Two key burial sites, Wilamaya Patjxa and Soro Mik’aya Patjxa, about a mile apart in the Andes mountains, have become pivotal in reshaping our understanding of early human diets. Contrary to the assumption of an 80% meat-centric diet, the analysis reveals a strikingly different ratio — 80% plant matter and 20% meat.
Who had the assumption of an 80% meat-centric diet? No, really. As long as I can remember, I was taught that various societies, even quite early ones, had a variety of diets based on what resources were there to exploit. Some had mostly meat, some mostly gathered, lots of them changed over time as conditions changed, moving to agriculture then back to hunting or herding, with unclear lines between what constituted either, or for that matter, what was planned crop raising and what was gathering managed resources that one migrated to throughout the year.
And then there's fish, unlikely to show up much in the Andes. My recollection is that a lot of "early tribes" went to fishing grounds at set times of the year but gathered plants at others.
The article blames "male archaeologists" for perpetuating the meat-myth, but I have to wonder if what they are really annoyed at are movies and children's coloring books and guys they hear in the market believing the wrong things about "cavemen," and they want to crush these myths to earth yet again. I could be wrong about that, certainly. Maybe there are lots of male archaeologists who are teaching tender young undergraduate minds that early cavemen were really macho and would barely touch a vegetable because those were for sissies.
Or maybe it's time to blame the reporters again, not the scientists.
When in doubt, blame the reporters. There are some (more than a few) scientists who have no perspective, even in their own fields, but the odds favor incompetent reporting.
ReplyDeleteWhen I took an anthropology course at college in the early 1970s, we were told that plant food formed the bulk of the hunter-gatherer diet, and that it was mostly gathered by women. Men specialized in hunting, and because meat had more nutrition per unit, this division of labor meant a better diet overall. In other words, fiber was everywhere, carbs were plentiful, protein was in short supply, and fat was scarce.
ReplyDeleteOnly a few cultures would have a purely meat diet, and then only in special circumstances (e.g., the Innuit in winter).
So no, nobody ever said that.
This is a specific instance of a common failure: someone under 60 thinks they know what life was like before they were born because old people are evil and stupid, they don't bother to check at all, and are wildly wrong.