Wild Free and Happy Sample 34

[Note: This is the thirty-fourth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 203 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Corn

Corn is a jumbo-sized tropical grass that can grow 10 feet (3 m) tall.  Some exotic strains can grow to 43 feet.  In many countries outside the U.S., “corn” means any type of grain, and “maize” is specific to the plant Zea mays (mays/maize).  Somewhere around 8000 B.C., corn was domesticated in Mesoamerica (the region spanning from central Mexico to Nicaragua).  Experts have many different opinions about when, where, and how it happened.  Over centuries, the wee, humble, mild-mannered wild grass was transformed into an amazing Super Plant — and a time bomb.

Domesticated corn, cattle, sheep, and wolves (dogs), are ecologically hobbled.  These mutants have little ability to survive outside the human sphere.  With corn, the rugged husks securely hold the kernels on the cob, inhibiting their ability to fall to the ground and produce the next generation.  If a field of mature corn is abandoned, the corn plants are likely to go extinct within two years or so. 

Even the corn of colonial America was phenomenally productive.  Paul Weatherwax wrote that typically, for each seed planted in Indian farming, folks could harvest 300, far better than Old World grains.  When conditions were perfect, it could yield up to 2,000 seeds.  Today, 33 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used for animal feed.  North American tribes had no livestock to feed, and turkeys were good at foraging.  Thus, essentially the entire harvest was food for humans, minus some seeds set aside for sowing next year’s crop.  After the seeds were stripped off, the cobs made excellent tailpipe cleaners (tree-friendly predecessors of toilet paper).

Corn began migrating into the eastern U.S. around maybe A.D. 200, but the heat loving tropical grass did not enjoy the shorter summers and cooler climate.  By 900, it had adapted to the temperate climate, and its use expanded.  By 1200, the corn culture had spread from Florida to Ontario.  In South America, corn expanded into regions of Peru and Chile.

Alfred Crosby noted that early white settlers in America were amazed by corn.  Sowing a bushel of wheat might yield 12 to 20 bushels at harvest time.  A bushel of corn might yield 200 bushels or more.  Corn was a fairly reliable producer that could be grown using simple tools and unskilled labor.  It could do OK on marginal soils, required minimal weeding, and could survive several frosts.  It also stored well.  Husks discouraged losses to birds.  When mature, ears could be left on the stalk and harvested later, without risk of spoilage.

In America, both settlers and Indians were far better nourished than the feeble porridge eating commoners of Europe.  Most folks in the future U.S. lived in rural areas, in low density, which discouraged epidemics.  Well-fed settlers bred like roaches and many of their kiddies survived to adulthood.  Folks had access to abundant land for expansion.  By 1775, the U.S. population was doubling every 25 years.  In 1790, half of Americans were younger than 16 years old.

Colonists brought with them a collection of Old World diseases.  Those pathogens had been created by combining dense crowds of malnourished people, with dense crowds of non-human animals, all living together in conditions terrible hygiene, filthy water, streets filled with garbage and excrement, and millions of fleas, lice, and rats.  Native Americans had no immunity to the deadly pathogens.  Clive Ponting wrote that up to 90 percent of them died from disease.  The death toll during the sixteenth century may have been close to 100 million. 

Among the Indians who survived the epidemics, the corn-growing tribes were the most vulnerable.  European colonists aggressively destroyed their fields and stored grain.  Nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes were not chained to a place by their food supply, so they could disappear into the forest, and kill settlers when they had the strategic advantage, when they were in the mood for rough justice.  But, for good reason, they often avoided contact with white folks, because the settlers were walking reservoirs of highly contagious deadly diseases. 

Hominins were nomadic for four million years.  More recently, humans have discovered that sedentary living provides some benefits, but they come at high cost to their health, security, sanity, their children, the environment, and so on.  Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating essay on the emergence of domestication.  It had a catchy title, “The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race.”  He noted, “In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” 

Diamond mentioned the research done by George Armelagos, who studied the skeletons of 800 Native Americans found at the Dickson Mounds site in Illinois.  The upper level (newer) skeletons were farmers, and those found lower (older) were hunter-gatherers.  At birth, a hunter had a life expectancy of 26 years, and a farmer was 19 years. 

Hunters enjoyed a high quality diet of wild foods.  Farmers got adequate calories from starchy foods, but their corn-based diet lacked some amino acids, vitamins, and minerals.  Farmers lived in greater density, which was better for sharing diseases and parasites.

