High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [12]
It’s safe to presume that the most talkative of all primates, Homo sapiens, evolved in the context of cooperative social groups also, hunting and gathering on the African savannahs. The theory that has percolated best into popular imagination is the one that claims men clobbered the animals, providing intermittent jubilations of protein for the home crowd, while women dug roots, picked fruits and seeds, and harvested edible plant parts. The latter activities presumably would provide the bulk of the steady calories, but for many decades the burgeoning science of human origins was captivated by the hunting scenario: the need to peer out over the savannah grass as incentive for walking upright; the necessities of spear making and cooperative hunting giving rise to language, dexterity, and a large, complex brain.
This neat boy-girl theory smacks of sexist backward projection, I’ve always thought, while I do concede (having carried a toddler on my own hip for a few years) that it’s more feasible to go berry picking than lion hunting with a nursing child in tow. But many early anthropologists, unable to resist drama, apparently overestimated the importance of “the hunt” as a shaper of our body, character, and destiny. It’s now understood that the earliest evidence of meat eating in the human archaeological record comes from East African sites that are less than two million years old. Considering that we have been walking upright and approximately human for more than twice that long, carnivory may have been an afterthought. Anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman argues that the challenge that shaped us was most likely the savannah environment itself, which is not a monoculture of tall grass but a complex mosaic of grassland, hills, and forested areas along watercourses. Potential food sources were abundant but seasonal and widely scattered; the early human’s home range would have been much larger than that of living savannah baboons and chimpanzees. The best survivors would be those with a good locomotor system and the capacity to carry water and food, as well as offspring. Based on the fossil record, and on close study of living hunter-gatherers and our primate relatives in similar habitats, Zihlman has estimated that plant foods, insects, and small vertebrates made up more than 90 percent of the early hominid diet, and that “scavenging and consumption of large dead animals found by chance” was probably infrequent. This scenario, which has our ancestors shooing off hyenas and vultures from the carcass du jour, isn’t going to sell any movie rights, but it has the advantage of evidence behind it.
In any case, the best perspective on the notion of a natural division of labor was given me long ago by one of my most influential college professors, Preston Adams, a botanist who studied human evolution. He pointed out that all “man the hunter” theories implicitly establish women as the first botanists. He also liked to tell restless zoology majors that it takes a superlative mind to appreciate a plant. He kindly allowed me to put two and two together.
When it began to dawn on our insightful ancestors that they could save some edible seeds, put them in the ground, and have a whole new edible crop right on the front stoop, we had agriculture on our hands. It’s a giant step, the historical materialists maintain, to go from appropriating the products of nature to increasing their supply through human labor. The first evidence of cultivated grains comes from archaeological sites that are in the neighborhood of eleven thousand years old. Joseph Campbell, in his Atlas of World Mythology, identifies at least three independent points of origin for “The Way of the Seeded Earth”: the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America. Domestication of animals followed right along. A handful of seeds, like Jack’s magic beans, turned our fortunes head over heels.
Friedrich Engels, the nineteenth-century