>
The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados, but it really served as a quick snack for big mammals like the mammoth... How the avocado still exists in the wild after surviving its evolutionary failures remains a puzzle. But once Homo sapiens evolved to the point where it could cultivate the species, the fruit had the chance to thrive anew. Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves.I don't see the puzzle at all.
13,000 years ago yes humans hunted and killed off the megafauna. But they wouldn't be agriculturalists yet for thousands more years -- they still hunted and gathered. Avocados had a lot less fruit to them (since cultivation wasn't a thing yet), but that was true of many, probably most, wild fruits and vegetables at the time. Humans ate them all despite how they had less flesh -- they just ate more of them I guess. (And it's not like the avocado was more attractive to a mammoth than a person...) And so humans would have presumably been distributing the seeds as they took home sacks of them and some fell out, or they dumped leftover pits somewhere else in the forest.
The fact that avocados became cultivated in the first place almost certainly implies we were eating them already, and therefore transporting their pits often enough too.
I don't understand on what basis the author can assume humans weren't eating the original avocados...???