There was no written language, so he probably pulled out his hollow log, drummed some impressive beats and impressed his homies with song about shit-death-berry that everyone remembered and repeated.
…or his song was shit and nobody cared till the next poor sod shit himself to death.
The consequences of not supporting the artistic community were more severe back then
And that led to the release of Shit Death Berry 2: Electric Boogaloo
Literal shit posting
i didn’t know shit could post
Jesus, what did OP do to you guys?
Very rarely are things lethal like that. Poison edibles tend to taste awful, and if you start with a small amount you will learn whether it makes you sick.
Now mushrooms on the other hand? No idea how they figured it out.
For real. Aren’t most poisonous mushrooms neurotoxins too?
Trip balls so hard you think you are dying and you actually are dying. Horrific.
What I don’t get is how ancient humans figured out more complex stuff. Like neanderthals learned how to make a glue to hold their weapons together. It was probably a simple method, like this article talks about, but it still took a lot of planning and also a lot of basic reasoning before trying it themselves if it was even something that could be done.
I would say it a combination of two things:
- People walked around for around ~300.000 years before inventing agriculture. That’s a lot of time to find out things by accident. We learned about antibiotics by accident. I’m sure also stumbled upon many inventions by pure luck.
- Caveman were smart. As smart as we are. Average person is not going to invent electronic watches but there’s always this 1% that’s more curious and intelligent that will experiment and discover things.
Combine this and you have 300.000 years of very slow but steady progress fuelled by chance discoveries and occasional geniuses.
Oh I’m certainly aware of the second part. It still astounds me that they were able to figure out things like that without just observing the natural world. Here’s another example, although it may not apply to the early agricultural world because I don’t know when it was first cultivated. Who figured out that the leaves of rhubarb were poison and the stalks are only edible with further processing? According to Wikipedia, it’s been cultivated for at least 1800 years. How do you figure out, “well, this is making people sick, but what if we just ate the stems but cooked them a whole lot first?”
I would imagine a lot of it has to do with food scarcity. There weren’t trucks and boats and planes to transport food back then. You had to eat what was available in your specific patch of dirt. If there aren’t a lot of food options where you live, and what is available can make you sick, you might start trying to prepare it and eat it in different ways until it stops making you sick.
For most people, rhubarb is one of hundreds of options of things to buy from a grocery store. To our ancient ancestors, it may have been one of a small handful of things that grew where they lived, and therefore a necessity to figure out how to eat it.
I eat raw rhubarb all the time. I usually pull a stalk off to munch on as I mow the lawn. They probably just ate the stalk first, enjoyed it, and some stopped there, while others didn’t. Doesn’t take much more experimentation than that to learn that the stalks are edible and tasty, while the leaves aren’t.
Yeah, animals know what plants to avoid. I would say that when it comes to what was poisonous monkeys already knew that and people didn’t have to rediscover it.
I imagine a lot of boredom (besides staying alive), helps finding out stuff. I can also imagine, that they had basic roles in a group, where people were designated “mess around with stuff and discover things, aka proto scientists”
I’m not saying it was aliens, but …
It was aliens.
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I find it pretty amazing how someone figured out how to make cassava edible. It’s got enough cyanide to kill you unless it goes through some complex process of mashing and boiling. Who thought to themselves “this killed Greg, but maybe it’ll be delicious if I boil it for a little longer”?
Necessity is the mother of invention. One day somebody was just that hungry, a cassava plant was available, experimentation ensues, bam staple crop. It’s not that huge of a leap though. Most societies have some kind of root or tuber food, and once you’ve got the idea that roots and tubers can be food it’s not a huge stretch to go looking for others. Pretty much all of them have to be cooked at least to be edible and palatable.
Second Caveman: “Ted just never listened to anybody.”
If you simply MUST eat strange plants, test them first by crushing a berry/leaf and rubbing the juice on your skin. If you get any discoloration, blistering, etc, then you will NOT enjoy eating it.
A meme about a meme
On a serious note
Humans more than likely instinctively knew which foods were safe the same way their genetic ancestors did. Since humans evolved alongside other similar species they would share similar instincts on what to look for in safe to eat vs not safe to eat foods.
