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.
Comment on Prehistoric shitposting
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 months agoOh 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?”
Signtist@lemm.ee 7 months ago
ExLisper@linux.community 7 months ago
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.
teejay@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I would imagine a lot of it has to do with food scarcity. There weren’t trucks and boats and planes to fly food back then. You had to eat what was available in your specific patch of dirt. If there aren’t a lot of options, 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 grow where they live, and therefore a necessity to figure out how to eat it.