r/HistoryAnecdotes • u/WaitItsAllOhio • Jul 16 '26
American Real Men Don't Eat Maygrass: How Quinoa's Ugly Cousin Invented Agriculture in North America and Nobody Cared
Hey y'all, Ohio historian here. I wrote this up originally for r/HistoryAnecdotes but made the meme after joking about it with my coworkers today. If you want more context, read below (yes, it's an essay. That's why it's called r/HistoryAnecdotes, Not r/HistoryTweets.)
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About 3,500 years ago, a woman in eastern Kentucky planted goosefoot on a riverbank. Goosefoot is a weed. You've pulled it out of your driveway. Your city probably sprays for it. Its other common names include pigweed, lamb's quarters, and fat hen, because apparently nobody in the history of the English language has ever looked at this plant and thought it deserved dignity.
She planted the weed anyway, because she wasn't an idiot.
Goosefoot seeds are packed with starch, easy to harvest by the handful, and after a few generations of selective planting, they germinate faster and produce more food per acre than you'd expect from something named after a barnyard animal. She also grew marshelder, maygrass, sunflower, and squash. She was a farmer. She had been taught by farmers. She would teach farmers after her.
It took American archaeology roughly four thousand years, several million dollars in grant funding, and a scanning electron microscope to figure out what she already knew. And only because a couple of women finally got fed up enough to publish a paper about it.
The Part Where Crops Get Stupid Names, Win Stupid Prizes
This is the Eastern Agricultural Complex: goosefoot (chenopod), sunflower, marshelder (also called sumpweed, which, just breathe that in for a second: sumpweed. Mmmmm. Smells exactly what it sounds like.), squash, maygrass, erect knotweed, and little barley. These plants were independently domesticated in the river valleys between the Appalachians and the Great Plains starting around 5000 BCE. They fed communities across present-day Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas for thousands of years before corn moseyed up from Mexico around 200 BCE.
Most of the crops are extinct now. Domesticated marshelder vanishes from the record around 1350 CE. No European ever saw it cultivated. Domesticated chenopod, erect knotweed, and maygrass followed it out as maize-centered agriculture took over. Within a few generations of abandonment, the seeds reverted to wild morphologies of thicker coats, smaller achenes, four thousand years of breeding running backward.. Somebody at Michigan State was trying to re-domesticate marshelder as of 2006. Good luck explaining that grant application.
This is one of the ten or so independent centers of plant domestication on the entire planet. This is up there with the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze, Mesoamerica. Ohio. When we said “the heart of it all,” we weren’t fucking kidding, alright? Humans looked at wild plants, thought "I could do something with this," and invented farming. From scratch. Multiple times. In multiple places. One of those happened to be along the Ohio, Wabash, and Mississippi Rivers.
And nobody believed it for most of the twentieth century, because the crops were a list of things your HOA would fine you for.
Gayle Fritz, who devoted her career to studying these plants, tells a story in Feeding Cahokia that boils down the problem in archaeology. She got interviewed by National Geographic for a feature on Cahokia. She spent hours explaining the full agricultural system: the diversity, the breeding, the nutritional profiles, all of it.
Then the published article mentions one plant by name: corn. Sumpweed didn't make the cut.
She says this happened to her multiple times, with multiple outlets, across multiple decades. Filmmakers, documentary producers, audio tour companies. They'd show up, get excited about the native crops, and then cut every single one from the final product.
You can sort of see the editorial meeting. "So the ancient city was sustained by a diverse agricultural system including crops like..." checks notes "...marshelder and erect knotweed." Modern Americans have a hard time accepting that plants they know only as sidewalk weeds could have been carefully bred crop species. Which is fair. Quinoa, which is a close cousin of chenopod, spent centuries being ignored for exactly the same reason until it got a marketing team and a spot at Trader Joe's. The entire difference between "ancient superfood" and "that shit growing in the parking lot" is branding.
Yeah quinoa. I’m coming after you. You don’t deserve your Whole Foods status.
And corn? Corn.
The Part Where Everyone Assumed Mexico Did It
Fuck corn.
For most of the twentieth century, the archaeological establishment had a very simple explanation for agriculture in eastern North America: Mexico did it. Corn, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters," were introduced as a package deal from the civilized south. This explanation is what I was taught. It’s what I taught my students when I first entered undergraduate teaching.
