No idea how much they eat per hour, but it does include nursing babies

Yes.

If the food consumption details worry you, why not time your villagers and find out?

This is a critical part for me in the game too. I do not leave the game until I have seen the first two events.

This is how I play the beginning:

1. Get the herb mastery with the adults and the oldest child
2. Get my fire started after my herb mastery
3. Set the adults as researchers and the oldest child as the farmer, the other children are set on research and healing
4. When the next oldest child makes 14 they go to the research table
5. When the algae blooms I have that villager go to the table
6. I should have reached at least 1500 by then ( hard,2x) I know that if I need to I can buy the next level in food
7. I try to get to 6500 this is enough for food and engineering
8. When I reach 6500 I buy my food and the level 1 in engineering
9. I put two villagers on food and everybody else on building the dam
10. By the time the coconuts run out the dam should be finished or just about
11. There may not be food at this time but the time for the crop to come is not that long for them to starve to death.
12. I put everyone except the oldest villagers at the table and the oldest builds the hut, this way they can master the hard skill while they are still young. The other hard skill is farming. I try to get them to master these two first.

The village that I am currently playing is on track now to the 90k level of food. We had to use 10k for exploration and now we are on our way. Most of the villagers have mastered at least 2 skills at this point and I have only been playing 24+ hours.

With this method I find that it is easy to get them to 90k without anyone dying of starvation.

Maybe someone else has a better way.

As soon as you have your dam in place, immediately make the scarecrow. Any Master Farmer can do it without additional Tech.

That way you avoid the whole "birds" crisis.

Yes! But Adept Farmer is sufficient

Thanks for correction.

Also, if you have a tribe that gets sick a lot, early L2 Medicine may be worthwhile. Although I bought it for an early sickly tribe of mine and they all got sick anyway.

I have killed off 10 villages so far 3 of them while I was in the hospital for 2 months........most of them died because I let them on 2x speed too long I think. the thing is is that the event screens we get help our tribes grow stronger in some way or another. the tribes I have now I have done differently than the dead ones..... I make all of them fish at first then they get the algea, but enough food to last until they reach 1500 to buy agriculture. Then I let them "make up" for the lost food by picking coconuts. I will then start a few (3) on building the hut, 1 on farming, and one on research. Before the coconuts get too low, I put them all on research then watch them so they do not eat all their food. They usually are on 2x speed for this part because it goes faster and they get enough tech points for engineering. then you let them ALL loose on the coconuts and farm, I get my adept farmers (2) to go get the stuff for the scarecrow. Then there is plenty of time for researching for everything else. So far my tribe is going strong on normal speed.