Kriemhild Conee Ornelas

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.

Africa South from the Sahara

Describing the principal sources of food for the inhabitants of Africa south from the Sahara is a relatively easy task. Most diets are dominated by products made from a single staple crop, and there are not all that many of them. Maize, sorghums, pearl or bulrush millet, and rice are the prominent grains, and cassava, yams, and bananas or plantains account for most of the vegetatively propagated varieties. Furthermore, their general geographies can be explained, for the most part, by annual totals and seasonality of rainfall. For example, near the dry margins of cropping, pearl millet makes its greatest dietary contribution, whereas the equatorial zone is where bananas and plantains come to the fore. Even adding in the role played by livestock, one that varies from insignificant to crucial, does not overly complicate the picture. Among farmers, fowl are fairly ubiquitous, while sheep, goats, and cattle are kept wherever diseases, especially sleeping sickness, do not prohibit them. When aridity intervenes to make crop cultivation too hazardous to rely upon, the herding of camels or cattle becomes the primary subsistence activity. The problems come when attempting to go much beyond this level of generality. There is a plethora of other foods that are important to diets, including those from wild sources, and matters get even more difficult to sort out when issues of history, culture, and nutritional adequacy must be addressed. The region’s human diversity is enormous, and most food systems display a complex interweaving of influences, ranging from the distant past to the present. Unfortunately, trying to understand what has happened through time is hindered by a dearth of information. The written record is sparse before the twentieth century, and archaeology,so far, has produced very few dates. As a result, temporal insights often must rely on somewhat less precise sources of information, such as paleobotany, historic and comparative linguistics, and cultural anthropology.