Farmers had almost 50 percent more tooth enamel defects, four times more iron-deficiency anemia, three times more bone lesions, and more spinal damage, probably from hard physical labor.  James Scott mentioned that women who regularly ground corn while squatting on their knees had deformed toes.

Forty years after Diamond’s heretical essay, Peter Ungar published a book that included newer research on changes in bones and teeth over the centuries.  He noted that in the New World, the average caries rate (tooth decay) for corn eaters was five times higher than for hunter-gatherers.  Also, corn eaters had far more caries than folks who ate Old World grains.

Importantly, Ungar did not forget to mention that even corn eating Indians had far better teeth than modern Americans who, for no good reason, consume staggering quantities of a devilish health-thrashing substance known as sugar.  It helps bacteria stick to the teeth, making it easier for them to colonize, accumulate, and produce lactic acid.  Sugar took away my mother’s teeth before I was born, and later gave her diabetes (which I got too).

And then, the choir sat down, and Michael Pollan stepped up to the pulpit, and proceeded to deliver a ferocious hellfire and brimstone attack on the Devil’s food — sugar.  Americans are getting as fat as heck, and their kiddies are likely to have a lower life expectancy than their mommies and daddies.  The old proverb says, you are what you eat.  Thus, literally, what Americans mostly are is processed corn.

Most of the excess calories we consume are made of corn.  Traditional table sugar (sucrose) is made from sugar cane or sugar beets.  In 1970s, the new kid on the block appeared — high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  A bushel of corn (35 l) can produce 33 pounds (15 kg) of HFCS.  Junk food made with HFCS is extremely cheap, one dollar can buy 1,200 calories of body rotting garbage.  HFCS is commonly used in making processed foods, breakfast cereals, and soft drinks.  By 1999, the average American was annually devouring 37.5 pounds (17 kg) of HFCS, in addition to table sugar.  In 2018, we consumed 62.4 pounds of sugar (both HFCS and table sugar).

Of the world’s primary grains, corn has the most nutrient deficiencies.  In unprocessed corn kernels, the niacin is not in a free form, so your body can’t utilize it.  Niacin (vitamin B₃) is an essential nutrient.  Also, corn has some protein shortcomings — too little tryptophan or lysine (important amino acids).  Native Americans eventually figured out how to address these two challenges.

For the niacin issue, the solution is called nixtamalization, which is a happy bouncy word for the process of treating corn with an alkaline solution — lime or wood ash, plus water.  The corn is soaked and cooked in the solution.  This softens the kernels, loosens their hulls, and transforms the niacin into a free form that your body can use.  Hooray!

After the processed kernels are washed, their hulls are removed.  The softened kernels (hominy) are easier to grind.  Ground hominy is called masa, which can be made into a dough, unlike ground corn that has not been processed.  Masa is used to make products like tortillas, tamales, and tortilla chips.

As non-Native Americans became corn eaters, many did not know about the niacin quirk.  Poor folks whose diet majored in cheap untreated corn meal often got pellagra.  In the 1880s, 100,000 poor Italians suffered from it.  In 1916, 100,000 Americans had pellagra, and the disease killed 7,500 every year, mostly poor southerners.  It affected twice as many women as men.  Without treatment, folks with pellagra can die in four or five years.  The way to prevent pellagra is also the way to cure it — shift to a diet that is at least slightly better (added milk, eggs, meat, legumes, greens, etc.).

For the protein issue, beans came to the rescue.  Beans provide amino acids missing in corn.  Eating corn and beans together can provide higher protein content.  One source recommended a blend of three parts beans to seven parts corn.  Also, squash seeds can contain 30 percent protein.  A popular Native American delicacy was succotash, a mixture of corn, beans, dog meat, and bear grease.

On a side note, Lynn White mentioned that folks in Europe also discovered magic beans (peas, lentils, beans).  Prior to beans, the diet of commoners majored in carbs from cereals, and was deficient in protein.  By the tenth century, the addition of beans to the crappy traditional diet spurred a surge in the growth of population and cities.  Wheat provided an adequate source of niacin.  Nutrition is big juju!  Nutrient deficiency diseases like pellagra, beriberi, scurvy, kwashiorkor, and so on, are essentially unknown among hunter-gatherers.

Holy Shit!

