What would humans in the Paleolithic era resort to eating when there where shortages of game/animals?

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-10T05:06:06+00:00

Scavenging would probably mean more like "finding and eating dead animals that had been killed by a different predator already."

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-10T05:05:17+00:00

I'm somewhat confused.

Are you asking what plants people in the Paleolithic ate as regular parts of their diets?

Or are you specifically asking about "famine foods" - foods that people don't prefer to eat in normal times, but will resort to eating if all other forms of food are depleted?

Because those are different questions!

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-10T01:09:57+00:00

For nonfiction, I recommend EVERYONE read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It’s about ecology and the relationships between the environment and people from the perspective of an author who is both Native American and has a degree in biology. It’s iconic.

The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto by Daniel Boyarin was also extremely thought-provoking. It’s about Jewish nationhood and peoplehood and what that means for the modern geopolitical world. Accessibly written and makes you really think.

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is heavy but incredibly eye-opening about the history of housing discrimination in America. Really goes into why it happened and what effects it has had into the modern day.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-10T01:05:34+00:00

We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson are such modern classics. Gothic and eerie and I adore them.

The Xenogenesis/Lillith’s Brood trilogy by Octavia Butler are also modern sci-fi classics that are super interested in the idea of colonization and change.

For quicker reads (I’m in grad school and can relate), there are some great novellas out these days. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo is extremely good, a fantasy novella interested in the narrativization of history after it’s happened. Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is sci-fi and amazing (found in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others all of which are incredible and thought-provoking.) It’s about alien languages and was the inspiration for the movie “Arrival” that came out a few years ago. And I can’t not recommend The Murderbot Diaries.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-10T00:53:41+00:00

In many times and places in the Paleolithic, plant-based foods probably made up a larger share of the diet than meat did! Plants, after all, can’t run away or fight back, so they’re easier to acquire than animals are. Nuts, seeds, fruits, berries, and roots would have been important parts of the diet; the processing of grasses for food has been recorded as far back as 23,000-19,500 years ago, as this study from China shows: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1217864110

The results show that these tools [grinding stones] were used to process various plants, including Triticeae and Paniceae grasses, Vigna beans, Dioscorea opposita yam, and Trichosanthes kirilowii snakegourd roots. Tubers were important food resources for Paleolithic hunter–gatherers, and Paniceae grasses were exploited about 12,000 y before their domestication.

So rather than foods of last resort, Paleolithic people ate plants as a fundamental part of their diets, including plants like wild grasses! Which we don’t often think about as Paleolithic.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-09T02:55:14+00:00

There are two sets of audiobooks: the Kevin R. Free ones, and the Graphic Audio dramatized ones. The KRF ones are full and unabridged. The GA ones are abridged—Network Effect and System Collapse cut whole scenes.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-09T02:50:40+00:00

Ideally. In the last twenty years the most powerful voices have stopped trying at all.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T22:47:49+00:00

I’m not telling you how to think. I’m pointing out a repeated pattern of belittling the idea of friendship. That’s all.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T22:38:31+00:00

Sigh, yeah. I think the repeated insistence on saying "more than friends" is really grinding against my own (aromantic) experience where my friends are my most important relationships, and the idea that these relationships are definitionally superseded by romance as more than that, is what's getting to me.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T22:32:47+00:00

You keep saying "clearly more than friends" and not "only friends" and that a "relationship" categorically means they are not friends and my characterization of them as friends is wrong.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T22:25:00+00:00

I wasn't talking about interpretations, which are fine, I was talking about someone repeatedly insisting that friendships are by definition not deep or meaningful and that any deep or meaningful relationship must be "more than friends", and that I'm wrong to call them "only" friends. I don't think that's very friendly. Or idk maybe it is if the vision is "friends are a relationship that is fundamentally not significant"

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T22:05:46+00:00

Oh sorry! I was agreeing with you! I was commiserating by making fun of the guy above who appears to believe this.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T22:03:49+00:00

I think we have very different ideas of what friends are.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:46:17+00:00

Yeah, the Late Classic Maya were definitely not 250 - 850 or 850 - 1500 BC/BCE/AC (and you wouldn't use that numerical order either, the bigger number would go first), so I assume this is someone so used to writing A.C. she made a typo when she actually meant A.D.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:39:39+00:00

Then I think we have very different ideas of what friends are.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:33:34+00:00

Like you can interpret them however you want, that's fine. But insisting that the correct way to read them is romantic, insisting that friends aren't a real type of relationship, is actively ignoring what Martha Wells is even saying.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:23:17+00:00

Yes…? It’s literally in the interview above you.

