I think just watching someone you know and trust eat these things and look like they’re enjoying it would be enough to convince almost anyone.
I don’t think human communities were as individualistic and distrusting as ours are now.
I mean at most the majority of your community would be at least your 2nd cousin or closer
I imagine it’s an easier sell when you’re hungry af and some other person you know has tried oyster and didn’t have any adverse effects after a day. Also, I bet this was figured out by some barely upright-walking ancestor.
Hominids have been eating oysters before homo sapiens was even a thing.
I think the same situation has happened every time any person has ever eaten raw oysters for the first time.
“…And it makes you horny!”
everyone starts slamming down fistfuls of oysters
I had never heard about this until I ate an esky full of fresh oysters in South Australia and broke the bed with the girlfriend.
Breakfast with her family was slightly awkward, especially her dad.
Guess they don’t work for everyone!
I think, over the course of hominin history, NOT eating something that wasn’t blatently poisonous was the weirder move. My theory is that a lot of texture aversions are recent (and often local). For instance, Japanese natto which are slimy, string, fermented soy beans. Also yamaimo (some kind of tuber) is slimy as hell.
Think how hungry the first guy eating crabs was. Ohh yes, this plated sea spider with claws is probably delicious…
Probably even took a few generations to figure out that shell wasn’t that good.
i remember watching a documentary about first homo sapiens leaving Africa, walking around the coast of the red sea, and eating lots of shell fish, so it probably has been a while
i think, if you’re really hungry, everything seems edible.
Is that RWBY? I should really finish that series.
I’d eat that before I trusted an unknown mushroom
I still need convincing
They were so hungry at that point, that the only alternative was each other, so even semi-liquid protein starts to look good enough.
Some of you guys have never been truly hungry, and it shows.
For all of these ‘first person to eat _____’ posts, the answer is always: They were hungry. And not the kind of hungry you’re familiar with. The ‘I need to eat something or I’m going to die’ kind of hunger. That kind of hunger does things to you psychologically. It will make you obsessed with food. You’ll be constantly daydreaming and fantasizing about food. Your first, second, and third thought about anything you encounter will be ‘can I eat it?’ And many ‘disgusting’ things will seem far less disgusting when you’re in that kind of mental state.
In ancient times, people were much more likely to be starving and in this truly hungry state. So there were plenty of opportunities to discover new foods this way.
