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I have been employed to illustrate a book on medicinal plants in Oman.
but look at fungus. Its completely impossible to determine if a fungus is poisonous any way other than to eat it and see if you die. I suspect a lot of peasants, serfs and slaves died working out what was edible!!
Quote from: lincsyokel2 on August 18, 2010, 20:49:40but look at fungus. Its completely impossible to determine if a fungus is poisonous any way other than to eat it and see if you die. I suspect a lot of peasants, serfs and slaves died working out what was edible!!I doubt if the peasantry was quite that dimwitted. I should think they probably tried it out on the dog (or someone else`s dog) first.
I rather suspect that most of the discoveries were made not by the deliberate sacrifice of human life, but as a result of either curiosity or mistake on the part of the discoverer, who probably carried on living long enough to inform his anxious relatives of the cause of his impending demise.Where fungi are concerned it is very easy to confuse poisonous with harmless - people still do it today - but a look at the leftovers would add yet another shred to the bulk of human knowledge, and no doubt the hunter/gatherer who had had a blank day would have been tempted by those big, plump brightly coloured berries and after eating his fill took a few sprigs back for the missus and kids, and his prompt expiration immediately after presenting them would raise some grounds for suspicion.Where potatoes are concerned South America produced a large number of different cultivars, most of which are poisonous, but rather than hundreds of slaves being lined up by an Inca King to test each variety in search of an edible one, I suspect that someone who`d never seen a potato before found an edible one by chance, and the subsequent discovery of the poisonous nature of the others was made by those who ate them in the mistaken belief that all potatoes were the same ,After all, most of the major discoveries by the human race have been made more by accident that design.
Bread has always baffled me. Making bread is a very complex series of steps, it cant have been accidental, there must have been a seriously clever stone age hunter gatherer somewhere worked that one out.