>Sam and everyone....   One difference between the paleolithic hunting of
>animals and modern animal husbandry is that the number of animals needed to
>support a wild hunter is much larger than the number needed to support a
>civilized meat eater.  To elaborate, the wild forager takes only a small
>percentage of the herd, so the land required to deliver that small
>percentage is great in proportion to the meat it produces.  The civilized
>carnivore, on the other hand, takes a large percentage of the herd, if not
>all of it eventually, so the same amount of land required to feed one wild
>carnivore will feed many civilized carnivores.  This is possible because
>modern herds are more efficient producers of meat:  there's artificial
>insemination requiring fewer bulls, breeding to produce disease resistant
>animals that also grow larger on less food, veterinary practices, no wild
>predators etc.  Also adding to this efficiency is the fact that
domesticated
>animals are docile and easy to catch and kill.

Granted that modern 'cattle farming' is more efficient than hunting. But the
irony is that the modern cattle industry is *dependent* on agriculture (as
well as on the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology, and soon also on the
genetic engineering folks.) They need lots of grain to keep the cattle fat,
and their yields would drop, probably dramatically, if they had to resort to
letting the livestock graze free-range. So their efficiency depends on the
very ecology-impactful practices we like to criticize! Where I live, cotton
used to be king. Now the farmers grow milo and sorghum as cash crops, which
is fed to the cattle.

The other downside to the modern approach is nutritional - the significantly
altered lipid profiles of modern cattle. Again, to get the high yields you
get the trade-off of a much different nutritional profile. Those of us who
are eating paleo while mainly getting our animal products from the high-tech
meat producers are all walking experiments to a degree. We just don't know
what the long term affects are of eating paleo while having a large
percentage of our diet come from grain-fed beef, Tyson chicken, hatchery
fish raised on dog food, etc.

>     So all in all, I think that our ancestors would have done fine without
>planted agriculture, and would have avoided some of the environmental
damage
>caused by it, if only emissaries from the future had stocked them with our
>domesticated breeds of ruminants and the knowledge needed to use them.

That may be the biggest "if" I've ever heard.  <g>  To borrow Ray's
religious analogy from "Neanderthin", that argues that everything would've
been ok if someone had come along and offered our ancestors the "apple" of
technology.

Granted though, the cattle would've been easier to catch than a mastodon.
They don't run very well.

Sam