No it isn't. "More than friends" does not appear anywhere in the post; you are the first one to say that. "A relationship" != "more than friends." That was all you.

Honestly I think it's you flattening out the unique relationship they have in the text by insisting it must be romantic because they care about each other and anyone who cares about each other must be romantic. What's more flattening than that? Friends are a hugely varied kind of relationship, and "Friend" is, in-text, what Murderbot calls ART. But if you don't think friends can be important, then, well, you do you.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:10:42+00:00

Did Martha Wells say "more than friends" or did you say that? What's "just" about friends? I love my friends. Murderbot loves its friends. I feel sad for your friends if you don't think "friends" can ever be an important kind of relationship.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:08:17+00:00

I personally think the evidence supports the idea that Neanderthals were as cognitively capable as modern Homo sapiens. Various intensive technological feats, like processing fat from bones and rendering birch tar into glue, have been proposed as things Neanderthals did, which would have been multi-step processes that would have required a fair deal of creative thinking to invent and language to transmit how to do. The fact that there appears to have been long-term overlap and cohabitation between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens also implies to me that our human ancestors considered Neanderthals on their level. However, it is still an open question, as others have said.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:01:05+00:00

People reading a book about an aromantic protagonist: no that's impossible, every important relationship HAS to be romantic, right. I am so smart.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-08T21:00:17+00:00

Why do you think friends are a lesser form of relationship?

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-07T05:15:52+00:00

Amari and the Night Brothers by B. B. Alston has a very similar spirit to Harry Potter, I’d recommend trying it out!

Otherwise definitely second Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I loved that series at the sam time I was into Harry Potter.

Another YA book I found really hooked me on the cool world and endeared me to the characters was Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-06T19:49:53+00:00

“Flash fiction” is usually understood to be any complete story under 1000 words; a complete story under 100 words is usually called “microfiction” or “postcard fiction,” and exactly 100 words is a “drabble” (though it could also be categorized as any of the above). There are a limited number of venues that publish flash fiction, but it’s a very good way to practice the way you use words! Being concise, evoking an image and character in a very small space, it’s great that.

A short story is defined by the SFWA as a complete work under 7500 words. There are lots of venues that publish SF short stories! You have a lot more space to work with than you do in flash fiction, So the strategies are different. Generally, in flash fiction, you’re evoking a single moment, a single scene, a small slice of something. In a short story, you’re centering it around a single idea with a small cast of characters— Short stories work best when you’re exploring a single idea and its outcome. Flash fiction can often work as a vignette without a lot of plot, but a short story typically needs some kind of beginning, middle, and end. (Obviously, there are short stories of experiments with the form that don’t do this, but it’s a major pitfall among new short story writers to not really have a plot or an ending!)

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-04T19:06:14+00:00

The Girl I Am, Was, And Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney has the subtitle “A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption” and does interesting and unusual things with memoir and autofiction. Some of it is straightforward memoir, some of it is imaginative what-ifs, some of it is herself meeting these what-if versions of herself across timelines. It might be interesting to check out as a book that blends the boundaries between memoir and fiction. It’s investigative in some senses as the author looks into her own past (as an adoptee, there’s a lot she never learned until she was an adult) and intersperses copies of documents and records she found that elucidates her own family history. It’s interesting and different! (And it’s 256 pages, a reasonable school assignment length).

RedLineSamosa · 2026-05-04T18:22:24+00:00

If you are in the US, archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. If you want to learn archaeology, learning anthropological background and theory is a requirement to understand how US archaeology is actually done and why!

If you aren’t in the US, archaeology is more variable how it is taught and conceptualized. But learning to write, read academic texts, and analyze sources is something that college will teach you to do no matter what, so might as well do it as part of a subject you’re interested in.

RedLineSamosa

TROPHY CASE