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Domestication
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I know it’s a joke but this is science memes and it plays into a widespread misconception about early humans that we were some kind of blood drenched carnivores. Not true. Humans have always mostly eaten plants supplemented with some meat or other animal foods.
Also it's not like "getting food is easier" is the only hypothesis out there as to why we settled down. Another one, IMO much more in line with human nature, is that we figured out how to ferment beer and for that reason planted buttloads of grain.
Since there’s no written record, it’s hard to know for sure but I believe it was because agricultural communities were able to reproduce much faster and live at much higher densities, so they tended to win conflicts and displace societies based on foraging—even though foragers had better quality of life and didn’t normally experience the food shortages people imagine.
That said, modern foraging societies have largely converted to agriculture after being subjugated and not because they were hungry. So there is some evidence to support this hypothesis.
Also the foraging people might end up living on the periphery of a settlement, foraging and then trading what they foraged with the settlement to make thier lives easier.
It depends so much on location and period, as an example, the Inuit diet consisted of a lot of meat whole the Kaurna in Australia ate lots of yams.
Yeah you’re right, I probably stated it over-broadly. I’m more talking about the typical prehistoric human diet but there were exceptions.