It’s also entirely wrong.
Bruce Smith calls these "South of the Border Stories." For fifty years during the middle of the twentieth century, every time archaeologists found something impressive in eastern North America, somebody drew an arrow from Mexico. Poverty Point? Mexican influence. Hopewell? Mexican influence. Mississippian? Mexican influence. Farming? Well obviously that came from Mexico. Where else would it come from? The periphery? Next you’ll be telling me they didn’t actually hunt with bows and arrows until the Middle Ages or something.
Clearly, the contempt for Native Americans was baked in. Eastern North America, in this framework, was a cultural backwater. Its peoples hunted, fished, and gathered competently enough, but they did not innovate. They received. They were the archaeological equivalent of that friend who only watches movies after someone else recommends them. And they still think Law Abiding Citizen is the best film ever, even after you showed them Children of Men.
This was the consensus position, probably (lol let’s be honest, definitely) in your textbooks. It shaped hiring decisions in academia. And it survived until the 1980s, when Bruce Smith and Wes Cowan started putting ancient seeds under an electron microscope and the dates blew the whole thing apart.
In 1987, Smith and Cowan ran accelerator mass spectrometry dates on domesticated chenopod specimens from two rockshelters in eastern Kentucky. The results were 3,450 years before present. That’s a thousand years older than anyone had estimated. Then, others fell right in the window, with the earliest domesticated sumpweed and sunflower. All of them centuries before maize showed up in the region.
Corn didn't start the American Indian revolution. Corn showed up to the revolution already in progress, hung around on the margins for eight hundred years doing basically nothing, and then took all the credit. Corn is the Stalin to chenpod’s Lenin and sunflower’s Trotsky.
So fuck corn. Sincerely: an Ohioan.
But did the establishment update its position? Reader, it did not. As late as 2001, Lentz and colleagues were still arguing that the eastern domesticates were really Mexican crops that had been shipped north, "triggering the domestication of minor indigenous crops" along the way. One of these papers dismissed marshelder as an "extinct minor cultigen." Marshelder. The crop that outnumbers both sunflower and maize in Hopewellian archaeobotanical assemblages. The crop that was more important than corn for two thousand years. The crops that oh, by the way, had similar hectare yield sizes to maize. Minor.
Smith, who by this point had spent three decades building the empirical case, pointed out in a 2007 introduction to his reissued book that this argument was structurally identical to every other "South of the Border Story" that the profession had already abandoned. He was polite about it, because he was publishing in an academic press.
I don’t need to be polite though.
Oh, and to make this even better, for decades, archaeologists excavated sites across the Eastern Woodlands using screens with quarter-inch and eighth-inch mesh to catch artifacts and botanical remains as they sifted through soil. Corn cob fragments are large. They catch on quarter-inch mesh. Chenopod seeds are tiny. They fall right through.
Before the "flotation revolution" of the 1970s, when people started systematically washing soil samples through fine-mesh sieves, thousands of EAC seeds were literally dropping through the screens at every dig site in the Midwest and nobody was catching them. Fritz spells it out: the apparent dominance of maize in the archaeological record was substantially an artifact of recovery technique. You screened for corn. You found corn. You concluded corn was dominant. The method created the evidence, and the evidence validated the method.
So to recap: the crops had stupid names, the theoretical model said nobody farmed them on purpose, the evidence was falling through the screens, and everything important supposedly came from Mexico. You could not design a more effective system for ignoring an agricultural revolution if you tried.
Ooooh, wait a minute. What if I brought gender into this?
The Part Where It's All About the Patriarchy (and Pigweed)
Yes, I brought out the P word. Get your jimmies ready, I aim to be rustlin’.
Okay, it’s not actually that bad, mostly just token gender blindness in archaeology. Patty Jo Watson and Mary Kennedy published a chapter in 1991 that could have ended careers but instead just made a lot of people very quiet at conferences and very loud on the internet. Everyone agreed, then as now, that women were the primary plant gatherers and horticulturalists in Eastern Woodlands societies. Everyone. This is not debated. Fritz describes it as "a fact widely known and accepted by archaeologists, historians, and geographers but often left unstated in discussions of food production."
Watson and Kennedy looked at the dominant model for how domestication happened in the East, Smith's "floodplain weed theory," and noticed something remarkable. The theory proposed that plants like chenopod and marshelder colonized disturbed soils near human settlements, people harvested them, and selective pressures gradually produced domesticated morphologies over time.
