There is a common misconception that primitive, Hunter gatherers didnt practice agriculture. The fact is humans, and indeed Neanderthals have practiced agriculture for as long as they have existed. Some cases in point: 125,000 years ago Neanderthal peoples at a site called Neumark-Nord turned an area of dense forest into a grassland over the course of a few hundred years through controlled burning, girdling unwanted trees, and planting of tubers, berry bushes, and fruit/nut bearing trees. In the pre-Colombian Amazon, aboriginal people cleared vast areas of native forest to grow roots, tubers, and fruit and nut bearing trees. In California there are 5000 year old semifossilized remains of digger pine and oak trees, (nuts), planted in regular rows hundreds of feet long. In the Pacific Northwest, native Haida people created food forests using fire, and selective planting practices. The Salish people created vast huckleberry patches that exist to this day through burning and selective planting. DNA tests of the plaques on Neanderthal peoples teeth indicate that they subsisted primarily on roots, tubers, nuts and seeds, not meat. Early humans subsisted not in a wilderness, but in a garden of their own creation for tens of thousands of years before what is commonly considered the birth of agriculture.

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