Derek Wall examines the "mighty hunter" myth of human ancestry
from The Vegetarian, September/October 1988, published by The Vegetarian Society
UK:
Derek Wall, B.Sc., studied archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology which
is part of London University.
Archaeology and vegetarianism are, at first sight, a rather unlikely combination;
most people if asked to consider the diet of our ancestors would tend to conjure
up images of cavemen roasting mammoth steaks or early medieval monarchs spitting
venison over a roaring fire, not a lentil in sight. Many academics have taken
these simplistic visions to their logical and dangerous conclusion; to argue,
that in the past we have eaten meat, therefore eating meat is 'natural' and
that vegetarianism is an unhealthy regression to the period when we were full
fruitarians and swung from tree to tree.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the view that we have only become human through
eating meat, that according to people like Robert Dart writing as long ago as
the 1930s, it has only been through hunting, aggression and violence that we
have eaten non-carnivorous rivals in the evolutionary battle of the fittest.
According to Dart and others, changes in human and early hominid dentition show
that our teeth adapted to chewing meat. Happily more recent investigation tells
a different story; Dr Clifford Tolly suggests that the real evolutionary transition
came when our ancestors left the tropical forests of central Africa and took
to the open savannah, shifting from a diet made up mostly of fruit to one based
on seeds and grains, our ancestors' teeth adapting to cope with the relatively
hard particles that needed a lot of grinding down before they could be digested.
Hunter-gatherers
Despite this, nutritionalist John Yudkin claims that for 99% of our existence
we have been hunters with an 'ideal' diet where '. . . people tend to have a
quite high proportion of meat.' Yudkin goes on to draw the conclusion that we
suffer nutritional problems today (especially allergies) only to the extent
we have shifted from this all animal diet with the occasional root or tuber
thrownin. A major pitfall associated with this line of reasoning is the fact
that much illness is caused by over consumption of animal fats; heart disease
cancer, weight problems . . And again the archaeological evidence tells another
story as does the existence of so-called 'hunters' in the modern world.
Groups such as the Kalahari bushmen and the Australian aborigines are not so
much hunters as 'hunter-gathers', gathering much of their diet in the form of
roots and tubers, seed grains, fruit, nuts and other nutritious plant products.
Gould, who spent some time studying the aborigines of the Western Desert, states
quite clearly that, 'The diet is primarily vegetarian'. In a very detailed study
of the Kalahari bushman's diet it is revealed that: 'The proportions by weight
of vegetable food and animal food in the total diet are, respectively, 81.3
per cent cent and 18.7 per cent. If the plants taken as water sources (such
as melons and tubers) are included in the vegetable food count, the ration of
animal food to vegetable food is even lower . . . Although the proportion of
animal food of the total (18.7 per cent) diet is quite large, the Kade San can
survive in the Kalahari without it, whereas they could not survive without vegetable
food.'
In fact, out of existing hunter-gathers and those recorded by early anthropologists
(before we made them extinct), only the Eskimos/Innuit, living in a climate
where they have little choice, eat anything like the proportion of meat we consume
today in Western society. This said we can't have it all our own way, there
have probably been as few pure vegetarians as 20th century European style carnivores
amongst our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Even so, if we go by the evidence of
modem hunter-gathers, our ancestors probably ate meat in a more sensible fashion
than that of present. Meat tended to be, as we have seen, only a very small
part of diet, sauce to make the vegetables and grains more palatable rather
than the other way round. Hunter gathers also tend to treat their prey with
rather more respect than the way we treat our poor factory farmed, hormone and
antibiotic ridden livestock. The Ainu of Japan traditionally pray to the spirits
of the animals they kill and ask their forgiveness; similar practice is known
amongst both North American Indians and African bushmen.
Any way, back to the strictly archaeological evidence. Can we tell for certain
what our ancestors in the very distant past before the existence of written
records ate? Dentition gives us at best only a very rough idea and anthropology
provides only possible parallels. Food remains found in the course of archaeological
'digs' are a help but tend to be biased to animal products because, in most
conditions, bone is far better preserved than highly biodegradable vegetable
matter, if we excavated a Kalahari bush camp, abandoned for the sake of argument
for 50 years (a tiny span of time in archaeological terms), we would find bones
from the occasionally eaten gazelle but would miss almost entirely the staple
gongo nuts or the 50 other plants exploited from the desert as food.
Tools used for food preparations may help as well, but flint 'tool' to take
one example, have tended to be misinterpreted by meat eating archaeologists.
Palaeolithic (old stone age) axes originally thought to be butchering tools
would have been just as servicable for digging up root vegetables. In a paper
under the title 'Mesolithic Europe - the economic basis', Clark shows how middle
stone age people in Britain could have exploited nuts, fungi and a rich variety
of plant foods from a landscape which has since become so degraded by human
damage, that we have overlooked this vegetarian possibility almost entirely.
He goes on to show that flints previously interpreted as tips of hunting arrows,
may have components of composite vegetable grating boards!
Civilisation!
Since the arrival of farming, the written word and 'civilisation' in general
some 7,000 years ago, archaeologists have been able to discuss the diet of our
more recent ancestors with more certainty than that of earlier stone age peoples.
The Aztecs and Incas combined maize, beans and squash, so that the different
amino acids in the maize and beans could be complemented by the carbohydrate
content of the squash. Classical India was vegetarian, as was Japan up until
a generation or two ago. The staple of Egyptian workers building the Pyramids
was boiled onions. Pythagoras was a vegetarian, although he had a weird distaste
for beans. Even the Roman army marched on its vegetarian stomach. It is clear
that 90% of humanity have subsisted on a 90% vegetarian diet. Modern carnivorous
men and women are the exception not the rule.