Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
concluded that the high regard for meat in foraging societies is nothing but a mis-
conception created by ethnographers, and that the real quest was for fat.
There is no need to go to this extreme in order to coni rm a common preference
for killing fatty animals, including underground mammals (antbears, badgers, por-
cupines) and, once the adequate weapons and hunting strategies were in place, such
large herbivores as mammoths, aurochs, bison, eland, or elks. And eating high-fat
foods was a metabolic imperative in the Arctic (Cachel 1997), a requirement that
was easier to satisfy thanks to the abundant insulating fat in marine mammals (seals,
whales). But the environment often hindered the quest for fatty meat or made very
little of it available. Contrary to the common perception, species-rich tropical forests
were an inferior place to hunt.
Bailey et al. (1989) suggested that perhaps no foragers could have ever lived in
tropical rain forests independent of cultivated foods. They modii ed this conclusion
in the light of archaeological evidence from Malaysia and conceded that environ-
ments with high densities of sago and pigs could be exceptions (Bailey and Headland
1991). But it is obvious that in contrast to grasslands and open woodlands, hunting
in tropical rain forests is much more difi cult because most of the resident zoomass
is relatively small, mostly folivorous (and hence arboreal and inaccessible), and often
nocturnal. Not surprisingly, Sillitoe (2002) found both gathering and hunting in a
tropical rain forest of the Papua New Guinea highlands costly (with people expend-
ing up to four times more energy on hunting than they gained in food) and con-
cluded that it could not have been a prominent component of the highland
subsistence: proto-horticultural practices and shifting farming were needed to secure
adequate food.
Killing the largest terrestrial herbivores with simple wooden and stone weapons
entailed high risks. Such weapons were available since the Late Paleolithic—in 1948
a nearly complete spear from the last interglacial period (125,000-115,000 years
ago) was found (inside an elephant skeleton) in Germany, and in 1996 throwing
spears found at Schöningen were dated to 380,000-400,000 years ago (Thieme
1997)—but a high rate of success would have been impossible without cooperative
hunting strategies. Many anthropologists and students of the Quaternary environ-
ments believe such hunting caused a relatively sudden demise of the late Paleolithic
megafauna.
Hunting and Megafauna
The term
megafauna
conjures enormous, long-extinct dinosauria, but when used in
the context of late Pleistocene extinctions (they took place during the last millennia
