A-ha! Finally, near the very end of the Salatin chapter, he goes into some specifics of essential fatty acids and livestock being fed corn or grass. He even gets it right that grass-fed beef is better for you than corn-fed salmon. Good jerb.
The "Forager" chapter has a bit of fuzziness that caught my attention, though.
The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended.
Well, maybe. It's certainly a lot easier to sustain a considerable population density and group size with hunting when you're the apex hunter, and that's a lot easier when you still have megafauna. The problem is that it's relatively easy to wipe out all the giant predators (harder to kill an individual but easier to reduce the population to the breaking point) but much harder to wipe out all the smaller ones. It's easier to wipe out all the grizzly bears in your area than all the wolves, much less all the coyotes. And grizzly bears may take down bison, but wolves are less likely to, and coyotes generally won't even try. But if the prey animal you depend on is deer, then the wolves and even coyotes may be competing with you directly.
And it takes a lot more rabbit-hunting, say, to support 200 people than bison-hunting. But most cultures we know of, historically, wander into agriculture. I think it's just a vicious cycle. You start farming, and you settle down, and your population quickly expands. And then you're locked into agriculture unless a lot of people leave or die. And even if a lot of people do leave or die, odds are that the remaining population will keep farming. You don't see many cultures go from agriculture back to hunting and gathering.
Of course, once you domesticate animals, you have to feed
them, which is often the biggest part of agriculture. Plains Indians, still living with selective megafauna (bison), were semi-farmers, in that their culture depended on staying with the herds. They just didn't need to feed the bison (because they let them roam freely and followed them) and didn't need to protect them (because they'd killed off most of the major predators and, anyway, there were so many bison). And the population stayed low enough that there were plenty of bison to go around.
If you look at the Maasai, they're slightly further along the agricultural curve -- they take ownership of herds but don't keep them in one place. Instead, they follow the herd around, letting it graze as freely as possible. As their population density has gone up in modern times, though, this lifestyle has become a lot more difficult . . . and they're killing off all the lions in their territory, having already killed a large proportion of them in earlier eras.
