How the fuck did we as a species figure out what berries are edible? How the fuck did we figure out we could use spices? How would we tell the difference? Have you seen clove in its pre-ground state? It's pic related. Does that scream "medicine or flavoring" to you?
It's not like some guys just went around sampling every plant they saw, regardless of poison. That'd be preposterous.
Native populations know what's good and what's bad. The people writing the books go off of that. Also animal observation.
>>28538490
Daring cunts, trial and error
here <stupidest person in the tribe> eat these berries
hey, everyone bob's not dead, eat up
Animals you dip.
>>28538490
Instincs I'm guessing I have often thought abojt this, how exactly did they know that 1 plant out of thousands was for stomach aches? Its pretty crazy mind boggling concept but that and trial and error, example of that is how many people died while eating mushrooms? How did they know what one is edible and will kill
>>28538490
the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms must have been absolutely terrifying
imagine it, some lonely traveler alone and hungry lost in the forest, finds some mushrooms to eat and is happy as a nigger in kfc, but then a half hour later he would feel like he was dying and talking to god or something
>>28538525
This, just watch which berries the birds eat.
Think about it for a few seconds jesus christ anon
>>28538490
>It's not like some guys just went around sampling every plant they saw, regardless of poison.
Why is that preposterous?
Even today you have people trying all kinds of designer drugs even though we KNOW they are poisonous.
>>28538623
>>28538525
He's asking how the native population came to know which plants were edibles to begin with you idiots
Berries are simple -- watch animals, try it and see what happens, etc. Spices are harder to explain. Especially since it's pretty clear that our ancestors knew they had antibacterial properties.
>>28538623
You do realise that many, many berries birds eat would poison a person right?
>>28538587
>>28538656
Animals have completely different digestive systems. Koala bears can process poisonous leaves for instance
>>28538663
thank you
They often had to chose between taking chances and starving to death.
Also, imagine how many long hours of free time they had after the hunt with no video games to play to experiment with plants.
>>28538490
You know that kid in school that would eat flies and shit?
That's how.
>>28538694
w-wait, you saw kids do that? Worst I saw was a kid eating crayons
>>28538671
I'm not talking about no koala bears I'm talking about deer eat.
And even if it's still poison, it's not blindly trying everything.
>>28538726
even so, animals dont eat clove of shave off cinnamon from trees, so your argument doesnt exactly hold up
>>28538490
Are you religious by any chance? You're making it sound like one day there were humans and we had to figure out what to eat. We have been identifying what to eat for thousands of years by smell and taste. Early man eats a berry and it gives him a tummy ache, for generations no one eats that berry.
This is not hard to comprehend anon.
>>28538775
I'm not religious at all, but even with what you're saying it's hard to imagine people committed voluntary suicide just to find out what is edible, even imagining animals doing this perplexes me. And you still have yet to fully answer my question, since spices were not developed when we were cromagnon and such. They came to be during the bronze age
>>28538490
Fuck that, more importantly, how did people figure out bronze working?
>you see these rocks that look a bit different? yeah, let's mine them, put them in a furnace at a very high temperature, take them out, hit them with a hammer to get the shape we want, just for the sake of it.
>>28538818
When the early neanderthal Chads or whatever couldn't find an animal to eat, they would be desperate and eat plants and shit.
>>28538833
Penicillin and gunpowder were discovered by accident, I think brewing (as in beer) too, so that's probably what happened.
>>28538818
Plants that will kill you are extremely rare. Plants that will kill you in a single berry do not exist. An animal finds a new plant and has a taste, it tastes/smells bad and it spits it out. This is literally what our senses were developed for.
With civilization came free time. People experimented with everything, of course they will find the strongest smelling and tasting things to experiment on.
>>28538900
Brewing was discovered by monks as a means of purifying river water
>>28538833
You're an idiot anon, it was clearly not that trivial.
>>28538833
I imagine it started with meteoric iron, which didn't need to be smelted but just beaten into shape. Then someone dropped a spear tip into the fire, and was amazed to see it melt then resolidify. He wanted to see if other substances behave the same way.
>>28538490
your forefathers died eating those shiny black berries, they didn't die from the bumble red ones. it gets recorded and shared
there ya go, humanity and how they progress in a nut shell.
>>28538900
At least all of these can be accidental.
>shit i forgot my petri dish. wait all the bacteria are dead and this is what killed them?
