Potential food sources for foragers in Malaysian rainforest; Sago, yams and lots of little things

Abstract

It may be that enough starchy food simply does not exist in most rain forests to supply even small human groups on a reliable, long-term basis. In that case, prehistoric hunter-gatherers could not have lived in the deep forest but must have been oriented toward its edges, where they could collect food from several different habitats. The archaeological evidence is too fragmentary at present to prove this notion, but the fact that the Hoabinhnians so consistently combined terrestrial sources with aquatic foods supports it. (Hutterer 1988:69.)