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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Can trees expand their territory across water? |
The short answer ought to be "why not? Look at coconuts an'at". But the long answer should be "easier said than done, mate..." and go into the sorts of seed, the sorts of water, the sorts of wind, the sorts of beach... But such natural considerations would appear to be irrelevant here.
| Oak trees (Quercus) started spreading westward across Europe about 10,000 years ago. By 9,000 years ago they got to the south of England and the south of Ireland. And by 7000 years ago, they had spread everywhere except the very north of Scotland. Between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago the English Channel and the Irish Sea filled up with water. So I assume that the Oak trees spread by land, not by water. |
Sounds like they were spread by hand.
Does your book say the oak is considered to provide a superior sort of forest, in terms of light, space, timber, food and the variety of other species and game that thrive in it?
| The current Celtic league political boundaries correspond closely (not perfectly) to the biological limits of where the tilia tree expanded 5000 years ago. |
Again, suggests human intervention. Lime provides fibre and timber and I dunno what else. Except that Celtland is typically upland as well, so there could be a biological element to this. I suspect economics is stronger though, given that we have a number of trees that occur only in hedgerows and not in woodlands: they are distinct elements of the rural economy.
Rural countryside is not the same as wilderness. I'm not sure you'd find any of the latter in Britain.
I've come across the odd mention here and there of other species that correlate to Celtland or England -- frogs and birds and stuff... I dunno -- which usually means they date their arrival to the Celtic or Saxon/Viking invasion. Worth assembling the data.
(There's a migratory bird that comes to Great Britain but not Ireland, which would be food for other thoughts if I could remember what it was.)
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Does your book say the oak is considered to provide a superior sort of forest, in terms of light, space, timber, food and the variety of other species and game that thrive in it? |
No, it just says that birch and pine spread first, then hazel and elm, then lime, oak, and alder. It says that: "The change that occurred when the forests returned to most of Europe at the end of the Younger Dryas set the seal on the future of human activities across the continent."
I've never heard the term "set the seal" before, but I think he's saying that the trees came first and that subsequently determined human activities.
The book also shows that farming reached Britain by about 5500-5000 years ago. Does planting trees count as farming?
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Xerxes
In: The Forest of Dean
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| In a book I'm reading, it says that Oak trees (Quercus) started spreading westward across Europe about 10,000 years ago. But this book also shows the spread of the Lime (Tilia) tree. |
A few thoughts that might be helpful:
o Lime trees prefer lowland sites with base rich soils and don't grow well on upland, wet, acid sites. This might help to explain why they are not much in evidence in Wales, Scotland, Brittany, etc. The link with the Celts (whoever they were - read THOBR) may just be happenstance.
o Lime trees have provided an important source of fodder for domestic animals, and may have been favoured/cultivated/planted for that reason.
o Oak trees grow well in the lowlands (Pedunculate Oak) and in the uplands (Sessile Oak) so you would expect them to have a wider distribution than Lime.
o Oak timber has been very important for its strength and durability for a long time.
o Oak has been associated with religious beliefs for a very long time, perhaps because of the similarity between an acorn and the male generative organ.
o The stories concerning the spread of trees northward after the last Ice Age should be viewed with caution. Swedish scientists claim to have found the world's oldest tree up a mountain in Sweden, see www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080414-oldest-tree.html . At 9,500 years old it is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the scientists is quoted as saying:
"Prior to our studies the general conception was that spruce migrated to this area about 2,000 years ago, so now you will have to rewrite the textbooks," Kullman said.
"Deglaciation seems to have occurred much earlier than generally thought," he added. "Perhaps the ice sheet during the Ice Age was much thinner than previously believed."
"We can see trees have an ability to migrate much faster than people had believed," he said. |
So don't worry too much at present about those detailed orthodox timescales that are quoted in your book.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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One very deep thought that has been creeping about my brain for some time is to ask why lowland Britain isn't like Scandinavia and the Canadian Laurentian Shield in being a post-glacial wasteland -- all bare rocks, thin soils and peaty lakes. After all England is just as recently emerged from glaciation so it really ought to be.
