xylaria
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
anthropology is certainly import, environments differ and are capable of supporting people differanly. When I worked in the museum of london, I remember processing an early bronze age find. It was a bone midden from what is now has east london built on it. Then it was a huge marsh system that was rivalled the everglades in size. Wooden walk ways were built through the marshes. They appeared to eat mostly goose and other water birds. Or differant people came to the marshes to hunt goose.
I look at the river esturies near where I live and they support a massive wild bird population, and literally tons of reedmace, seabeet, parsnip, larfa, shellfish. The cocklebeds and larva are harvested in thier tons, and sheep are farmed on the saltmarshes. There is plentyful food but the two most calorie dense products I am not allowed to collect, the birds and the sheep. One private section of marsh allows shooting, but it costs for the permission. Taking sheep is theft. The human diet in the long term needs some fat, water fowl certainly provided this in the past.
I always feel when these threads desend into really unpleasant pointless rows about how a man would starve eating just rabbits, and parsnips, it would be healthier to discuss where various nutritive requirements could come from. Instead of keyboard warriors stating points based on something they read somewhere, rather than on any practical experiance. Practical experiance teaches that processing food, finding the locations of foraged food and hunting skills becomes more effienct with practice. Humans developed ways of preserving food and harvesting/hunting in bulk when we were still huntergathers. A years worth of hazelnuts were done in one go, herds were driven over cliffs, our history of advancement has been driven by our innovation to find the laziest way of making a living. But now that drive for the easy life has cut our knowledge down so far most people cant see how to find food without a supermarket.
