To eat weeds, or not to

Many people believe once an agricultural civilization appeared, it would not turn back to hunting-gathering. In fact, farmers in southern Sweden reverted to hunting-gathering in 2700 BC, than went back to farming 400 years later (Guns, Germs, and Steel p. 109). It is easy to imagine the difficulty of farming in the prehistoric time, but I was surprised that a matured agricultural civilization, such as the colonial India, suffered such a huge yield fluctuation — according to the report “Early Farming Communities Often Ate Weeds, Other Wild Plants, Archaeologist Finds. Thousands of years after the advent of agriculture, ancient farmers in India routinely foraged for wild plants — even weeds — when times got tough, a UCLA archaeologist has found.”

No wonder throughout the 150k-year modern human history, agriculture appeared only 10k years ago.