Years ago I read some theory that part of the social pressure to create early states with centralized power and militaries in places with grain-centric agriculture was about the ease of stealing harvested grain. By comparison, places that had root-crops which could be left in the ground and harvested as needed, thieves could not quickly/easily take a lot of value, so there was less need to guard resources.
The current article is kind of a reminder that the safety of crops / the difficulty of theft is variable with context; it's not just an attribute of the crop-type. If this continues, I wonder if we'd see tree-owners engage in something like tree-spiking, so it's literally unsafe to cut their trees.
The current article is kind of a reminder that the safety of crops / the difficulty of theft is variable with context; it's not just an attribute of the crop-type. If this continues, I wonder if we'd see tree-owners engage in something like tree-spiking, so it's literally unsafe to cut their trees.