Read some archaeology. The civiliazations which developed agriculture
arose mostly in fertile plains, not in temperate forests. Also,
acorns must be processed to remove the tannins before they are
edible. Also, many oaks bear large crops only every other year.
Also, if you're trying to develop a stand of bearing oaks, it is going
to take multiple years vs. one with a grain crop.

M. Reed

Archimedes Plutonium wrote:

I am the proud owner of some Burr Oak, Quercus macrocarpa (forgive the
spelling if wrong). Anyway, recently I am thinking about my Burr Oak as
to
harvesting some of the wood since they are too old and I need to make
more room for other trees.

But what I was wondering the most about was why human civilization is
based
on wheat, rice, potatoes, corn and several other staples. But why not
oak acorns?
It would be much easier every year to harvest oak acorns and to make it
into
a bread. Rather than spend so much time on the "annual crops". And oak
in most
of human history has covered most of the Temperate climates so there is
not
a question of paucity of oak and acorns.

If I did not know much about humanity and the species and Earth, and
suppose
I was some God in Olympus having to make myself more aware of humanity
in history, one of the facts that would bother me would be the fact that
humanity
never really made much use of the oak acorn. It seems to me that
humanity
could have based itself on oak acorns more than on wheat or rice.

I guess the answer lies in the taste. I guess that oak acorns are rather
unpalatable.

Many times in the past 10 years of my Internet posting I said that if
aliens existed on other planets and were in communication with each
other. I said that
the main thing is that those aliens have more in common with each other
than
they have differences. Not that they can mate with one another if given
a chance,
because the differences are larger than species DNA. But this Burr Oak
idea
is a nice example of differences between aliens. Here on Earth, the
staples are
wheat, rice, corn, potatoes. But I would wager to guess that on many
alien
planets should they exist that many of those alien civilizations have
staples not
of annuals but of perenials such as a Oak analog.

Archimedes Plutonium,
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies