John D. Speth

Energy source, protein metabolism, and hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies

During late winter and spring, hunter-gatherers in temperate, subarctic, and arctic environments often relied on diets that provided marginal or inadequate caloric intakes. During such periods, particularly when stored food supplies dwindled or were used up entirely, lean meat became the principal source of energy. Nutritional problems associated with high-protein, low-energy diets are discussed. These problems include elevated metabolic rates, with correspondingly higher caloric requirements, and deficiencies in essential fatty acids. The relative benefits of adding fat or carbohydrate to a diet of lean meat are evaluated in light of the protein-sparing capacities of these two nutrients. Experimental data indicate that although both enhance high-protein, low-energy diets, carbohydrate is a more effective supplement than fat. Given the nutritional inadequacies of a lean-meat diet, the paper concludes with a discussion of alternative subsistence strategies that increase the availability of carbohydrate or fat at the critical time of year.

Early hominid hunting and scavenging: the role of meat as an energy source

Abstract Perspectives have shifted recently from the traditional view that early hominids were hunters to one which now sees them as opportunistic scavengers. However, both views share the common underlying nutritional assumption that meat inevitably provides a “high quality” food that will be incorporated into human diet more or less to the extent that animals are avaible and accessible. This paper argues that meat may actually have been a relatively marginal source of sustenance for early hominids, because physiological limits to total protein intake (plant and animal), scarcity of fat in most African ungulates, comparatively high levels of protein in many plant foods, and the inability of early hominids to extract lipids from the cancellous tissue of bones, acted together to maintain their total meat intakes at modest levels, particularly during seasonal or inter-annual periods of resource stress.

Early hominid subsistence strategies in seasonal habitats

Nutritional arguments concerning the role of lean meat in the diet of hunters and gatherers in highly seasonal temperate and northern latitudes are discussed. These arguments suggest that high protein intakes may be detrimental to hunter-gatherers at these latitudes during seasonally recurrent periods of weight loss and inadequate total calorie intake. It is argued that contemporary environments in eastern and southern Africa also display marked seasonality (in rainfall) that produces similar periods of resource stress and weight loss in both hunter-gatherers and higher primates. Given comparable seasonality in African Plio-Pleistocene environments, it is suggested that early hominids also faced seasonal resource stress, to which they too would have responded by avoiding high intakes of lean meat. Thus, while faunal remains from Plio-Pleistocene rainy season sites are likely to reflect hominid procurement of meat (by either scavenging or hunting), and hence should provide clear insights into the role of animal protein in early hominid diet, bones from height-of-dry-season sites are more likely to reflect food-getting activities under conditions of resource stress, when acquisition of fat rather than meat may have been more critical. As a consequence, faunal remains from height-of-dry-season sites may tell us little about the overall importance of meat in early hominid diet, and may introduce serious bias into our reconstructions and interpretations, unless we find ways to determine site seasonality and take into account the nutritional consequences of different energy sources under conditions of stress.

Seasonality, Resource Stress, and Food Sharing in So-Called "Egalitarian" Foraging Societies

Abstract Most discussions of food sharing among so-called “egalitarian” hunters and gatherers implicitly assume that, because all adult members of a group participate in the network of sharing, all must therefore be receiving portions of more or less equivalent nutritional worth. This assumption is questioned and five basic points are raised: (1) because fat is not uniformly distributed over the carcass of an animal and because it is depleted sequentially when an animal is stressed, certain individuals may receive nutritionally inferior portions of meat, with potentially serious health consequences for the recipients during seasonal or interannual periods when other food resources are in short supply; (2) even when sharing is quantitatively and nutritionally equitable, food taboos may block certain individuals from access to meat and/or fat, particularly children, women at critical stages in their reproductive life, and the elderly (however, in the case of pregnant women, such food taboos and seemingly inequitable sharing practices may have positive as well as negative consequences for the health and survivorship of the fetus or newborn infant by keeping maternal protein consumption below about 20% of total calories and by reducing the mothers risk of exposure to potentially teratogenic substances that may accumulate in animal tissues); (3) skilled hunters may acquire nutritionally more valuable parts than do other males by “snacking” at kill sites and through differential sharing; (4) food-sharing practices and food taboos vary widely among foragers, and this diversity may contribute to observed differences among groups in fertility and infant mortality patterns; and (5) the focus of anthropologists on the sharing of food, especially meat, as opposed to the sharing of a broad spectrum of social, political, economic, and sexual rights and privileges, is an overly narrow and potentially misleading perspective. In closing, the paper briefly discusses the utility of the term “egalitarian,” concluding that the concept, by conflating ideology with actual behavior, may obscure rather than enhance our understanding of the origins and adaptations of foraging societies.

