The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics?

268 Pages·2010·6.85 MB·English

by  John D. Speth (auth.)

The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology
of Big-Game Hunting
INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHAEOLOGY
Series Editor: Jelmer Eerkens, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Founding Editor: Roy S. Dickens, Jr. Late of University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
For more information about this series, please visit the Series Homepage at:
www.springer.com/series/6090
John D. Speth
The Paleoanthropology
and Archaeology
of Big-Game Hunting
Protein, Fat, or Politics?
John D. Speth
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan
4013 Museums Building
Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1079
USA
[e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-4419-6732-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-6733-6
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6733-6
Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010929855
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To my family—Lisa, Larrea, and Robin—for
their patience, good-natured teasing, and
obvious amusement as they queried me about
what bizarre topic I happened to be dabbling
in that day—Why do elephants have such big
brains? Why does chimpanzee breast milk
have so little protein? Why are human babies
born with more body fat than baby seals?
Judging by their ear-to-ear grins, I know my
kids are convinced that archaeology must be
the weirdest field on the planet….
to the Garnseys, Elmer (Skip) and Jane, the
Slash/G Cattle Company, and a lot of yellow
paint, where all of this began so long ago….
to Kate Spielmann, whose insights into Pueblo
hunting and protein needs were critical
catalysts in the development of these ideas….
to Glynn Isaac, who invited me to East
Africa “to see for myself”….
to Aram Yengoyan, who once quipped:
“Speth thinks culture is nothing but
verbalized fat.” Well, maybe….
and to my parents, Fred and Lottie, who let
me follow my dreams, even if it meant never
truly climbing out of the sand box….

Foreword
For more than a century, conventional anthropological wisdom has assigned
big-game hunting a central role in human evolution. As the story generally goes,
men’s adoption of this practice gave access to a rich, readily available, yet previ-
ously untapped source of subsistence. This, in turn, favored the emergence of
nuclear families as units of common economic and reproductive interest, spreading
the responsibility for the provisioning of offspring beyond mothers, reducing the
demands of the food quest, and enabling women to bear and raise more children. It
further selected for a pattern of delayed maturity that allowed more time for learn-
ing, ultimately leading to the development of peculiarly human cognitive and
behavioral capabilities. In short, it was meat that made us human – or so the “Man
the Hunter” model still widely encountered in college textbooks and popular media
would lead one to believe.
Over the last four decades, this basic idea has been deployed in diverse, often
mutually conflicting evolutionary scenarios, some envisioning the presence of
nuclear families headed by big-game-hunting, offspring-provisioning fathers
among the earliest representatives of genus Homo more than two million years ago,
others suggesting that this same pattern emerged much later, coincident with and
largely responsible for the spread of “anatomically modern” Homo sapiens beyond
Africa beginning only about 50,000 years ago. Depending on the specific archaeo-
logical data cited, each of these scenarios and others as well can be made to sound
equally plausible, in most cases due to the persistent appeal of the underlying prem-
ise – meat is and always has been good and good for you – and because the bones
of large animals figure so prominently in so much of the archaeological record.
In the important book at hand, anthropological archaeologist John Speth gives us
two reasons to be skeptical of this received wisdom. First, drawing on a steadily
increasing body of quantitatively sophisticated ethnographic work among tradition-
ally oriented hunter–gatherers, Speth shows that big-game hunting is often less than
the best approach to the problem of feeding one’s family. Even in environments where
large animals are abundant, the short term, day-to-day risk of failing to take one can
frequently be quite high. Even when a hunter succeeds, the chances are good that
most of the meat so acquired will go to others, outside his own family, with no guar-
antee of timely, commensurate reciprocity when those “others” themselves do well at
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the game. Take away the weapons – bows and arrows, atlatls and javelins – that allow
traditional hunters to succeed as often as they do but that have been available for less
than a quarter of the time genus Homo has existed and the prospects for securing a
reliable nutrient stream based on big-game hunting become even less promising. As
Speth points out, this same ethnographic research further shows that hunters truly
concerned with feeding their wives and children would generally do better by target-
ing a broader range of prey, including small game and plant foods that are often more
reliably acquired and always more easily defended from the claims of non-family
members. The fact that traditionally oriented hunters so often focus on big game to
the near-complete exclusion of these alternative food sources strongly suggests the
pursuit of some other goal.
Speth’s second point, one that he himself has developed extensively over the
last three decades, is that meat isn’t always and everywhere good and good for you.
His survey of the historical and recent nutritional literatures on the perils of heavy
reliance on animal protein clearly indicates the existence of surprisingly strict
limits on human ability to subsist on a heavy meat diet. The “obvious” archaeologi-
cal evidence of past pursuit and consumption of large animal prey does not neces-
sarily mean that big game were a major component, let alone the mainstay of early
human diets. It almost certainly wasn’t the resource that fed the increase in brain
size, drove the changes in cognitive and behavioral capabilities, or encouraged the
development of patterns in social organization that distinguish us so markedly
from our nearest living great ape relatives and our common primate ancestors.
Like many good pieces of science, Speth’s book not only challenges long-
standing paradigms on the basis of emerging knowledge but also identifies new
and important problems for future research. If offspring provisioning often isn’t
the main goal of big-game hunting among modern foragers and wasn’t in many
cases in the past as well, how do we account for its prominence either as a modern
practice or as reflected in the archaeological record? If meat consumption didn’t
provoke the evolution of our distinctive morphologies, capabilities, and patterns of
behavior, what did? Speth’s informative, highly readable work throws these ques-
tions into sharp relief and encourages the next generation of anthropological
archaeologists to pursue them aggressively.
University of Utah, James F. O’Connell
Salt Lake City, Utah February, 2010
Preface
Regardless of what particular academic track you may have followed as a college
undergraduate, whether it was paleoanthropology, archaeology, biology, geosci-
ences, or even premed, at some point you probably learned about the earlier stages
of human evolution and the pivotal role played by big-game hunting (preceded
perhaps by a “stage” of big-game scavenging) in transforming a bipedal ape-like
ancestor into what we are today. Over the years, more and more evidence for our
ancestral interest in hunting and meat-eating has accumulated and by now few
would question the importance of hunting in our heritage. Hand-in-hand with
Paleolithic (“Stone Age”) flaked stone tools, we find dense concentrations of
broken-up animal bones, often the remains of more than one species that some
ancient hominin (roughly synonymous with hominid) had transported to a single
locality. And many of the bones bear unmistakable traces of human butchery in the
form of cutmarks made by stone tools when the carcasses were dismembered and
defleshed, as well as impact fractures produced when hominins broke open the
limb bones to retrieve their content of fatty marrow and, in more recent sites, even
occasional charred bones, the tell-tale evidence that early humans had begun
cooking their food.
Few, however, seriously question what big-game hunting was really all about.
That part of the puzzle has always seemed pretty self-evident – hunting provided a
critical part of our ancestor’s diet and, through the gradual evolution of our behav-
ioral and technological wherewithal, our ancestors became ever more effective and
efficient at putting meat on the family table. In a way, the “big-game hunting” issue
bears certain resemblances to issues surrounding the concept of evolution. When
undergraduates ask me “is evolution a fact,” I have to respond to their question in
two parts: “yes, evolution as a description of events is a fact – we can make it
happen in the lab, as is routinely done in genetic experiments with fruit flies; we
can see it in our environment, as so clearly demonstrated by the growing resistance
of many bacteria to antibiotics; and we can see its results in the fossil record.” But
I then have to hasten to add that “evolution as explanation is not fact but theory, a
good one and a powerful one, but theory nonetheless.” We know it happens, few
scientists would question that, but we are still far from agreement about precisely
how it works. That debate will keep us busy for many years to come.
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