Heracles inexpectatus

[landingtree]

Day's writing productivity: working out what kind of fish the protagonist is being given. Yesterday's writing productivity: working out that the other protagonist's village mainly grows rye. Grand strides? Grand strides.

Mainly, though: New Zealand was apparently once home to a three foot tall parrot.

Comments

[landingtree]

a) I don't know very much about the origins of agriculture, or what theories are currently standing about that. And I take it to be a hard problem! But

b) I have the instinct that you've set the problem in its hardest form with getting wild grains to become useful crops was a multi-generational project that no one could have known in advance would work. My instinct is to doubt that anyone had agriculture in mind as a goal when they started the processes that lead them to agriculture. Many of those steps would have to have been followed as by-products of previously existing life modes before anyone could have the thought, 'Hey, we could make a system out of this, let's test these nightshades on people we dislike.' I take this to mean that hunter-gatherer life has some tendency to produce the kind of accidents which can result in agriculture. (Not that this is an answer, this just shifts the field of my version of the question!) However,

c) I take it that one of the assumptions of hunter-gathering is mobility; that people had to roam over a fairly large range except in conditions of exceptional land productivity. (Now I feel as though I should check that further). But when your land is draped in an apparently-mystical shroud of cobweb which drains vitality out of humans preferentially, followed by other large mammals, followed by everything else in the ecosystem and possibly the structure of reality as well, then there's an incentive toward concentrating into larger groups and maintaining the long-term fertility of a comparatively small area of land.

(What I need to research more is what actual concentration of humans this would result in based on different parameters of how the cobweb might behave. For the moment I am fudging this, though, which is why protagonist's village is a village).