Middle Paleolithic Settlement Patterns in the Levant

Drawing on a variety of lithic and faunal data from Hayonim, Kebara, Amud, and other well-documented sites in the Levant and adjacent areas, as well as information on numbers of sites, intensity of occupations, and internal structure of occupations, this paper explores broad changes in the nature of settlement patterns over the roughly 200,000 years of the Levantine Middle Paleolithic. The most readily visible differences between the early and late Mousterian are about numbers of people on the landscape—rates and timing of visitation and, perhaps, the sizes of the social groups present. From the point of view of site structure, we see substantive contrasts between Hayonim and Kebara caves and the successive phases of the Mousterian that they represent. Hayonim seems to be characterized by redundant, spot-specific use of domestic space, whereas Kebara displays a more rigidly partitioned and persistent spatial pattern, probably in response to higher rates of debris generation and more frequent visitation. Convincing indications of more people in the later Mousterian appear as two spatial aspects of the

The role of platform angle and core size in hard-hammer percussion flaking

ABSTRACTSteel balls were dropped on to massive equilateral and right-angle glass prisms in order to investigate the effects of varying platform angle and prism size on the shape and size of hard-hammer percussion flakes. Ball diamėter, drop height, and impact angle were held Constant. For a given platform angle [measured between striking platform and exterior surface of prism or flake], a decrease in the size of the prism is accompanied by a decrease in terminal flake length, terminal flake width, and terminal platform thickness, and by an increase in the minimum ball diameter required to remove a flake. For prisms of comparable size, a decrease in platform angle is accompanied by a decrease in terminal flake length and in the average values of the length/width, length/platform thickness and width/platform thickness ratios. A decrease in platform angle is also accompanied by a marked increase in the width of the zone along the edge of the prism within which flakes can be produced. Thus, the larger the pla...

Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics?

I have pulled together a variety of information concerning protein as a nutrient, focusing particularly on protein’s costs and potentially undesirable effects when consumed in large amounts. Intakes of protein (plant and animal combined) above about ∼200–250 g per day can lead to weight loss, lethargy, and weakness, and, if sustained long enough, death. Such intakes can also be detrimental, even toxic, to the fetus and nursing newborn, lowering birth weight and increasing the chances of cognitive disorders, morbidity, and perinatal mortality. Because of its high-specific dynamic action (SDA), protein is also an inefficient way to provide energy to the body, whether for general metabolic needs or specifically for fueling the brain. It is also not the ideal nutrient for brain growth, which requires considerable inputs of fatty acids, particularly the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Aside from brain, the meat and organs from wild ungulates, African or otherwise, are limited, costly, and inefficient sources of DHA (see data in Crawford et al. 1969; Cordain et al. 2001, 2002b).

Middle Paleolithic Large-Mammal Hunting in the Southern Levant

I examine the ungulate remains from late Middle Paleolithic (MP) Kebara Cave (Israel) and offer evidence pointing to overhunting by Levantine Neanderthals toward the close of the MP: (1) the frequency of red deer and aurochs declined over the course of the sequence, largely independent of major fluctuations in the Levantine speleothem climate record; (2) the proportion of juvenile gazelles and fallow deer increased in the younger levels, as did the proportion of young adults; (3) upward in the sequence, hunters brought back fewer gazelle and fallow deer heads, suggesting that they either had to travel farther to hunt, or that they took many more animals per trip, perhaps in cooperative kills. Taken together, these observations, in conjunction with evidence from other sites in the region, suggest that the resource intensification characteristic of the “Broad Spectrum Revolution” (BSR), may already have begun in the latter part of the MP.

Arizona Bifaces of Wyoming Chert

ABSTRACTSeven bifaces from sites in Arizona and one from New Mexico are so similar in material, form, and workmanship that a single source is inferred. The distinctive raw material is tentatively identified as “Tiger Chert” from southwestern Wyoming. These finds suggest widespread exchange of large bifaces among the pueblos of the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, and a previously unrecognized contact to the north.

The Role of Hunting and Scavenging in Neandertal Procurement Strategies

This paper has two principal goals. The first is to demonstrate through faunal analysis that the Neandertals who inhabited Kebara Cave (Israel) between about 65,000 and 47,000 years ago were effective hunters, repeatedly targeting the prime adults of species as large or dangerous as aurochs and wild boar. The second goal is to show that the Kebara hominids, at least during the seasons of the year when they occupied the cave, did not rely on scavenging as a major component of their animal procurement practices. In so doing, we contribute to the continuing, and often contentious, debate about modern human origins by showing that, at least in these critical behavioral dimensions, the Kebara case reveals nothing demonstrably “archaic” about the procurement practices of Levantine Neandertals. The origins of anatomically modern humans (henceforth AMH), and the role of Neandertals in human evolution, remain fascinating and hotly debated issues (e.g., Mellars and Stringer 1989; Trinkaus 1989; Wolpoff 1989a,b; Aitken et al. 1992; Bar-Yosef 1992; Frayer et al. 1993; Stringer and Gamble 1993; Templeton 1993; Trinkaus and Shipman 1993; Nitecki and Nitecki 1994; Klein 1995). On one side of this debate are the protagonists of the so-called “Out of Africa” model or “Eve Hypothesis” (see discussions in Stringer 1989; Frayer et al. 1993; Mellars 1996; see also Ayala 1995; Templeton and Ayala 1996). Proponents of this view, citing mitochondrial DNA evidence from modern populations as well as the human fossil record, maintain that AMH arose about 150,000–200,000 years ago in Africa and then spread throughout the Old World, completely replacing Nean-