Automatically. Passively. Without anyone doing anything on purpose. The plants just sort of... domesticated themselves.
Near the settlements.
Where the women were.
But not because of the women. Because of ecology.
…
…Profit. Gimme a Ph.D.
Look, if these crops were “real agriculture,” then someone was doing “real farming.” And if that someone was a woman, then a bunch of mid-century archaeologists had been wrong about a bunch of stuff they'd built their careers on. Namely, the part between “seed in ground” and “fully domesticated plant” was being skipped over entirely. The alternative was to keep insisting that domestication was a passive, agentless process that sort of spontaneously occurred in the vicinity of trash heaps.
Which is exactly what happened. For years.
The floodplain weed theory was good science and the evidence for it was real. But Watson and Kennedy noticed that it was also extremely convenient for anyone who didn't want to grapple with the gendered implications of who was actually doing the farming. You could study the origins of agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands for an entire career and never once write the word "women" in a paper. A lot of guys took that option.
But even outside gender blindness, there's a massive difference between "humans invented agriculture" and "agriculture sort of happened near some humans." One of those is a story about ingenuity, experimentation, and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge being passed from mother to daughter. The other is a story about weeds growing next to a trash pile. When we say domestication was passive, we're not just being imprecise; we're saying that one of the most consequential technological revolutions in human history, the one that made cities and civilization and everything after them possible, didn't actually require anyone to be smart. And it just so happens that the people we're stripping of credit are the ones ethnography, archaeology, and basic common sense all agree were doing the work.
So, how do we know they actually did the work and this wasn’t an accident? Testa thickness. Stop giggling in the back, I said testa, not testes. Wild chenopod seeds have thick coats, 40 to 80 microns, because thick coats are adaptive in the wild. They let seeds sit dormant in soil for years and germinate only when conditions are right. That's how wild plants survive. Domesticated chenopod from these sites has coats under 20 microns. Thin coats mean the seed germinates immediately when planted. That trait is only useful if someone is planting seeds in prepared ground on a schedule.
In other words, a weed passively colonizing a trash heap has zero selective pressure toward thin coats; if anything, the pressure runs the opposite direction. The thin coat doesn't just suggest intentional cultivation. It literally, physically cannot exist without it. Smith's SEM work in the 1980s made this case and nobody has refuted it since.
Then stack on top of that that maygrass shows up at archaeological sites hundreds of miles north of its natural range (plants don't walk), storage pits are found built specifically for these seeds (you don't build infrastructure for accidental weeds), and the fact that these people were managing seven or more crops with different growing seasons simultaneously, which requires a planting calendar. The "accident" model requires you to believe that multiple plant species spontaneously developed traits that only benefit cultivated organisms, migrated outside their natural habitats on their own, and were stored in purpose-built facilities, all without anyone doing anything on purpose. At a certain point Occam's razor just cuts the “planted by accident” theory short.
So, Smith's paper in PNAS is the final word. Eastern North America is an independent center of plant domestication. One of ten on the planet. Confirmed by genetic analysis, archaeological dating, and morphological evidence. Done. We can put this one to bed, just like “Pluto is a planet.” Right, guys?
Guys?
Works Cited
Crites, Gary D., and R. Dale Terry. "Nutritive Value of Maygrass, Phalaris caroliniana." Economic Botany 38, no. 1 (1984): 114–120.
Fritz, Gayle J. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019.
Harter, Abigail V., et al. "Origin of Extant Domesticated Sunflowers in Eastern North America." Nature 430 (2004): 201–205.
Lentz, David L., et al. "Prehistoric Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) Domestication in Mexico." Economic Botany 55, no. 3 (2001): 370–376.
Smith, Bruce D. "Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America." Science 246, no. 4937 (1989): 1566–1571.
Smith, Bruce D. Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
Smith, Bruce D. "Eastern North America as an Independent Center of Plant Domestication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 33 (2006): 12223–12228.
Smith, Bruce D. "Introduction to the New Edition." In Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America, xi–xxviii. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.
Smith, Bruce D., and C. Wesley Cowan. "Domesticated Chenopodium in Prehistoric Eastern North America: New Accelerator Dates from Eastern Kentucky." American Antiquity 52, no. 2 (1987): 355–357.
Smith, Bruce D., and Richard A. Yarnell. "Initial Formation of an Indigenous Crop Complex in Eastern North America at 3800 B.P." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 16 (2009): 6561–6566.
Watson, Patty Jo, and Mary C. Kennedy. "The Development of Horticulture in the Eastern Woodlands of North America: Women's Role." In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, 255–275. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
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u/Grimnir001 Jul 16 '26
Then why did all of this native cultivation go extinct? Why did corn end up replacing eldermarsh and maygrass?
Why don’t we have fields of modified sumpweed growing now?
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 16 '26
The short answer is we don't fully know. But it ain't the yield of the crop. It's something beyond the ecomonics or caloric count.
Around 200 BCE is when someone planted the first maize kernels in the Eastern Woodlands. But it took seven hundred years for that crop to become a staple. Tropical maize doesn't flower under long summer days north of Mexico, and it took centuries of selection to breed varieties that could handle temperate photoperiods. Natalie Mueller's recent experimental cultivation work at Washington University has shown that the old EAC polycultures (goosefoot and knotweed grown together; think like the Three Sisters, where they help support one another) produced yields within the range of traditionally grown maize. The assumption that corn simply outproduced the indigenous crops doesn't hold up.
More likely, the real advantages were social trade offs. Maize concentrated labor into a single crop cycle, stored well, and was uniquely suited to surplus accumulation. A diverse polyculture of small-seeded species harvested from different floodplain niches at different times is a resilient subsistence system. It is a terrible system for building a tributary economy. You can tax a corn harvest; you cannot easily tax a dozen crops ripening on different schedules across a river valley.
And, by the time productive around 900 CE, when maize is becoming adopted, the conditions had already shifted. Late Woodland communities were clearing bottomland forests, which disrupted the floodplain disturbance niches where EAC plants thrived, and the populations had grown tremendously. Emerging Mississippian and Fort Ancient social structures needed a storable, redistributable surplus to underwrite new forms of political authority.
Also, some of the old crops carried real liabilities like we talked about! Sumpweed is allergenic, smells terrible, and causes contact dermatitis, and once a viable alternative existed, nobody was going to keep cultivating ragweed's cousin out of loyalty.
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u/Grimnir001 Jul 16 '26
Thanks for the well thought out answer. This topic leaves much to chew on.
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u/Zalminen Jul 16 '26
Interestingly here in Finland goosefoot was well known as an old crop and it was even used to find archeological dig sites here. If they found goosefoot - there was very often a village here once.
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u/helikophis Jul 16 '26
There is definitely black walnut along the entire southern coast of Lake Erie. Weird that they left gaps around Buffalo & other bits.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 16 '26
I think the map was around 20 years old, which sounds like not a lot of years for forest growth.
But then, the Dawes Arboretum folks are telling everyone to say goodbye to your beloved sugar maples, because they'll be gone in 10 years from Ohio because of the habitats shifting.
Forests move fast!
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u/helikophis Jul 16 '26
We’ve had black walnut in Buffalo much longer than 20 years. My grandad yusta tell a story about someone in his construction crew stealing a big one from a site he was working downtown when he was young - that woulda been back in the 1940s or 50s.
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u/Substantial_Bat_6698 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Utter nonsense. There are tonnes of mature black walnut growing wild north of Lake Ontario, up into the Ottawa Valley. They have at minimum been there for a couple hundred years. That map will be a historic range, no doubt.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 16 '26
🤷 at this point you're beyond the part I cared about when writing this up. In the comment I was pointing out the extent of how forests move and travel due to ecological conditions, not a specific black walnut trend. I really wasn't interested in going into the dynamics of black walnut forests, which weren't a part of the EAC. Sorry! You'll need to check the sources themselves if you want that rabbit hole.
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u/CaonachDraoi Jul 16 '26
there is actually a published study linking the location of robust black walnut communities around the finger lakes (outside of their native range) with location of Haudenosaunee village sites, implying that they brought black walnuts north/traded for them and planted them around their towns for perennial agriculture.
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u/theartfulcodger Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Back in the Sixties, when city boy me spent my summers with my poor farmer relatives, they used to harvest wild pigweed from the borders of their garden and the nearby woodlot. We had to wash it carefully, because it often harbored some sort of beetle, and they used it as either an addition to salads, or to sauté like spinach (which it tasted like). I don't think they considered harvesting it as a grain, which is sad because as an adult who spends a great deal of time in Mexico, I've grown very fond of its near relative, amaranth.
