging in time-honored speculation about how different history could’ve been had a few historical accidents changed. For example, the Mayan civilization collapsed about 500 years before the Spanish showed up due to the worst drought in something like 7k years, so people have speculated about what Mesoamerica might have looked like when contact was made of those millions of people hadn’t died. Repeat for having draft animals, not losing the immune system lottery so badly, etc. Given their martial traditions it’s very plausible that in slightly different scenarios the arriving Conquistadors would’ve been killed or captured and lead to return expeditions.

[BurningFrog]

The "immune system lottery" is really why the native Americans were doomed.

They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance.

Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game.

It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely unknown factor.

[acdha]

Agreed, but this tradition of speculation had been around for decades before researchers figured out just how severe the plague toll had been. I think part of that was the lack of stone buildings in the eastern United States setting the tone for Americans to think that the native peoples outside of Mesoamerica had been small hunter-gatherer tribes because it took time to establish how large the pre-Colombian populations had been in places like the Mississippian culture or that there are ways to manage the environment other than by plowing fields for grains which weren’t native to the continent.

[larksimian]

It's not really random. Disease development in the Old World was a combo of long term urbanisation and animal husbandry. Urbanisation in the New World existed but wasn't as old and obviously there was way less animal husbandry. Also assuming the Bering straight crossing hypothesis humans probably left almost every freaking old world parasite and disease behind by the time they got into the americas. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of eveolution of diseases that evolved in Africa/Eurasia pretty much gets purged during that migration.

[ashoeafoot]

They also had a civilization knowledge base within them , which they could have mined. But there wasn't even a united south-north native empire.

[thaumasiotes]

> Or could there have been warmer micro climates?

Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.

[steve_adams_86]

According to graphs I’m seeing, it looks like it was warmer for a period, but then cooler until now. They would have been farming here during a cool period. It’s entirely possible that they established the farm thousands of years ago when it was warm (and warm means about the same temperatures as today), then kept farming throughout the ‘little ice age’ despite crops yielding less. Perhaps that’s what triggered such a huge expansion of the farm land. Or, perhaps there were far more people there than we think. Lots of questions

[thaumasiotes]

What graphs are you seeing? This is what the article says:

> Radiocarbon dating suggests the ridges [farming furrows or similar] were initially constructed roughly 1,000 years ago. They were maintained and used for 600 years after that.

Wikipedia says this:

> Erik Thorvaldsson (c. 950 – c. 1003), known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer [...]

> Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE

["Erik the Red"]

And this:

> The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.

> The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries

> The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850

["Little Ice Age"]

And this:

> The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE.

["Medieval Warm Period"]

The article would appear to suggest that the farm was established near the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period and abandoned near the beginning of the Little Ice Age... which seems incredibly unsurprising.

> They would have been farming here during a cool period.

I see no indication of that.

[throwaway2037]

    > The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850

Are these due to volcanic eruptions?

[thaumasiotes]

Why do you ask? I'm not familiar with any such theory. Krakatoa erupted in... 1883, which doesn't seem like a good match. And volcanic winters don't seem to last much more than 10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter#Past_volcanic_...

There is a theory that the Little Ice Age was precipitated by the reforestation of land in America as the natives died off from exposure to European diseases. And of course, there's always the theory that it's just something that happened.

[throwaway2037]

I didn't realize that the original quote (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44282822) was lifted nearly verbatim from Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

More from that same page:

    > Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), inherent variability in global climate, and decreases in the human population (such as from the massacres by Genghis Khan, the Black Death and the epidemics emerging in the Americas upon European contact).