Good essay. I was an archeologist for a time (it was my major) and most of my field experience was with California Bay Area sites. They were hunter gatherers, subsisting mostly on acorns (our native oaks produce more nutritious acorns than European varieties) but the one plant they did cultivate was tobacco. There’s lots of debate about why they didn’t deliberately grow other staple food plants since they obviously knew how considering all the tabaco they grew. They would combine it with crushed shells to increase the potency.
Happy you liked it! I did read in one of the papers that some native groups were known to mix lime with tobacco to increase its potency, I think it might have been in South America though. Wish I had the time to squeeze all those extra little details in but then I'd never actually post it!
>These plants are believed to have evolved in the Eastern Andes before spreading North, then West across the ocean before finally reaching Africa, landing on the continent from their foothold in Australia. How exactly this ocean-crossing occurred is still a matter of debate
Fascinating!
The third citation puts forth a conundrum on dating: "Bally and colleagues placed the mutation event of NbRdr1 to NbRdr1m at 710–880 thousand years BP [37], long before humans occupied the continent 65,000 years BP [9]. If this were the case, it seems distribution of the allele either has not spread beyond the region it first occurred in or has shrunk to this region from a broader distribution over this vast time period."
I don't know that much about plant genetics, but is it possible that this highly diverged mutation is from the Americas, and arrived as you suggest? Then the American Nicotiana crossed with the local variety.
Based on current knowledge it appears broadly accepted that the genus is South American in origin and spread from there, so over geological timescales it somehow spread throughout the Pacific, far before humans travelled to the area, and diversified locally. As I said it's a genus that produces many small seeds which is useful for long-range dispersion.
The domesticated tobacco variants come solely from South American species and are not crossed with Australian species. I didn't dig too deeply into it but as far as I'm aware only N. suaveolens which is indigenous to the country was used by aboriginals.
The definition of indigenousness is already complex just within a biological context, to say nothing of a human one. The quick and easy definition is that any plant species that arrives some place on its own, without human intervention, could be seen as indigenous.
Of course some people disagree, seeing humans as a part of nature and thus their actions in spreading a species being a natural event that wouldn't detract from a species' claim to being indigenous once it stabilised itself in a new area.
The extremes of this is people not considering Acer pseudoplatanus as indigenous to England, even though it grew there during the last interglacial period, because it retreated during the final ace age and returned after humans brought it there. Or in Northwestern Europe, Taxus baccata not being considered indigenous in places because it was all cut down for weapons crafting or to avoid intoxicating flocks and replaced later by human activities.
So there are various definitions. I'm somewhat flexible, considering that any species reaching an area without human intervention is indigenous to it, but also that reintroduced species that had disappeared in an area are still indigenous. I wouldn't consider species introduced explicitly and voluntarily by humans over the past few centuries to be indigenous though.
Anyway in this case all pre-colombian tobacco species outside South America seem pretty clearly to be indigenous and not introduced purposefully by humans
Good essay. I was an archeologist for a time (it was my major) and most of my field experience was with California Bay Area sites. They were hunter gatherers, subsisting mostly on acorns (our native oaks produce more nutritious acorns than European varieties) but the one plant they did cultivate was tobacco. There’s lots of debate about why they didn’t deliberately grow other staple food plants since they obviously knew how considering all the tabaco they grew. They would combine it with crushed shells to increase the potency.
Happy you liked it! I did read in one of the papers that some native groups were known to mix lime with tobacco to increase its potency, I think it might have been in South America though. Wish I had the time to squeeze all those extra little details in but then I'd never actually post it!
>These plants are believed to have evolved in the Eastern Andes before spreading North, then West across the ocean before finally reaching Africa, landing on the continent from their foothold in Australia. How exactly this ocean-crossing occurred is still a matter of debate
Fascinating!
The third citation puts forth a conundrum on dating: "Bally and colleagues placed the mutation event of NbRdr1 to NbRdr1m at 710–880 thousand years BP [37], long before humans occupied the continent 65,000 years BP [9]. If this were the case, it seems distribution of the allele either has not spread beyond the region it first occurred in or has shrunk to this region from a broader distribution over this vast time period."
I don't know that much about plant genetics, but is it possible that this highly diverged mutation is from the Americas, and arrived as you suggest? Then the American Nicotiana crossed with the local variety.
There are several indigenous species of Nicotianas that can be found in Australia, 16 according to this website, but the classification may have changed since then to include more or fewer species. https://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/NSWfl.pl?page=nswfl&lvl=gn&name=Nicotiana
Based on current knowledge it appears broadly accepted that the genus is South American in origin and spread from there, so over geological timescales it somehow spread throughout the Pacific, far before humans travelled to the area, and diversified locally. As I said it's a genus that produces many small seeds which is useful for long-range dispersion.
The domesticated tobacco variants come solely from South American species and are not crossed with Australian species. I didn't dig too deeply into it but as far as I'm aware only N. suaveolens which is indigenous to the country was used by aboriginals.
Oh, misunderstanding about "indigenous," as I don't usually think of species in place for a million years as a transplant.
The definition of indigenousness is already complex just within a biological context, to say nothing of a human one. The quick and easy definition is that any plant species that arrives some place on its own, without human intervention, could be seen as indigenous.
Of course some people disagree, seeing humans as a part of nature and thus their actions in spreading a species being a natural event that wouldn't detract from a species' claim to being indigenous once it stabilised itself in a new area.
The extremes of this is people not considering Acer pseudoplatanus as indigenous to England, even though it grew there during the last interglacial period, because it retreated during the final ace age and returned after humans brought it there. Or in Northwestern Europe, Taxus baccata not being considered indigenous in places because it was all cut down for weapons crafting or to avoid intoxicating flocks and replaced later by human activities.
So there are various definitions. I'm somewhat flexible, considering that any species reaching an area without human intervention is indigenous to it, but also that reintroduced species that had disappeared in an area are still indigenous. I wouldn't consider species introduced explicitly and voluntarily by humans over the past few centuries to be indigenous though.
Anyway in this case all pre-colombian tobacco species outside South America seem pretty clearly to be indigenous and not introduced purposefully by humans