Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-...
It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
I didn't know seaweed wasn't a common food until I moved to the Netherlands and started enquiring about the local seaweed, only to be met with blank looks or people pointing me to the sushi nori at Albert Heijn.
I've been here for years and I still don't understand how such a seafaring nation with such an intimate connection with the coast line could lack a seaweed culture.
Until I saw this article I was starting to think seaweed was unique to rockier island coastlines, but I guess it just comes down to taste/fashion?
After all, you can sail the seven seas as pillage the world of all its spices, but nothing compares to a broodje kaas! Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours, but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
You also reminded me of something I heard on the great History of the Netherlands podcast from the University of Amsterdam. Apparently back in the day in Friesland they would tether their cows to something and let them float when the regular flooding came.
But speaking of the flooding: I can see how that would be bad for other kinds of crops, but surely seaweed would actually be pretty notable for dealing well water? Sounds like even more reason why I'd expect to see it as part of the culinary traditions here.
Except vegans, of course.
They are often the source for lots of Asian ingredients in mainland Europe, while I was in the UK we sourced lots of things like umeboshi and miso from Holland; to my surprise being from CA with lots of access to Japanese/Chinese/Korean ingredients I found lots of the Dutch stuff to be really good.
I'm not sure if that has to do their with relationship (and desire for it's food) with Japan during the isolation period, but there were lots of Japanese products in a biodyanmic farm/shop I worked at in Germany too.
Sadly, it was rather limited in scope because they are the main exporters of conventional food in the EU for a reason.
After a few years living in the NL I was travelling home via London. I'd come to love vegan food while living here and expected London would be beyond my wildest dreams for choices, being so big and so diverse.
Imagine my dissappointment when I went to the shop and the closest thing to a vegan option I could find was a cheese and egg sandwich!
Ended op going to Boots where I found mint and sweetpeas.
on the evolutionary scale, this is provably false. all the great apes are vegetarian. we have flat, grinding teeth like cows, and long intestinal tracts like cows too -- not the quick, short intestinal tracts of predators or their sharp, pointy teeth.
strictly speaking, not even cows are vegan. not absolutely, perfectly, and totally. one of the weird side effects of ubiquitous cameras today is people have caught cows eating birds that were trapped in fences. it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.
but overall, with a reasonable margin of approximation, then yes, our ancestors were definitely vegan, at least our evolutionary ones.
" their sharp, pointy teeth." Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.
Australopithecus did eat animals. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus#Diet"
Its a common misconception among vegetarians that humen were originally vegetarians. Quiet the opposite is true.
we have evidence for hunter gathering societies since 1.8 million years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Archaeological...
Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.
sure. is that evolution or technology?
idk if that's really worth the effort, but I admit it, you made a point.
edit: to everybody else, I apologize for the passive-aggressive vibe, I just don't see where else this (requested!) reply can really go.
It's only in modern times that we have the luxury of taking the animal's feeling into account at all. I'm sure you would want even more consideration for the animals, but it's much better today than it was.
I don't find it difficult to imagine my great-great-great-great-(fill in the appropriate number of greats here to qualify for ancient ancestors) grandmother butchering a pig and not really giving it a second thought at all, having grown up on a farm myself. Hell, my current grandma is probably much gentler and gives the pork a much better time than my ancient ancestors did
The concept of how an animal was feeling simply didn't occur to them. An animal was a tool, and you took good care of the tool, but not because of the tool, but because then it was more useful.
It was the 18th century when animal rights started becoming a thing, which exactly corresponds with the industrial age when things became less scarce and people could worry about animals, and not just themselves.
There are hundreds of Roman monuments, inscriptions, and poems [celebrating dogs](https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2015/06/20/every-dog-has-his-d...) as companions and pets. There are medieval European graves that strongly suggest sentimentality towards the animals buried in them. There's this [lovely ninth-century Irish poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/...) about a cat. Someone with more knowledge in the area than I possess should comment on animal portraiture in ancient and early-modern China and Japan, but that was a thing as well.
I think the fairest thing to say is that people in every era - very much including today - instrumentalize some animals, and sentimentalize others.
Wow.
Meanwhile, I've travelled a lot for work - mostly to odd corners of the world, and I've yet to meet people that didn't have stories about animals and animal behaviours.
Famously, for example, Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are largely about animals, Tiddalick the Frog, Emu and the Jabiru, etc.
They encapsulate the place of animals in the environment, and as hunter gatherers attuned to where next years meal will come from, attention is paid to breeding and caring for the young so that there are full grown adults to breed again and to eat.
Rightly or wrongly the stories are about the imagined feelings of animals, the things that make them happy and plentiful, the bad things that cause numbers to dwindle.
Various people had various relationships with various animals, not as "pets" but as other beings in the world.
For example: Ngarritj - the Yolngu speaking bird
- Mahavira, 6th century BC
(Translated, of course.)
It's sad this type of trolling is becoming tolerated on HN.
It tastes a LOT nicer fresh. But that's not saying a lot, I mean it still tastes like salty rubber.
As for the content below, that it tastes like bacon?? I mean, yeeeeeaaaaaahhh? In the same way that a used condom might taste of bacon?
Aye, I've only had the fresh stuff myself as a child. My aunties would rent a caravan down on the Strangford coast and we would go down to get it ourselves, and we'd pick mollusks from the rocks and other things of that nature. Some great memories there, thank you for bringing them to the fore.
Salty rubber is right. I don't actually like the stuff myself but I still enjoy eating it somehow! The iodine flavour is always the main thing for me, but I can see the appeal for sure.
If you're interested you might want to look for hiking/walking tours into the dunes with some nature-freak and/or chef. Or do some internet searching. I recall going on walks with guides as a kid with the family and they would point out tons of stuff that was edible, but somehow ceased to be popular food.
This reminds me of some other losses of Dutch identity/tradition: Dutch folkloric dances (almost no Dutch person will be able to tell you what they where) or the fact that only Japanese seem to know what "Dutch coffee" is.
I know what you mean about the dancing too. I play traditional music from Ireland and we have a regular folk dance evening here in Rotterdam. It's always a pity that we have to look so far afield for the music and the steps.
From what I've heard there's a perception in Dutch society that folk dance would be mainly associated with the far right. Do you recognise that? Always surprises me because at home the traditional music is very much anti colonial.
That's very believable. Puritan protestants banned all kinds of things that produce "pleasure". How do you think westerners got so prudish about intercourse?
> but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Warmer waters carry less oxygen(I think that's the gist of it), so less seaweed grows.
Just think about a perfect beach, with clear blue waters and seeing all the way down to the sand on the seafloor... you know it's somewhere very warm and there's no seaweed.
Apparently when prepared right it tastes like bacon.
Given potatoes are part of the post-Columbian exchange, dulse might be more Irish than potatoes.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-...
Actually an export product, too. https://www.dal.ca/news/2017/08/03/nova-scotia-s-best-kept-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan#Food_and_other_dom...
From Old Irish duilesc (compare Scottish Gaelic duileasg), from Proto-Celtic doliskos, duliskos (compare Welsh delysg), from Proto-Indo-European dʰelh₁- (“to bloom, be green”) (compare duille (“leaf”)).
Whereas Latin 'dulcis' comes from PIE dl̥kús ("sweet")
Actually probably cognate with Latin 'folium' (Italian foglia, French 'feuille'). EDIT: Actually no. Not sure there's a Latin cognate at all; the dʰelh₁ PIE doesn't seem to have evolved to "Leaf" in Latin and the Greek word for "bloom" was borrowed instead? Something like that.
Deleted comment
> Note that phonetically dulce in NI would be pronounced "dulis."
is interesting in that the modern pronunciation looks much closer to the ancient pronunciation than the modern spelling is to either. What happened?
We also have no real idea how proto-Celtic or even Gaulish or early old Irish would have been pronounced. Only best guesses. We have inscriptions in e.g Gaulish from Roman times but they look to me suspiciously Latinized.
And then look at English.. it's a mismash of a bunch of different orthograpic conventions -- Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Nordic, Latin, Greek... and makes no sense. Even us native speakers have no absolute certainty how to pronounce a word they've never seen before.
not. Dulce means sweet or candy in Spanish, but not fresh
Not uncommon in Canada, especially eastern coast.
You can find it in grocery stores sometimes. Price has nearly doubled in the last few years.
https://www.amazon.ca/stores/page/6A642280-AC30-4571-9ECB-08...
I had some potatoes from the Island of Jersey when I was working in kitchens in London, they were incredibly good and paired well with seafood dishes: I had to do some research on a dish my Sous had asked me to create with them and I found out why they were so well matched.
Turns out the Isle of Jersey is often covered in seaweed [0], and they use it extensively in the cultivation of it's potatoes. So even indirectly they are eaten even though things like wakame and kombu are not common outside of fine-dining in London they are still a main-stay of the British diet, well if you Jersey Royals at least.
I've also seen it sold in little bags in pubs in the Republic of Ireland!
It was savoury, not sweet, great for breakfast with bacon etc.
I also really enjoy most seaweeds I've tried. Great food generally. I'll have to see if we can get something of laverbread locally.
I think one of the reasons for people not liking it is western diets tend not to like rubbery textures in food.
https://marutaka-nori.co.jp/en/nori1.html#:~:text=The%20hist....
Also, wakame as a salad or in miso soup.
'Sea grape', also in (South East) Asia, is quite delicious in salads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa_lentillifera
I'm imagining like an Indian curry with seaweed mixed in, or an Italian pasta with seaweed mixed in (in addition to existing ingredients).....
[1] if you buy it from a good brand, so YMMV.
Because Asia industrialized later, they had access to eg plastics and efficient diesel engine boats to make farming seaweed easier. So they could avoid or reduce going through a period where seaweed lost relevance.
These days owning your own home is a dream, but you can walk into a supermarket and buy things that my father wouldn't have dreamt of as a child. Cooked chickens? Every type of fresh fruit and vegetable from all parts of the globe? A frozen food section? Jesus. Remember that video of Yeltsin in the US supermarket?
My father is 96. He grew up in rural Ireland, and his family's lifestyle probably didn't differ much from that of his great grandparents. No cars, electricity, running water, tv, phones. That was "normal". Even the poor families in our part of the world owned their own house and a plot of land. Daily bread was the big issue! Even wealthy locals wouldn't be wasteful with food, and nobody had heard of an avocado. On a daily basis they collected water from a well, chopped wood and collected kindling from around the local woods to keep the stove constantly lit. They milked their own cows, churned butter and cream. He remembers walking the beach with a bucket, collecting periwinkles, and wandering the fields looking for mushrooms when they were in season. He collecting hazelnuts, sloes, damsons and berries from the hedgerow. They kept chickens. They bartered eggs and butter for pork, flour and oats. And yes, they would also go to the local shop to buy tea, sugar, cloth, shoes, materials to repair everything, coal etc. Pots and pans were handed down through generations or given as wedding gifts. Perhaps only a bunch of times every year would they make a trip into the big town to buy clothes and shoes, or replace work out necessities. But even his clothes were sparse, and worn until they practically fell off him. Everything was repaired over and over. I'd say practically none of his calories were imported, pre-cooked or packaged. Today, almost all of it is. Nobody needs to forage to survive any more.
When he told me how hard life was back in the first half of the 1900s, he said "We weren't even poor by local standards! My mother was a cook for a wealthy household and knew how to make the most of whatever was available, and she could sew. My father had a good job on the railway, and had an interest in growing vegetables. Plus his extra uniforms (which came with the job as a railway guard) provided good quality material for children's clothes! Other children in my school though we were well off!"
Owning your own land is how you go from being a poor bachelor to being a poor family.
It is definitely not the case in general in the ancient world that poor people are likely to own land.
(Though also: were there no Travelers in rural Ireland?)
These days, the poorest people I know have 42" TVs, smart phones and deliveroo 4 nights a week (ok, from McDonald's, but still...). But they'll never own their own homes, never have "security", and their cars are knackered. But still, compare their materialist luxury to that of my dad's childhood. Or even mine in the early 80s.
1. The United States has a tiny population relative to its supply of land.
2. Poor families are already successful. They are very far from the bottom of the economic scale.
All the rage at Italian/Japanese fusion joints (and honestly in Japan too - Japan loves pasta)
Im going to take a wild guess and say this is not in Italy.
it's all about that umami
Seaweed is one of the few foods that will nearly ruin a dish for me. I just really don't like the flavor or the smell.
There's a lot of unknown food which doesn't taste particularly good at first, or it even tastes bad - but people learn to like just about everything, just give it time. It's not a yes / no forever issue.
If you live near the coast, you can easily forage your own too.
Including seaweed in one's diet may have worked for people but living exclusively on seaweed seems to have problems.
Historians all agree that these are for "religious" purposes collecting blood from sacrificed beings. I say they they are fools, because most valuable commodity thousands of years ago was salt.
Another purpose was drying seaweed, because you can mildly high, probably from nicotine, because drying seaweed smells like fermenting snuff at Swedish Tobacco.
Is the article supposed to be surprising or just keeping us updated on the oldest findings? It seems it thinks the former.
Only a few peoples stopped consuming traditional foods, as one might expect.
This is a trend that started in the U.S. and gradually spread out across industrialized nations in the post-WWII world as globalization accelerated. However even for Americans, offal used to be a common ingredient before and during WWII: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gidc5a/when_...
Hyperindustrialization has done the exact opposite! The middle class can only afford prime rib and tenderloin because more than half the weight of the cow gets processed into gelatin, burgers, pet food, and stew meat (A friend and I split a whole cow from a local butcher but my stats are based on grass fed). The price of off cuts is entirely demand driven: i.e. flank cuts that are popular in Latin American cuisine are dirt cheap in New England but really expensive in California. Stuff like offal absolutely dominates pet food inputs.
The reason most Americans don’t eat it is better options. Like rib eye steak and a salad.
You can also buy multiple forms of seaweed at Costco and Walmart. That’s about as North American as it gets.
Living in NYC, where you can get both tripe and liver easily - you have to go to "ethnic" stores to get heart, kidneys or lungs. (I have yet to see any lungs or intestines in any US store... and I mean ANY. I'd have to go to a butcher and order small intestines to make sausages.)
As for seaweed - it's primarily dried Japanese style seaweed that we can get in Costco's around NYC.
Premium cuts became "better options" because of hyperindustrialization, which made those cuts more affordable than before. This is a point you raised yourself in an earlier comment.
The only reason you can buy seaweed at Costco and Walmart is because of multicultural immigrants and globalization, which are starting to undo the hyperindustrialization of the food industry even if by just a little bit.
No one is asking you to eat any intestines... but why common mushrooms, that are abundant, replaced by literally only ONE species?
Your regular store will have 5 types of mushrooms, that are all literally the same mushroom at different stages of maturity. (Agaricus bisporus is typically the ONLY fresh mushroom available at supermarkets in US)
And if you have a problem with the chewiness, you can substitute oyster mushrooms.
Even if you don't buy some of the marketing wankery that CEO spouts, ground up seaweed and kelp are just straight up a better version of salt. It's salty, a little umami, and utterly delicious.
They are growing millions of pounds of the stuff and I think they are the biggest distributor in the US right now. Really awesome seeing locals do good things with our local businesses. I have a lot of connections to lobster fishers, and I want them to have a bright future.
I expect it to be a really cheap and plentiful food additive at some point, maybe a good source of MSG or something.
For Bay Area people, there are companies that teach seaweed foraging: what types to look for, where to look, healthy versus "on the toilet all day", etc. Always nice to have another excuse to go to the beach, especially at unusual hours (such as before dawn to catch a low tide).
They might have noticed that eating a little amount of seaweed will prevent illness.
For omega-3 fatty acids, they had much better food sources in bone marrow or in fish (the multicellular algae have very low content of fatty acids; those that are used for omega-3 fatty acid production are unicellular and they are not algae, even if they are named "algae" in advertisements and on labels, because it is believed that something like "straminipiles" would be incomprehensible for laymen; even many scientists misspell "straminipiles" as "stramenopiles", only "Straminipila" is correct Latin).
The vitamins were also abundant in their food, only iodine is deficient in all terrestrial food.
Some places still (mostly) don’t. A notable exception (I’m sure there are others but not as well reported) is Israel where iodized salt isn’t a regulatory requirement and not very popular, with (predictable) widespread deficiencies:
https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13584-020-...
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2017-03-27/ty-art...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170327083438.h...
Evolution works through reproduction so any condition that doesn't impact survival until sexual maturity is unlikely to face any evolutionary pressure. Since humans are tribal and took care of their offspring in group settings, survivability after procreation also has little effect.
[1] https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/43010/9241592001...
Diseases that impact even just appearance can surely make you less attractive as a mate though. And larger goiters can impede breathing or swallowing. So I'd be suspicious of the idea that we've been significantly deficient in iodine for extended periods of our evolutionary history.
I’d be far more suspicious of applying modern standards of beauty to humans that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Ruminants are more efficient at absorbing nutrients from plant material due their digestive system, and this is how they get iodine in non-coastal areas.
All vertebrates have thyroid glands and there is a very similar organ in marine chordates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endostyle. So this is an organ that likely emerged when our biological ancestors still lived in a iodine-rich environment.
All things in moderation.
If the biomarkers are able to remain detectable for thousands of years without breaking down, perhaps they're also able to accumulate in fish?
I don't know anything about it so my idea is probably wrong, but I'm surprised the article doesn't mention it since it seems like an obvious thing to wonder.
> They found the chemical biomarkers of seaweed and aquatic plants in 26 samples, which suggests that early humans were eating—or, at the very least, chewing—these bounties from the sea
Like, yeah maybe the fish they were eating was covered with seaweed, but unless they were popping the stomach/intestines into their mouth... for the parasite load(?), the seaweed in the fish is digested. This isn't Carbon-14 dating, they identified families of plants on the the ancient teeth, not digested plant matter.
And the article doesn't make any mention of which specific biomarkers they chose or whether they're affected by digestion. They're obviously pretty hardy compounds to begin with if they're not broken down by saliva to begin with, or thousands of years of natural decay.
And it does seem kind of akin to carbon-14 dating. It's not like they found actual recognizable pieces of the plants in between their teeth or anything.
>Aquatic ecosystems are complex with some isotopic variability even within the same species of seaweed, freshwater algae, and freshwater aquatic plants (macrophytes), making use of this C&N isotopic data to detect these resources somewhat challenging, certainly where it represents <20% of the diet. Moreover, while stable isotopic analysis remains valuable in providing a broad view of major foods consumed, this is dependent on the dietary protein intake, with seaweeds lower in protein compared to meat or fish, and can therefore be overlooked due to equifinality, where other foods can, in combination, be used to explain the stable isotopic data observed, sometimes in contradiction to other archaeological evidence available.
The taste depends a lot of the type of seaweed.
I'm pretty sure I had some other sea plants in Italian recipes too, it's not very common but not unseen.
Here is some information: https://gallowaywildfoods.com/an-introduction-to-seaweed-for...
Check your water first.
And whether the water is clean enough for it to be safe. Good luck though!
A few. Marine upper plants are very rare, but red algae are harvested. There are several cultured marine Protists (I wouldn't say domesticated, but this is debatable) and also aquatic Cyanobacteria.
China grows most of them. Japan or Korea also.
Is it normal to refer to people of this time period as "early humans"?
Maybe they are intending to extrapolate backwards, but 8 kya is still a far cry from the 300 kya origin of Homo sapiens...
Therefore, early Europeans ate also the many different red, brown, and green algae that came in each urchin stomach. This predigested small pieces is what gives the urchins its special flavor. You can't ate one, and not the other.
This does not mean that they would eat directly the same algae raw. They are a cocktail of chemicals. not easy to eat in any significant amount without processing.
I can buy the idea of people eating the water lily starchy but acrid rhizomes as an emergency food in winter. Everything else is poisonous if I'm not wrong. They have narcotic properties, so another possibility is that they would chew is as a primitive painkiller for tooth decay. Red algae have a lot of chemicals also that could act as primitive cures.
Modern research techniques are wonderful, but if the humans lack of the ability to include instinct, observation, logical thinking and link facts; their results will try to run wild into full gallop. They can be more a trap than a solution if not filtered by common sense.
Second, we also still eat seaweed, as many other comments here point out (most of the comments are from the British Isles, so I'll add one that is also available in the Netherlands, where I'm from: salicorna, or "zeekraal"). I'd also like to note that I have never heard of any dish involving sea urchins. I'm sure they exist in the cuisine that you are familiar with, but I'm just mentioning this to point out that you do not speak for the culture of the entire European continent.
With that in mind, I find it rather odd to conclude that it is more likely that the measured seaweed molecules in teeth of ancient humans came from sea urchin stomachs than from seaweed directly. It does not pass Ockham's Razor.
You may have heard about a small place called the Mediterranean.
not a place really relevant for European culture if we except three or four empires that shaped the history of the humanity.
Every country touched by the Greeks or Roma knows how sea urchins taste. You could find them easily [1] in coastal areas of Greece, Spain, Morocco, Lybia, Egypt, France, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus... probably also Ireland. I bet that a lot of Asian and American countries have heard of it also by their own means. Japanese pay astronomical prices for them.
[1] If you know where to look for
Guess the reason why so many people eat them.
There's a theory named the "kelp highway hypothesis," which describes how the first people to make it to America might have taken a coastal route (instead an inland route via the land bridge). By following the massive coastal kelp beds, these hunter gatherers would have been able to sustain themselves with kelp itself when no other food was available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas)#K...
https://irishseaweeds.com/shop-2/carrageen-irish-moss-recipe...
The recipe above is almost accurate; they also added poitín to the mix.
I see this hoard of people heading to the first ocean or lake they can find and munching down on it.
Jokes aside:
> That timespan is significant, as archaeologists had long assumed that the introduction of farming during the Neolithic era meant that early humans largely abandoned such foods from the sea, according to a statement from the researchers.
You know what they say about assuming...
Buñuelos de Algas (seaweed Fritters) from Rocha, Uruguay [1]
[1]: https://www.sippitysup.com/seaweed-fritters-bunuelos-de-alga...
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the earths oceans are now polluted with human waste and other things that will make you sick.
I'd eat seaweed only if it was grown in a tank with actually clean water...
Its quality may vary a lot if they are picked fresh or after being dettached by storms etc.
Salicornia is more related with Quinoa or cacti than with algae. Crithmum is a carrot's cousin from cliffs. none of these are seaweeds.
I thought I loved seaweed, then one day ate a large amount on an empty stomach, and it was some of the worst nausea of my life.
It is great for fiber and minerals.
Always hard to tell if researchers are really as dull as these press releases make them to seem, or it's just academia's form of clickbait. Did anyone in their right mind really think that people went "ok, we've found a very labor intensive way to have food available for a relatively short period of a year, conditional on lots of factors like the weather, pests, disease, etc... time to put the kibosh on all other processes of generating caloric intake that we've honed for millennia!"
Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past.
If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.
Which is not to say that people living in these places didn't continue to eat seaweed, because they did.
But still, two radically different food producing paradigms meeting an established hunter-gatherer population could lead to some of the traditional foraged foods from the region being ignored.
I don’t know if seaweed is eaten or even prevalent in the seas around Anatolia, but steppe based cultures who drive herds would be likely to ignore it IMO
If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better.
... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)