7 CHAPTER 1 LAST HUNTERS, FIRST FARMERS Animals feed, man eats; the man of intellect alone knows how to eat. Anthelme Brilllat Savarin (1755–1826) Acorns were good until bread was found. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) OUR ANCESTORS began the deliberate and systematic hunting of ani- mals some 700,000 years ago in Africa. Before this their diet had been based mostly on plant foods, occasionally enlivened with meat from scav- enged carcasses – other animals’ leftovers. But by the time we became Homo sapiens – Our Kind – which happened in eastern Africa some 100,000 years ago, we were hunters, not scavengers – opportunistic hunters who apparently became so good at it that those ancestors put a considerable dent in their food supply. Around 80,000 years ago they began to radiate out of northeast Africa to western Asia, where they once again encountered plenty of protein on the hoof, and in this larger world they mustered the momen- tum to out-compete all others of the genus Homo that had preceded them. This was the modern human species, which began colonizing Australia around 50,000 years ago, moved from the Asian steppes into Europe from around 40,000 years ago, and into the Americas 15,000 to 30,000 years ago. And it was in these wanderings that the progressively larger brains of humans gave birth to progressively better tools and weapons and increas- ing social organization. 8 A Movable Feast There is evidence of specialized hunting strategies by 20,000 years ago that allowed our big-brained ancestors to consistently bag really big game. In the middle latitudes of Eurasia large gregarious herbivores such as horses, wooly mammoths, reindeer, and bison were victims of these strate- gies. Elsewhere the prey consisted of buffalo, wild pig, aurochs, and camel. Large animal carcasses had numerous advantages over plant foods. A day of foraging for plants produced the food value of just one small animal, whereas by eating animals humans took in a highly concentrated food that contained all the essential amino acids. Moreover one large animal could feed an entire band, and food sharing seems to have been the norm for hunter-gatherers. 1 Others of Our Kind made a living from the water. Ancient rock art the world over depicts fi sh, although it is relatively silent about how they were caught. Probably, until late in the Paleolithic – when bows, arrows, and harpoons appeared, large animals were on their way to extinction, and fl imsy dugout canoes and reed rafts were replaced by more reliable watercraft – fi sh procurement was largely limited to rivers. There fi sh could be taken with clubs, spears, nets made of twisted fi ber, and lines (the fi sh-gorge, a kind of hook, dates from around 27,000 years ago) often after damming the water. Then, too, hunter-gatherers were surely familiar with the annual “runs” of various anadromous species such as salmon that swim from the ocean into and up ancestral rivers to spawn. 2 The exploitation of coastal, as opposed to riverine environments, involved not so much fi sh, but shellfi sh – mussels, oysters, cockles, scallops, whelks, clams and the like – whose shells comprise the myriad middens of both Paleolithic and Neolithic origin found on seacoasts and rivers around the world. The succulent nuggets within these shells represented easily col- lected, high-quality protein (and also bait for fi shing) – the drawback being that the food came in small increments so that large-scale gathering efforts were required. Sea slugs and sea anemones were also collected (still eaten by the French), as were lampreys – too many are famously said to have killed England’s Henry II in 1189. Inland, mollusks such as snails also offered a living to gatherers – their discarded shells contributing to still other middens. Many coastal and inland middens indicate intensive activity during the early years of the Neolithic – perhaps another indication of big game dis- appearing? In any event, collecting mollusks must have been a pleasant alternative to the rigors (and dangers) of the hunt or labor in the fi elds. So Last Hunters, First Farmers 9 too was the collection of health-giving algae – excellent sources of vita- mins, minerals, even fats. 3 Perhaps the only reason that beaches were not jammed was that the coasts could not provide enough food for everyone. Giant sea turtles were another vital marine resource for many, although reliable watercraft were required to exploit their eggs, which were often deposited on uninhabited offshore islands. 4 The eggs, of all of the six or seven species (the number is in dispute) of these giant marine reptiles have long been good food for humans but the sea turtle most favored for its veal-like meat is the green turtle ( Chelonia mydas) – named green not for its color but for the green gelatinous substance found underneath its lower shell, called “calipee.” When scraped out, calipee is the base for the justly famous green turtle soup. 5 Even though sea turtles are easy to catch when out of the water, turtle fl esh – but not turtle eggs – is avoided by many around the world. For others, however, like the coastal Miskito population of Nicaragua, whose home coasts are one of the principal feeding grounds for green turtles, they are a staple. 6 Many of these foods, including turtle eggs, were eaten raw throughout much of humankind’s time on earth and some still are, like oysters, clams, mussels, fi sh, and fi sh eggs (caviar and its pretenders). In Japan eating raw fi sh (called sashimi since the seventeenth century) has been traditional since ancient times. 7 Meats, too, are still eaten raw, such as hams (although cured or smoked) and beef (as steak tartare and carpaccio). Insects consumed, sometimes raw and sometimes cooked, served as another important food source for hunter-gatherers and their descendents. To name but a few of the many more than one thousand species that have fi gured into the practice of entomophagy: North American natives ate the larvae of moths, grasshoppers, crickets, and caterpillars; in Mexico several hundred species of insects, including caterpillars, dragonfl ies, ants, bees, and wasps, are still eaten; and in South America giant queen ants are not only thought tasty but are depended on as an aphrodisiac as well. 8 In the Old World the ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed grasshoppers and large grubs, and European peasants continued to make insects impor- tant sources of protein until the nineteenth century. In Africa entomophagy is still practiced on a large scale with caterpillars (“the snack that crawls”) a widespread favorite. Locusts, termites, and palm grubs are also commonly eaten. Until recently locusts were regularly popped into human mouths in South Asia and the Middle East. Beetle consumption has long been popu- lar in Southeast Asia, where ant larvae and pupae are not only regularly 10 A Movable Feast consumed but also canned and exported to spe- cialty food outlets, as is bee brood. Silkworm pupae are shipped to the United States from Korea and regularly consumed in China. The Japanese are fond of wasp pupae and larvae, and locusts are regularly consumed through- out East Asia. In Australia the black honey ant, a special kind of bee, and witchetty and bardi grubs (the larvae of a moth and a beetle, respec- tively) were all local delicacies for hunter-gatherers that have recently found their way into restaurant menus – a modern reminder that these were all important Aborigine foods, along with moths collected during migrations. 9 Vegetables and fruits comprise other groups of foods often eaten raw. Lettuce has been fried and boiled, but as a rule it is not. One does not say raw oranges to differentiate them from cooked varieties because they are seldom cooked – a good thing, too, because heat kills the vitamin C they contain. But, this having been said, although numerous food items have been, and still are, eaten raw, cooked food is generally the best tast- ing and the best for us. Heat destroys toxins in plants and unwanted wildlife in meat and fi sh such as worms and a gamut of smaller patho- gens. 10 It increases the nutritional value of many foods, makes others more digestible by the denaturation of protein and the gelation of starch, even makes some inedible foods edible. Cooking softens tough foods by breaking down animal and vegetable fi bers while simultaneously liberat- ing protein and carbohydrate materials – indeed, starch requires heat to release its sugars. 11 The domestication of fi re, then, was not only the fi rst but the most important of all the domestications that humankind has managed. Although its permanent acquisition is told in a thousand myths and legends, gener- ally of divine gift-giving, in reality fi re must have been acquired only to be lost again countless times over millennia as (often painful) trial and error led from the capture of naturally occurring fi re (fi re collecting) to its preservation in embers that could later be fanned into fl ame. Tamed fi re (fi re production) was probably initially employed for illumination, to frighten away dangerous carnivores, and for hunting rather than for cooking. However as cooking became routine, more reliable tools for fi re kindling such as fl ints, fi re drills, and other friction devices came about, and the art Last Hunters, First Farmers 11 of making charcoal was developed to fuel human progress from the Stone Age to the Iron Age to the Backyard Barbecue Age. Cooking almost certainly came about by accident, and one suspects that there were an infi nitesimal number of accidents that called human attention to the process, such as the fanciful account of Charles Lamb. Appearing in an 1823 issue of London Magazine, the essay posited a litter of piglets trapped in a burning dwelling in China. In the aftermath of the fi re the swineherd noticed the appetizing odor of roasted pig, and tasted the crisp fl esh. Soon pigs were being immolated in other buildings delib- erately set on fi re until, fi nally, it dawned on the arsonists that the cooking fuel need not be an edifi ce. 12 With apologies to Lamb, however, cooking was underway and fi re had been domesticated long before the pig entered this state. Some credit Peking man, a hominid living around a half million years ago with the fi rst use of fi re. 13 Others have placed the event in Africa some million years earlier, but few dispute that fi re has been the property of almost all humans for the last 100,000 years. It is true that earthen hearths baked by repeated fi res were not numerous until around 40,000 years ago, but this does not mean that fi re was not used with regularity. Rather it merely reminds us that hunter-gatherer bands regularly changed their address, and there seems little doubt that at this point humans had graduated from fi re collecting to fi re producing. 14 Presumably roasting foods directly over the fl ame was the fi rst method used. But they were also steamed in bags made with skins and stomachs suspended over the fi re. Charred fl at stones from ancient sites suggest that grilling may have taken place, and hot pebbles and stones were placed in wooden vessels for making porridges whereas holes dug in the ground served as ovens for baking roots and tubers. Pit-cooking a variety of foods came next, and the rudiments of cookery magic were established – a magic that became even more powerful with the use of pottery vessels that began in the Middle East around 8,000 years ago (earlier in Japan and China), which simplifi ed boiling, even promoted frying. 15 Grains that had previously been toasted could now be boiled, and this, coupled with their domestication – a procedure that involved the selection and propagation of desirable traits along with the elimination of those deemed undesirable – made them more digestible. Interestingly, regularly cooking foods promoted a substantial reduction in human tooth size. We simply no longer needed large teeth for tearing at raw meat or chewing tough fi brous plants. 12 A Movable Feast But fi re served humans in many ways besides cooking. With it they could begin rearranging environments to suit themselves, clearing land to stimulate the growth of wild foods and opening landscapes to encourage the proliferation of food animals, that could be later driven by fi re to a place chosen to harvest them. In addition, fi re stimulated the growth of grasses – a kind of bait for herbivores. 16 Fire, as a weapon in the arsenal of early humans, was useful for driving away unfriendly animals too dangerous to spear (especially in the dark), but more importantly was applied to cornering game, even driving large numbers off cliffs. Other weapons entered that arsenal over time such as the atlatl and bow and arrow. These were more powerful than the spear – so much so that they confused the instinctive fl ight distance of prey – the range that an animal will permit a predator to approach before fl eeing. Such technologies, in turn, promoted increasingly sophisticated hunting strategies that took a quantum leap forward with the transformation of the wolf into a hunting dog around 16000 BCE . As Alfred Crosby points out, humans were now substituting cultural evolution for genetic evolution 17 – a substitution that in progressively removing humans from nature’s rhythm was fraught with myriad consequences. One of these consequences, not long in coming, was to thrust humankind onto the horns of the Malthusian dilemma. Increased food production, coupled with cooking, delivered more in the way of whole protein to the young, which ensured that more individuals survived to adulthood. Yet as humans grew more numerous, this meant more pressure on the large game animals (megafauna) they fed on. These dwindled in numbers and in the end became extinct as several genera and numerous species disappeared. Human populations were expanding to the outer limits of a food supply now diminishing in the face of the planet’s champion predator, and – to spread the blame – in the face of climatic change as the Pleistocene epoch came to an end. One way out of the dilemma was for people to become more celibate, but this was apparently not an option for Our Kind, who dug in to invent agriculture instead. They could not have realized that they were trading in a life of ease (contemporary hunter-gatherers work only about a dozen or two hours weekly to get food together and to make, maintain, and repair weapons and implements) for one of back-breaking labor from sunup to sundown with a narrow-minded concentration on a single crop. 18 And they had no way of knowing that they were exchanging good health for famine Last Hunters, First Farmers 13 and nutritional diseases, not to mention swapping plenty of elbowroom for crowded living conditions – conditions that helped open the door to plague and pestilence. But even had people been more prescient, would population pressure and resource depletion have left them with any other choice? Or had lead- ers recognized that settled agriculture would increase their control over resources and consequently enhance their own personal power? Or was it simply that people, previously confi ned to remote bands, began to enjoy the excitement of living in seasonal settlements and converted them into permanent villages? No matter what the precipitating factors, the people who made the transition from foraging to farming only gradually discov- ered the pitfalls because the transition was a leisurely one. It had its beginnings around 17000 BCE , several millennia before the one million years of the climactic tumult of the Pleistocene shaded into the Holocene. It was then that wild emmer and einkorn grains were fi rst harvested in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, as were broad beans in southwestern Asia, and a couple of kinds of broad beans may have even been domesticated in northeast Thailand. Eleven thousand years ago is the date generally assigned to the start of the Holocene, which saw the begin- ning of agriculture and is the age we live in today. Such early agricultural experiments were stimulated by the changing climate at the close of the last great Ice Age. It was a gradual, but cata- clysmic, process that lasted for nearly 100 centuries and ended only at the start of the Copper Age. Rising seas, caused by melting glaciers, exacer- bated the population problem by inundating land bridges to those New Worlds of the planet that had been safety valves for excessive numbers. However, left behind in compensation for those not following the animals retreating with the glaciers was a stable climate favorable to the spread of wild cereal plants and, consequently, also favorable to the multiplication of herbivorous animals. That stable climate has continued to persist for the last 10,000 years during which the human diet that had leaned heavily on animal protein tilted back towards plants – and this despite the domes- tication of barnyard animals. 14 CHAPTER 2 BUILDING THE BARNYARD There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a fl ash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mastery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul. John Ruskin HUNTING WAS THE MAJOR preoccupation of people everywhere around 18,000 years ago and there were plenty of caribou and bison to be hunted – these animals still staring out at us from cave paintings at Lascaux in southwestern France and Altamira in Spain. But over millennia, as temperatures grew warmer, herds were nudged northward. The caribou, probably the most important game animal in Europe, had long sustained humans and some followed the animals. Others, however, faced up to the problem by taking charge of the caribou, leading them between winter and summer feeding grounds, and harvesting individuals as needed for food. 1 Does this mean that animal domestication preceded that of plants? Not really. These animals were probably no more domesticated than the wild grasses being harvested at the time. Most experts are convinced that domesticated plants came before domesticated animals, save the dog, and that the former were vital to the domestication of the latter. Climatic change at the tail end of the Ice Age produced forests on what had been bare steppes and crafted a habitat of wild plants that fed smaller creatures such as deer, hare, boar, and various birds. 2 Sheltered in the new forests, they began to proliferate as the larger animals either relocated or Building the Barnyard 15 passed into extinction. At fi rst they were merely new prey for human hunt- ers, but later on many of them, especially those that were gregarious and herd-oriented, became our domesticated animals. 3 Domestication, among other things, means to change genetically. These changes involve physical ones to be sure, but also behavior changes such as a loss of defensive alertness and fearfulness, along with relaxed territorial attitudes. Physical changes include alterations in size. Skeletal elements and teeth change as well; those of domesticated animals becoming mor- phologically distinct from those of their wild ancestors. Despite such blatant modifi cations, however, dates indicating when the various barnyard animals underwent domestication remain hazy because it was generally a very lengthy transformation. It began with people who had settled into sedentary agriculture and, anxious to ensure good harvests, cap- tured animals for sacrifi cing to gods they hoped would do the ensuring. As animals accumulated, some taming took place and then, ultimately, breeding. The places where such domestication occurred are similarly obscured because of multiple domestications – and domestications in which the ani- mals may have cooperated because of a need to adapt in a world made increasingly uncertain by growing human domination. 4 DOG However, the fi rst animal to be domesticated, the dog (Canis familiaris) did not fi t this pattern. Taming and breeding transformed the Asian wolf into a dog long before the invention of agriculture – around 16,000 years ago toward the end of the Paleolithic – and at about this time fossil remains from Iraq indicate that dogs had been put to work tracking game (the many dog varieties are mostly a nineteenth-century phenomena). 5 If the hypothesis is correct that humans and wolves – both pack hunters – had joined together to pool their respective hunting skills, then domestication seems a natural outcome of such a partnership. 6 Wolf pups that lost par- ents and were raised by humans were imprinted with substitute family leaders. Those animals displaying the most tameness were bred with one another, and the domestication process was underway. 7 And there were doubtless multiple domestications. Dogs were in the British Isles around 7300 BCE ; the Swiss lake dwellers had dogs by 6000 BCE ; and sometime between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago dogs walked into the Americas with human masters and rode in the canoes of Pacifi c voyagers. 8 16 A Movable Feast However, this union of humans and dogs did not, and does not, preclude the dog from becoming dinner, and probably on occasion vice-versa. In fact, dogs, along with pigs and chickens, most likely served as portable food on many such long distance treks. 9 SHEEP AND GOATS Wild goats and sheep, captured while munching on crops, have long led the list of animals domesticated in the early Neolithic. In fact, such crops may have doubled as lures to draw the animals to places where they could be easily killed (garden hunting). But many were also captured, again for sac- rifi cial purposes. Taming came next and then, with domestication, average size began to decrease. Evidence dating from 9000 BCE of goat domestica- tion (from Capra aegagrus) and sheep domestication (from Ovis orientalis) has been found in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Southwest Asia (in the eastern sector of the Fertile Crescent). The domestication process was hurried along after humans learned to herd these animals. The herders led them to food, protected them from predatory animals, and looked after the newborn. In short, the animals became dependent on humans. 10 Domesticated goats (C. bircus) thrive in a subhumid environment and achieved a vital place in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Mediterranean countries like Greece and Turkey, where summer drought conditions could make the production of enough fodder for cattle prob- lematical. 11 The domestication of sheep (O. aries) included selection for “hornlessness” (a process not yet complete), wool fi bers (their ancestors were hairy), and fat tails (a delicacy in the Mid- dle East). Sheep are more uniformly spread across the Old World than goats, but the milk of both becomes cheese, yogurt, and butter (ewe’s milk stars in such illustrious cheeses as the Roquefort of France, the Romano of Italy, the Feta of Greece, and the Manchego of Spain). 12 PIG In a recent development the pig (Sus scrofa) has been put forward as a challenger of sheep and goats for the distinction of being the oldest domesticated animal after the dog. In part, this is because of multiple, [...]... consumption – never again achieved the popularity it had with hunter-gathers and, in fact, most people have also avoided the consumption of equine relatives such as the mule and donkey However, although farmers not eating their horsepower is understandable, the avoidance of mare’s milk is less so, the Mongols being notable exceptions Such reluctance was probable tied to religious hostility to hippophagy... other non-Buddhist butchers do the killing (and are believed damned for the transgression) Consequently, practically everybody eats yak flesh – fresh, salted, smoked, and especially dried.34 CARIBOU The last four-legged animal to enter domestication in the Old World was the “reindeer,” the domesticated caribou Caribou (Rangifer tarandus) seem to have been the most important game animal in much of the . 7 CHAPTER 1 LAST HUNTERS, FIRST FARMERS Animals feed, man eats; the man of intellect alone knows how. the rigors (and dangers) of the hunt or labor in the fi elds. So Last Hunters, First Farmers 9 too was the collection of health-giving algae – excellent