Harlan's Crops and Man. H. Thomas Stalker

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Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker


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What did he know about plants, and what might have caused him to begin the process of domestication? The descriptions given here will necessarily be brief and sketchy, but will give an idea of the condition of man before he began to grow plants with the purpose of using them for food.

      We also need to know something about man as a hunter to understand ourselves. Lee and DeVore (1968) have put it succinctly:

      As a matter of general education and self‐understanding, it is important that we know something about this basic human adaptation. There are two general approaches to the problem: (a) we can study surviving nonagricultural societies and examine the ethnographic observations made within the last few centuries, or (b) we can attempt to interpret preagricultural life from the artifacts, refuse, and other clues left by ancient man and recovered by archaeological techniques. In this chapter, we shall deal primarily with the first approach but the archaeological record shall be touched on in later sections.

      Traditionally, agricultural people have looked down on hunting people who are described as “savage,” “backward,” “primitive,” “ignorant,” “indolent,” “lazy,” “wild,” and “lacking in intelligence.” Europeans applied the term “civilized tribes” to some eastern North American natives who lived in towns and cultivated plants, but these Native Americans themselves referred to the hunting tribes of the plains as “wild Indians.” In Africa, farming groups that surround hunter‐gatherers, “… did not merely assert their political dominance over the hunter‐gatherers and ex‐hunter‐gatherers they encapsulated; they also treated them as inferiors, as people apart, stigmatized them and discriminated against them” (Woodburn, 1988, p. 37). Similar attitudes prevail in Asia, Oceania, and Tropical America. The prejudice is nearly universal.

      Occasionally, an unusually perceptive student of mankind tried to point out that hunting man might be as intelligent as anyone else; that he had a sensitive spiritual and religious outlook; that he was capable of high art; that his mythologies were worthy of serious consideration; and that he was, in fact, as one of us and belonged to the same species with all its weaknesses and potentialities. Such opinions were seldom taken very seriously until recent years. It has finally become apparent that no part of the stereotype is correct and that widely held presuppositions are all completely false and untenable. Our ancestors were not as stupid or as brutish as we wanted to believe.

      In 1966, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore organized a symposium on Man the Hunter held at the University of Chicago and published in 1968. Lee reported on his studies of the San !Kung of the Dobe area, Botswana. Over a three‐week period, Lee (1968) found that !Kung Bushmen spent 2.3, 1.9, and 3.2 days for the first, second, and third week, respectively, in subsistence activities. He wrote, “In all, the adults of the Dobe camp worked about 2 ½ days a week. Since the average working day was about 6 hr long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from 12 to 19 hr a week to getting food.”

      Among the Bushmen, neither the children nor the aged are pressed into service. Children can help if they wish, but are not expected to contribute regularly to the work force until they are married. The aged are respected for their knowledge, experience, and legendary lore; and are cared for even when blind or lame or unable to contribute to the food‐gathering activities. Neither nonproductive children nor the aged are considered a burden.

      Source: Adapted from Lee (1968).

Protein (g/day) Calories per person per day Percent caloric contribution of meat and vegetables
Meat 34.5 690 33
Mongongo nuts 56.7 1,260 67
Other vegetable foods 1.9 190
Total 93.1 2,140 100

      Sahlins (1968) came in with almost identical figures for subsistence activities of the Australian Aborigines he studied and elaborated on his term “original affluent society.” One can be affluent, he said, either by having a great deal or by not wanting much. If one is consistently on the move and must carry all one's possessions, one does not want much. The Aborigines also appeared to be well fed and healthy, and enjoyed a great deal of leisure time.


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