>shit i set this pile of coal dust and some other shit and it made a big flame, what if i do that but with more flammable stuff?
>i left a jar of water with wheat for a couple of months. man this smells like shit, but let's drink it. hold up i'm feeling good all of the sudden.
>>28538957
Obviously it wasn't you retard, that's why it's difficult for me to imagine how did they think about it in the first place.
>>28539005
Sounds plausible, but still too simple.
>ITT no one understand trail and error and curiosity for the sake of it.
Nuclear power was born out of a lab team saying, "hey anyone ever try to cut this thing?"
>>28539050
>Nuclear power was born out of a lab team saying, "hey anyone ever try to cut this thing?"
Proof?
>>28538717
Did you go to a private school or something??
Idiots. We weren't dropped off a cosmic truck onto Earth and left to figure it all out. Everything alive has been evolving around each other since life appeared. Our bodies have evolved, adapted to consuming foods found in the ecosystems our ancestors inhabited thousands and thousands of years ago. We didn't look at birds - we already knew, instinctively, what we could and could not eat. At a base instinct level, you know not to eat something that looks like, smells like, or tastes like it will kill you. When we started developing intelligence, we began modifying how we consumed the food. Cooking it, mixing it. Then, when we started developing things like trade and barter, some people realized eating can be more than just fueling our bodies. Salt and similar spices appeal to our sense of taste like it does all other animals - it's why you leave salt licks for animals, they're instinctively drawn to it because it benefits them to consume. Being humans, we took it many steps further, and now we have the art of cuisine.
Read a book for fuck's sake.
>>28538833
>hey I can get this fire super hot
>wow it can melt rocks
>wow the rocks separate into different things
>wow this gets really hard when it cools
>let's mold it into something
>emperor: weaponize it
>>28539153
Shut the fuck up, you're retarded.
>>28538750
It smelled nice.
I was referring specifically to foods, not spices. With spices it was almost always smell (perfume) before flavour.
>>28538775
Go back to plebbit please.
>>28539198
That's a cool story shit for brains.
>>28539077
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
scroll to history
>After English physicist James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932,[16] Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in Rome studied the results of bombarding uranium with neutrons in 1934.[17] Fermi concluded that his experiments had created new elements with 93 and 94 protons, which the group dubbed ausonium and hesperium. However, not all were convinced by Fermi's analysis of his results. The German chemist Ida Noddack notably suggested in print in 1934 that instead of creating a new, heavier element 93, that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments."[18][19] However, Noddack's conclusion was not pursued at the time.
>"The charge of a uranium nucleus, we found, was indeed large enough to overcome the effect of the surface tension almost completely; so the uranium nucleus might indeed resemble a very wobbly unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation, such as the impact of a single neutron"
>In short, Meitner and Frisch had correctly interpreted Hahn's results to mean that the nucleus of uranium had split roughly in half.
>Frisch suggested the process be named "nuclear fission," by analogy to the process of living cell division into two cells, which was then called binary fission. Just as the term nuclear "chain reaction" would later be borrowed from chemistry, so the term "fission" was borrowed from biology.
>>28539206
Yeah, story, you said it yourself, but it isn't cool and it isn't a fact.
Fucking kill yourself.
I feel that maybe a few people fucked up and ate some poisonous plants on a dare or something. Kinda like
>cave bot: hey chad
>cave chad:what anon?
>cave bot:hey chad I dare you to eat that [some sort of plant or fungus], or are you a pussy or something
>cave chad: fuck you cave bot! I'll eat this [plant or fungi] for you to not question my manhood
>cave chad:*grabs and eats plant or fungi*
>*chad either dies or doesn't die, or just gets sick*
>if chad does die or sick(either instantly or later in the day)
>cave bot: I guess that [plant or fungi] was poisonous
>cave bot: oh well at least chad *dead or incapacitated* allowing me continue cuck his wife
>if chad doesn't die either instantly or later in the day
>cave chad:*pimp slaps cave bot to the ground*
>cave chad:now you eat plant cave bot
>cave chad:*forces cave anon to eat what they think is just a disgusting plant*
>cave bot cooks back in the tribe
>cave bot thinks would be good ingredient for the stew back at cave
>incorporates into cooking
>>28538654
Thousands of years of no internet or entertainment leads to lots of progress in knowing the environment around you. Trial and error, mostly.
>>28538490
The guy who discovered cow's milk probably did a lot of other weird stuff as well.
