Harlan's Crops and Man. H. Thomas Stalker
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western North America, but there are no examples left in the more productive agricultural lands of the world.
At the time of European contact, the eastern forests and woodlands of North America were largely populated by native agriculturalists; the people living in the plains and westward mostly maintained hunting–gathering economies. There were enclaves of farmers, such as the Mandan on the Missouri River in North Dakota, and a highly sophisticated agriculture had developed in the Southwest USA where people practiced irrigation on a large scale and often lived in towns. Some farming was practiced along the Colorado River watershed and into southern California, but most of the California natives and other tribes of western North America lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering. A substantial body of information has been assembled about them, but we must remember that they did have contact with farming people and some of their cultural elements could have been borrowed.
Data for hunter‐gatherers in South America have been accumulating during the late 20th and into the 21st centuries. In the review by Scheinsohn (2003), she indicates distinct areas occupied by hunter‐gatherers in the grasslands of Argentina and southern Chile, farming communities in the highlands of western South America, and mixed hunter‐gatherer and farming societies in more mid‐to‐low land areas of Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela by about 6000 BP (Before Present). There is some evidence of man in South America by at least 30,000 BP (Scheinsohn, 2003), and these peoples were certainly hunter‐gatherers. The Bushman of southern Africa has been studied in some detail, but we know historically that they had long contact with the livestock‐herding Hottentot and farming Bantu tribes. The Congo pygmies often spend part of each year with agricultural people. The Ainu of Japan have taken up some farming in the last century or so. Many of the hunter‐gatherers of India are so constricted by agriculturalists that they have virtually become members of a nonfarming caste.
The Andaman Islanders succeeded in preserving a greater degree of isolation, partly by killing off strangers who landed or were shipwrecked on their shores. Still, we know they borrowed some customs from outsiders. Both pottery and pigs seem to have been introduced about 1500 AD (Coon, 1971). It is even possible that they were agriculturalists when they arrived and abandoned the practice when they found it unnecessary.
Perhaps our most reliable data come from Australia. At the time of European contact in the early 19th century, there was an entire continent populated by an estimated 300,000 people without a single domesticated plant and no genuine agriculture. Although it is true that for some centuries before European contact there were Malayan traders visiting northern Australia on a fairly regular basis, there is little evidence that this resulted in significant changes in use of food resources and it did not induce the Aborigines to take up the cultivation of plants. The Torres Strait is also rather narrow and some contact with agricultural Melanesians occurred. That this would influence the whole of Australia very much seems doubtful.
I shall, therefore, rely more on ethnographic data from Australia than elsewhere, but will remind the reader that any reconstruction of a way of life of some thousands of years ago, based on a small, biased sample of living people, is full of hazards and sources of error. The earlier accounts may have more value than some of the later ones because the effects of European contact were rapid and profound.
Woodburn (1988) and in a series of papers, outlined an important distinction between immediate return strategies and delayed return strategies. The former live from day to day, or at most a few days at a time on current returns. Delayed return groups have longer‐term goals; these include manufacturing of boats, nets, weirs, traps, and deadfalls, tending bee hives, the capture and keeping of animals to be eaten later, the replacement of the tops of yams at digging time, sowing of seeds, managing vegetation with fire, water spreading, irrigation, flooding of forests, arranged marriages, and so forth. The Australian Aborigines were delayed return strategists of great skill, and as such were closer to agriculturalists than to immediate return hunter‐gatherers such as the Bushmen and Hadza. Great Basin and West Coast Native Americans and the Jomon of Japan were also delayed return strategists.
As more and more data have accumulated, a consensus has developed that present day and recent hunter‐gatherers, whether of immediate or delayed return, have evolved in parallel with agriculturalists and no longer represent the original condition before agriculture. They are not the “pristine” hunger–gatherers of 10,000–12,000 years ago. In addition, the diversity among hunter‐gatherers is such that no single model can represent them. There is not even a single model for Australia, let alone the other hunter‐gatherers in the world. Our extensive field studies will not tell us all we want to know about preagricultural societies, but they are suggestive.
The oldest remains of Homo sapiens L. were left in Morocco about 315,000 years ago (Hublin et al., 2017a, 2017b), which is much older than previously thought. Foley (1988) reserved the term “human” for anatomically modern man who appeared on earth as early as 100,000 years ago and as late as 30,000 years ago in some regions, but many intermediate fossil remains define the evolution within the genus Homo. However, early species of Homo were not “human.” Late Pleistocene man was anatomically modern, but larger, heavier, and more sexually dimorphic. Foley suggests reduction in size and dimorphism was a response to a change in food procurement systems. With the extinction of many large mammals and general impoverishment of the fauna at the end of Pleistocene, men and women began to share more evenly in food procurement, and the broader spectrum of plants and animals exploited was accompanied by morphological changes in humans.
What Do Gatherers Eat?
Lee (1968) classified 58 tribes according to the percentage of dependence on hunting, fishing, or gathering. The data were taken from the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), but adjusted somewhat by transferring the pursuit of large sea mammals from fishing to hunting and shell‐fishing from fishing to gathering. The food obtained by gathering is predominantly of plant origin. The class does include small animal foods such as mice, rats, lizards, eggs, insect grubs, and snails. Tortoise and shell‐fishing is important to a few gathering tribes. In several cases where detailed analyses were made, however, plant foods contributed 60%–80% of the intake of gathering people.
In his List of Foods Used in Africa, Jardin (1967) compiled an extensive and complex list of species. I have attempted to remove cultivated plants and introductions and reduce the synonymy as much as possible. There still remain more than 1,400 species that could be grouped into classes as follows:
Grass seeds approximately 60 spp.
Legumes approximately 50 spp.
Roots and tubers approximately 90 spp.
Oil seeds approximately 60 spp.
Fruits and nuts >550 spp.
Vegetables and spices >600 spp.
Total >1410 spp.
Most of Jardin's reports concerned agricultural tribes and only a small fraction of the list represented foods of gatherers. This suggests that (a) many more species have been gathered from the wild than have ever been domesticated, (b) even after agriculture is fully developed, gathering wild plant foods is still a worthwhile effort, and (c) wild plant resources are of the same general kinds as domesticated plant resources. See also Fox and Young (1982) for southern Africa.
Yanovsky (1936) in his Food Plants of the North American Indians lists 1112 species of 444 genera belonging to 120 families. About 10% of these are crops or imported weeds; the rest are native American plants. The bulk of the plants listed were gathered by nonagricultural tribes. Fernald and Kinsey (1943) listed about 1000 species for eastern North America alone. Plants gathered in Central and South America have not been conveniently compiled, but the number of species is very large. A partial listing is given by Lévi‐Strauss (1950) in The Use of Wild Plants in Tropical South America.
Our most reliable information again might come from Australian areas where agriculture was not practiced and where none of the plants had been domesticated. Lists compiled by Cribb and Cribb (1975), Irvine (1957), Levitt (1981), and Maiden (1889),