Asclepius:

The article, and the paper it's based on, seem to spend a lot of time dancing around and failing to understand one very simple concept: Prey animals can only adapt in evolutionary time, whereas humans can adapt in cultural time. 

Unfortunately, succinct summations don't get you published.  If you're lucky, they get you quoted (and already being famous helps).

Moving on: trapping is an excellent example of using toolmaking and brainpower to catch prey in an energetically efficient way.  I don't know when the first archaeological evidence of trapping occurs, but I know fishing dates to at least 40 KYA -- and 140 KYA is likely, given the indirect but relatively persuasive evidence at Blombos Cave.

eddie:

Aaron has ably answered the general case, but there are plenty of specific examples.  For example, the aardwolf has become completely insectivorous -- it eats only termites, unlike its carnivorous hyaenid relatives -- and the panda bear, though a true bear of the order Carnivora, subsists entirely on bamboo.  (Though pandas will eat meat and eggs if given to them.)

Aaron:

Hot buttered scorpions...sounds delicious!  I'll take you up on that offer someday, though I won't be as suave about it as this man.

I'd love to have access to the HRAF...maybe someday I'll sign up for the free trial.

Is there still any debate about the monophyletic origin of eukaryotes?  I thought that was a long-settled question...

Asclepius:

I've seen articles which purport to debunk that assertion, but they're based on metrics like rainfall and biomass...so rainforests end up balancing out the desert.  The problem is that the rainforest is a relatively poor environment for biomass edible to humans. 

There's a reason the American Indians regularly burned off the forest understory and kept the trees thinned...savanna and grassland support lots of tasty grazing animals.  They might have less absolute productivity, but the amount edible to humans is much greater.

vizeet:

"Widespread" is probably an exaggeration, but there is evidence for it in several Paleolithic sites, the earliest dating to 780 KYA.  However, the evidence is not unequivocal until much more recently (AFAIK).

Intra-species competition is a feature of every animal, especially territorial animals (which includes most animals that aren't strict herbivores, for which foliage/grass is nearly everywhere).  The rarer the food source, the more likely intraspecific competition is to exert selection pressure.  Though the direct evidence is thin and speculative, I plan on discussing this.  Thanks for bringing it up!

JS

Asclepius:

You're always welcome to link to relevant posts on your own site.

No, I haven't read Fairlie -- he's "on the list" of books I haven't yet had the time to read -- but that's an excellent point.  In our (justified) zeal to save land from development, we mistake a land depleted of native grazers and covered with climax forest for the "natural" state of the land.

Also, it's true that agriculture wasn't invented overnight.  We have evidence that people were regularly gathering and processing wild grains as early as 19 KYA, at Ohalo II...but it took another 8,000 years before anyone thought to deliberately plow and plant.  And the bone deformities associated with manually grinding sufficient quantities of grain to constitute the majority of the diet only appear after the transition to agriculture (see: Abu Hureyra).

JS

Jeffrey:

Yes.  That topic is covered at length in 1491, a fascinating book about pre-Columbian civilizations.  Apparently the natives found a way to sustainably farm in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest -- one which has since been lost in a reversion to slash-and-burn techniques.

JS

Scotlyn:

I think his speculations about the impact of cooking on the human social system are intriguing, and quite possibly correct -- but the evidence so far is that they happened on the currently-accepted timetable for the domestication and usage of fire, not 1.7 MYA as he claims.  You have to throw away a lot of solid evidence, and posit a lot of heretofore-unearthed evidence, to push control of fire back that far.

As I said, the topic deserves an entire article on its own.

Gorse sounds a lot like chaparral, but thornier.  Unfortunately there's a fine line between grazing and overexploitation: you can't simply let cattle loose on a big range and have them do what native grazers did.  You have to confine them to small areas and move them around frequently, to simulate the behavior caused by the predators that aren't chasing them anymore.  Otherwise they just spread out and eat everything down to nubs at once, which isn't good either.

In other words, a true biotic community is a dynamic equilibrium between several opposing forces.  So unless the Irish want to reintroduce wolves and spotted hyenas to Ireland, humans are going to have to engage in active management.

JS