Very funny, you cannot believe I was equating planting people with planting seeds to grow food. I was demonstrating humans were intelligent enough to ritualistically bury their dead and much more but they could go for thousands of years without figuring plants out? Doesn't matter, I believe humans have always been humans and humans have always been farmers and herders and hunters and fishers. From "In the begining".
I've always thought that agriculture brought about the first harnessed source of energy--raiding your neighbor to capture slaves to work the fields.
And isn't it interesting that slavery ended when fossil fuels were discovered...
It's not a matter of "figuring plants out". It's a matter of establishing a self-sustaining agricultural community, which is *not* as simple as it may seem at first glance when starting from hunter-gatherer origins. *And* it's a matter of finding a reason to do so in the first place -- the first agricultural attempts would have been a poor replacement for the nomadic lifestyle, and I'm often surprised that anyone ever took the first plunge at all.
Again, you might want to read the book I recommended in my previous post. It covers a lot of these issues.
"Figuring out" that you could put seeds in the ground and have plants sprout from them was the easy part. But figuring out how to survive and succeed at subsistence farming with wild-type crops is far harder, and the benefits of making the effort hard to see at first.
Doesn't matter, I believe humans have always been humans and humans have always been farmers and herders and hunters and fishers. From "In the begining".
Mountains of evidence indicate otherwise. Again, check out the book I recommended.