Hunter-Gatherers: Where do they get their calories?

Factual Questions
41

There’s a problem inherent to trying to extrapolate historical norms from current populations of hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers and even pastoralists in modern times are restricted to regions in which agriculture is a no-go. (Deserts and near-deserts; tropical rain forests; arctic areas.) All of those regions (including the rain forests) are limited in the availability and/or quality of wild plant foods available. That makes hunting of obvious importance.

You can’t extrapolate from that to what the situation may have been like in other places, before farming took over.

42

Agriculture is perfectly feasible in tropical rain forests (or let us say more precisely, lowland tropical moist forest). In Panama, pre-Columbian peoples deforested and planted extensive areas even in very wet portions of the Caribbean slope. And in recent times, pure hunter-gatherers have not “been restricted” to rain forests. Part-time hunter-gatherers such as Pygmies get much of their food by bartering with or working for neighboring Bantu agriculturalists.

43

Blake, as a mere consumer of the thread (I don’t have enough background to contribute), I have to say that I would find it more helpful if you could summarize the current state of knowledge on the topic, preferably with cites. I get that you know something about the field - mainly, that you’re accepted as such by Colibri and others (in this and other threads) - so I’m happy to accept summaries and paraphrases. IOW, I grant you the license of expertise. The request for cites is just so that we “noobs” can assess the competing views.

So, if we can get back to the question posed in the OP, what say you on the relative contribution of the hunters vs. the gatherers?

44

To reply to your substantive points:

  1. You have provided no evidence for the proposition that “…edible tropical vegetation is usually easier to find, produced in greater quantities and requires less processing than temperate vegetation”. This certainly is NOT TRUE in tropical rainforest environments. If you are alleging it IS true in other types of tropical environments, please produce evidence of same.

  2. There certainly is a scientific debate about whether hunter-gatherers can survive without agriculture in tropical rainforests. I have provided cites for the same, which you seem to simply ignore.

  3. I have no idea what you are trying to attack here. It does not resemble anything I have said.

I’ll make a further point: in the study of so-called complex hunter-gathering groups (that is, ones displaying social stratification), it would appear that they generally are found in temperate climes - such as the natives of the West Coast of British Columbia, or the Ainu. Part of the reason for this no doubt is the abundance of easily harvistable meat that exists in these areas - such as the reliable bounty of the salmon run. And again, it is possible that the easiest places to gather may have been long ago taken over by agriculturalists (but not that most of the centres of agriculture were in temperate climes as well!).

If, as some allege, the existence of a food surplus makes social stratification more likely, it seems notable that the alleged superior bounty of tropical climes (subject to the caveats mentioned above) have not produced as many notable examples of complex hunter-gathering groups.

Again this could be in part random chance, in part because they tend to get pushed aside by agriculturalists, and perhaps (contrary to the assertion that bounty leads to stratification) the very difficulty of living in a temperate clime (dealing with food storage and the like) leads to stratification.

But nonetheless, I have so far in this debate seen no actual evidence that gathering of foods is easier or more bountiful in tropical climes. The reason I have heard why it should not be, in spite of the greater solar energy and lack of winter, is reasonably straightforward - absent agriculture, greater biodiversity means lesser concentration of those species which are reliably edible. You are less likely to get fields naturally occurring of edible species. Therefore a gatherer must wander further afield to find favoured species, which counter-acts the advantage of year-round availability. This is certainly the case in tropical rainforests (which in addition suffer the defect that much of the edible material is up in the canopy and thus inaccessible).

I have no idea whether this point is correct; it is what I have heard as an explaination, but I have not personally attempted comparative gathering (I have gathered in temperate climes - what you tend to get is an amazing but strictly time-limited availability). I welcome evidence either way.

45

That’s a good point - there are certainly dangers from extrapolating from the present what occurred prior to the invention of agriculture.

The problem is that the evidence for prior hunting and gathering is going by its nature to be hard to obtain.

The remains of hunting simply survive better, in the form of stone weapons and bones. I would not go so far as to say that gathering leaves no evidence, but its evidence does not necessarily survive as easily - in the form of seeds and the like in midden waste.

