How did people first discover that food is food?
score:14
The same as any other animal does; by nibbling at it a bit and seeing what happens.
This kind of question is the subject of Chapter 7 (How to make an almond) of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel.
Almonds are held out as a particularly interesting case, because raw wild almonds typically contain enough cyanide to kill a person. However, there are occasional mutants that are edible, and hungry animals (including people) always found those.
Since the cyanide is the plant's protection from having its seeds eaten, this would normally be enough to kill off any of those mutants from the gene pool. However, humans brought something new to the equation. As hunter-gatherers with large ranges, at first humans who ate them accidentally spread the mutant almond trees around via their refuse dumps. Once they started planting their favorite food trees, obviously only the good mutant almond trees got planted.
Getting back to the oddity of someone trying a new plant, Diamond tells us for hunter-gatherers its not that odd at all:
... an entire field of science, termed ethnobiology, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment. Such studies have concentrated especially on the world's few surviving hunting-gathering peoples, and on farming peoples who still depend heavily on wild foods and natural products. The studies generally show that such peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost, until one arrives at modern supermarket shoppers who could not distinguish a wild grass from a wild pulse.
...
Whenever I have taken New Guineans with me to other parts of their island, they regularly talk about local plants and animals with other New Guineans whom they meet, and they gather potentially useful plants and bring them back to their home villages to try planting them. ... The first farmers were heirs to that knowledge, accumulated through tens of thousands of years of nature observation by biologically modern humans living in intimate dependence on the natural world. It therefore seems extremely unlikely that wild species of potential value would have escaped the notice of the first farmers.
More post
- 📝 About how long ago was the most recent day on which a human did not die
- 📝 Are the Nazi Party, Communist Party, and Bolsheviks far-right or far-left?
- 📝 Who uses a pre-"Gregorian" calendar and why?
- 📝 How pervasive was the idea that we had reached "the end of history" in America during the ninties?
- 📝 Elevated walkway in background at 1980s Potsdamer Platz seen in Wim Wenders' film “Der Himmel über Berlin”
- 📝 When did covered wagons disappear from America?
- 📝 What prompted Lincoln to change his mind about ending slavery?
- 📝 Why was Turkey neutral during WWII?
- 📝 Was Switzerland really impossible to invade during WW2?
- 📝 What are the problems archaeologists face in deciphering the Indus Valley writing?
- 📝 Completeness of Old Parish Registers in the 1700s
- 📝 U.S. biplane Identification
- 📝 Where to find reliable source about Palestinians leaving in 1948 (Nakba)?
- 📝 Birth by Caesarean Section in Ancient Times
- 📝 Why did King Charles II cede New Amsterdam / New York to his brother James, Duke of York, in 1664?
- 📝 How did people in Athens 500 BCE refer to Homer's era?
- 📝 What kind of missile flew with such speed in 1st century BCE?
- 📝 What was the original process for becoming a US citizen?
- 📝 Comparing Percentage Of Spanish Nobility Migrating To Latin America To Percentage Of Pan-European Nobility Migrating To USA And Canada
- 📝 How was planning done before computers?
- 📝 Did ancient/medieval armies have music/chants to march to?
- 📝 Were groups (or 'companies') of dogs used to attack enemy armies in medieval battles?
- 📝 Does US law permit spending taxpayers' money to support foreign political parties?
- 📝 Did Joseph II introduce the presumption of innocence in his legal code?
- 📝 When did humans develop the ability to sail any direction regardless of wind direction?
- 📝 Did teenage Sultan Osman II use people as targets?
- 📝 How did Poland fare under "personal unions?"
- 📝 Why is Britain the only country called "perfidious"?
- 📝 Military capacity of Turkey during the Cuban missile crisis (1962)?
- 📝 How did John Duns Scotus live in England during the Scottish Wars of Independence?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 How did people first discover that food is food?
- 📝 How did people react to Cavendish bananas when they first replaced the Gros Michel strain?
- 📝 How did people realize that America was a different continent?
- 📝 Did the Tamil People discover that the earth was round 2000 years ago?
- 📝 How did the First French Empire and allies differ from the other European monarchies at that time?
- 📝 How did the people of Massachusetts react to the territory that is now Maine being split off from Massachusetts?
- 📝 How did people ensure that renaissance Papal election bribery was honored?
- 📝 When did people decide that all caps means the writer is shouting?
- 📝 How did people distinguish slaves from free people in Ancient Rome?
- 📝 How did 300,000 people survive the 3 1/2 year siege of Sarajevo?
- 📝 How did people wash dishes before dish detergent?
- 📝 When and how did people begin to consider slavery immoral?
- 📝 Did active frontiersmen really eat 20,000 calories a day? How does this compare to other highly-active people in recorded history?
- 📝 How did the American Civil War help the U.S economy recover from the Panic of 1857 given that civil wars are extremely destructive?
- 📝 How did people put down a drinking horn?
- 📝 How did people travel to remote islands like Easter Island?
- 📝 How did people deal with ice on the roads during the horse-and-buggy era?
- 📝 When did the term "Nationality" first come into use? How did ancient civilizations refer to themselves? By ethnicity?
- 📝 How did Europeans first acquire gunpowder?
- 📝 How did people wake up on time before alarm clocks?
- 📝 How did people cut "pieces of eight"?
- 📝 How did people have access to ice in warm areas before the industrial revolution?
- 📝 How did bank transactions (or "data" transactions) work when it took people weeks to travel vast distances?
- 📝 How did people in the desert stay cool in the past?
- 📝 How did the Romans discover dry cleaning?
- 📝 How did Moldova and Romania become separate in the first place?
- 📝 If salt was scarce and expensive, how did people "salt the earth" to ensure their enemies would stay defeated?
- 📝 How did people say “I have to go to the bathroom” before the bathroom and pipes were common?
- 📝 How did people dress at the Jesuit missions to the Hurons?
- 📝 How did people and goods move between East Pakistan and West Pakistan?
