Steven Cloud

[The] beauty of a hunting and gathering economy is that it’s very flexible. If you use 80 plants and 14 animals, and you lose 10 plants and two animals, you can just shift your resources. When you commit yourself to agriculture that has very narrow environmental parameters, and your whole population is dependent on that, slight changes in the environment can have catastrophic effects
-Dr. Curtis Marean (via Boing Boing - “How shellfish saved the human race”)