46

There’s also the tools used to process the products of gathering (grinders, storage vessels), and also stone and other tools associated with gathering itself e.g. in South Africa, the !kwe stones used with digging sticks to harvest tubers (incidentally, we’re talking tubers that can be as large as a man, here), or the Natufian flint grain sickles.

47

Yeah, I remember reading articles on the surface polish on flint sickles and the like. Good points. I had forgotten that not all of that was associated with purely agricultural societies.

Though OTOH much of that stuff belongs to those relatively late Mesolithic cultures like the Natufians which embraced a somewhat sedentary lifestyle prior to the invention of agriculture. For the great expanse of homo sapients hunter-gatherer history, are there such remnants? They certainly gathered, but they probably did not carry about as much in the way of tools for that purpose (at least not as many non-perishable tools as used for hunting).

Another interesting thing about the Natufians - they evidently set much store in gathering abundant wild grains to eat, as evidenced by stone sickle microlith technology; and they, like many such groups, lived in the temperate zone - not the tropics. Once again, it seems to have been relatively easy and rewarding to collect large quantities of food (in this case, grains) in temperate climes, perhaps in part leading to the possibility of a sedentary lifestyle and increased population density. For whatever reason, agriculture developed first in these areas.

48

Well, a fair number of megafauna were apparently hunted to extinction by humans. I suspect that there were times when mastadon hunting was quite profitable.

After the horse was introduced in America, some smart native americans dropped their plows and took up buffalo hunting. That is, they went back to hunter gathering because it was a more rewarding lifestyle. Similarly, agriculture was adopted in certain parts of the world when hunted quarry became scarce.

So yes: what Mangetout: the answer to this question varied a lot by region and across time.

49

Extremely debatable. Not that humans likely didn’t have some role in the extinctions, but the “overkill” hypothesis has been discredited.

50

pretty sure pandas evolved to eat all kinds of stuff which is part of their problem, they have a bears digestive tract and keep stuffing low nutrient grass in their face instead of real food for some reason.

I could be quit wrong on that though.

51

And just to point the obvious, I find the argument “women collected more calories and therefore they were more respected” to be unconvincing. Why couldn’t women of the past collect all the calories and still be doorstops? I mean, as far as feminism goes.

52

Nonsense. I don’t know why you keep posting this, since we’ve discussed it a number of times and you’ve been informed of the actual state of the debate. The idea that humans hunted many of the megafauna to extinction has not at all been discredited. It’s only the extreme form of it for North America, the “Clovis blitzkrieg” hypothesis, that seems to be incorrect.

53

There’s the San digging stick weights I mentioned, as well as stone grinders. But you’re right, a lot of veg processing tools like digging sticks themselves as well as wooden mortars etc. would not preserve well, and then there’s the problem of how do you classify e.g. a stone knife that may have been a butchering tool, or may have been a vegetable chopper? Although I’m given to understand that knife shapes can be highly specialised and classifiable.

54

QFT. A parallel.: Women do most of the farming, and gathering of wild foodstuffs and other materials etc. in Xhosa, Zulu and other Nguni village cultures, providing the greatest amount of sustenance and other creature comforts, but it is the (relatively uncontributive to the diet) male cattle-herding that gets the status. Now, it’s possible that this is an inherited pattern from a previous cultural iteration where cattle played a bigger dietary role (like the Masai, maybe), but it’s certainly not the case that women’s status is valued in step with their contribution to diet.

55

Not an answer by any means, but an additional point of discussion, if I may.

Part of the problem with tropical climes is (as mentioned upthread) the diversity and spatial separation between food sources. Although something is likely to be in fruit (or otherwise ripe for collection/harvest) at any given time, individual specimens of, say, fig trees are often quite a distance apart. So while one could forage for one’s self by simply walking around and eating such plant materials as may be encountered, collecting a sufficient volume for the rest of the tribe/group is more difficult.

Two gathering strategies seem possible: If we split up and forage alone, *someone *at least stands a good chance of finding *something *edible. But perhaps few of our tribes-men (-women) will be so fortunate on a given day. If instead we forage together, random chance makes it less likely that we will find anything at all. But if we do, there will be multiple hands available to harvest and carry.

Beyond the issues involved in harvesting, perhaps there is another difference between tropical and temperate regions, that being preservation. The tropics provide many “soft” plant foods, like ripe fruits and mature non-fruit edible plant parts (call them vegetables). Regardless of the debatable issues of total amounts available at any given moment, these are difficult to preserve for future use. Yes, they could be dried, but drying anything is problematic when humidity cycles near 100%. Indeed, the tropics are known for their swift conversion of no-longer-living biomass into living biomass via decomposition and re-absorption. The problems of gathering, and the difficulty of laying in a supply, suggest that the tropics may be eminently survivable, but food gathering would need to be an almost continuous, daily activity.

Temperate regions, again as noted upthread, often provide large albeit seasonal abundances of edible plant products. Many of these are locally aggregated as well, as seen with “wild rice” in swampy areas, and nut species found as common constituents of most forests. This makes them particularly amenable to harvest by mutual cooperative effort, unlike the tropical scenario. Here, putting “all hands on deck” can have a significant reward.

The hard seed grains and nuts so harvested are also particularly suited to storage. Dried grains and nuts will last at least until the next season, and drying is facilitated by the low humidity and cooler weather that typically follows “harvest season” in temperate climes. Note that this also works for whatever “soft” plant materials may also be found at that season, like fruits and berries.

Being able to lay in a stock of food to carry one’s tribe through until next year may mean that certain times of year require no gathering effort at all. This may then facilitate leisure activities, like tool making and social development. The tropics, on the other hand, seem more amenable to rugged individualism where everybody can find enough food to eat, but everybody (or nearly everybody) needs to do so virtually every day. These factors may play into the long term success and development of human populations in these different climates.

56

Thanks, CannyDan, for that excellent post.

That seems to me to make good sense of why one would expect hunter-gatherers in temperate climes to develop towards greater complexity of social structure - hunting/fishing of course would also have a similar effect, particularly if localized (my example again being the salmon run in British Columbia).

57

You’re welcome.

I constrained my post to the gathering of plant material, exclusive of hunting. But I suspect that, as you suggest, there are similar realities in place for animal species.

The tropics, especially but not exclusively tropical forests, are typified by highly diverse, overall abundant in terms of biomass but locally highly dispersed animal species too. There is hardly ever a special concentration of available edibles at any season. That’s the thing about the tropics-- every day is pretty much like every other. If there is seasonality, it is usually rain versus non-rain.

I can’t think of any anadromous fish in the tropics (although I guess we could count sea turtles as part of a coastal “run” of edible animals). Nor can I come up with any herding animals typical of exclusively tropical climes. Arboreal animals (e.g., birds, monkeys) may be locally abundant, but their flocks/troops are scattered, swiftly moving, and, well-- arboreal. Not easily hunted by terrestrial critters like hominids.

How this goes back to a division of labor, or the actual versus the ceremonial value of labor devoted to gathering or to hunting is beyond me. I’m a biologist, not an anthropologist. :wink:

58

It’s a side-argument to the side-argument. :smiley: I was merely surprised that the contention (that gathering in temperate climes was easier than in the tropics as a generality) proved so - contentious, upthread. I was under the impression this was pretty well established, for the reasons you describe.

I suppose what I’ve learned so far on the actual topic is that there is pretty good evidence that hunting broadly defined is as, or more, significant than gathering to modern hunter-gatherers, but that evidence lacks as to whether this was true for hunter-gatherers in the past living in a world lacking agriculturalists. Also, not all “hunting” was done by men and presumably not all gathering was done by women.

59

Nonsense yourself. :stuck_out_tongue: Nothing anyone has posted has been evidence that humans have hunted any of the Megafauna to death. Eveything I have seen debates how much huamns caused the extinctions (some think it was more climate, some think more humanocentric) and just how much *hunting *(as opposed to ecosystem modification- by fire, introduced species and what not) was part of said human-causation.

But yes, you’re right- the “blitzkrieg hypothesis” which is the most extreme version- has been shown to be incorrect.

I agree that there is a wide range of opinions on this, but there’s no evidence at all that human hunting was the sole cause of the Megafauna extinctions.

60

That isn’t true in any way whatsoever.

Are you joking? Have you never seen a documentary on the African savannas, you know, the highest densities and diversity of herding animals on the entire planet.? Never heard of a kangaroo or a camel?