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A Crash Course in Thriving on Locally-Foraged Plants

For most of the 300,000 or so years Homo sapiens has existed as a species, we have been hunters, gatherers—and expert foragers. At a single 23,000-year-old site in Africa’s Rift Valley, archaeologists have found evidence that Paleolithic foragers feasted on 20 small and large animals, 16 families of birds, and 140 different kinds of fruit, nuts, seeds, …