I just can't imagine that. They grazed cattle in the high mountains without guidance from a forest service? They used corridors without Zinke? They established trade without subsidies from a commerce dept? Unbelievable!
Saturday, November 03, 2018
Major corridor of Silk Road already home to high-mountain herders over 4,000 years ago
Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic animals -cattle, sheep, and goat - made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago, as published in a study in PLOS ONE.
Long before the formal creation of the Silk Road - a complex system of trade routes linking East and West Eurasia through its arid continental interior- pastoral herders living in the mountains of Central Asia helped form new cultural and biological links across this region...MORE
I just can't imagine that. They grazed cattle in the high mountains without guidance from a forest service? They used corridors without Zinke? They established trade without subsidies from a commerce dept? Unbelievable!
I just can't imagine that. They grazed cattle in the high mountains without guidance from a forest service? They used corridors without Zinke? They established trade without subsidies from a commerce dept? Unbelievable!
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3 comments:
Have you ever seen the documentary about the search for grass made in about 1920's before movies had sound. It is the most amazing film about the very subject matter in the article. It was done yearly by the nomadic tribe.
And, yes there was no sign of a green pickup in any of the footage. However a free passage by the livestock was not in the making. A newer version of this film shows negotiations between the nomads and the tribes over who's land they were crossing. The newer version is not as good as the 1920 documentary.
Interesting article and especially so since there is still an abundance of grass after centuries of livestock use. The authors seem surprised but could have saved a lot of verbiage if they had read the Bible or at least the Torah first since the people they are talking about are very likely cousins of Abraham.
A false accusation that the "Dust Bowl" was caused by so called "overgrazing" by livestock became the political justification for enlarging the size and power of government agencies until we have today's Dept of Interior and Dept of Agriculture. Abusive, thoughtless land management can in fact result in desired plants dying off and massive soil erosion; however, rational people want the real source of the problems identified and only spend money to fix the things that can be fixed. Politicians of the Dust Bowl days eagerly declared that citizens needed to be controlled in order to solve a problem that didn't exist and today's politicians are no different.
F.E. Mollin rebutted the fallacy of overgrazing in "If and When It Rains" (1938). Cliff Gardner has a scanned copy of this booklet on his web site www.gardnerfiles.com as document 11(A). Mollin wrote in 1938 that loss of plants and accelerated soil erosion was a symptom of on going drought not grazing and argues his points really well as indicated by the title "If and When It Rains".
I may be wrong but wasn't the dust bowl brought about by railroads raising the price of freight on wheat and corn and farmers plowing up more land to counter-act the price increase by producing more?
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