From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 15 2003 - 18:05:46 MDT
On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 07:18:18PM -0400, gts wrote:
> Damien Sullivan wrote:
>
> > It's worth noting that most surviving H-G cultures were the
> > ones pushed into marginal habitats, ones unusable by farmers
> > or pastoralists.
>
> Is this a speculation of yours, or are you relating something you learned
> from a reliable scientific source? If the latter then do you have any refs?
Uh, look at the world. List some surviving H-G cultures:
Kalahari Bushmen: desert. Australian aborigines: mostly desert. Mbuti
pygmies: tropical jungle, feared by the local farmers. Eskimos: tundra or
pack ice.
The North American Indians would be a big exception, but it depends on what we
mean by surviving: I don't think there's much left now to study. And a lot of
the ones in better areas did practice light agriculture. Estimating the food
eaten by tribes before 1900 say depends a lot on the accuracy of the observer,
and trusting them to not have overlooked women's work, or to have been overly
impressed by male hunting, is more trust than I have. Again, the ones we can
actually study now are in desert, jungle, or tundra.
Do you actually doubt this? I thought this was an obvious fact of the subject
-- farmers and herders, whatever their health, had much larger populations
with which to sweep into any area suitable for them.
> > If they seem to eat a lot of meat, it might
> > be because of a scarcity of plants.
>
> I'm skeptical because I don't see how it is possible for wild game to exist
> in habitats where plants are scarce. The bottom of the food chain can exist
> without the top but the top cannot exist without the bottom.
Well, the Eskimos would be an obvious actual example. A theoretical one might
be where the plants tend to be inedible, so you have to eat the desert lizards
instead. As it happens the aboriginal diet could swing from mostly meat to
mostly plant, even in the desert, so I'm not going to push this point.
-xx- Damien X-)
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