Very rarely are things lethal like that. Poison edibles tend to taste awful, and if you start with a small amount you will learn whether it makes you sick.
Now mushrooms on the other hand? No idea how they figured it out.
mushroom 1: tastes like chicken :) mushroom 2: oog died :( mushroom 3: arg says he saw the world melt and then spoke to god
For real. Aren’t most poisonous mushrooms neurotoxins too?
Trip balls so hard you think you are dying and you actually are dying. Horrific.
There was no written language, so he probably pulled out his hollow log, drummed some impressive beats and impressed his homies with song about shit-death-berry that everyone remembered and repeated.
…or his song was shit and nobody cared till the next poor sod shit himself to death.
Literal shit posting
i didn’t know shit could post
What I don’t get is how ancient humans figured out more complex stuff. Like neanderthals learned how to make a glue to hold their weapons together. It was probably a simple method, like this article talks about, but it still took a lot of planning and also a lot of basic reasoning before trying it themselves if it was even something that could be done.
I imagine a lot of boredom (besides staying alive), helps finding out stuff. I can also imagine, that they had basic roles in a group, where people were designated “mess around with stuff and discover things, aka proto scientists”
I’m sure that’s a big part of it, but it still amazes me the things they figured out how to achieve artificially, especially when they had no natural analogue. Like who figured out how to brew beer?
Second Caveman: “Ted just never listened to anybody.”
If you simply MUST eat strange plants, test them first by crushing a berry/leaf and rubbing the juice on your skin. If you get any discoloration, blistering, etc, then you will NOT enjoy eating it.
On a serious note
Humans more than likely instinctively knew which foods were safe the same way their genetic ancestors did. Since humans evolved alongside other similar species they would share similar instincts on what to look for in safe to eat vs not safe to eat foods.
