“Gathering is a lot easier than hunting.”
Have you ever tried gathering 2,000 calories every day for a week?
Hunting is more work but the caloric payoff is orders of magnitude greater.
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Hunting needs superior weapons. Humans had flintstones and sticks for weapons many millenniums back. Pretty difficult to down a deer with those.
Have you ever tried gathering 2,000 calories every day for a week?
Hunting is more work but the caloric payoff is orders of magnitude greater.
It is all situational. If there is plenty of plant calories around to be gathered, you can bet there will be plenty of herbivore and omnivore competition for those plant calories.
If there is plenty of game, easily hunted, hunting can be far more productive than gathering.
It appears to me, the Americas offered plenty of game and easy hunting for the first thousand years or so. Then the continents were full of hunting tribes, the easy big game was hunted to extinction, and life became much harder.
Not an endorsement for nowadays.
Humans have become dominant because they can survive to procreate eating just about anything. After procreation when evolution is done with you, though, plant based generally increases lifespan.