far from agriculture being some sort of remarkable scientific advance, foragers (who after all tended to be intimately familiar with all aspects of the growing cycles of food plants) were perfectly aware of how one might go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetables. They just didn’t see any reason why they should. ‘Why should we plant,’ one !Kung informant put it – in a phrase cited ever since in a thousand treatises on the origins of farming – ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’
