Re: A China-Sumer connection

From: P.Comm (tjsrno_at_spampost.com)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 09:32:07 GMT

<phippsmartin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1108895048.441936.175440@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Jacques Guy wrote:
>> phippsmartin@hotmail.com wrote:
>>
>> > This reminds me of a Chinese legend that one of their benevalent
>> > emperors once took it upon himself to taste all of the wild plants
>> > growing in China so that his people would know which ones were safe
> to
>> > eat. I don't know if you find that relevant or not.
>>
>> Yes, I do. I take us back to when we were apes. Did not our
>> ancestors know how to tell poisonous stuff from edible stuff?
>> Somehow the knowledge just had to be transmitted down the
>> generations. Otherwise we wouldn't be here to puzzle about
>> it. And whom from did our great-great-grandfatherly apes
>> get that knowledge? Wind it back, wind it back, wind it back.
>> To the precambrian soup.
>
> Well, except that animals, so the argument goes, rely more on instinct
> that is passed down by artificial selection. An animal eats an edible
> plant not because the animal _knows_ it is safe but because its
> ancester _didn't_ die from eating it. You're right though: people
> should have known already what was safe to eat and that it another
> argument against this legend being literally true.

Not really - agriculture was a new thing - the old plants were altered.
Eating too much corn and not enough of anything else can produce pellagra
(which might explain the Aztec lunacy..... heh) - they'd not have directly
known to relate the two things if the "poisoning" was very slow and not so
obviously causal.
>
> (I remember being told as a child that people in Europe thought that
> tomatoes were poisonous until somebody tried one and didn't die, so
> there's a chance there might be a grain of truth to the Chinese
> legend.)

People in Europe also thought that rubber was of the devil because water
didn't go thru it. Hmm.
>
> Martin
>

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