I have been learning more and more about Exorphins in staple ‘Western’ Foods (Actually peoples of the Indo-european family of languages) for the past few years since I too read my compatriot Greg Wadley with Angus Martin’s, paper. Please everyone see updated information from Greg Wadley and citations to and clarifications of his writing at his University webpage: http://www.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/gwadley/ethology/ethology.html
While his paper orginally published in 1993 in The Australian Biologist is very good as an introduction to this staple ‘western’ foods-drugs subject and it’s implications, it has some serious shortcomings. That I know in some cases or suspect in others cases, that Greg Wadley has updated his views nowadays. For a crucial instance of an updated view about this importance of exorphin (opioids) in the transition to ‘western’ agriculture in the fertile crescent see the very well written and richly informative paper that Greg Wadley cites:
Hillman G, Hedges R, Moore A, Colledge, S., and Pettitt, P. (2001)
New evidence of Lateglacial cereal cultivation at Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates Holocene 11 (4): 383-393

The evident civilisation and development since many thousands of years ago of highly sophisticated and evolved kinship systems that contrary to Wadley & Martin (1993, p. 6, conclusion) involve “devoting effort to the benefit of non-kin” before or without any staple food-drugs is one instance that is a crucial exception to his hypothesis, that Greg Wadley doesn’t yet seem to know about but may do so, in the instances (best known examples to me) of the 600+ different societies in Terra australis - Australia (officially recorded today 260+ fully different languages - the 600+ figure being the official count of the no. of dialects across all those languages and what are the so called tribes or tribal language areas) - the many societies & civilisations that as far as is known didn’t get addicted to or even perhaps ever have access to staple drugs-foods until western colonial invasion, but nonetheless, despite stereotypes and pre-conceived vain ideas of Europeans or ‘Westerners’ to the contrary, did for tens of thousands of years have the choice of agriculture because they had the faculty of agriculture all that time and only in a few areas of Australia did the pressure, desire or need arise to impliment that faculty of (full) agriculture. See “Agriculture: was Australia a bystander?” by Peter White - Archaeology, University of Sydney, Australia, presented at the World Archaeological Congress 2003 for a recent reference on this - see: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=cache:MT8vXyKw_eQJ:godot.unisa.edu.au/wac/pdfs/191.pdf+
And see - Fullagar R & Field J 1997. Pleistocene seed-grinding implements from the Australian arid zone Antiquity 71 (272): 300-307. at: http://www.emu.usyd.edu.au/docs/field_5.pdf

The upshot of all this revision of western cherished illusions and stereotypes is that there evidently are clearly various different avenues or ‘life-ways’ to develop civilisations and highly evolved societies that include amongst other developments “devoting effort to the benefit of non-kin”, to quote one of Greg Wadley & Angus Martin’s pivotal points again.

There is a very large anthropological scientific literature on the many kinship systems and spiritualities of the civilisations and highly evolved societies of Australia. The best writings are by Indigenous writers themselves who have had the opportunity to also in addition to there own culture, learn’t to write in ‘western’ anthropology including getting there PhDs and so on. Marcia Langton is one fine writer, thinker, academic and person for example. A review paper to catch up with the state of the ‘western’ level of understanding to 1992 of the people’s of Australia is Professor Max Charlesworth’s “Introduction” in Religion in Aboriginal Australia - An Anthology
see online scanned copy (with some scanning errors) at: http://theology1.tripod.com/readings/charlesworth.htm

Key papers by Marcia Langton are:

Marcia Langton 1999 ‘The fire that is the centre of each family: landscapes of the ancients’ in A Hamblin (ed) Visions of Future Landscapes. Proceedings of the Australian Academy of Science 2-5 May 1999 Canberra 169-178.
As at (large): http://affashop.gov.au/product.asp?prodid=12831
or (large): http://www.daff.gov.au/corporate_docs/publications/pdf/rural_science/vision.pdf
Intro at: http://www.daff.gov.au/content/publications.cfm?Category=Bureau%20of%20Rural%20Sciences&ObjectID=4F5E088D-E9BF-4AFD-819DCC63FEF98696

Marcia Langton 1999 ‘The fire at the centre of each family: Aboriginal traditional fire regimes and the challenges for reproducing ancient fire management in the protected areas of northern Australia’ in FIRE! The Australian Experience, Proceedings of the 1999 National Academies Forum Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering Ltd 3-32.
As at: http://www.atse.org.au/uploads/FireLangton.pdf
Intro & Abstract at: http://www.atse.org.au/index.php?sectionid=190

Best wishes to all,

Jase

1) Origin of Sumerians, Floods etc - see Stephen Oppenheimer’s ‘Eden in the East’ for his story about the drowning of SE Asian Sundaland after the Ice Age, his speculations on the origin of the Sumerians, (and Polynesians) and (almost half the book) discussion of various flood myths.

2) See http://www.sambali.blogspot.com for Paul Manansala’s speculations about Austronesian voyaging, etc (suspiciously, though, mostly starting from his home province in the Philippines). He also believes that Sumerian originated from Austronesian voyagers, but I didn’t find that too convincing - most of the words he cited as cognates were missing from the ‘Sumerian Lexicon’ published on the net.

3) Black Sea Flood - see William Ryan and Walter Pitman - ‘Noah’s Flood’ - very interesting

4) Bahrain (literally ‘Fountain of the Sea’ in Arabic) is still peppered with hundreds of tumuli - Some Danish scientists dug there and, I think, off Kuwait, hoping to find the legendary Dilmun, about 40 years ago.

5) Raiders - My Jordanian trading partner’s name was ‘Ghazi’ - literally ‘raider’ in Arabic. There is still a strong tribal culture in Jordan, and a strong town vs country/planter vs pastoralist dichotomy. (Now a bit swamped by the huge number of refugees from that country to the West).

And may I also comment favourably on the very high standard of replies to the articles I’ve read.

I came across this site only a few days ago, having just found the paper on wheat exorphins, by googling for ‘exorphins rice’. I’m glad I did.

In nature, things work. They work well, and more often, they work elegantly. When problems arise in nature, we expect to find a single cause, that expresses itself in a host of symptoms. There is no reason to intuitively think that a runny nose, a cough, and a fever have anything to do with one another, except that we’ve experienced them as a set before. A single maladapted microorganism running amok in an unfamiliar host gives rise to a whole host of symptoms.

I’ve found the overdetermined viewpoint often leads to paralysis. Our problems can’t be solved, because they have so many causes, many of which are unsolvable. I also reject the notion that humans are somehow “fallen,” so I take a more medical view of our problems. We know the symptoms; what cause can we trace them back to? It is my expectation that humans work well, and elegantly, but one little thing went wrong a long time ago–and all the ills that plague us now are the myriad symptoms of that “illness.”

I look at the situation as a number of interrelated facts that allowed the system to perpertuate itself. I believe that, if any of the props fall away, the system ultimately self-destructs. To put it in a metaphorical way, it’s like a tumor in the body — they happen all the time but are suppressed by the body’s system. Only a very few, under certain circumstances, arise to become truly dangerous.

The Californian First Nations had the abundance but not the vision. The Kwakiutl had the vision but not the abundance. The people of Rapa Nui had the vision and the abundance but were isolated. Our people has vision, means, and a physiological justification (pseudo-addiction) to keep on going.

Even isolating it down to the two causes listed above doesn’t do it justice. I’m relatively sure we could come up with a dozen criteria that lead to this happening. But that’s not the point.

The point is that if you hamper the vision, you help slow down the process. If you disable any portion of it, you have a chance of stopping it. That’s what makes dealing with the vision important. Still, to stop it all from happening ever again? I think that will require building something different.

Hope this all makes sense!

One comment I wanted to make on civilizations is that I personally consider a lot of them to be ’shadows’ of what they once were. Imagine it this way; the culture is overtaken by the Taker meme and assimilated into it. How does that meme manifest given their unique perception of the world? Sometimes they evolve (for a time) into something that tries to be environmentally sound or relatively progressive. Each time, it collapses under the weight of its own conflicted ideals (Consume more vs gentle on the earth).

As far as the -kill your neighbors- vision, we’ve seen that this applies to a number of tribal cultures as well. It’s just that, without agriculture, it’s difficult to do it and even with agriculture, you still have to justify what you are doing to your world and your people. Wheat just gives people a stronger religious purpose to keep things going (at least in my humble opinion). It’s a great opiate for the masses. (heh)

We’ve seen how unsatisfac […]