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Well, edible bananas don't have seeds, you have to excavate and extract, prepare, and then bury (plant) culms to spread them. So yes, it was definitely deliber
by jbotz 6y ago
Well, edible bananas don't have seeds, you have to excavate and extract, prepare, and then bury (plant) culms to spread them. So yes, it was definitely deliberate, people carried banana culms around with them in order to plant them as they traveled from island to island.
- pixl97 6y agoUm, that is only modern bananas. "old" bananas are mostly seed.
- jbotz 6y agoYes, that's why I said "edible" bananas... those "mostly seed" ones aren't really edible, there's nothing to eat. The mutation / hybridization that resulted in seedless edible bananas must have preceded their being spread around by humans or we wouldn't have bothered.
- inglor_cz 6y agoOh, anyone bothers if they get really hungry. Stone Age people were fairly resourceful when it came to food. A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.
- user_ 6y agoCare to share any of the stories? I think you'll find a receptive audience :)
- inglor_cz 6y agoThe best one is probably this from the early 2000s. They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days. They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent. Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste. No health consequences.
- hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y agoSouthern France/Northern Spain is not a total wilderness. That level hunger after a two day detour implies a serious level of poor planning.
- inglor_cz 6y agoWell, it was their second tour of the Pyrenees. They have come back almost every year since 2001 and learned from their mistakes.
- deathgrips 6y agoEating skin cream after two days without food? There are people who recreationally fast for that length. There's something missing from this story.
- inglor_cz 6y agoShe is tough, but very lean. Not that much body fat, so low reserves. As for fasting. I fast sometimes, but I would not try fasting on a long hike in mountains like Pyrenees. Probably not even Tatras.
- dTal 6y agoDepending on what's in the skin cream, it might not be an unreasonable thing to do. They often contain not much more than plant fats and stablilizers. Probably the perfume will make it taste foul, but it won't kill you.
- sebmellen 6y agoMusa acuminata bananas, native to SE-Asia, and probably the sort talked about in this article, do have seeds, though the domesticated variants have significantly less. It seems highly unlikely that these particular bananas had no seeds. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata