Kenneth F. Kiple

History, Diet, and Hunter-Gatherers

In the years since 1960 there has been a dramatic change in our perception of the diet, nutrition, and health of “hunter-gatherers,” who constitute the world’s smallest, most “primitive,” and presumably oldest-style societies. The Hobbesian perspective (Hobbes 1950, original 1651), which assumes that malnutrition, disease, and hardship characterize primitive life – a view that prevailed among scholars for the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries – has been challenged during recent decades by a large series of new observations and a new theoretical paradigm. Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers Studies of African hunter-gatherers by Richard Lee (1968, see also 1969) and James Woodburn (1968), in the influential anthology Man the Hunter (Lee and DeVore 1968), suggested that far from living on the edge of starvation, primitive hunter-gatherers frequently enjoyed not only adequate and well-balanced nutrition but also a relatively light workload. In his analysis of the diet and workload of the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, Lee (1968, 1969) noted that the San diet consisted of an eclectic, yet selective, collection of wild foods – mostly (about 80 percent) vegetable, eaten fresh. He found that the San consumed 23 of 85 plant species that they knew to be edible in their environment and 17 of 55 edible animal species. He calculated that for a relatively small investment of time, San hunter-gatherers obtained an adequate and well-balanced diet. By obtaining chemical analyses of their native foods and estimating the quantity of each food consumed by every individual, he was able to show that theoretically, each individual in the group received sufficient protein, vitamins, and minerals. In contrast to modern diets, what seemed the “limiting” factor – the element in the San diet most likely to be short or lacking – was the number of calories it delivered. Lee estimated the caloric intake at about 2,140 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day during a season of the year that he considered neither the richest nor the poorest.