Depletion of Easy Food Sources Forced Hunter Gatherers to Examine Alternatives They Had Ignored Before
Over the millennia, as waves of humans migrated out of Africa and gradually spread around the world, depletion of local resources, especially from overhunting, had been a relatively easy problem to solve: move. The solution was often to simply walk a few miles over into the next valley or along a shore or down a river, until they arrived in a new biosphere not yet occupied by other humans.
However, by the end of the last of ice age, circa 11,500 years ago, humans had already moved into and occupied nearly the entire world. Other than some Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, nearly every habitable zone on earth, from the Arctic Circle in the north all the way down to the southern tip of South America, was already inhabited. That put paid to the usual standby solution of simply moving over to the next valley when resources in one’s own valley had run low. The next valley already had other hunter gatherers, and they were unlikely to welcome another band encroaching on their territory and using up the resources they needed for their own survival.
One possible solution was to violently oust neighboring bands from their stomping grounds in order to take their place, and many undoubtedly went with that option. However, violence would not always have been practical: for one thing, the neighboring hunter gatherers might have been more numerous, and even more warlike and bloodthirsty in defending their turf.
Another option was to stay put, and handle the problem of depleted local resources by putting one’s wits to even more intensive and efficient extraction of resources from their local environment. That often meant hunter gatherers were forced to take a second look at food items that their ancestors, who had lived in eras of abundance and plenty, would not have bothered with. Things got hard enough that some communities, driven by hunger, were reduced to experimenting with eating grass – wild wheat and barley.