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how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy?

my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group in particular favorable climate that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.

furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia, or some other Asian countries which have been populous for many centuries.




> how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy?

What infomation do you have on pre European landing famine in Australia?

> my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group

The Swan Valley quote above applied to Western Australian and Central Desert groups prior to being shunted off traditional lands by European settlement (an area comfortably three times larger than Texas) - it continues to apply in areas where traditional practices on traditional lands continue.

https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

> that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.

Recent genetics has confirmed what was also the local oral history, that people arrived, fanned out, and stayed where they first settled:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416

This runs contrary to the views espoused for decades by Windshuttle in Quadrant.

> furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia

?? Pre Dutch contact Indonesia ?

I specifically linked to the example of Australian hunter gathers.

You can take it that my earlier comment doesn't apply to Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, etc peoples of Alaska.


> time & effort humans had to spend on simply acquiring enough calories

so you are reducing "humans" in the comment you are replying to, to Western Australian and Central Desert groups? that's not the majority of humans, who really did have to fight for calories


Exactly. You don't have to go back very far to find a lot of famines even in the "developed world".

Look back in history before the invention of nitrogen fertilizers (only about a century ago).. we spent nearly a century harvesting guano off uninhabited rock islands in order to produce fertilizer & gun powder. We even past laws to encourage it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act


I read an article years ago where archaeologists studied the bones of pre-Columbian Native Americans. They found evidence of repeated famines.




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