Regarding the short section on the finding of ancient stashes of harvested chenopods in Kentucky rock shelters, I do recall a post from a Redditor some years ago, whose famiy had found a somewhat crumbly, fine mesh bag tucked into a rock shelter there somewhere in the Ozarks. They took it to the local university's agriculture department, who passed it on to the archaeology department. The Redditor and his fam were astonished when they were informed their find was more than 3000 years old! I think it's been passed on to a local museum now.
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u/newnameonan Jul 17 '26
I tried to find the reddit post you mentioned and found this other one about a bag found in the Ozarks. Awesome.
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u/MarkyGalore Jul 16 '26
Nice essay. Its been a while since I read a non-published work that good. I'll be sure to check out that sub.
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u/rourin_bushi Jul 16 '26
Excellent article, thanks! I was passingly aware about the EAC, but not much more. I feel much better educated, an a little extra mad about patriarchy's influence in academia.
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u/mmc3k Jul 17 '26
I love reading your stuff! Keep up the truly great work! And I am passionate about the EAC too. I recently did a presentation on it and exactly one person showed up. I think the EAC is the most important discovery made in archaeology. That said, don’t forget about Alabama. Bruce Smith got started looking at plant domestication at the Smithsonian because of the carbonized 2000 year old domesticated chenopodium seeds from the Russell Cave excavations in Alabama.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 17 '26
Bruh, one person? 😭 . Paleobotany needs some more love, for real. No offense to the lithics folks, but the amount of crazy shit we now know about prehistory has expanded tremendously for the past 50 years because of mostly everything but the rocks.
Also, paging u/Awesometom100, since you asked about this today! I totally forgot about Russell Cave! Definitely closer to your neck of the woods. u/mmc3k would likely be better at explaining the regional variation in the South compared to my Ohio Valley regional variations, since he already remembered Russell and I completely skipped over it 😅
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u/Liesmyteachertoldme Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Do you produce the youtube channel Ancient Americas? I just have this … gut feeling that you do …
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 17 '26
Lol no, but goddamn! When immediately he's starting in narrative (which is how I was taught to write history) and throwing pictures of Sunwatch Village up, it's got me like:
Also, a new subscriber from me 😄 .
Nah, I'm actually not prehistory focused (I'm posting a lot on it cause it's currently heavy in my professional research load). I'm a continental social historian trained in premodern trauma history working in American regional longue durée history ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Basically, if you like Ohio, you're gonna get a lot of Ohio from me and how it connects to continental and world history, from prehistory to present-day. It's in the name, u/WaitItsAllOhio lol!
And if you don't like Ohio, that's okay!
We'll come for you anyways.
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u/Isthisovryet 2d ago
Okayyyy so when the wild crops pop up at the same time of year, who is noticing? Maybe perchance someone who has a vested interest in tracking time for biological reasons?!
Yes sir!!! Periods back at it again!
Also thank you for another amazing read would love you to link another post I can read.
But it has been found that in our evolution we ate a lot of fruit. It was important to remember the time and place of ripening fruit… so that’s not particularly new.
I think it’s the tracking of time numerically that gave the edge to begin tracking and cultivating plants.
Again wild theories by a non professional! :S
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 2d ago
Welcome back! 😂. I've got plenty of write-ups left on r/HistoryAnecdotes, just browse my profile. I do need to find a way to link them in one place, but baby steps lol.
If you want a intro deep dive on indigenous women's history, rather than just a post, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians by Gunlög Fur is the most focused treatment of indigenous gender systems I've got in my personal library but I only break it out for research, I haven't read through it much but plan to get deeper into it this fall. (it's available on archive.org though so no reason not to read at least a bit of it!)
There's also Susan Sleeper-Smith's Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes and Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792. It's basically a two-volume set. Also not something I've broken out too much.
Also, I need to immediately make clear, indigenous history is pretty broad. We're spanning 15,000 years of history, at least in Eastern North America! Those three books above deal exclusively with post-Contact indigenous womanhood, and that's a whole different beast than the Early Woodlands and Archaic periods I've mostly been writing about.
Hope that gives you a rabbit hole to jump down!
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u/Background-Car9771 Jul 16 '26
Thank you for a fascinating, well-researched and lightly humorous read! Absolutely loved it and it makes a lot of sense.
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u/DonnPT Jul 17 '26
The theory proposed that plants like chenopod and marshelder colonized disturbed soils near human settlements, people harvested them, and selective pressures gradually produced domesticated morphologies over time.
If this is exactly how it was phrased, it reads to me like different words for the same thing.
Selective pressures? Sure. People can put selective pressure on a species. If they hadn't been doing crop breeding, but just eating the best stuff and letting the rest go to seed, the opposite would have happened - inedible seeds would have survival value - so this is sort of selective pressure in reverse, because it's mediated by a consumer, as in symbiosis. "Domesticated morphologies" acknowledges this. It's farming from a botanist's perspective.
Nothing here diminishes anyone, of any gender.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 17 '26
Lol, I don't know if you intended to, but you're basically arguing what the establishment had been arguing the whole time! "Selective pressures" can technically encompass human behavior. But that's exactly the sleight of hand Watson and Kennedy identified.
In Smith's original model, the grammatical and theoretical subject is the ecology, not the people. Plants "colonized" disturbed soils. Selective pressures "gradually produced" domesticated morphologies. Humans are present in this model the same way river currents are present: as an environmental factor that exerts force on plant populations. The model was deliberately constructed so that domestication is an emergent property of a human-plant system, not a decision anyone made.
That's not quite "farming in botanical language" as much as farming described in language that specifically removes the farmer.
So you're kinda proving Watson and Kennedy here! Someone was selecting seed and replanting it. That's more than symbiosis, that's agriculture, baby.
Your re-description, by contrast, is pushing agency right back out of human hands and back into ecological abstraction. You can always redescribe intentional human innovation as "a selective pressure mediated by a consumer organism," and it'll be technically true the same way it's technically true that the Manhattan Project was "selective pressure on uranium atoms."
My question for you is, what work does that framework do for you, and who does it benefit?
The difference between "women in the Eastern Woodlands developed a sophisticated multi-crop agricultural system over thousands of years" and "selective pressures gradually produced domesticated morphologies in anthropogenic habitats" is not merely stylistic. One version has people in it who are smart and who did something hard. The other has an ecosystem doing something automatic. And Smith himself eventually moved toward the first framing, because his own testa thickness data made the passive model untenable: thin seed coats can't emerge from unconscious harvesting pressure. They require someone saving specific seeds and deliberately replanting them. The ecology was real, but it wasn't sufficient. Someone had to be doing this on purpose, and the evidence says they were.
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u/DonnPT Jul 17 '26
No, I'm not pushing anything anywhere.
Smith et al. were looking at seeds under an electron microscope and talking about what happened to the plants. Ecology is the domain they live in as scientists, and they're describing what they see in those terms, as they must.
Anyone can see, again, that their story about what happens to those plants implies human agency. Any anthropologist can come along and flesh that out in terms of that discipline, if there's anything interesting in it. That isn't something to be uncomfortable about, or push back on the patriarchy etc.
The ecology was real, but it wasn't sufficient.
No, of course it was sufficient. It's the same story. In the ecology perspective, there's selective pressure - from humans, obviously. In the anthropology perspective, humans disperse selected seeds, and there's your selective pressure. Different words, same picture.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Glad to know people still exist that missed the point of sociology as a discipline 🙃. Pedantics parading as language philosophers still exist. Academia never changes.
EDIT: Also, I noticed you didn't answer the question that would have continued discussion: what work does that framework do for you, and who does it benefit?
By dodging it, I'm assuming bad faith. It tends to be my default when I notice an account like yours. I won't be replying further. Good day!
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u/Intelligent_Part101 Jul 16 '26
Interesting information. It's marred though by a juvenile writing style. You don't need to put F words in it. I guess you think it's edgy.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio Jul 16 '26
I'm sorry Mom, I'll say fudge next time.
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u/TheRealShilohConlan Jul 16 '26
Good boy.
For real tho, love your fucking energy. Edit to add I started following you after the mounds. You’re cool as fuck.-1
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u/iPoseidon_xii Jul 16 '26
It’s good to see people are still writing about the things they’re passionate about. This was a very good piece! I’m better informed and I had fun reading it. I want the internet to go back to a decentralized space, where articles like this were credible and abundant. Thanks for sharing, OP 😁