And the answer is that basically lowland Britain is entirely a manicured environment. In other words, what we think of as English-speaking Britain is the product of five-to-eight thousand years of careful megalithic sculpting by agricultural obsessives. Which did not, it would seem, include the Celts who preferred less dragooned ways of living.
The specific introduction of trees (including obviously artificial trees such as the various oaks) is one obvious early method of terraforming. And something even the Celts may have picked up in their desultory fashion.
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Xerxes
In: The Forest of Dean
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One of the chief differences between Swedish and English geology/pedology is that a very large part of lowland England has several hundred feet of chalk and clay below the soil, and so has much of northern France.
Mick, please tell me that your latest posting is not suggesting that thousands of cubic kilometres of chalk and clay were planted in Europe by agricultural obsessives.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| it just says that birch and pine spread first |
Ah, birch, "the bushman's greatest ally".
| I think he's saying that the trees came first and that subsequently determined human activities. |
Ain't it lucky for us that the first ones were the most immediately useful -- birch and pine -- and the more sophisticated, roundedly economical ones came later?
| Does planting trees count as farming? |
If you ask me, yes.
"Agriculture First" is an amazingly pervasive paradigm: it even surfaced in a discussion I had with a museum curator about the what-you'd-think-was-rather-technical-and-recent matter of Roman roads in Britain. Things coming together to enable settlement and division of labour and organisation and hierarchy... are supposed even to have had demonstrable effects on our psyche.
But it's all poo.
Organising fields of crops and pastures full of animals and hedges and coppices and woods and copper mines and gold placers and stone quarries... it's all the usual business of installing a technology in a suitable place to make good use of resources.
As far as I know, the entire British landscape has been worked over for these purposes and there is not a drop of wilderness left.
A couple of asides:
� Have you ever seen a field full of brambles, somewhere there are swathes of blackberries that only birds can reach... or are they always pretty well within reach?
� Mick suggested in THOBR that ancient English peasants probably lived in stone (not masonry) houses and every indication we have is that timber has always been a valuable commodity, rather than a cheap and plentiful material for the masses.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Lime trees... The link with the Celts may just be happenstance. |
Is there anything funny about the time it took to spread across the available lowlands?
Is there anything funny about what counts as lowland when sea levels are changing by a hundred metres? (Would the bed of the North Sea have been upland and East Anglia evenmoreupland at one time?)
| At 9,500 years old it is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time... |
...given current thinking on Ice Age conditions.
If glaciers vary between 4-ish and 8-ish miles per year now, when climate change is arguable, then how fast could they be going during an Ice Age? How seasonal? How does the behaviour of the ice vary with the rate at which it is deposited...?
It's the root system of the tree referred to that was dated to 9500 years old. What can they survive that trunks and branches can't?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| And the answer is that basically lowland Britain is entirely a manicured environment. |
Why isn't Scandinavia? Britain has the distinct advantage of the Gulf Stream.
It is surely geography that determines that Europe dominates the world.
Look at the African coast of the Mediterranean: boring.
Look at the European coast: feature-rich (and/because well-watered).
If we're not careful, someone will mention Atlantis.
| five-to-eight thousand years of careful... sculpting by agricultural obsessives. Which did not, it would seem, include the Celts who preferred less dragooned ways of living. |
For themselves, perhaps, but there is even a Welsh Dragoon on the flag.
We saw once before that the trees were spreading across Britain again and the turning point (I forget which one: towards treefulness or towards treelessness) coincided with the supposed arrival of... someone or other. Does anyone have the dates?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Mick, please tell me that your latest posting is not suggesting that thousands of cubic kilometres of chalk and clay were planted in Europe by agricultural obsessives. |
The first thing to ask is how come all this chalk and clay survived the scouring action of the ice. And the corollary: Scandinavia and Laurentia are so awful over such vast tracts that it is unlikely that such a local phenomenon as underlying geology/pedology is going to be the explanation.
On the other hand there are clear examples of "Scandinavia" in England. The whole strip from the Dorset coast to the Surrey heaths seems to have defied the megalithic farmers (though this is just beyond the ice of course). But other bits -- all the higher areas for instance -- seemed also not worth 'getting the treatment'. Even though what we regard as a 'higher area' would be thought of as not in the least high by Scands or Canadians.
It is important we have a genuine look-see in this area, rather than repeating the vagueish bromides of people for whom the very idea of ancient terraforming is a non-starter. At this stage, remember, I am not advocating that it happened, just pointing out that England is not immediately recognisable post-glacial terrain. After all, even Xerxes would admit that orthodoxy dismisses Scandinavia and Laurentia as 'post-glacial' without further ado.
On the question of wholesale chalk engineering, it may not be possible to lay down a few thousand feet of chalk but it may well be possible to get rid of it.
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Whether Neanderthal was the same species is something for us to work out, rather than an assumption for us to proceed from. |
But what's a species? I took it for granted that specie was a well defined term. But consider these equids:
This equid has 64 chromosomes:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Shetland_pony_dalmatian2.jpg
These equids have 64 chromosomes:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-471121/The-worlds-tallest-horse-meets-worlds-smallest.html
This equid, Przewalski's Horse, apparently the only wild horse species left, has 66 chromosomes:
http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/research/alaska/figures/figure33.jpg
The 64 chromosome horse can breed with the 66 chromosome horse and produce a horse with 65 chromosomes. But the 65 chromosome horses cannot breed with other 65 chromosome horses and produce offspring due to the odd number of chromosomes. The 65 chromosome horse can breed with a 64 horse and produce a 64 chromosome horse with very few of the 66 chromosome horse characteristics. Yet some biologists consider them the same species.
If you had to determine species based on the fossil record alone, don't you think the scientists would conclude that the Shetland pony and the Przewalski horse were more or less the same thing, and that the Belgian worker horse is entirely another?
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| DPCrisp wrote: |
What is the source of (or ground for) your doubt? |
I'm not sure. I don't know enough about genetics. When I first heard theories about "based on DNA this is where we were then and this is how many of us there were" I believed them.
For instance, with mtDNA I thought they could tell how old a genetic group was based on the DNA alone. Kind of like if you tied a knot at the bottom of the string and then put a bunch of beads on it, you would know which bead was put on first based on where the knot was. But now I think it's more like a necklace and you can't really know which bead came first without assuming which bead came first.
I read Bryan Sykes' book about the 7 daughters of Eve and I got the impression that their enterprise goes something like this:
Anthropologist: Hey Geneticist, I think that we all walked out of Africa a long time ago. What do the genes say about this?
Geneticist: Hey, not sure. I'll go look...Well, this is what I worked out. The genes certainly form clusters. You can think of them as vaguely responding to ethnic groups if you like. But I can't really figure out which of the clusters is oldest. Let's go ask the computer programmer. Hey, Computer Programmer, can you work out which group is the oldest? I seem to be going around in circles.
Computer Programmer: No, problem. Hey Geneticist, well it's all worked out except for one problem. I've got some relations between the clusters of genes figured out, but the problem is, they are forming more of a network of clusters rather than a tree of clusters. I need to know which cluster is the root.
Geneticist: Hmm. Go ask the Anthropologist. He might be able to help.
Athropologist: Well, gee. We know that this cluster is the African cluster. Therefore, that's the root of the tree.
Anthropologist, Geneticist, Computer Programmer: Great! Let's publish.
Philosophy undergrad: Hey guys, couldn't this be a case of Petitio Principii or something like that.
Anthropologist, Geneticist, Computer Programmer: What are you on about? Latin? No one cares about Latin anymore.
