Index 
Idea of Time Science (origin of agriculture) Purpose
The idea of the future as alluded to above (previous journal entry) may have received a big boost with the "stumbling across" of agriculture. Perchance a gatherer of seeds gathered enough to fill her hands and perhaps her pouch, then sauntered over to an overhang to get out of the rain, jumping a small creek on the way and dropping some of her seeds, cursing slightly she hurries on to the shelter, there nibbling at the grain she didn't spill, placing it in a little pile for easy pickings. Then she sees a big cat or bear or snake or other human or for some other reason leaves the pile before it is all eaten. Then the next year or so the family is passing through the same area and the same thing happens to her. Under the overhang she sees the pile she left last year and remembers. She looks out and sees abundant seed plants where she spilled the seeds before and remembers. Again, maybe again. Maybe she shares her stories around the fire about finding the pile and the seeds spilled and the abund ant seed plants. Then perhaps someone else chimes in with a similar story. The someone clicks. Future - I can CONTROL the future. If I spill seeds here, next year many seed plants appear and I THINK I caused it by spilling the seeds. So the family then EXPERIMENTS. They purposefully spill seeds and return the next year and find seed plants. They don't know they are "seeds" of course, only that spilling the little chewy things seems to cause more chewy things the next or later. Perhaps the idea of "future", of potentially retrievable storage of surplus, maybe just a day's surplus of collecting, left as our heroine did above, preceded the idea of seeding and CONTROL of the future. The surplus pile is made NOW and retrieved LATER, so the storer doesn't really control the future, he or she just controls the present in a way that makes it last. But the idea of spilling food so food plants "appear" later, I think is a "whole nother" way of thinking. The thought, "My action now in spilling seeds mak es more seeds later is an intellectual leap necessary for agriculture to occur, and I suspect, absent for the most part from human consciousness before. Agricultural Surplus: Of course other critters are attracted to the tempting piles of food, squirrels, bugs, bears, other people. So some bright fellow, I am sure it was a fellow and not a girl, offered to protect the pile while everyone gathered seed, because that's when the other critters were wont to "steal" from the piles. Of course he must be able to take from the pile more than he contributed to it, breaking a cardinal rule of family equity, but his "service" "required" it because, of course, he could not be in the fields to collect seeds and protect the pile at the same time. So money was born, as was a king. As the cooperative and its stash grows, more is available in poor growing seasons so fewer children starve, population grows, the stash grows, as do the assaults upon it by the squirrels and, mainly, other people. So the "job" of protection becomes more difficult. Maybe as the pile protector grows old he offers his sons as protectors and teaches them special knowledge about how tto protect the pile. Hereditary hierarchies are born, and everything is in place for modern society including derivatives trading, all based on the "idea" that I can hedge the future. |