Study showing how Australian Aboriginal people shaped the distribution of useful plants across their lands, dispersing them in more preferable areas, etc:

"The findings call into question our whole notions of what agriculture is," said Douglas Bird, study co-author and professor of anthropology at Penn State. "Rather than thinking about the difference between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies as a matter of kind, we'd be better off thinking about it as a matter of degree—that people influence plants long before they engage in what we think of as farming."" - phys.org/news/2024-10-landscap…

Peoples who are used to living with the environment (instead of "against" it) understand that often the best interventions are the ones that are extremely subtle. In this case, the interventions were so subtle that they didn't fit into traditional western understandings of cultivation and agriculture.

So it's good to see this kind of subtle cultivation getting more recognized by science. There are many ways to live with the environment and to place the resources you need into places that are convenient for you and your people. The more that westerners can learn that, the more possibilities open up for how to live with the land.

#indigenous #australia #cultivation #agriculture #science #gardening #gardeningau #plants #nature #environment #ecology #anthropology

Landscape effects of hunter-gatherer practices reshape idea of agriculture

Some of the wild plants that grow across the Australian landscape may not be so wild, according to new research led by Penn State scientists.

^{Francisco Tutella (Phys.org)}