Saturday, April 08, 2017

Vegetarian Neanderthals and what that implies

Per NPR studies of the dental calculus (hardened plaque, tartar) from three Neanderthal specimens showed that the individual from a cave in Spy, Belgium was largely carnivorous; while two individuals from El Sidrón cave in Spain were vegetarian.

Laura Weyrich, the lead on this study is quoted as follows:
She says the difference in diets reflects the fact that the two groups lived in two very different environments.
Northern Europe, including Belgium, had wide open spaces with grasslands and many mammals. "It would have been very grassy, and kind of mountainous," says Weyrich. "You can imagine a big woolly rhino wandering through the grass there." Perhaps tracked by hungry Neanderthals looking for dinner.

But farther south in Spain, the Neanderthals lived in dense forests. "It's hard to imagine a big woolly rhino trying to wedge themselves between the trees," says Weyrich. And so, she says the Neanderthals there feasted on all kinds of plants and mushrooms. "They're very opportunistic, trying to find anything that's edible in their environment."
We are told by supposedly respectable historians that want to write a grand narrative for the human race that the human body has evolved handle a particular diet.  The very fact that humans adapted to environments from the frigid north where little green grows, to the equatorial regions, or at least environments as varied as ancient Belgian grasslands and dense Spanish forests indicates that humans were not evolved to handle any particular diet.   (Don't quibble that this study is about Neanderthals, not homo sapiens sapiens; our non-Neanderthal ancestors were more successful than the Neanderthal line, and so likely were even more adaptable than the Neanderthals.)

What is amazing is that people with a supposedly scientific temper swallow this historian nonsense with little to no skepticism.   Since I don't think we evolved to credulously believe historians, I'm not sure what is the basis for this lack of skepticism.
 

Comments (13)

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With what historians are you arguing?
1 reply · active 416 weeks ago
Those that try to write sweeping generalized histories of the human race.
In that case your point doesn't make a lot of sense. What does the fact that primitive peoples ate the locally available food have to do with generalized histories? Perhaps there is some historian somewhere who thinks humans (like pandas) can only eat, say, eucalyptus leaves, but I've never heard of him. And what, if anything, does that have to do with generalization? Have you ever read any such historian? Names would be helpful.

And what do you have against generalization, it's the soul of science? Are you against it everywhere, or just in history.
1 reply · active 416 weeks ago
In this particular generalized history, the invention of agriculture was a wrong turn for humans, their diets not only deteriorated, their diets became unnatural.
In that case, I think I know exactly whom you are talking about, though a number of people have made that observation. The historical generalist among them is the Israeli Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I don't think that the vegetarian diets of Neandertal or Sapien is an exception however. Humans are opportunists, and eat what is available. Most HGs eat a mainly vegetarian diet, but a very varied one, usually including insects and meat when they can get it.

I don't know if you have actually read Harari (and I'm guessing not, based on your argument) but he just says that a very narrow diet, for example almost all wheat or almost exclusively rice, is unhealthy compared to a varied one. Many peasants throughout history, including today, have eaten such diets, and the skeletal remains as well as modern medicine demonstrate that the results are unhealthy.

Those Spanish Neandertal probably ate hundreds or even thousands of different kinds of mushrooms, roots, berries, and nuts as well as insects and the occasional squirrel or rabbit. They also evidently knew to gnaw a certain kind of tree bark for pain relief.

Harari's real point, though, is not that agriculture was a wrong turn, his point is that it was far from an unmixed blessing. I think we can say the same about a lot of history's trends.
3 replies · active 416 weeks ago
The invention of agriculture - cereal farming - dates to some 12,000 years ago, and the initial "permanent" settlements were tiny (and perhaps these moved whenever the fertility of the land declined). I'm not sure a few dozens of people in a farming settlement were qualitatively more crowded than a hunter-gatherer group. Animals were domesticated around the same time (though pigs supposedly predate cereals by 3000 years). These early agriculturalists were probably gathering-hunting as well. The highly varied diet comes from gathering, not hunting; it is gathering that is efficient in a calories gained per calories expended, much more so than hunting. Also, nothing I can find talks about the caloric efficiency for humans of animal herding as compared to gathering-hunting. It is not at all clear to me that the inventors of agriculture were not also gatherers and perhaps hunters and also animal herders, and much more efficient than their pre-agricultural ancestors.

It is perhaps only a few thousand years after the invention of agriculture that population densities increased to the point where gathering was no longer sustainable, and the diet necessarily lost its variety. The population likely increased precisely because agriculture + gathering + animal herding was so much more efficient. It is this subsequent population that likely displays the effects that Harari, etc., point out - that is my guess. To attribute to the invention of agriculture effects that showed up considerably later than its invention is IMO not quite honest.

I'm mostly guessing in the above; presumably if the research literature was readily available, I could decide my guesses easily.
Harari's real point was that agriculture was far from an unmixed blessing? Really, then why is he quoted as calling it "history's biggest fraud."?

Sorry, this sounds similar to apologia for Trump.
Further, which 20th century historian wrote like this: "Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers." ?????

Moreover, they probably did abandon pure hunting gathering precisely because life became more pleasant. That a couple of thousand years later it would not be so pleasant is a different matter.
Just recording a factoid:
"Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. " (per http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/05/the-...
1 reply · active 416 weeks ago
That's a great New Yorker article you found! It adds a lot of interesting details. I think it clarifies and illuminates Harari's claims more often than it contradicts them, though.

One more brief excerpt:

"The more people clustered together, the more pest-ridden and poorly fed they became. "
Another factoid (found on the web)

The major samples from Herculaneum and Pompeii reveal the stature of the ancient adult body. The average height for females was calculated from the data to have been 155 cm in Herculaneum and 154 cm in Pompeii: that for males was 169 cm in Herculaneum and 166 cm in Pompeii. This is somewhat higher than the average height of modern Neapolitans in the 1960s and about 10 cm shorter than the WHO recommendations for modern world populations.

- Laurence, Ray. "Health and the Life Course at Herculaneum and Pompeii." Health in Antiquity. Ed. Helen King. London: Routledge, 2005.
Or you could read what Harari actually wrote. Your guess is not a bad approximation, but in places suited to intensive cultivation population grew very rapidly. There are still places where mixed HG and farming are both practiced, and they were no doubt the rule initially. However, where intensive agriculture worked best (wheat and rice lands) population grew quite rapidly, and the demands that agriculture makes on time crowded out HG activities.

In many ways, the mixed lifestyle offers some of the best diets. But in most places it doesn't seem to be stable.

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