Harlan's Crops and Man. H. Thomas Stalker
What did he know about plants, and what might have caused him to begin the process of domestication? The descriptions given here will necessarily be brief and sketchy, but will give an idea of the condition of man before he began to grow plants with the purpose of using them for food.
We also need to know something about man as a hunter to understand ourselves. Lee and DeVore (1968) have put it succinctly:
Cultural Man has been on earth for some 2,000,000 years; for over 99% of this period he has lived as a hunter‐gatherer. Only in this last 10,000 years has man begun to domesticate plants and animals, to use metals and to harness energy sources other than the human body.… Of the estimated 80,000,000,000 men who have ever lived out a life span on earth, over 90% have lived as hunters and gatherers; about 6% have lived by agriculture and the remaining few percent have lived in industrial societies. To date, the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved.
As a matter of general education and self‐understanding, it is important that we know something about this basic human adaptation. There are two general approaches to the problem: (a) we can study surviving nonagricultural societies and examine the ethnographic observations made within the last few centuries, or (b) we can attempt to interpret preagricultural life from the artifacts, refuse, and other clues left by ancient man and recovered by archaeological techniques. In this chapter, we shall deal primarily with the first approach but the archaeological record shall be touched on in later sections.
The Hunter‐Gatherer Stereotype
Traditionally, agricultural people have looked down on hunting people who are described as “savage,” “backward,” “primitive,” “ignorant,” “indolent,” “lazy,” “wild,” and “lacking in intelligence.” Europeans applied the term “civilized tribes” to some eastern North American natives who lived in towns and cultivated plants, but these Native Americans themselves referred to the hunting tribes of the plains as “wild Indians.” In Africa, farming groups that surround hunter‐gatherers, “… did not merely assert their political dominance over the hunter‐gatherers and ex‐hunter‐gatherers they encapsulated; they also treated them as inferiors, as people apart, stigmatized them and discriminated against them” (Woodburn, 1988, p. 37). Similar attitudes prevail in Asia, Oceania, and Tropical America. The prejudice is nearly universal.
The stereotype includes the idea that hunting–gathering people were always on the verge of starvation and that the pursuit of food took so much of their time and energy that there was not enough of either one left over to build more “advanced” cultures. Hunters were too nomadic to cultivate plants and too ignorant or unintelligent to understand the life cycles of plants. The idea of sowing or planting had never occurred to them and they lacked the intelligence to conceive of it. Hunters were concerned with animals and had no interest in plants. In the stereotype that developed, it was generally agreed that the life of the hunter‐gatherer was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and that any study of such people would only reveal that they lived like animals, were of low intelligence, and were intellectually insensitive and incapable of “improvement.”
Occasionally, an unusually perceptive student of mankind tried to point out that hunting man might be as intelligent as anyone else; that he had a sensitive spiritual and religious outlook; that he was capable of high art; that his mythologies were worthy of serious consideration; and that he was, in fact, as one of us and belonged to the same species with all its weaknesses and potentialities. Such opinions were seldom taken very seriously until recent years. It has finally become apparent that no part of the stereotype is correct and that widely held presuppositions are all completely false and untenable. Our ancestors were not as stupid or as brutish as we wanted to believe.
In 1966, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore organized a symposium on Man the Hunter held at the University of Chicago and published in 1968. Lee reported on his studies of the San !Kung of the Dobe area, Botswana. Over a three‐week period, Lee (1968) found that !Kung Bushmen spent 2.3, 1.9, and 3.2 days for the first, second, and third week, respectively, in subsistence activities. He wrote, “In all, the adults of the Dobe camp worked about 2 ½ days a week. Since the average working day was about 6 hr long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from 12 to 19 hr a week to getting food.”
Among the Bushmen, neither the children nor the aged are pressed into service. Children can help if they wish, but are not expected to contribute regularly to the work force until they are married. The aged are respected for their knowledge, experience, and legendary lore; and are cared for even when blind or lame or unable to contribute to the food‐gathering activities. Neither nonproductive children nor the aged are considered a burden.
To the !Kung Bushman, the mongongo nut [Schinziophyton rautanenii (Schinz) Radcl.‐Sm] is basically the staff of life. These nuts are available year‐round and are remarkably nutritious (Table 1.1). The average daily per‐capita consumption of 300 nuts weighs “only about 7.5 ounces (212.6 g) but contains the caloric equivalent of 2.5 pounds (1134 g) of cooked rice and the protein equivalent of 14 ounces (397 g) of lean beef” (Lee, 1968). Lee found the diet adequate, starvation unknown, the general health good, and longevity about as good as in modern industrial societies. The average of 2140 calories per person daily (Table 1.1) compares favorably to the 2015 USDA recommendations of 2400–3000 calories for an adult male and 1800–2400 calories for an adult female (https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/appendix‐2/).
Table 1.1 Diet of the !Kung Bushmen.
Source: Adapted from Lee (1968).
| Protein (g/day) | Calories per person per day | Percent caloric contribution of meat and vegetables | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meat | 34.5 | 690 | 33 |
| Mongongo nuts | 56.7 | 1,260 | 67 |
| Other vegetable foods | 1.9 | 190 | |
| Total | 93.1 | 2,140 | 100 |
Sahlins (1968) came in with almost identical figures for subsistence activities of the Australian Aborigines he studied and elaborated on his term “original affluent society.” One can be affluent, he said, either by having a great deal or by not wanting much. If one is consistently on the move and must carry all one's possessions, one does not want much. The Aborigines also appeared to be well fed and healthy, and enjoyed a great deal of leisure time.
Gatherers can obtain food in abundance even in the deserts of Australia and the Kalahari Desert of Africa. The rhythm of food‐getting activities is almost identical between the Australian Aborigine and the !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa. The women and children are primarily involved in obtaining plant and small animal materials. Hunting is reserved for males at the age of puberty or older but is more of a sport than a necessity. Meat is a welcome addition to a rather dull diet but is seldom required in any abundance for adequate nutrition. Both males and females tend to work for 2 days and every third day is a holiday (Figure 1.1). Even during the days they work, only about 3–4 hr per