> archaeologists had long assumed that the introduction of farming during the Neolithic era meant that early humans largely abandoned such foods from the sea Always hard to tell if researchers are really as dull as these press releases make them to seem, or it's just academia's form of clickbait. Did anyone in their right mind really think that people went "ok, we've found a very labor intensive way to have food avai…
On top of that, the creation of agriculture was almost certainly extremely granular. There is a spectrum of foraging to farming. You go out in the forest and take some fruits back. Some of the discarded fruit seeds end up growing trees near your settlement. Someone eventually realizes that having fruit trees close by is really convenient, and they start planting seeds intentionally. This was probably done for a very,…
If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better.
... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)