5 ms·

It's heavy on plants but plants seem like a trickier source for fossil foods since most plants we eat are domesticated and/or otherwise evolutionarily recent -

by pvg 5y ago

It's heavy on plants but plants seem like a trickier source for fossil foods since most plants we eat are domesticated and/or otherwise evolutionarily recent - we eat lots of grasses. Animals we catch might be a good source for new entries - sharks and sturgeons are ancient, hagfish are eaten. Maybe some of the edible seaweeds haven't changed much morphologically?

dredmorbius 5y ago
It's pretty fascinating how recent most plant foods humans eat are. As you note, grasses (wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, ...) and maize are both recent developments and exceedingly selected and hybridised by humans. Both grasses and flowering plants post-date the first emergence of dinosaurs. Numerous other crops are similarly recent: stone fruits, pomes, etc. Others were available locally but not worldwide: potatoes and tomatoes. I suspect tubers and berries may be among the older plant foods eaten.
- quietbritishjim 5y ago
  > Both grasses and flowering plants Grasses are a type of flowering plant
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Point, though given the present significance of both the broader class of flowering plants, and the specific case of grasses, it's worth noting each individually.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Some sort of global disaster appears to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, with evidence of massive flooding and wildfires and dramatic shifts in climate happening over the course of days and weeks all over the world. Agriculture and advanced culture may have existed prior to the event, but it looks like the source for flood myths. Aside from Gobekli Tepe and a handful of other sites, it appears most knowledge and culture was lost. People had to start from scratch, so agriculture begins at most 12,000 years ago, comprising almost every plant we eat today. There's no way to know what might have been utterly lost. There's evidence of modern humans going back almost 300,000 years. (Crazy to think we were without dogs for ~260k years. Humans are better with dogs around. ) Humans probably invented language and writing and all sorts of proto-sciences many times over those hundreds of millenia, but everything before 12,000 years back is gone. There's virtually no evidence of the vast majority of human culture before then. Entropy sucks.
  - cdjk 5y ago
    This is an I interesting idea I haven’t heard before - do you have any sources on this?
    - joe-collins 5y ago
      The Younger Dryas was a climate cooling event around that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas A minority view holds that the YD was caused by an comet disintegrating and creating a chain of impacts or airbursts across the Northern Hemisphere. A further subset of that minority suggests that those events are the source for flood myths around the world, and speculates that advanced civilizations existed prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis#In_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicians_of_the_Gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicians_of_the_Gods
      - ianai 5y ago
        ...and you can hear more about it on the Joe Rogan podcast. Is there a good/extensive take on the mainstream geological and anthropological knowledge of what was going on around that period of time?
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      There’s a few different myths and theories here. There was an event that killed most humans 50,000+ years ago, probably a volcano. Later, in the 5,000-15,000 year timeframe there were a few different flooding events, in the Black Sea, Middle East, the North Sea, etc. Presumably they were related, but hundreds or thousands of years may have separated these events. More recently, in the 12th-13th century, tens or hundreds of thousands of people were washed away in the Frisian islands. Lowland plains are the most fertile places to live, and probably contributes to the universal nature of the flood myth. I would imagine that the current Black Sea was a paradise lost when it flooded, probably quite suddenly, 7,000 years ago. When you think of ancient oral histories and myths that endured into modern religion, concepts like the garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, days of judgement, etc are powerful morality tales that may have been boiled down from some derivative of actual history. I’ve always found the idea inspirational, as life & humans have a way of powering on in the face of incredible adversity.
bcherny 5y ago
This looks like a pretty interesting abstract: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248421001573?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

by pvg 5y ago

dredmorbius 5y ago

It's pretty fascinating how recent most plant foods humans eat are. As you note, grasses (wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, ...) and maize are both recent developments and exceedingly selected and hybridised by humans. Both grasses and flowering plants post-date the first emergence of dinosaurs. Numerous other crops are similarly recent: stone fruits, pomes, etc. Others were available locally but not worldwide: potatoes and tomatoes. I suspect tubers and berries may be among the older plant foods eaten.

quietbritishjim 5y ago
> Both grasses and flowering plants Grasses are a type of flowering plant
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Point, though given the present significance of both the broader class of flowering plants, and the specific case of grasses, it's worth noting each individually.
robbedpeter 5y ago
Some sort of global disaster appears to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, with evidence of massive flooding and wildfires and dramatic shifts in climate happening over the course of days and weeks all over the world. Agriculture and advanced culture may have existed prior to the event, but it looks like the source for flood myths. Aside from Gobekli Tepe and a handful of other sites, it appears most knowledge and culture was lost. People had to start from scratch, so agriculture begins at most 12,000 years ago, comprising almost every plant we eat today. There's no way to know what might have been utterly lost. There's evidence of modern humans going back almost 300,000 years. (Crazy to think we were without dogs for ~260k years. Humans are better with dogs around. ) Humans probably invented language and writing and all sorts of proto-sciences many times over those hundreds of millenia, but everything before 12,000 years back is gone. There's virtually no evidence of the vast majority of human culture before then. Entropy sucks.
- cdjk 5y ago
  This is an I interesting idea I haven’t heard before - do you have any sources on this?
  - joe-collins 5y ago
    The Younger Dryas was a climate cooling event around that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas A minority view holds that the YD was caused by an comet disintegrating and creating a chain of impacts or airbursts across the Northern Hemisphere. A further subset of that minority suggests that those events are the source for flood myths around the world, and speculates that advanced civilizations existed prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis#In_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicians_of_the_Gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicians_of_the_Gods
    - ianai 5y ago
      ...and you can hear more about it on the Joe Rogan podcast. Is there a good/extensive take on the mainstream geological and anthropological knowledge of what was going on around that period of time?
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    There’s a few different myths and theories here. There was an event that killed most humans 50,000+ years ago, probably a volcano. Later, in the 5,000-15,000 year timeframe there were a few different flooding events, in the Black Sea, Middle East, the North Sea, etc. Presumably they were related, but hundreds or thousands of years may have separated these events. More recently, in the 12th-13th century, tens or hundreds of thousands of people were washed away in the Frisian islands. Lowland plains are the most fertile places to live, and probably contributes to the universal nature of the flood myth. I would imagine that the current Black Sea was a paradise lost when it flooded, probably quite suddenly, 7,000 years ago. When you think of ancient oral histories and myths that endured into modern religion, concepts like the garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, days of judgement, etc are powerful morality tales that may have been boiled down from some derivative of actual history. I’ve always found the idea inspirational, as life & humans have a way of powering on in the face of incredible adversity.

bcherny 5y ago

This looks like a pretty interesting abstract: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248421001573?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...