Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best.

Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?

Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing.

As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home.

Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!"

Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place.

Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.

Wild cereals were one of many plant food sources in the paleo/meso- lithic world, and not even the most important. More careful analyses reveal families like Vetches and roots (known in the literature as underground storage organs/USOs) that simply don't preserve well in the material record.

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