Nomadic hunter/gatherers probably would have known how to make pottery and permanent structures – they just chose not to, because pottery is generally too heavy and fragile to haul along on long nomadic journeys, and permanent structures are a waste of time and effort if you’re not going to live there permanently.
Really, agriculture is the key to making pottery and permanent structures practical.
But you might not find agriculture to be as easy as you’d think, especially if you’re not already an experienced farmer/gardener. Subsistence farming can be tricky and risky at the best of times, and those are not the best of times. You’ll have several challenges to inventing agriculture:
Modern domesticated crops haven’t been domesticated yet. Which means you’re stuck cultivating the shitty wild versions, which generally have much lower crop yields. Eventually you could begin domesticating crops yourself, but that takes many years, and you’ve got to eat in the meantime. Most animals haven’t been domesticated yet, either, so if you’re trying to raise animals, you’re going to be dealing with smaller, leaner ones that are more difficult to handle and control.
No weather forecasts or almanacs to work from. It will probably take you a few years just to get a good feel for the local weather patterns (which may be different back in that time than they are now). Which means a higher chance of crop failures due to unexpected bad weather.
Wild animals haven’t been decimated as much yet, which means you’re more likely to have problems with wild animals eating your crops before you can harvest them. (You’ll also need to spend a lot of time making pottery, to keep wild animals – especially rodents – out of your crops after you harvest them.)
You don’t have modern fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Fertilizer can be locally made easily enough (though it still won’t be as good as the processed modern stuff). But your only substitute for herbicides will be to laboriously go out there and manually remove weeds. And the lack of pesticides might really hurt you if you’re unlucky enough to get a bad infestation and bugs eat all of your crops. A swarm of locusts rolling through at the wrong time could doom you to starvation.
You may have difficulty fending off other hunter/gatherer tribes who have no concept of land ownership and see your crops as just more wild plants to gather and eat whenever they want. And if you try to stop them from doing that, you might end up looking down the pointy end of a pointy stick.
Especially when first getting started, before you’ve managed to create a stockpile to fall back on, just one or two failed crops – for any of the reasons listed above, or for a dozen other reasons – could mean starvation and death in the winter. Inventing agriculture isn’t as simple as just having the idea of ‘Hey, let’s stay in one spot and grow stuff there.’ It’s an entire system that needs to be set up. And it’s a system that will be very fragile in the beginning, when you haven’t yet had a chance to build up a stockpile that could carry you through bad years.
If, like in the picture, you got accepted into a tribe, you could work incrementally while following along their migration path.
Everywhere the tribe typically sets up a camp, dig a cache and store tools, non-perishable food, pottery, etc. there. You can even purposefully plant seeds for edible plants around those areas where they might have a chance to grow on their own.
It’s true we won’t have mass production crops and most grains are going to be tiny at this point in time, but the plants will be hardy. If they grow in an area naturally, chances are they’ll grow there if you pamper them a little too. You can even start domesticating plants this way by purposefully planting the seeds of the better fruit in better places or weeding out the undesireable ones.
Assuming the tribe follows a regular migratory pattern every year or follows it closely enough, you can slowly build up the caches and natural resources every year.
If you can show off how useful it is to have stored stuff, the other members of the tribe might start assisting you which would allow for better production. Fermenting food while you’re away seems like a good way to show off the usefulness of pottery.
You can also build the walls and floor of some basic dry-stone structures as you go along the route without immediately using them. Seeing how they’ve fallen apart by the time you make it back would also give you insight into how bad the weather gets or if there are destructive tribes who also frequent this area.
Once you have enough supplies to hold you through winter at one of the cache sites and a basic permanent shelter, you decide to stay there through winter.
When your tribe comes back around and finds you still alive, I’m sure some will probably want to stick around with you. A viola, you have a somewhat permanent settlement.
Nomadic hunter/gatherers probably would have known how to make pottery and permanent structures – they just chose not to, because pottery is generally too heavy and fragile to haul along on long nomadic journeys, and permanent structures are a waste of time and effort if you’re not going to live there permanently.
Really, agriculture is the key to making pottery and permanent structures practical.
But you might not find agriculture to be as easy as you’d think, especially if you’re not already an experienced farmer/gardener. Subsistence farming can be tricky and risky at the best of times, and those are not the best of times. You’ll have several challenges to inventing agriculture:
Modern domesticated crops haven’t been domesticated yet. Which means you’re stuck cultivating the shitty wild versions, which generally have much lower crop yields. Eventually you could begin domesticating crops yourself, but that takes many years, and you’ve got to eat in the meantime. Most animals haven’t been domesticated yet, either, so if you’re trying to raise animals, you’re going to be dealing with smaller, leaner ones that are more difficult to handle and control.
No weather forecasts or almanacs to work from. It will probably take you a few years just to get a good feel for the local weather patterns (which may be different back in that time than they are now). Which means a higher chance of crop failures due to unexpected bad weather.
Wild animals haven’t been decimated as much yet, which means you’re more likely to have problems with wild animals eating your crops before you can harvest them. (You’ll also need to spend a lot of time making pottery, to keep wild animals – especially rodents – out of your crops after you harvest them.)
You don’t have modern fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Fertilizer can be locally made easily enough (though it still won’t be as good as the processed modern stuff). But your only substitute for herbicides will be to laboriously go out there and manually remove weeds. And the lack of pesticides might really hurt you if you’re unlucky enough to get a bad infestation and bugs eat all of your crops. A swarm of locusts rolling through at the wrong time could doom you to starvation.
You may have difficulty fending off other hunter/gatherer tribes who have no concept of land ownership and see your crops as just more wild plants to gather and eat whenever they want. And if you try to stop them from doing that, you might end up looking down the pointy end of a pointy stick.
Especially when first getting started, before you’ve managed to create a stockpile to fall back on, just one or two failed crops – for any of the reasons listed above, or for a dozen other reasons – could mean starvation and death in the winter. Inventing agriculture isn’t as simple as just having the idea of ‘Hey, let’s stay in one spot and grow stuff there.’ It’s an entire system that needs to be set up. And it’s a system that will be very fragile in the beginning, when you haven’t yet had a chance to build up a stockpile that could carry you through bad years.
If, like in the picture, you got accepted into a tribe, you could work incrementally while following along their migration path.
Everywhere the tribe typically sets up a camp, dig a cache and store tools, non-perishable food, pottery, etc. there. You can even purposefully plant seeds for edible plants around those areas where they might have a chance to grow on their own.
It’s true we won’t have mass production crops and most grains are going to be tiny at this point in time, but the plants will be hardy. If they grow in an area naturally, chances are they’ll grow there if you pamper them a little too. You can even start domesticating plants this way by purposefully planting the seeds of the better fruit in better places or weeding out the undesireable ones.
Assuming the tribe follows a regular migratory pattern every year or follows it closely enough, you can slowly build up the caches and natural resources every year.
If you can show off how useful it is to have stored stuff, the other members of the tribe might start assisting you which would allow for better production. Fermenting food while you’re away seems like a good way to show off the usefulness of pottery.
You can also build the walls and floor of some basic dry-stone structures as you go along the route without immediately using them. Seeing how they’ve fallen apart by the time you make it back would also give you insight into how bad the weather gets or if there are destructive tribes who also frequent this area.
Once you have enough supplies to hold you through winter at one of the cache sites and a basic permanent shelter, you decide to stay there through winter.
When your tribe comes back around and finds you still alive, I’m sure some will probably want to stick around with you. A viola, you have a somewhat permanent settlement.