On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Dori Zook wrote:

> Actually, hunting gives you far more bang for your buck (no pun intended,
> believe it or not) than the gathering (AND milling AND coooking) of wild
> grains.  No fuzzy math here.

I think that's a good explanation of why grains would not have
been more than an adjunct food, along with many other adjunct
foods.  Edible greens, for example, are very low-density,
resulting in a low energy return on the investment of energy
needed to gather them.

At some point, as hunting fields were depleted, I imagine hunting
began to give less and less bang for the buck.  That is, it
became harder and harder to kill enough prey to keep the tribe
going.  This would have made it increasingly more reasonable to
think about promoting what used to be adjunct foods to a higher
status, and then to devote more energy to gathering and
processing those grains, and eventually to cultivating them.

This is the only way I can make sense of the transition to
agriculture.  If hunting had remained a sweet deal everywhere, I
don't think agriculture would have gotten a foothold.

Todd Moody
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