Intensive gathering
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Intensive gathering describes the tending-to of edible wild plants to assure their continuous availability at known, convenient locales. Intensive gathering methods include weeding, discouraging predators, pot-irrigation, and limited harvesting to ensure reproduction.[1] The same system of methods is involved in cultivation, a process which additionally requires systematic soil preparation and planting to tending and harvesting. This human manipulation ultimately results in the domestication of involved plant life.
Intensive gathering results in a higher total yield but at a lower efficiency compared to a highly mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Thus, intensive gathering is a product of sedentism and increased population density.[2] Intensive gathering of plant foods at the expense of hunting large game, which was becoming scarcer as population density increased, was common worldwide in the two millennia preceding agriculture.[3] Archeological evidence of intensive gathering includes marked increases in the frequency of particular or groups of taxa relative to prior periods or nearby regions within the same period[2] and bags of several thousand seeds.[4]