That's also my understanding. I do wonder if that's a bit of a misunderstanding about not practicing agriculture, though. They did practice forest management with intentional burns. I'm pretty interested in traditional English forest management, and reducing brush and decreasing canopy increased the amount of forest "products" available to people, from building materials (basketry, hut materials, etc) to increased yields from under story vegetation.
It's a bit of a digression, but it's a subject I find interesting and rarely pops up in hacker news. :)
I live in NorCal and do some culinary foraging for fun. There's plenty, I mean people lived here before Europeans colonized. There's all kinds of native berries, blackberry, salmon berry, service berry, elderberry huckleberry. There are plenty of nuts, beaked hazelnuts, black walnut and the most plentiful are acorns.
And there's plenty of small game to hunt and trap. I don't see that Petrov did this, but I imagine if he was comfortable catching and eating a neighbors duck, he probably took a squirrel or two in his life. The natives would obviously fish, take all kinds of small game, even including rat.
I am ignoring it for the time being. and maybe I am misunderstanding its usefulness. I'm having a hard enough time with less experienced engineers generating large blocks of code and pushing it on me to play find the errors; the idea of an AI doing it as part of my workflow doesn't sound very appealing.