Oh yes, great excerpts and citations, thanks.

Yes, I have no citations! I have to apologize in that regard in that I am now living far from the university library and am only repeating things I've read but have forgotten many of the citations. Michael Coe's books on Mesoamerica and the Maya may contain citations for the early tomato domestication.

I went through much of the literature on agriculture beginnings when I was near the libraries of one or the other Univ. of California campus. I agree with Binford's scenario as you posted it, except I am still not convinced it was human hunting which extincted the megafauna. There are ecological explanations for this extinction which avoid the one big problem of the human-caused extinction hypothesis, that being that we now know humans had been in North America before Clovis, and they had been in Europe through several interglacials without causing such extinctions. The counter to that, often made, is that it was only at the end of the Pleistocene that human hunting had become efficient enough to cause these extinctions, since during prior interglacial episodes only Middle Palaeolithic tools were used. This doesn't convince me, given that the very Upper Palaeolithic Plains Indians of North America were hunting bison and even with the addition of the horse as a tool, they were not causing extinctions.