The avocado is an evolutionary anachronism
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
I don't see the puzzle at all.
13,000 years ago yes humans hunted and killed off the megafauna. But they wouldn't be agriculturalists yet for thousands more years -- they still hunted and gathered. Avocados had a lot less fruit to them (since cultivation wasn't a thing yet), but that was true of many, probably most, wild fruits and vegetables at the time. Humans ate them all despite how they had less flesh -- they just ate more of them I guess. (And it's not like the avocado was more attractive to a mammoth than a person...) And so humans would have presumably been distributing the seeds as they took home sacks of them and some fell out, or they dumped leftover pits somewhere else in the forest.
The fact that avocados became cultivated in the first place almost certainly implies we were eating them already, and therefore transporting their pits often enough too.
I don't understand on what basis the author can assume humans weren't eating the original avocados...???
Does it have to pass through the gut?
The next avocado you eat, leave it in an inch of water and it will sprout in a couple weeks, splitting in half to extend roots and a small canopy.
Had I not had to weed the backyard as a kid during avocado season, the plants would've kept growing from fallen avocados. They have these massive yolks that let them grow pretty much anywhere, as long as they find their way to some soil after a while.
I'm sure megafauna gave them a nice travel system.
Tend to see them sprout up best after sustained rain, temps 25c-30c in the shade
As a metaphor it works, but is unprobable that a species carefully adapted to extreme chilling cold and another species adapted to do no stand any cold would share space and a trophic link
Monoecious means they have both male and female flower parts on the same plant ... but interestingly with avocados both bits don't work at the same time.
There's two types of avocado trees, helpfully called type A and type B. Type A is functionally female first, and then (a day or two later) male. Type B is the other way around.
They're one of very few plants to work this way, though I don't imagine it would have confounded early practitioners of agriculture.
That is about the caloric equivalent of 3 medium-sized bananas. It's a great source of healthy fats, and very satiating due to the high fiber content.
Definitively something to be included in a healthy diet, but bear in mind that due to the high caloric content, if you eat a whole avocado with some toast that is going to give you the caloric equivalent of a whole meal.
So if you eat them every day in addition to your standard diet, it's going to add a lot of calories to your daily total. The suggestion is to eat them occasionally as guacamole making a meal out of it, or eat a smaller portion as a snack.
In their natural state, avocados are ripe about two weeks per year, so it's not something that we had the opportunity to eat a lot of in the past.
Definitively a healthy thing to add to the diet, I eat maybe one or so a week.
This actually has a name - Mutualism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(biology) for example.
It has a "higher fat content than most other fruit, mostly monounsaturated fat, and as such serves as an important staple in the diet of consumers who have limited access to other fatty foods (high-fat meats and fish, dairy products)." to quote Wikipedia.
From an evolutionary point of view is definitely a (perverted) mutualism (perverted as in the artificial selection on cows make them quite unfit to human-free life).
On the appreciation side it would be relevant to know more about how cows see humans. I believe many cows in farms are quite happy and many (more) cows are quite miserable.
> Personally I doubt it, which makes calling it "mutualism" a euphemism.
Overall if we assume cows do not have a cultural understanding of "humans are going to kill us" this would look more like a projection of our society on them.
My view on the topic is that there is a predefined innate concept of a good life for all complex life, including cows, and with my current knowledge I see no reason why a cow in a farm would be unable to live a good life. Obviously in too many cases industrial optimization is clearly opposed to this, still I see no reason not to call [0] (assuming the context given as true) a mutually beneficial relationship
[0] https://preview.redd.it/g5l57bwdd4p01.jpg?width=960&crop=sma...
I mean, chickens are tasty and all, and there are probably billions of them in the world right now... but do you call living in a cage with your beak cut off "prospering"? From a purely genetic propagation point of view they are prospering I guess... but at what cost?
Evolution is not a conscious being, it is not positive nor negative, it does not try to achieve anything, and particularly not happiness for anybody.
In a similar way, we don't need to protect the environment in the sake of nature. Nature does not care, evolution does not care. Humans are the ones who care. We are the ones worrying about other animals lives, preserving species and landscape, both for romantic and practical reasons.
A super foreign virus could come tomorrow and kill all complex life on earth. Would that be a disaster? For us yes, but in general life would follow its course anyway and evolve again. Nothing has a meaning except the one we are to give.
until one day when an avian virus spreads through chicken and wipes out humanity, leaving them to become the ruling species on this planet.
"the one who clucks last, clucks the loudest" (-- old chicken proverb)
Take dogs, 6-12 in a litter, can give birth twice a year. Naturally (street dogs) most young will die, those that end up in to adult hood will be half starved and diseased.
Not exactly a pleasant life, but having so many young, they can survive the high death / suffering rate.
I am not sure I would say street dogs prosper, but they are evolutionary successful
Better than die at ten days old by any of the dozen predators living in a rainforest, that is the destine of 90% of the wild chicken
I didn't see any mention of avocado fossils or remains.
>Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves. Through cultivation, humans have bulked up avocados so there is more flesh for us to eat.
Those could still show some effects of cultivation though, it depends on how much information there is too study and so on.
Trees like oaks have the potential to be great producers of crops but have largely eluded cultivation, because they take decades to fruit for the first time.
"The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados..."
Even today, it's common to see North American squirrels eating avocados right off the tree in Los Angeles.
King Arthur: We found them.
Guard: Found them? In Mercia? The avocado's tropical!
King Arthur: What do you mean?
Guard: Well this is a temperate zone!
King Arthur: The resplendent quetzal may fly south with the sun, or the house marten or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land!
Guard: Are you suggesting avocados migrate?
King Arthur: Not at all! They could be carried.
Guard: What? A resplendent quetzal carrying an avocado?
King Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
Guard: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound avocado!