How'd We Get Here?

Video summary · 13:18

What did ancient humans eat on a normal day?

Not the mammoth. A big animal turned up about once a month. The rest of the month, people ate what someone dug out of the ground with a stick.

· 5 min read

Twenty-nine days without a kill

Kristen Hawkes and her colleagues spent years with Hadza hunters in northern Tanzania, men with bows living in some of the best game country left on the planet, and they counted. The answer was about one large animal per 30 hunter-days. A hunter goes out, comes back with nothing, and keeps doing that for about a month before he brings home a zebra. That's a 97% failure rate. Yet nobody starved on the other 29 days. So the real question is who kept everyone fed the rest of the time.

A month of Hadza hunting as a calendar: 29 days fed by digging sticks, one day with a large animal. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Big game 29 days: roots, nuts, honey 1 day: a big animal
One hunter's month, roughly. From Hawkes' counts among the Hadza: one large animal per 30 hunter-days. Food still arrived on the other 29.

The picture came from a conference room

In 1966 about 70 anthropologists met in Chicago for a conference called Man the Hunter. That title ended up in textbooks, museum dioramas and every painting of men dragging a dead animal home at sunset. But one of the papers at the conference, by Richard Lee, showed that most of what the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari ate, by weight, was gathered from the ground, mostly by women. The conference published the evidence against its own title in the same book, and people remembered the title. Tools show the same bias. You could draw a spear right now. A digging stick is a straight piece of hardwood about as long as your leg, with a fire-hardened point, and hardly anyone has ever drawn one. At Poggetti Vecchi in Tuscany, boxwood digging sticks made by Neanderthals date to around 171,000 years ago.

What the mud kept

Plants usually rot away while bones survive, so the archaeological record over-reports meat. Waterlogged sites are the exception. At Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, about 780,000 years ago, Naama Goren-Inbar's team found remains of more than 55 edible plant species on one old lakeshore, along with pitted stones next to the shells of hard nuts. People sat there cracking nuts for thousands of years. At Border Cave in South Africa, Lyn Wadley's team found charred Hypoxis rhizomes about 170,000 years old, cooked on purpose. They're the oldest cooked vegetables ever found. None of this means people didn't hunt: the Schöningen spears from Germany, around 200,000 years old, are balanced like a modern javelin. But people carried the spear on good days and the stick on the other 29.

Neanderthals ate their greens

Chemistry in Neanderthal bones looked like a wolf's, so for decades everyone assumed they ate only meat. In 2011 Amanda Henry looked at their teeth instead. Hardened plaque traps what you chew and keeps it for 50,000 years. In Neanderthal teeth from Shanidar in Iraq and Spy in Belgium she found starch grains from grasses, dates and roots, some swollen in the way starch gets when it's cooked in water. In 2017 Laura Weyrich's team read DNA from the plaque. The Spy Neanderthals had eaten woolly rhino and wild sheep. The El Sidrón group, living in a forest, showed no meat at all, only pine nuts, moss and mushrooms. One of them had poplar DNA in his plaque, the plant behind aspirin, and an abscess in his jaw.

Roots, nuts and honey

Most afternoons meant roots. Hadza women dig a tuber called //ekwa from about a metre down in hard, stony ground. It's woody, so people chew out the starch and spit the fibre out, and archaeologists find those spat-out wads dried into cave floors. Among the Ju/'hoansi, mongongo nuts held the whole diet together: about 300 a day for an adult, cracked one at a time between two stones, and giving more protein than the meat did. Honey was a staple, not a treat. Frank Marlowe's team found that honey, bee grubs included, made up roughly 15% of what the Hadza ate. People even had help finding it. In Mozambique, Claire Spottiswoode showed in 2016 that when Yao honey hunters make a special call, a bird called the greater honeyguide leads them to nests, and the chance of finding one rises from 16% to 54%.

Where all of this falls apart

North of the tree line almost nothing edible grows, and traditional Inuit diets relied overwhelmingly on seal, whale, caribou and fish. Vitamin C came from raw whale skin, about 36 mg per 100 g, more than the roughly 10 mg a day that prevents scurvy. They ate it raw because cooking destroys the vitamin. In 2015 Rasmus Nielsen and Ida Moltke's group found fat-metabolism gene variants at close to 100% frequency in Greenlandic Inuit. Loren Cordain's survey of 229 forager societies put the median at more than half of calories from animals, though that sample leans heavily on cold-climate groups. The honest answer depends mostly on latitude.

Schematic: in warm regions most forager calories come from plants; towards the Arctic most come from animals; the in-between is uncertain. Plants carry you Animals carry you ? WARM COUNTRY ARCTIC share of calories, schematic
Latitude does most of the work. In warm places plants supplied most of the food, and near the Arctic animals did. For the regions in between we don't really know the average, and no average forager ever existed.

Bread before farming, rotten teeth before sugar

Ohalo II, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, is a 23,000-year-old camp with brush huts that still have their bedding. It has more than 140 plant species and a grinding stone with wild barley and wheat starch on it, 12,000 years before anyone farmed. At Shubayqa in Jordan, a 14,400-year-old fireplace held charred crumbs of flatbread made from wild cereal mixed with ground club-rush tubers, so the first known bread was half root. At Taforalt in Morocco, around 15,000 years ago, Louise Humphrey's team found cavities in 51% of the teeth, in people who had never seen a field or any sugar. They ate sweet, sticky acorns and pine nuts all year, and their teeth paid for it.

So why hunt at all?

Hawkes ran the numbers for Hadza hunters, and they don't look good for hunting. A man chasing big game brings his own children fewer calories than he would by collecting tortoises and birds' eggs, and when he does make a kill, the meat is shared across the whole camp. Hawkes thinks he's earning reputation, not dinner. Others see it as insurance: my luck today, yours next month. That debate isn't settled. The food question is. On an ordinary day, most calories came out of the ground on the end of a stick. We still name meals after the animal, like steak and chips or chicken and rice, and call the part doing most of the work a side dish.

Chapters

  1. Twenty-nine days without a kill
  2. The 1966 conference that drew the picture
  3. What the mud kept and the bones didn't
  4. The plaque nobody looked at
  5. A metre down, straight through stone
  6. Where all of this falls apart
  7. Bread, 12,000 years too early
  8. Why he keeps hunting anyway
  9. Look at how you name dinner