[HN Gopher] Hunter-gatherers were mostly gatherers, says archaeo...
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Hunter-gatherers were mostly gatherers, says archaeologist
Author : pseudolus
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-01-24 22:12 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| Qem wrote:
| > The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two
| burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and
| 6,500 years ago
|
| The findings are based on remains from people that lived post
| megafauna extinction. I bet there are good odds the conclusion
| would be different if those remains were from people that lived
| during pleistocene, over 10.000 years ago, before people hunted
| Glyptodonts, Eremotherium and other big game to extinction.
| proc0 wrote:
| I wonder then if the start of carnivorous diet began around the
| time humans are thought to have developed language (or more
| specifically symbolic thinking and/or imagination), I think
| 20,000 year ago?. Maybe that was the beginning of dominating
| animals and realizing we can hunt with tools, or maybe there
| was an abundance of meat and that fueled brain growth which
| then allowed for symbolic thinking.
| hackerlight wrote:
| I thought it was before that, as soon as we came down from
| trees and learned to use throwing rocks as a weapon,
| something like 50k years ago.
| proc0 wrote:
| From reading popular evolutionary science, if I recall,
| it's the dates of the first cave drawings or other evidence
| of symbolic thinking like scratch marks on bones to count
| something. These point to 20-40K years ago.
| andsoitis wrote:
| We have evidence that humans used symbols for self-
| expression at least 72,000 years ago:
| https://www.amnh.org/explore/videos/humans/symbolic-
| thinking
| Fricken wrote:
| Evidence regularly turns up that pushes back the dates
| for how long our ancestors have been doing the special
| things that make us human.
| Qem wrote:
| Anatomically modern humans existed since ~300.000-200.000
| years ago[1], and behavioral modernity[2] arised between
| ~150.000-50.000 years ago. That begs the interesting
| question, why did civilization appears to have arised only in
| the last 10.000 years or so? IIRC, the usual explanation is
| that the climate back in pleistocene was too unstable for
| agriculture. But I also wonder, perhaps people just didn't
| feel the need for anything resembling civilization, at least
| while there was plenty of megafauna to hunt. So humanity
| spent about 50.000 years just hanging around and enjoying
| low-hanging calories from the giant beasts, unsustainably,
| depleting their numbers slowly with stone-age tech. By the
| end of the ice age we got them completely eradicated almost
| everywhere. So people had to survive on small-game and
| gathering, eventualy resorting to labour-intensive
| agriculture to make ends meet. Once people were forced by
| self-made scarcity to develop agriculture, civilization
| followed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
| arp242 wrote:
| "Anatomically modern humans" is kind of a misleading term.
| Basically it just means "these skeletons look the same as
| modern humans", but that doesn't mean their brains or
| behaviour was identical. Evolution didn't stop for 300,000
| years.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Nor does it mean that they resembled what modern humans
| look like. I wonder how different their noses or ear
| shapes were, how much hair covered their body, etc. We
| have a few well-preserved bodies but that doesn't mean
| that it was the same everywhere.
| nradov wrote:
| Another interpretation of the available archaeological data
| is that there was an earlier civilization which was
| destroyed around 11,000 years ago by a series of bolide
| impacts (Younger Dryas impact hypothesis). There's no
| reliable way to date stone structures; we only have
| circumstantial evidence. And most remnants of a
| hypothetical Ice Age civilization would likely now be
| underwater due to sea level rise.
|
| I don't necessarily believe this interpretation myself,
| it's somewhat of a fringe idea and there are lots of holes
| in the data. But until there is definitive evidence we
| should be open to the idea that human civilization is older
| than 10,000 years.
|
| https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-apocalypse/
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Probably plenty of factors, including chance, mostly chance
| I suspect.
|
| A combination of particular needs, like what you are
| describing, opportunities, like the right species of plants
| and animals, the rights ideas, enough success for the
| agricultural tribes to survive and a willingness to expand
| and develop the ideas.
|
| It can take quite a while before everything goes together.
| arp242 wrote:
| Eh? Homo Erectus ate meat and almost certainly hunted.
| There's tons of evidence for this. There's also evidence for
| this for Neanderthals, homo habilis, homo ergaster and
| probably other early humans. This behaviour goes back
| millions of years, and has been a major factor in human
| evolution.
|
| Tool in hunting use goes back much further than 20,000 years
| - at least 400,000 for spears in a quick check, but that's
| just what we have conclusive evidence for. I wouldn't be
| surprised if it's actually much older. We have evidence of
| stone scrapers and axes from millions of years ago, and do
| you think people using stone scrapers to butcher animals and
| axes to chip down trees couldn't figure out how to make a
| pointy sticks? It's just that stone preserves well and pointy
| sticks don't.
| proc0 wrote:
| Well then that contradicts the claim of the research in the
| article, which is fine. I'm just assuming it's correct and
| then asking questions based on that, mainly how it relates
| to when humans developed language (not the spoken word
| necessarily, just the capacity for imagination/language,
| and that is not that old from what I recall reading).
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| 20,000 years ago is way too recent. Aboriginals arrived in
| Australia 50,000 years ago after which they were basically
| isolated from the rest of the world until the British
| arrived. Unless you believe humans developed language at
| least twice it has to have happened before that.
|
| Also there are several stories which are believed to be quite
| a bit older than 20,000 years.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Um, yes? I wasn't aware that any competent professionals in this
| area (vs., say, machismo wanna-be's pushing their Paleo Diet
| fantasies on YouTube) believed otherwise.
| matteoraso wrote:
| This is incredibly obvious if you've ever foraged before. Plants
| are everywhere and stay still while animals are rare to see and
| constantly run around. You can also get a lot of calories from
| nuts and grains, so it's not as if you're going to starve if you
| go a week without catching an animal.
| NotGMan wrote:
| One large animal can feed a family for many months if the meat
| is preserved/dried.
|
| There were no grains before agricultural revolution.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| "Grain" refers to small, hard, edible seeds. They include not
| only cereals, but also peas, beans, sunflower seeds, flax
| seeds, mustard seeds, buckwheat seeds, chia seeds, etc., etc.
| Grains can come from a _huge_ variety of both wild and
| domesticated plants.
|
| While grains are less important to hunter-gatherering
| societies than they are to farming societies, grains
| nevertheless have been a part of the human diet since long
| before agriculture.
|
| The big difference here is that most hunter-gatherers ate
| extremely diverse diets. Their diets were not dominated by a
| couple species of cereal grains, like later diets were.
| Instead, they were eating a huge array of different grains,
| nuts, fruit, tubers, mushrooms, fish, insects, etc., on a
| seasonal and regional basis.
| brnt wrote:
| It is not likely meat was preserved for any length of time
| back then. There were no methods to do so. Look at how
| predators work now: they eat what they can and the rest is
| lost.
| Fricken wrote:
| Prairie natives had pemmiccan, which could be stored for a
| couple years.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I can't imagine what you could mean by that - smoking meat
| for preservation has been practiced since Paleolithic
| times, likely about as long as humans have been cooking
| with fire at all.
| huytersd wrote:
| Smoked/dried meat keeps for a long time. Months sometimes.
| Anecdotally I know salted dried shrimp and fish keeps for
| several years.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| In addition to simple drying/smoking already mentioned,
| it's possible to preserve food in different ways depending
| on conditions and food type, with different types of
| burying. In some cases this is done to keep things dry, in
| others it's to result in fermentation.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People were making products like acorn flour and breads from
| that for millennia. Even in societies that never cultivated
| wheat.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Plants are everywhere and stay still while animals are rare
| to see and constantly run around
|
| This is true in some places and not true in others. People
| living north of the Arctic circle did not have a diet "composed
| of 80% plant matter and 20% meat". They ate primarily meat and
| fish with a few plants during the short season that plants were
| available.
| tengbretson wrote:
| He should watch the TV series "Alone"
| belorn wrote:
| Through the last decades there been multiple studies and books
| arguing for one side or the other. Usually the hunter-side will
| look at existing native populations in the world and rituals,
| while the gatherers-side looks at archaeological evidence.
|
| Both sides also have strong arguments against them. For the
| gatherers argument, a main issue is that burial sites themselves
| implies a immobile natural resource where humans would remain in
| a single location and still be able to find enough nourishment,
| generally for a lot of people and for several generations.
| Cultivation of plants is thus a logical conclusion. The hunters
| would be constantly moving to new hunting grounds based on where
| prey animals would be most easy to hunt (in time with seasons),
| and thus do not leave such burial sites for archaeologists to
| find.
|
| It is a similar problem in defining what tools people used. If
| all you find left from a time period is stone artifacts like
| arrow heads, it is easy to make the assumption that people did
| not use wooden material like sharpened sticks.
| defrost wrote:
| Studies of modern hunter-gathers show both behaviours in
| parallel, both plant cultivation (not modern agricultural
| market gardening) at seasonal sites, _and_ seasonal hunting.
|
| Movement isn't random, it's a progression around a larger
| territory that may take a decade to fully revisit all parts.
|
| Plants, roots, leaves, fruits, etc are gathered around sites
| where people stay for three months or more, competing unwanted
| plants are pulled up, weeded out, desired seeds are spread,
| ground tubers are only partially used with the remainder left
| to regrow.
|
| Animals are hunted about the area, attention is paid to
| breeding numbers - often plants are used to hunt animals
| (particular types of young saplings for spears, particular
| ground up leaves to stun fish in pools).
|
| And then they move on to both hunt and gather elsewhere .. with
| a great deal of the food being gathered.
|
| Doing this for 70,000 odd years sees patterns of midden mounds
| (discarded shells from tidal and river molluscs), bone piles,
| ock art, etc develop across the landscape .. and living
| custodians have been pretty good on telling the oral stories of
| songlines - the movements with yearly and decadal seasons.
| arp242 wrote:
| "For this specific time period, in this specific location" is the
| qualifier that should always be used for these type of things.
| Humans ate ... whatever was available, and that varied quite a
| bit.
|
| And it's not The Guardian misrepresenting the authors with a
| sensationalist title here, the authors of this study themselves
| are extrapolating a small and limited study to all early humans.
| This is complete nonsense, as anyone with the most basic of
| understanding of the matter will tell you.
|
| The hand-waving away of all earlier research with FUD about "male
| archaeologists from western cultures" is exactly that: anti-
| intellectual FUD. Hell, if there's any field that is dominated by
| lefty vegetarian hippie types then it's archaeology (not a
| complaint, just an observation).
|
| In general there's a lot of nonsense peddling surrounding this in
| vegan circles. I say this as a vegan. People go on about "primal
| humans being vegan, so that's the natural state" or some such and
| then you ask about it and they come back with some early human
| from 4 million years ago. yeah ... that's like a different
| species mate.
|
| The unwarranted anti-intellectual statements make me not trust
| any of this research. This seems like the sort of "researcher"
| who will do their damnest to find evidence for their conclusion,
| no matter what.
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