Abstract
from bali and the Paleolithic, we move to Sardinia and the Neolithic, the era in which agriculture emerged as one more set of strategies for human land use and food getting. Although agriculture was once treated by archaeologists as a rapid revolution that stormed different continents at about the same time—some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago—it is now recognized that hunter-gatherers practiced elements of plant selection, transplanting, and dispersal for many thousand years before that apparently instant revolution. In other words, agriculture was a slow food revolution that seldom transformed any culture’s traditional diet in one fell swoop. Neither was the adoption of agriculture a peculiar watershed between Paleolithic adaptation and Neolithic maladaptation. Farming and herding peoples like the Sardinians and Cretans continued to draw upon wild herbs, legumes, snails, and fish, and that is one of the reasons we will be visiting them.
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© 2013 Gary Paul Nabhan
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Nabhan, G.P. (2013). Finding a Bean for Your Genes and a Buffer Against Malaria. In: Food, Genes, and Culture. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-493-2_4
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