Anyway, when I was looking at the mtDNA map http://www.geocities.com/haplogroupb/mtdnamigrations.jpg
the "M" groups had me stumped. I couldn't see any "into Africa" pattern without ignoring the "M"s in the Middle East and Africa.
But then I read http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/223 that the M groups were a backflow into Africa. But now I wonder, shouldn't there be two rather distinct looking groups in Africa. One that looks like Africans and the other that might look a bit Asian. I guess not understanding something can inspire doubt.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| The specific introduction of trees (including obviously artificial trees such as the various oaks) is one obvious early method of terreforming. And something even the Celts may have picked up in their desultory fashion |
The oak is an interesting tree. It was required for the main manufacturing industry of the Neolithic and Bronze Age: leather. Reindeer skins from northern Scandinavia were tanned using bast fibre from oak trees due to its high tannin content. This was done on the west coast of Ireland which was adjacent to huge oak forests. Ireland once had huge stands of oak forest in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age.
The leather was used to construct boats (hulls and sails). These boats were large vessels capable of withstanding the rigours of Atlantic sailing. Tim Severen sailed a replica to America. These boats were still being used at the time of Julius Caesar who wrote about them. In fact he clearly mentioned TWO distinct types of boat used by the coastal and island tribes. The west Britons used leather boats and the north Europeans used wooden boats. Both types are built using oak. The description of these boats closely resembles the Pucans of western Ireland and the Longships of the Vikings.
Longships are built entirely of oak but there is no oak in Scandinavia. The raw material for Scandinavian boats came from Ireland and Britain. According to the latest palaeobotanist surveys oak was introduced to Britain no earlier then 4000BC. There was no way it could have spread naturally across the channel.
The earliest boat building is also from around this time. It would seem that managed forests are not a new concept as we are lead to believe. Mick's terraforming idea is on solid ground. Though I don't think the Celtic proposition holds up as they were the boat builders.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Your description, Endless, of how the Out-of-Africa thesis arose is spot on. In fact the general process you describe is the basis of Applied Epistemology itself because all academic subjects that are based on peer review (which is all of them outside the pure sciences and maths) are founded essentially on accident. Or sooner or later are derailed by an accident.
It is an accident that Out-of-Africa accords with a current piece of political correctness and it is another accident (or at least one assumes so) that hominids came from Africa. So now, as you point out, questions are loaded in favour of Africanist solutions, and contrary theories/evidence tend not to get pursued/published. Hence over the years -- even when the original accidental trigger is long forgotten -- the evidence is still stacked all on one side.
The fact that this must happen sooner or later, and to a greater or lesser extent, to every academic subject (they refuse to develop structures for institutional revisionism) means that Applied Epistemology can stick in its thumb anywhere and pull out a plum. While always getting our fingers thoroughly burned of course.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Ireland once had huge stands of oak forest in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age. |
What we need to know -- and I fear we won't be able to get a straight answer -- is whether this is possible in natural conditions. I assume "huge stands" means a monoculture of oaks extending for some distance. So is it possible to get such monocultures naturally? And if so, are oaks a candidate for doing it?
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| What we need to know -- and I fear we won't be able to get a straight answer -- is whether this is possible in natural conditions. I assume "huge stands" means a monoculture of oaks extending for some distance. So is it possible to get such monocultures naturally? And if so, are oaks a candidate for doing it? |
If you're looking for a straight answer from orthodoxy I wouldn't hold your breath waiting. But their own evidence is that Oak was an 'introduced' species.
With regards to Ireland pretty much all the bog areas were once oak forests. The remnants of these forests are being continually dug up in the form of oak stumps embedded deep in the peat bogs everywhere. The adjacent higher well drained lands still carry the remnants of these forests.
Whether the forests were 'managed' by man or they just planted a few hundred trees and let nature do the rest is unknown. The latter would seem to be the easier of the two.
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