hunting

Physical Anthropologist John D. Speth wrote a fantastic book called  The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics? It's kind of a crime that it's not more widely available. It sells for $134 on Amazon, which is totally lame. If you are a student though you can probably get it for free. For my institution Springerlink had a free ebook download! I don't have time to do it justice right now, but there is a great chapter I just wanted to mention. It's about the high-fat African game animals, which are disproportionately represented in many sites tied to paleolithic hunting. 

This is an opportune moment to take another brief detour into the realm of archaeology, this time to look at views about the hunting capabilities of hominins who occupied sub-Saharan Africa between about 300,000 years ago and roughly 40,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia. For those not too familiar with
archaeology, in Africa this period of the Paleolithic is known as the Middle Stone Age (MSA). During more or less the same period of time, Europe and western Asia were inhabited by Neanderthals, and in these more northerly latitudes of the Old World the comparable part of the archaeological record is referred to as the Middle Paleolithic (MP). Richard Klein has written extensively about the hunting strategies of MSA peoples, focusing particularly on the faunal record from two well-preserved and widely known cave sites located east of Cape Town along South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast – Klasies River Mouth and Die Kelders.

Klein has argued for many years that MSA hominins lacked not only the technological know-how of the people who followed them during the ensuing Later Stone Age (LSA), but they also lacked the cognitive wherewithal. Interestingly, eland remains in these caves are central to his line of thinking, and hence the reason for this detour. And, as I have been doing throughout the book, I will let Klein speak for himself.

 In contrast to the other ungulates, the eland in MSA sites include a large proportion of primeage adults, and the age profile has a catastrophic shape…. The most likely explanation is that MSA people had learned that, unlike most other large African bovids, eland can be easily driven, without much personal risk. An eland herd caught in the right position could be forced over a cliff or into a trap…. However, MSA people could not have driven eland herds to their death very often or the species would have become extinct, since its reproductive vitality would have been sapped by the continuing loss of a large proportion of the available prime adults. Not only did the eland survive, but there is no evidence that it became less numerous during the long MSA time span… 

Thus, MSA people were probably not very successful at hunting eland, and this makes it especially interesting that eland is the most abundant ungulate in the MSA faunas. The clear implication is that MSA people must have been even less successful at hunting other species that are less common in the sites but were more common in the environment. In short, MSA impact on the large mammal fauna was negligible. By extension, it may be argued that LSA peoples, in whose sites eland and other species are represented more in proportion to their live abundance, probably took a higher proportion of game overall. In short, LSA people were almost certainly more proficient hunters. Klein (1987:36–37)

I think this argument needs to be turned on its head. Judging by the many quotes from historic accounts that I have already presented, all of which extol the virtues of the eland as the “game-of-game” in a land of fat-poor animals, the eland is precisely the animal that one should target if the animal is available and the hunters possess the means. If anything the abundance of prime-adult elands in MSA sites is testimony to just how good, and successful, they were as hunters, not evidence of their impoverished cognitive capacity. It is the LSA hunters that should be the focus of interest here. Why were they (as it would seem) compelled to concentrate more on the far leaner and smaller game, the prey that explorer after explorer considered inferior food, especially when they were short of adequate sources of carbohydrates or alternative means of acquiring fat? It seems far more likely that the hunters of the LSA were under some level of stress, either because they managed to overhunt the elands, or perhaps because environmental changes reduced the numbers of elands. All of this remains speculative, of course, but I think the one conclusion we can safely draw from this is that the presence or absence of eland in archaeological sites tells us nothing about innate cognitive capacities.

Incidentally, the abundance of prime adults, evidence that led Klein to postulate that MSA hunters may have driven groups of eland over cliffs or into traps (the “catastrophic” age profile that Klein refers too – that is, an age structure that resembles what one would observe in a living population) need not imply mass kills. Since the faunal assemblages are aggregates or palimpsests of countless individual hunting episodes, the abundance of adult animals in their prime is what one might expect if hunters often deliberately sought out animals that were at their peak in condition, but also now and then killed whatever eland came within their sights, regardless of age. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the adult eland at Klasies and Die Kelders were males….

Hmm, possible dissertation topic? What's so important about eland? Why would hunters target them?

An 18th century Swedish naturalist quoted in the book gives some clues:

This animal [“Cape-elk” or eland] has a great deal of fat, especially about the heart: from an old male which we gave chase to and shot, we got such a quantity of fine and tender fat, as we could with difficulty get into a box that would hold about ten pounds of butter. As at the commencement of our journey homewards through the desert, the hounds we had with us had unluckily devoured our stock of butter, a farmer, who still accompanied us, showed us how to prepare the fat from about the heart of the elk, and to use it for dressing victuals with and for eating on bread in the same manner as is generally practised with goose-grease and hogs-lard. The taste of it also was very similar to these, and to the full as good; and, indeed, if I may be supposed to have been able to form any judgment of the matter at a time when we were so sharp set, and in absolute want of any thing else of the kind, it was rather better. The breast is likewise extremely fat, and is always looked upon as a great delicacy. The flesh is universally of a finer grain, more juicy and better tasted than that of the hart-beest. Sparrman (1785:207–208)

Speth has great information on early food containers where hunter-gatherers may have stored things like fat or boiled bone grease. Pottery may date back as far as 200,000 years, but it's also possible to store and cook with liquids in skins and other containers that would not be present in the record. He also takes down the common use of the San (bushman) as Paleolithic proxies. 

I'll post more about this book soon. I've been very busy with school, but luckily this is what I study so I have ample fodder for posts now. I feel very bad for people who don't have access to this things.

It's possible they will take old books that are outdated and try to push their own rather narrow conclusions. Altough you don't need to have research journal access to find that Boyd Eaton thinks his own conclusions were wrong (though Konnor is still holding out):

Meanwhile, paleo eating continues to evolve. In 1985, Eaton and Konnor allowed foods like skim milk and whole-wheat bread. Konnor still thinks that was the right call, and believes his original concerns about fat were prudent. “You can’t just go to the supermarket and buy meat loaded with fat and say you’re doing the Paleolithic diet. You’re not.” Animals of 10,000 ago, Konnor says, were less fatty—so we must compensate by eating leaner meats, and less. Eaton has gone the other way. He says he had failed to consider the contribution of non-muscle meat like brain and fat depots, and thus underestimated the amount of fat we need. “It makes me feel stupid!”

In full discloser, I don't think there is enough evidence either way to draw a conclusion about fat in the paleolithic and we are dependent on modern nutritional science to elucidate whether or not fat is healthy (or types of fat). I also am a big fan of the idea that evolution of human being is on-going and didn't freeze in lower-paleolithic Africa. I personally cycle low and high-fat, but do best on high-fat (I lose my period on low-fat, for example). 

A well-meaning, but mistaken, commenter pointed me towards this paper: Hadza Scavenging: Implications for Plio/Pleistocene Hominid Subsistence. Notice it says "Implications for" not "An example of." The Hazda are not living fossils, though many anthropologists think their lifestyle might have some similarities with paleolithic humans.

But the paper is priceless for the actual descriptions of how Hazda people obtained meat. Often it was

1. Some people hear something or see vultures in the distance

2. They investigate

3. Turns out to be some predator consuming meat

4. They scare away the predator and hope something good is left

5. Often all the "premium cuts" are gone, but they crack open the brain and other bones and eat the fat from theses

In this way it challenges two silly assumptions

1. Foragers eat lots of lean meat... sorry! the lions took that before you got there! Looks like only marrow is left. 

2. Male foragers obtain giraffe meat by valiantly hunting it down...sorry! Looks like a group of women and some kids scavenged that meat from a lion kill.

Note that Hazda have some modern technology, so paleolithic foragers would have been even more dependent on scavenging.

Hmm, I think I have some marrow bones in the fridge calling my name....

Yesterday I went to another event with Jackson Landers, who taught my hunting class and writes an excellent blog. This time the event was about cooking Canada geese, which have been a subject of much controversy since the USDA randomly decided that the fat and immobile geese in Prospect Park in Brooklyn were taking down more planes than Al Qaeda and unceremioniously kidnapped, gassed, and buried them. It kind of doesn't make sense, but it's also a waste of good meat.

Jackson talked about methods for hunting that city-folks could employ, such as jump-shooting, which don't require a purebred hunting dog or a zillion decoys. Those of us who have tried to hunt complained bitterly about the city's onerous gun laws.

In between there was delicious goose prepared by Leighton here. A paillard of breast cooked with chipotle and cranberries was my favorite. Jackson generously gave me some of the goose remnants: a back and a leg, which I proceeded to cook wrong. And by wrong I mean totally overcooked. I should have googled a recipe or looked a Hank Shaw's excellent site, because it was not a forgiving as duck. If I could go back in time I would have done a confit or a low and slow braise in wine.

Now I understand the folk song Grey Goose, which is about hunting a grey goose that ends up too tough for anyone or anything to eat. They should have asked Jackson or Leighton and not assumed they could just fry the goose in a pan.

Jackson also set up a pigeon trap on John Durant's roof, a rather sketchy enterprise that ended up with no bird. I don't think we were that sad about it, though Jackson said dove tastes amazing and a pigeon is like a dove. Besides, my major worries were about the pigeon's feed, which doesn't make sense because I eat fish that have been marinating in some pretty frightening waters. And let's not even talk about the stuff we feed factory farmed animals...pigeons eat garbage, but so do pigs!

Recently Overcoming Bias had a post about how men are evolved to hunt, women to gather. It then went on to speculate about how most sports are based on hunting instincts:

"Now sports let us show off many kinds of physically-expressed abilities. But it seems to me that most sports emphasize hunting skills, such as chasing, evading, throwing, and hitting, far more than gathering skills, such as visual search and fine finger control. Now it makes sense for men to prefer hunting sports, but oddly females also seem to prefer them; pretty much all sports emphasize hunting more than gathering skills. Why don’t women prefer sports designed to show off the skills for which female bodies were designed?

Sorry, but there is a "sport" that uses exactly these "gather" skills--it's called hunting! Perhaps our ancestors did persistence hunt and our most popular sports are based on those skills, but the persistence hunt only works in certain environments.

Modern hunting really isn't much like persistence hunting, even when practiced in open plain environments that would be suited to persistence hunting using ancient methods. There isn't much chasing, that's for sure, in waiting all day in a tree blind for a deer to walk by. Visual search and fine finger control are extremely important in modern hunting.

Besides that, I think anthropological studies have been heavily clouded by modern ideas of "the hunt" that are only relevant to academics who have probably never hunted themselves. They seem to think that all hunting involves chasing animals around. For example, in some ethnographies, net hunting, trapping, and spear fishing are counted as "gathering." This has led to two erroneous ideas now embedded in pop culture: that women squatted around gathering leaves all day, and that such leaves made up most of the diet.

The real truth about the study posted on Overcoming Bias that showed that women in rural Mexico are better foragers for mushrooms is that mushrooms aren't exactly the most important food in the world. They are of very little food value, but have high culinary value, and the more hours you put into learning to forage for them, the better yields you get. I have zero experience with this myself, and in Sweden I got zero mushrooms, while my male Swedish roommate got several bucketloads.

But this is not all to throw away the idea of gender roles in evolution. A recent NYTimes article about the challenge of building a decent sports bra reminded me of the biggest foil to the "born to run" idea of human locamotion. Maybe men are born to run, but women happen to have breasts: jiggly protusions that are often quite large. When running they can be rather painful. Modern women get around this obstacle by using sports bras, but when was the last time you saw a hunter-gatherer with a bra? This explains quite well to me why women who hunt in those tribes utilize traps, nets, and bows. But maybe women get used to the "bounce" after awhile?

Elite female runners often experience amenorrhea which can lead to infertility and low bone density (and it's not associated with low body fat, it's associated with running). Do male elite runners experience such reductions in reproductive "fitness?" 

But it is an interesting question: what do you think? Were all humans born to run? Or just men?