What is that based on? Everything you said about Otzi was equally true of Alpine huntsmen in the 18th century. Heck, aside from the bow being replaced with a rifle, it’s true of hunters in the Rocky Mountains right now.
Do you also think it safe to say that the 18th century Swiss huntsman or 21st century Coloradans are also not farmers?
To me, the fact that someone is equipped for hunting only suggests that they were hunting. I can’t see how it suggest that they are a full time hunter, or a herdsman who spent his summers at higher altitudes.
Herdsmen aren’t HGs. Nor are people who happen to have the resources to cast & forge copper (and have the arsenic traces in their body to show that they did it a lot). And a bow and arrows don’t a HG make.
And in Africa and the Amazon, with poor access to fertile lands, hunter-gatherer cultures still exist. I still remember seeing a video (from late 90’s, early 2000’s I think) in my college days about a tribe in south-central Africa who would hunt giraffe by chasing them for miles and miles - and then when the giraffes finally got tired, they were able to surround it and spear it with javelins. That’s some serious cardio there, keeping up with running giraffes carrying a bundle of light spears.
Mesopotamia and Egypt are what I had in mind specifically, and to a lesser extent central America. Mostly I was just using the example that they needed to be stationary enough to realize seeds = plants, and needed to have enough access to food to allow them to be stationary. I should’ve made it more clear, but it was late
It also reminds me of how the ancient Greeks had a “war season” - while the crops were actively growing, and they didn’t need as much attention. This is a huge factor, according to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Western Way of War, for the development of the hoplite, and its specific method of a single, decisive battle. They needed this war business to be over before harvest.
Truly excellent book, by the way, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in classical Greece.
As Blake mentions, you don’t need thousands of people to keep a gene pool from stagnating. But, whenever one clan meets another, there’s usually a trade of females. This is done for political reasons, to make that tribe less likely to attack you since you’re now related, but the why of it makes no difference to the gene pool.
Also to show they are willing to go through the pain of childbirth. For both sexes, it also becomes an indication of status, and shows group identity like a uniform. If all the males of one tribe have crocodiles scarred onto their backs and chest, you know who not to kill in melee. The more scars you have, the braver you are, and the more respect you deserve; and the more likely your children are to be brave, as well.
He was an early agriculturalist, but it was the very early phase with large amounts of hunting supplementing the diet. So he wasn’t a HG or a true agriculturalist. I should have made that more clear in my post. Ötzi shows possible evidence of warfare, and shows that he lived a few days after he was attacked and had efforts done to help heal, leading one to assume there were others helping him; that it was more than just an assassination or homicide by one guy on a wandering traveler.
There’s also genetic evidence that all domestic cattle evolved from a herd of about 80 individuals from Mesopotamia, from about the same time agriculture took root (no pun intended).
You can also use wicker if you pitch it, and you can use tanned hides or animal stomachs. There’s obviously no real evidence of this archaeologically since they’ll rot away eventually, but contemporary hunter-gatherer and primitive agricultural societies still use it, so it’s not too far a stretch. Not counting artistic representations in pottery or literature that come from known agricultural civilizations (such as ancient Greek pottery).
Taboos and sexual regulation, plus natural infant death rates, were indeed far more common than intentional infanticide, which was largely used ritually - as mentioned, in the cases of twins, the deformed, or any newborn who the elders and shamans had reason to suspect may harbor or attract bad spirits.
Yes - alcohol can be made in skin or bark containers, or clay-lined baskets, etc.
There is evidence that perhaps suggests this - maybe not in the form of the fermenting equipment itself, but seeds from wild fruits that are unpalatable in their fresh state have been found in Neolithic (and older) digs in Europe - including sloes, haws, hips, crab apples, rowan - these are all barely edible in their fresh, raw state, but if you collect a load of them and let them ferment for a week or two in a container, they become sweeter, softer and mildly alcoholic.
If you just put them in a basket or woven-reed bag and hang it over a bowl, they’ll drip a sweet alcoholic liquid after a short time.
Or maybe they just had a taste for dry, bitter berries, but it seems likely anyone picking these fruits in quantity, then attempting to store them, would soon discover that they taste better when they start to rot.
One of the “physical signs” I mentioned was the wear and tear on his leg bones and joints that suggested he spent a lot of time hiking in the mountains. I doubt that modern recreational hunters show physical signs like that. The tribe or community Otzi belonged to could well have been agriculturalists, but his main occupations seem to have been copper smelting and hunting (or perhaps shepherding, which would probably necessitate some hunting in the summer if herds were taken to higher altitudes).
The arsenic traces seem to indicate Ötzi was a copper smelter, but at that time and place, his culture would have been an agricultural one. Alpine Europe had been agricultural since the Neolithic. The fact that an individual may have been a hunter (and evidence seems to indicate Ötzi was as much into hunting people as animals) doesn’t make him a hunter-gatherer. It makes him a hunting agriculturalist, so you can’t draw any conclusions about the warlike nature or not of HGs from him, which was the objection I raised.
And I can attest that miners, especially artisanal ones, often have to hike to get their ore. Plus transhumance in the Alps predates the Chalcolithic, so an agriculturalist getting out and about in that time and place is not unusual at all.
And I’d like his wear-and-tear compared to contemporary alpine people from other sites, before we draw any conclusions of his behaviour based on it.
What makes you doubt that? Do any experts share this doubt?
There is no “could” here. They indisputably were agriculturalists.
I ever said he was a farmer. I was simply pointing out that there is no evidence that he not.
When a man lives in a society of farmers, a society where >80% of people were farmers, when his last meal was a meal of farmed produce, then Ockham’s Razor dictates that we assume he *was *a farmer until we find evidence against it.
When I said “without war”, I should have said that the cultures of central California, as I understand them, certainly would have skirmishes and quarrels between adjoining tribes in which occasionally people died, but certainly did not have a war culture in which other tribes were massively attacked, young males proved themselves via war, prisoners were ritually tortured, slaves were taken, etc. It wasn’t Eden, but it was really quite different than our ideas of native cultures taken from plains cultures and the northeastern tribes. Probably the plentitude and variety of foods had something to do with it.
As for the quasi or proto agricultural methods . . . well, sure. There was manipulation of plant communities. I don’t know what the strict definition of agriculture is, but they didn’t break up ground and plant seeds or plants, water them or fertilize them, nor did they have crop species carried from another place, that would not survive without human attention.
Besides the bread found in Otzi’s stomach, there were three kinds of wild meat: ibex, chamois and deer, as well as wild berries and roots. This sure suggests that hunting and gathering played a large role in his life. I don’t doubt that he was from a farming culture, but that doesn’t mean he himself was a farmer, and that there was no place for hunting/gathering. The complex design of his shoes has led to speculation that there were specialized occupations, such as cobblers, in his home community that would have supported internal trade (shoes for grain, or wild meat and copper implements for grain). Considering the circumstantial evidence, it isn’t much of a stretch to think that hunting and copper smelting were Otzi’s occupations. It could be that smelting was his main occupation, that he had to regularly take long journeys to get copper ore and had to survive by hunting. There’s no way to say for sure, but the circumstantial evidence, including the following quote, suggest to me that Otzi was not a farmer himself.
"By examining the proportions of Ötzi’s tibia, femur and pelvis, Christopher Ruff has determined that Ötzi’s lifestyle included long walks over hilly terrain. This degree of mobility is not characteristic of other Copper Age Europeans."(Wikipedia)
If I looked at the stomach contents of a 19th century Alabama share cropper, I would get the same data. with the typical diet consisting of corn, deer, catfish and berries.
Do you therefore conclude that 19th Century share croppers were HGs?
So no evidence for your claim that it was atypical of modern recreational or subsistence hunters?
This explanation seems logical. Subsistence farming was more difficult and less rewarding that nomad life. My understanding is that the remains of early farmers show signs of shorter lifespans and less nutrient intake.
Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food by Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto talks a bit about it, along with tons of interesting information about the development of civilization and food.
Farmers will always hunt and gather and fish, if they can. Just read “Little House on the Prairie”, where Pa Ingalls, well into the industrial age, still hunts and traps for a large portion of his family’s food, and they gather wild plants all the time.
This is typical for farmers. Even if hunting “game” animals is illegal, they still hunt vermin and pests, and then eat them. They still collect fish and shellfish. They collect wild fruits, seeds and nuts.
The life of an early farmer would be almost indistinguishable from a hunter-gatherer, except the early farmer spends a a small part of the year clearing and planting. The hunter-gatherer already spends time harvesting wild crops in season, already clears land to increase availability of favored plants and animals, already has lots of the technology.
Even in the Amazon basin, people we think of as archetypal hunter-gatherers get a large fraction of their calories from slash and burn agriculture and growing plantains. Or in Papua New Guinea where stone-age people farm yams and raise pigs. Obviously there is a continuum between an Amazonian slash and burn horticulturalist and a Chinese peasant where every suitable square inch of land is cultivated or owned by someone. Both are agriculturalists, not hunter-gatherers. But both hunt and gather, even if the Chinese peasant only hunts rats and songbirds.
I don’t know who “we” are, but anthropologists do not consider any people living in the Amazon to be Hunter Gatherers. much less archetypal. It’s not actually possible for a human to survive in rainforest as a HG. Those people have been agriculturalists for thousands of years. Before the affect of European disease they lived in cities of thousands within Empires of millions. These people are not HGs who get a large part of their calories form farming. They are agriculturalists who get a minority of their calories form non-farmed sources.
The same applies to anyone in New Guinea who is farming yams and raising pigs. Those people invented agriculture and have been practicing it for 4, 000 years. Until 100 years ago they had the highest extra-urban population densities on the planet. They are in no sense HGs.
I’d sure like to know where this idea of the noble liberated savage, and the menial, unrewarding, and degrading life of the agriculturalist came from.
As for Otzi, his occupation aside, based on his quite extensive injuries - deep lacerations on his hands, wrists, and chest; cracked ribs (that may have come from ice compaction post mortem) an arrowhead in his shoulder with shaft removed (that he could not remove himself without causing far more damage to the wound) that entered from behind him with early signs of healing and clotting; and skull fracture with associated cerebral hemorrhaging at the back of his head - he was not the victim of a hunting accident or single murderer, or the victim of animal attacks. Much more likely a victim of a group of assailants who ambushed him, likely near or at his site of death. The missing shaft without a large, ragged wound and his body’s positioning (on his stomach with arm across his throat) suggests more likely that he was incapacitated, and someone tried to remove the arrow. Possibly the guys who killed him at the site, possibly later after he and some cohorts fled, as a last ditch attempt to save him when he lost consciousness.
Also of note is that he had considerable cavities, which is consistent with a refined starchy grain diet. Analysis from his intestinal contents and pollen on his clothes shows it to be an archaic form of wheat. He had whipworm, an intestinal parasite which is usually contracted through grains and beans. So while he himself may not have been a farmer (and arsenical content in his body combined with blackened lungs suggests indeed that he was a copper smelter, or lived nearby a smelter), he certainly had compatriots who were, and already had knowledge of how to harvest and grind wheat, and turn it into bread.
Really, it never ceases to amaze me how much information we can gather about his life just from his remains.
Certainly possible. The only thing that’s relatively certain is that there were more people present than just Otzi and his William Tell-esque colleague.
