These questions have far reaching impacts, such as on the size of sustainable city populations and standing armies. Not that I'll be making exact calculations of those but I'd like a rough idea as to whether a city of 10's of thousands of people could even exist and if organised professional armies and centralised states would be possible.
As I was researching these topics I learned that there is a difference between a cultivated food source one that domesticated. Cultivation is the deliberate attempt to sow and manage wild plants. Domestication is when people experiment and consciously select the right seeds to grow for various conditions. You could apply this to animals as well. Creating circumstances to attract certain animals to a place and managing them vs capturing them and selectively breeding them. I've decided that cultivation, besides hunting, foraging and fishing what sustained the Early period which then resulted in domestication and the emergence of the Middle period.
No Rice?
The scientific consensus is that rice was first domesticated in China 8000 to 13,500 years ago: Rice - Asia This lines up roughly with the time period that the floods in Southeast Asia happened. This gives us some wiggle room for our setting. We can imagine rice was domesticated in Sundaland and was then brought to China by the survivors of the great floods.
No Cotton
As an aside the earliest use of cotton is dated to 5000 BCE in the Indus valley: Cotton - History. People in Sundaland will have to make their clothing out of other materials such as animal hides, feathers and bark cloth. I will do more research into this topic in the future.
What are the staples?
I imagine for carbs people would have to rely on wild growing plants. Things like Lotus Rhizome, Sago, Bananas, Yams, Taro.
I imagine for carbs people would have to rely on wild growing plants. Things like Lotus Rhizome, Sago, Bananas, Yams, Taro.
As mentioned in other articles the other food sources will be hunting, gathering and fishing. The central savannah and grasslands could provide an interesting setting for the large scale hunting of herbivore while overexploitation of resources around growing cities could provide for interesting plot points in the Classical period. Think of the hypothesis that Mayan societies or those one Easter island collapsed because they overexploited the resources around them.
The thing about cows is that they have to be domesticated, because wild cows were aurochs. They were probably domesticated around 8500BCE, so it's kind of an edge case as far as Tanah Sunda goes, and you sure could put them there, but for me it is too big a step. I want everything but ships to be human muscle powered—I'm also going to avoid wind- or water-mills. With cattle, you get oxen, which gives oxcarts. You can have oxen turning mechanical power-wheels. For my version, I want specifically to avoid those things.
ReplyDeleteWe do know that large-scale civilizations can exist that only use human muscles for power, as we saw it happen in Central America and the Mississippi Valley among other places.
Also, thanks to genetic science, we have a pretty solid grasp on when and where cattle were domesticated. That's a little too late and a little too far away for my setting, though I could imagine it being the idea of Tanah Sunda refugee intellectuals who had experience of domesticated elephants or pigs before fleeing the flooding. "There aren't any elephants around here, just these huge, horned beasts. Whatever, it's the same principle."
ReplyDeleteIf Sundaland had a tropical, rainny climate like present Southeast Asia, the cow might be relatively rare compared to the water buffalo.
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly an interesting question! Keep in mind, though, that Sunda can only exist during an ice age, so global temperatures are likely to be a bit lower than at present. The climate is probably more temperate than tropical, though it could certainly be quite rainy.
ReplyDeleteGood point!
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