Timeline for How might a Professor of Mathematics Change History?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 31, 2018 at 23:29 | comment | added | J Thomas | @YElm Probably, your family had indoor plumbing and did not do a good job of returning the minerals they took from the soil, back to the soil. | |
| Jul 31, 2018 at 18:16 | comment | added | Elmy | As a matter of fact, my family has done exaclty that: removed the gras from a "wild" piece of land and made it into a garden. That is no easy task and you don't want to repeat is every few years. But even with frequent rotation the soil is depleted after 5 - 7 years and notably yields less produce without fertilization. It's a matter of fact that the medieval age was packed with severe famines due to bad weather and smaller rates of yield of the cultivated plants. | |
| Jul 31, 2018 at 18:05 | comment | added | J Thomas | @YElm You can dig a small garden with a hoe, with a wooden, bone, or stone blade. Kill everything and mix up some deeper dirt that hasn't had the minerals sucked out of it yet. And you can individually plant big seeds with a seed drill; poke a hole in the dirt as deep as you want it, drop one or more seeds in, and cover it up. There's a limit how much of that you can do without metal, and if you add your own wastes back onto your own garden, the minerals will work out without rotation. It's civilization that requires crop rotation, and civilization invents it. | |
| Jul 31, 2018 at 16:48 | comment | added | Elmy | @JThomas Crop rotation is still used today and was nessecary until early modern times to avoid starvation! Medieval crops yielded much less than modern crops and food couldn't be transported in great amounts. In the traditional crop rotation system legumes and manure (dropped by lifestock in the fallow) restore nutriens in the soil naturally which leads to better harvests. | |
| Jul 31, 2018 at 15:14 | comment | added | J Thomas | Crop rotation is useful when you export your crops. If you plant crops that suck the nutrients out of the soil and then you send the crops away, you need a way to replace those nutrients. If you just eat the food and return the nutrients to your fields, you mostly don't need crop rotation after all. | |
| Jul 31, 2018 at 11:18 | comment | added | Elmy | @HenningMakholm Maybe it's a matter of the educational system rather than the level of education. During my school time, topics like cranes, pulleys and crop rotation were taught sometime in the first 10 years of school (= basic education level). Basic scythes and plows are rather simple to recreate if you know how they look and work. With wheels and troughs available, I could probably cobble together something resembling a wheel barrow. A functioning windmill is a task for someone stuck in time though ;). You might be right concerning the wheel, I was too lazy to investigate. | |
| Jul 31, 2018 at 11:04 | comment | added | hmakholm left over Monica | Hmm, I think I have a comparative level of education to that of our hypothetical math professor -- and I wouldn't have the first idea how to go about making a plowshare or a scythe. I've heard of three-field crop rotation, but I wouldn't have any idea which crops to rotate, or in which direction, or what the benefits of it would be (so how would I convince the villagers to even try it out?) And some of the Bronze age artifacts I've seen look like they had better wheels than I'd know how to design. | |
| Jul 30, 2018 at 12:23 | history | edited | Elmy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added more examples like script
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| Jul 30, 2018 at 11:07 | history | answered | Elmy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |