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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

Hunting and gathering is fine if you have free rein of the land and live in a relatively productive area (for fruits and vegetables). From what I know of NorCal it does not naturally grow stuff you can pick and eat. Also hunting is relatively restricted around national parks and there is no mention of petrov doing it.

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I live in NorCal and do some culinary foraging for fun. There's plenty, I mean people lived here before Europeans colonized. There's all kinds of native berries, blackberry, salmon berry, service berry, elderberry huckleberry. There are plenty of nuts, beaked hazelnuts, black walnut and the most plentiful are acorns.

And there's plenty of small game to hunt and trap. I don't see that Petrov did this, but I imagine if he was comfortable catching and eating a neighbors duck, he probably took a squirrel or two in his life. The natives would obviously fish, take all kinds of small game, even including rat.

Have you tried living off foraged foods for any length of time? Is it realistic to be able to get enough calories, proteins, and fats doing this on your own without extensive fishing and hunting? Sounds like it would need a lot of nuts, and there aren't that many fruiting trees there to begin with, are there?

I just read a hypothesis from an anthropologist suggesting that the reason California’s indigenous tribes did not practice agriculture like eastern tribes, was due to the abundance of food they could forage year around. Oaks providing a significant part of their diet (which are plentiful in Mendocino) but also other nuts, berries, and tubers found throughout California.

So relative to our modern diet, maybe your point holds, but the California Floristic Province has plenty of plants to sustain humans. IIRC, the indigenous population density was some of the highest in the world.

I thought a lot of that is acorns (that need a lot of preparation) and fish, not so much random food growing around the redwoods you could just pick and eat?

(Lived in the area for a long time, but not an expert at all). Did the anthropologist provide any details? I'd love to read their work

Something would have limited their population though.

That's also my understanding. I do wonder if that's a bit of a misunderstanding about not practicing agriculture, though. They did practice forest management with intentional burns. I'm pretty interested in traditional English forest management, and reducing brush and decreasing canopy increased the amount of forest "products" available to people, from building materials (basketry, hut materials, etc) to increased yields from under story vegetation.

It's a bit of a digression, but it's a subject I find interesting and rarely pops up in hacker news. :)

The Dawn of Everything has an interesting take on this - they didn't practice agriculture because they wanted to differentiate themselves from other cultures in the area.

I would love to hear what it is. There are truckloads of acorns but it’s all I can think of besides some berries.

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