Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Discover First Use of Fertilizer
sciencehabit writes "Europe's first farmers helped spread a revolutionary way of living across the continent. They also spread something else. A new study reveals that these early agriculturalists were fertilizing their crops with manure 8000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought."
...is that people were convinced that fertilizer was a modern "invention" in the first place. I'm sure it didn't take the genius of a particle physicist to notice that the grass grew better where the animals took a shit, but then I'm not an archaeologist. Kind of like the conspiracy theorists who claim that there was no way human beings could have build the Pyramids without some kind of advanced technology or alien intervention...people seem to seriously underestimate the wisdom of their ancestors, almost to the point of arrogance.
The funny part is that essentially nothing has changed beyond our level of technology. People believed in crazy, stupid shit in antiquity, how is that any different from today? Our ancestors had wonderful things like white make-up made from lead, they drank "radium water" to CURE illnesses. I can't imagine that worked out like it said on the tin. We're much more advanced now though. Now we have people drinking homeopathic remedies containing exactly zero molecules of often poisonous compounds like arsenic, we have walking pairs of tits like Jenny McCarthy telling people not to vaccinate their children...and for all of our wondrous technology, even despite "putting man on the moon," we still have people killing each other over what imaginary friend they've bonded with. Just like the good old days.
Since it's far more arid in the Middle East, the use of dung for fuel was more obvious due to dried dung being a common thing to find laying around. Where as in Europe, which is far wetter, seeing green things sprout up in dung in the Spring was more easily observed.
Not true. 8000 years ago was smack dab in the middle of the middle of the ‘African Humid Period’.
Much of north Africa and ME countries were much wetter, and much more lush in prior times, beginning 12,000 years ago and lasting until 3,500 years ago. There is no way civilization would have begun in a middle east as arid as it is now, let alone flourished.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It still covers up to 10% of the Amazon basin, is man made, and if we could figure out how they did it:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon.html
Imagine if manure spread thousands of years ago still grew crops today. The terra preta —"dark earth" — of the Amazon is still working today.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality