The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Jelmer Eerkens, University of California, Davis, CA, USA Founding Editor: Roy S. Dickens, Jr. Late of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA For more information about this series, please visit the Series Homepage at: www.springer.com/series/6090 John D. Speth The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting Protein, Fat, or Politics? John D. Speth Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan 4013 Museums Building Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1079 USA [email protected] ISSN 1568-2722 ISBN 978-1-4419-6732-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4419-6733-6 (eBook) ISBN 978-1-4614-2674-5 (softcover) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6733-6 Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2010929855 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2010, First softcover printing 2012 This work is subject to copyright. 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Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science + Business Media (www.springer.com) To my family—Lisa, Larrea, and Robin—for their patience, good-natured teasing, and obvious amusement as they queried me about what bizarre topic I happened to be dabbling in that day—Why do elephants have such big brains? Why does chimpanzee breast milk have so little protein? Why are human babies born with more body fat than baby seals? Judging by their ear-to-ear grins, I know my kids are convinced that archaeology must be the weirdest field on the planet…. to the Garnseys, Elmer (Skip) and Jane, the Slash/G Cattle Company, and a lot of yellow paint, where all of this began so long ago…. to Kate Spielmann, whose insights into Pueblo hunting and protein needs were critical catalysts in the development of these ideas…. to Glynn Isaac, who invited me to East Africa “to see for myself”…. to Aram Yengoyan, who once quipped: “Speth thinks culture is nothing but verbalized fat.” Well, maybe…. and to my parents, Fred and Lottie, who let me follow my dreams, even if it meant never truly climbing out of the sand box…. Foreword For more than a century, conventional anthropological wisdom has assigned ­big-game hunting a central role in human evolution. As the story generally goes, men’s adoption of this practice gave access to a rich, readily available, yet previ- ously untapped source of subsistence. This, in turn, favored the emergence of nuclear families as units of common economic and reproductive interest, spreading the responsibility for the provisioning of offspring beyond mothers, reducing the demands of the food quest, and enabling women to bear and raise more children. It further selected for a pattern of delayed maturity that allowed more time for learn- ing, ultimately leading to the development of peculiarly human cognitive and behavioral capabilities. In short, it was meat that made us human – or so the “Man the Hunter” model still widely encountered in college textbooks and popular media would lead one to believe. Over the last four decades, this basic idea has been deployed in diverse, often mutually conflicting evolutionary scenarios, some envisioning the presence of nuclear families headed by big-game-hunting, offspring-provisioning fathers among the earliest representatives of genus Homo more than two million years ago, others suggesting that this same pattern emerged much later, coincident with and largely responsible for the spread of “anatomically modern” Homo sapiens beyond Africa beginning only about 50,000 years ago. Depending on the specific archaeo- logical data cited, each of these scenarios and others as well can be made to sound equally plausible, in most cases due to the persistent appeal of the underlying prem- ise – meat is and always has been good and good for you – and because the bones of large animals figure so prominently in so much of the archaeological record. In the important book at hand, anthropological archaeologist John Speth gives us two reasons to be skeptical of this received wisdom. First, drawing on a steadily increasing body of quantitatively sophisticated ethnographic work among tradition- ally oriented hunter–gatherers, Speth shows that big-game hunting is often less than the best approach to the problem of feeding one’s family. Even in environments where large animals are abundant, the short term, day-to-day risk of failing to take one can frequently be quite high. Even when a hunter succeeds, the chances are good that most of the meat so acquired will go to others, outside his own family, with no guar- antee of timely, commensurate reciprocity when those “others” ­themselves do well at vii viii Foreword the game. Take away the weapons – bows and arrows, atlatls and javelins – that allow traditional hunters to succeed as often as they do but that have been available for less than a quarter of the time genus Homo has existed and the prospects for securing a reliable nutrient stream based on big-game hunting become even less promising. As Speth points out, this same ethnographic research further shows that hunters truly concerned with feeding their wives and children would generally do better by target- ing a broader range of prey, including small game and plant foods that are often more reliably acquired and always more easily defended from the claims of non-family members. The fact that traditionally oriented hunters so often focus on big game to the near-complete exclusion of these alternative food sources strongly suggests the pursuit of some other goal. Speth’s second point, one that he himself has developed extensively over the last three decades, is that meat isn’t always and everywhere good and good for you. His survey of the historical and recent nutritional literatures on the perils of heavy reliance on animal protein clearly indicates the existence of surprisingly strict limits on human ability to subsist on a heavy meat diet. The “obvious” archaeologi- cal evidence of past pursuit and consumption of large animal prey does not neces- sarily mean that big game were a major component, let alone the mainstay of early human diets. It almost certainly wasn’t the resource that fed the increase in brain size, drove the changes in cognitive and behavioral capabilities, or encouraged the development of patterns in social organization that distinguish us so markedly from our nearest living great ape relatives and our common primate ancestors. Like many good pieces of science, Speth’s book not only challenges long- standing paradigms on the basis of emerging knowledge but also identifies new and important problems for future research. If offspring provisioning often isn’t the main goal of big-game hunting among modern foragers and wasn’t in many cases in the past as well, how do we account for its prominence either as a modern practice or as reflected in the archaeological record? If meat consumption didn’t provoke the evolution of our distinctive morphologies, capabilities, and patterns of behavior, what did? Speth’s informative, highly readable work throws these ques- tions into sharp relief and encourages the next generation of anthropological archaeologists to pursue them aggressively. University of Utah, James F. O’Connell Salt Lake City, Utah February, 2010 Preface Regardless of what particular academic track you may have followed as a college undergraduate, whether it was paleoanthropology, archaeology, biology, geosci- ences, or even premed, at some point you probably learned about the earlier stages of human evolution and the pivotal role played by big-game hunting (preceded perhaps by a “stage” of big-game scavenging) in transforming a bipedal ape-like ancestor into what we are today. Over the years, more and more evidence for our ancestral interest in hunting and meat-eating has accumulated and by now few would question the importance of hunting in our heritage. Hand-in-hand with Paleolithic (“Stone Age”) flaked stone tools, we find dense concentrations of broken-up animal bones, often the remains of more than one species that some ancient hominin (roughly synonymous with hominid) had transported to a single locality. And many of the bones bear unmistakable traces of human butchery in the form of cutmarks made by stone tools when the carcasses were dismembered and defleshed, as well as impact fractures produced when hominins broke open the limb bones to retrieve their content of fatty marrow and, in more recent sites, even occasional charred bones, the tell-tale evidence that early humans had begun cooking their food.