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The most reasonable to me is that megafauna come and wreck your farms, so you have to hunt them to extinction before farming is viable. Humans can stop a horse

The most reasonable to me is that megafauna come and wreck your farms, so you have to hunt them to extinction before farming is viable. Humans can stop a horse from eating their crops, but stopping an elephant or mammoth is not easy at all, and we see that humans hunted those to extinction right before they started agriculture. There used to be elephants and mammoths all over the world, but almost all places where humans developed agriculture they had already killed all of them.

alwa 1y ago
In other words, a farm is a megafauna version of a nice fishing lure? One way to stop them is to eat them :)
- Jensson 1y ago
  It is really hard to kill an elephant, you need a lot of people to do it or big traps. You can lookup videos of people doing that, you have like 100 people standing around throwing spears at it as it slowly bleeds to death and that is when its alone. If its a herd you can't even do that. So when farming requires you to have a big hunting party constantly ready to take down an elephant, why not just live off elephant meat? The farm doesn't add any value and is very difficult to start.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Barley makes beer.
derektank 1y ago
This is part of the reason why commercial agriculture is so difficult to this day in Africa. Hippos in particular will wreck a harvest in no time.
- Jensson 1y ago
  And African elephants form enormous herds, there used to be herds of hundreds of elephants roaming around, no way stone age level societies can defend against those all you can do is try to avoid them. Modern guns changed that of course.
margalabargala 1y ago
All the farming for millenia on the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia in general seems to disagree with that. The Indus Valley civilization certainly had elephants around.
- Jensson 1y ago
  They tamed those though, very different. Tamed elephants wont go wreck your crops and might even keep untamed ones away.

alwa 1y ago

In other words, a farm is a megafauna version of a nice fishing lure? One way to stop them is to eat them :)

Jensson 1y ago
It is really hard to kill an elephant, you need a lot of people to do it or big traps. You can lookup videos of people doing that, you have like 100 people standing around throwing spears at it as it slowly bleeds to death and that is when its alone. If its a herd you can't even do that. So when farming requires you to have a big hunting party constantly ready to take down an elephant, why not just live off elephant meat? The farm doesn't add any value and is very difficult to start.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Barley makes beer.

derektank 1y ago

This is part of the reason why commercial agriculture is so difficult to this day in Africa. Hippos in particular will wreck a harvest in no time.

Jensson 1y ago
And African elephants form enormous herds, there used to be herds of hundreds of elephants roaming around, no way stone age level societies can defend against those all you can do is try to avoid them. Modern guns changed that of course.

margalabargala 1y ago

All the farming for millenia on the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia in general seems to disagree with that. The Indus Valley civilization certainly had elephants around.

Jensson 1y ago
They tamed those though, very different. Tamed elephants wont go wreck your crops and might even keep untamed ones away.