I'm not convinced by "complex hierarchies and taxation schemes". It sounds just as plausible that grain was one of the first really tradeable forms of food, so people became able to trade non-food-related skills for food, with people from further away. Your ability to do this is badly limited if you're using wet foods like potatoes, because you are only able to trade with people fairly nearby before the potatoes start sprouting; but with grain you can send your son off to the market three hours' wagon-ride away with a month's worth of crop, for instance.

By the early 18th century, Japan had developed full-on derivatives markets (not just futures but CDS-style bets) for its rice crops.

I like the "portability/storability" hypothesis this article is proposing for societal development. If only because it becomes a proxy for financial systems. And you don't have to "convince" people that your money is useful: You can always eat it!

Showing Ireland as being dependent on roots and tubers in pre-colonial times is just plain wrong. It was the colonisers who brought the potato to Ireland.

This makes me suspect that the data is being made to fit the theory here and that they didn't want to leave out Ireland because, well, people would expect it to be there in any article about the impact of the potato :)

I loved the starting premise that it was so much better to develop large, hierarchical, societies.

Better for whom?

Better for surviving contact with other societies, sure.

Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much.

Grain crops can be burned in the field by attackers, as well as stolen. The WP article seems to overlook the possibility of slavery in early cultures, which would put social choices about crops into a vastly different dynamic.

The article fails to mention the other downside to roots: a bumper crop last year and a drought this means you still starve.

From the article:

> But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.

How is that a blessing? Sounds more like a curse.

I love subjects like this. But, I have a hard time believing its conclusions because it reveals more of our modern modes and assumptions than the prehistoric ones.

the paper, which isn't named in the wapo article, is 'cereals appropriability and hierarchy' here http://economics.mit.edu/files/10771.

The 'anthropological database' the wapo article describes is murdock's ethnographic atlas from 1967 and a geocoded 2013 derivative by fenske.

It's an interesting theory, but as with all of these kind of theories, mostly conjecture.

Crops are a cornerstone of human society, so it stands to reason that different crop types would after societies differently. I think this theory might be a factor in human development, but I think it would be a small one.

Usually, I avoid the comment sections on most websites, due to the alarmingly low quality...but the comments on this article are actually quite good, and provide some interesting counter arguments and additional historical context.

> Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground.

"In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. In Bolivia and Peru above 10,000 feet altitude, tubers exposed to the cold night air turned into chuño; when kept in permanently frozen underground storehouses, chuño can be stored for years with no loss of nutritional value."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato

Seems like the potato was more of a blessing than a curse.

I can't take an article discussing the New World's technological inferiority seriously if it doesn't mention horses.

Mmm interesting