Bibliographic record
Abstract
The timing of early cultivation in the West African forest zone has for a long time been shrouded in uncertainty. This is due, in part, to the paucity of archaeological research focusing on subsistence and agriculture, and the dearth of direct evidence of cultivation in the region. Some palynologists have used patterns in the occurrence of oil palm pollen, including steep upsurges during the mid‐ to late Holocene, as proxies for cultivation. Others have argued that the upsurges in oil palm pollen were caused solely by climate change and thus cannot be proxies for cultivation in the region. This entry examines the lines of argument and uses archaeological, archaeobotanical, and palynological data to provide new insight into early cultivation in the region. By blending these classes of data, results indicate a synchronous occurrence of oil palm pollen, charred oil palm endocarps, domesticated crops, and evidence for sedentism in the West African forest zone. This points to the possibility that human activities of some sort, especially cultivation, encouraged upsurges in oil palm growth in the region from the mid‐ to late Holocene. Another possibility is that both climate change and cultivation caused the retrogression of the forests and paved the way for upsurges in oil palm. Furthermore, phytolith and starch analyses are needed to add to the existing body of data to increase the chances of successfully disentangling the evidence for cultivation from natural phenomena.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".