Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
age in permafrost cellars offered a roughly 2000-fold net
energy return (unmatchable by any other form of hunt-
ing) and supported large permanent settlements and im-
pressive social complexity. This adaptation appeared to
be self-amplifying: more people in settlements could field
more whaling crews, resulting in more sightings and
higher chances of hunting success. Eventual limits on
population growth were imposed not by food but by the
need to hunt the marine and land species for raw materi-
als to make clothing, sinews, bedding, hunting equip-
ment, bags, floats, and covers.
The reliance on seasonal food flows required extensive
and often elaborate storage: caching in permafrost; dry-
ing and smoking of fish, fish eggs, clams, mussels, sea-
weed, berries, and various meats; storing seeds and roots;
putting seal oil and blubber into large clay jars; preserv-
ing food in oil; making intestinal sausages and nut meal
cakes and flours (Hayden 1981; Zvelebil 1986). Testart
(1982) argued that large-scale, long-term food storage
changed foragers' mentality, giving them new attitudes
toward time, work, and nature. The need for planning
and time budgeting was perhaps its key evolutionary con-
tribution; tool making and maintenance and the prepara-
tion of storage items had to be concentrated in slack
periods. Once this pattern was mastered, there was no
turning back without a sharp reduction of prevailing
population densities. Large-scale storage is not only in-
compatible with mobility but also highly conducive to
the accumulation of other foods and goods. Many com-
plex sedentary foragers found it natural to gradually in-
corporate incipient agricultural practices. The stage was
slowly transformed to a fundamentally different way of
subsistence and to widespread surplus accumulation. The
process was evolutionary and multifocal, its onset spread
over several millennia in different parts of the world, but
its outcome was universal. Humans ceased to be simple,
opportunistic, omnivorous heterotrophs and became—
through crop selection and cultivation, irrigation, and
nutrient recycling—increasingly refined manipulators
of solar energy flows, overwhelmingly herbivorous pro-
ducers of a few staple crops, rapid learners of social and
technical complexity.
