Posted on 02/02/2024 2:01:01 PM PST by SunkenCiv
During the Ice Age, how much plants could you forage in an Artic-like environment?
Eskimos eat berries and a few roots, when in season, but the rest of their diet is meat and fish, because that’s all there is.
No potato plants or grass grains above the Artic circle, nor 200 miles of the ice wall in the pre-Holocene.
Your are correct. Deers and rabbits run lot faster than a potato tree.
There were no Eskimo’s living in frozen areas during ice age. Most humans lived and survived in warmer climates.
Hunting needs superior weapons. Humans had flintstones and sticks for weapons many millenniums back. Pretty difficult to down a deer with those.
It has been a long established that lousy hunters are vegetarians.
“Exactly so. They balance out the Inuit of 10,000 years ago, who lived almost entirely off of hunting and fishing.”
Because snow and ice aren’t vegetables...
This was not long after the Younger Dryas extinction event. Most the of megafauna that was previously available was probably gone.
Gathering is very labor intensive and the processing often takes days.
As one forger would tell people, "There is no Hamburger Tree".
You shoot a rabbit you have dinner in thirty minutes. You gather grain it is going to take a bit longer. You gather acorns it is going to be several days before you get anything.
“Humans had flintstones and sticks for weapons many millenniums back.”
They also had cooperation.
“Pretty difficult to down a deer with those.”
Not when compared to digging up 2,000 calories worth of roots per person every single day. All they needed was one deer to feed several people for more than a week.
Was it more difficult? Yep.
Was they payoff worth it? Yep.
L
An atlatl which would have been one of the weapons they had, will easily take down a deer.
The throwing club, which was probably our first hunting weapon, is still quite effective at taking out small game.
Did I miss mention of species? Can we assume predominant Homo Sapiens based on any different info?
Isotope studies have also found evidence that ancient humans were hypercarnivores. A lot of what you eat depends on where you are and the culture you live in. Study the Inuit and you will think humans are hypercarnivores. Study India and you might think we are herbivores.
A couple sites in the Andes only prove people in that time and place depended on gathering. The real question for me is who is healthier: the hunters, the gatherers, or some diet in between?
Have you ever tried gathering 2,000 calories every day for a week?
Hunting is more work but the caloric payoff is orders of magnitude greater.
It is all situational. If there is plenty of plant calories around to be gathered, you can bet there will be plenty of herbivore and omnivore competition for those plant calories.
If there is plenty of game, easily hunted, hunting can be far more productive than gathering.
It appears to me, the Americas offered plenty of game and easy hunting for the first thousand years or so. Then the continents were full of hunting tribes, the easy big game was hunted to extinction, and life became much harder.
Thank you. Analytical thinking is a dying skill. Much appreciated…
hahahaha the deer run lot faster than humans. And they have sharp hearing. That is how they survive from a lion attack. They can hear foot steps. A lion which is 100 times more adapted to kill deer than humans, only succeeds in 1/10 surprise attacks. The ancient humans were short and skinny based on bone fossils. They most certainly did not have a daily meat diet.
Some of these reports sound suspiciously junior high.
One study, one site, and they’re telling us what ancient humans were all about.
They hunted where they could — those delicious wild ruminants, those mammoths...
They gathered when the gathering was good, and it’s a great way to keep the kids busy doing something useful...
They fished, of course, anywhere they found a fishing hole, or a sea. That too is a good way to get through a day with children.
Also, they trapped, which is rather like gathering, and you can learn it from a spider.
Even with big game around, not everyone is cut out for hunting. The lighter members of the bunch, women, children, elders — weren’t sitting around waiting for dinner to be delivered.
Intuits did not exist 500,000 years ago.
Thank you-I’m sure people ate whatever was plentiful and easy to harvest, whether flora or fauna-and at the high altitude of the Peruvian Andes with not much grass and plants for non-carnivorous animals to eat so you could hunt them, that would be root crops. People at lower altitudes had an easier finding animals to hunt. That seems like a no brainer, but I’m not a vegan...
and meat...
Mostly gatherers...
That makes sense.
Any human who has ever hunted knows that 100% of the surviving animal kingdom is 100% committed to the goal of staying alive.
Fishing, spearing, and netting is probably the most efficient human method for acquiring animal protein.
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