Small scale agriculture and aquaculture has been long understood.

The tipping point where the use of labour and soil to create surlus labour, which is then used to conquer more soil is why agriculture led to a "culture" or "civilisation"(according to 19th century hisorians IIRC).

19th century hisorians argued (I think) that superior societies had superior technology, which made them even more superior. If anything, I think modern academics are too concerned about refuting the premise that Western civilisation ended up with superior technology, rather than simply accepting that they did (in most ways) but that this didn't always make them morally superior.

I freely admit to knowing very little about "19th century hisorians" and their ideas about "surlus labour" ..

I also am unaware how this relates to the above theory about how pre colonial Tasmanians had and then lost "tech like crops".

I do have a notion that metrics such as "superior" tend to be value judgements based on particular axioms .. some people feel that storing their nuts for winter, creating an industrial revolution, eliminating other life forms on the planet through expansion, and altering the atmosphere to be a superior approach.

Others seemingly enjoyed a particular quality of life for several tens of thousands of years by spending some time gathering food and most of the time telling stories.

Clearly different value systems are at play.

Can we really put that down to value systems? You’re implying that the latter group made a choice, but for that to be true they would have to have developed the new technologies and chose not to use them.

you don't invent guns and grain silos because you're having a great time, you do it because resources are scarce and contested. Necessity is the mother of invention they say. Personally I don't subscribe much to notions of choice, but in that framework, I would say the pre-agrarians made the choice not to develop agriculture and all the rest.

Is there some place that resources were not scarce or contested? Competition for resources happens across the animal kingdom as far as I can tell.

There are many places across the globe (equatorial regions) that don't have the severe winter "nothing grows at all" problem that some would argue drove European cultures to advance food storage and intensive agriculture techniques.

There's always some kind of scarcity everywhere, sure, but the key notion here is regular predictable extreme scarcity that can be planned for and hedged against with a considered amount of energy and advance preparation.

Advanced food storage and agriculture tech originated not in Europe, though, but in the great flood plains - Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Amazonia.

On that note, it is by the way theorized that the necessity to coordinate farming with the floods and other farmers is what kicked off civilisatory development.

Fair point - I thought of that after I made the above comment (which obviously started with winter scarcity) but river delta flooding is another good example of literal flood | famine food availabilty.

And, as you note, an original challenge that predates human advance into the northern environments as glaciers retreated.

The great OG mathematical challenge for humans was the "fair" recurrent remarking of land plots following a flood - how to survey land area, and how to plan for and account for food surplus to last over food scarcity.

I don't see pests listed in the above discussion, although I could have missed it.

However this is as big as drought, if not larger. Not just insects, rodents, bird cyclictic overpopulation wiping out crops, but also fungus, bacteria, etc.

The world has starved more than once from such things, and the Egyptians had reverence for cats for a reason.

Jōmon Japan, too. And the PNW.

The degree to which resources are scarce and contested varies geographically yes.

Around me there is not a constraint on the deer population, resources are plentiful for them and outside of hunting season there is little contesting the deer. Eventually the deer population grows enough that the lifeforms they share space with decide to, mm, contest their expansion, but there are places and periods in which populations can grow unconstrained for a while. I suppose I was making the point that humans maintaining a certain way of life for tens of thousands of years may have lived in a way where resources and rival tribes were not an issue, and hence, had little motivation to develop defensive weaponry / collect starvation rations for rainy days.

Grain silos (storage pits, more generally) were primarily used to store seasonally abundant foods, as I understand it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_storage_pits

Judging one lifestyle to be a superior society seems to be a value judgement.

It's hardly a nuetral unbiased assessment when it's literally Europeans saying "who has two thumbs and superior culture" as they photograph themselves amongst a pile of dead indigenous people and ship a bunch of heads home to pickle for the phrenologists.

> by spending some time gathering food and most of the time telling stories

And dying of basic infections, having to birth 10 children so 2 survive to adulthood among other amazing perks of avoiding technological progress.

Hint: that was the case in "civilized" places with access to an abundance of introduced diseases, and poor diet dominated by cereal crops. Hunter-gatherer societies were typically healthier, judging by size of skeletons we find.

Of course the Canary Islands were settled by "civilized" people.

Any resources to learn more here? My understanding is the adult sized hunter gatherer remains appear healthy, I’m not sure that is an indicator that more babies made it to that stage

Telling stories and picking berries is very nice but you chose to ignore the fact that majority of your children would die, including a few of your partners from labor, any broken bone would be excruciating pain for life.

No amount of "colonizers bad" is gonna get away from those. Health care has improved tremendously due to technological advances and if you like preventing misery, singing songs and picking berries isn't the way.

They were not only gathering food and telling stories.

The men also took weapons and went to the tribes nearby and killed the men there, and ...

This has always been a violent species. (Not saying the other great apes are (were) any better.)

Previously the historians thought the stone age was peaceful, singing songs telling stories etc. And oh so much spare time. They know better nowadays.

Check out the Yanomami, or read about viking raids or Shaka Zulu. Humans don't just sit around and tell stories. They reproduce, become more and more, and ...

Aboriginal Tasmanians arrived there 40000 years ago when it was still a peninsula, and got cut off of Australia 8000 years ago, around the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry.

Afaik agriculture never made it to Australia (at least not in any sort of large scale) before the western invasion, let alone to Tasmania.

> When did the Tasmanian pre colonial people have crops?

My 'they' in "they lost tech like crops" referred to the Canary Islanders, as discussed by OP where the botanical evidence shows crops disappearing gradually over time.

If that was the case then to what parallel technology in Tasmania were you alluding to as "ratcheting downwards" ?

Also, population growth in the early stages of human history was important to establish enough labour to create an "idle" (as in "people|time not spent scrabbling for food|clothing|shelter") class able to advance technology for progress.

That's been increasingly non essential since post WWII with the rise of semi and fully autonomous mining | processing | production.

Smaller and smaller numbers are people are required to extract resources and meet demand for what is a population excess wrt strain put on the planets environment an atmosphere by current and growing consumption demands.