Big Mama Nature does a wonderful job of nurturing optimal stability in the family of life.  She does this over the passage of countless millennia, guiding ecosystems to find ways of adapting to ever changing conditions.  On the other hand, cultures of tropical primates that participate in domestication-based cultures have a habit of being as clumsy as a mob of hyperactive two year olds. 

All life depends, directly or indirectly, on essentials like sunlight, water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and so on.  In a healthy wild ecosystem, these essentials are continuously recycled by plants, animals, and the billions of wee folk who work on the composting team.  It’s a beautiful celebration of life that can happily continue until the sun burns out.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as sustainability, in its genuine and sacred form (prior to the era overhunting, overbreeding, extinctions, etc.).

In domestication-based cultures, some essentials are depleted, at various rates, which weakens the health of the ecosystem.  Phosphorus depletion is likely to reach crisis stage ahead of the others, since the output of global phosphate mining peaked in 1989, and what remains is of declining quality.  Phosphorus is transferred from the soil to the corn, from the corn to the hog, from the hog to the human, flushed down the toilet and sent to the sea, lost forever.

Poop is precious.  Remember that.  In 1588, Anzelm Gostomski, a Polish gentleman, once proclaimed an eternal truth: “Manure is worth more than a man with a doctorate” (a great slogan for a snarky tattoo).  In the modern world, every trainload, boatload, and planeload of food that moves from the countryside to consumer land is carrying away essential soil nutrients on a one-way ride to a sewage treatment plant, or to the nearest body of water.  This is a pattern that has no long term future.

In the Old World, in the era of low tech, muscle-powered, organic agriculture, every farm and village had livestock, poultry, and tropical primates that were highly skilled at producing generous amounts of excellent homemade fertilizer.  Everyone religiously returned the nutrient rich treasure to the soil, because this was more fun than depleting the soil and starving.  Farming and grazing also injured the land in other ways, which makes the sweet dream of sustainable agriculture very close to impossible in the long run, no matter how much hopium we snort.  Wild hominins lived happily for several million years, and it never occurred to them to chop down the forests and wreck the soil — so they didn’t.

Even modest sized cities could indulge in holy shit rituals.  In 1909, Franklin Hiram King visited Kyoto, Japan.  While traveling down a road one lovely morning, he observed a long caravan of men pulling cartloads of fresh night soil from town.  They were in the process of returning the treasure to the fields that fed them.  Each cart carried six 10-gallon (38 l) covered containers of aromatic plant food.  King noted that he passed 52 of these carts.  Then, on the return trip, he passed another 61 carts.  Other caravans moved down other roads.  He estimated that 90 tons of waste were hauled out of town on that morning.  I wonder if this was a daily routine.

Over in the New World, in better times, there used to be millions of large herbivores, some of which (like horses) may have been suitable for domestication.  Sadly, many of them had gone extinct by maybe 12,000 years ago.  Consequently, most corn farmers owned zero livestock.  In the Andes, some folks owned domesticated llamas and alpacas.  They were beasts of burden, and meat animals.  Nobody rode them or milked them.  One source asserted that these two animals were not kept in large numbers.  Another source mentioned one herder who alone owned 50,000.  When I worked at a technical writing business, there was a slogan on the bulletin board, “Remember: If it’s in writing, it’s true!”

Similarly, in grade school I was taught that Native Americans buried two or three herring or alewives in each mound that corn was planted in, for fertilizer.  James Axtell wrote that this was semi-fake news.  Indians didn’t traditionally do this.  Squanto, a Pawtuxet woman, had previously been kidnapped by terrorists and taken to Spain.  She learned the fish fertilizer trick in Europe.

She managed to escape and return home, where she taught the Cape Cod Pilgrims how to plant corn.  For no good reason, Pilgrims chained themselves to specific plots of private property, and then proceeded to deplete the soil.  New England colonists were delighted to learn that one or two herring buried in a planting mound could sometimes triple the yield.  The natives, on the other hand, had no wheeled carts, and were not bewitched by daffy ideas like private property.  When their current fields were depleted, it was far easier to simply clear new fields.  Hauling lots of slippery fish around in baskets was not pleasurable work.

Paul Weatherwax wrote about early Native American agriculture.  Several societies along the Pacific coast utilized a super fertilizer called guano (bird poop).  At some locations there were enormous deposits that seabird colonies had created over many centuries.  The Inca civilization prohibited killing birds in these colonies.  During the nesting season, nobody could visit the treasure islands.  Law breakers were executed.

In 1585, one observer in North Carolina reported that Indian farmers used no manure or other fertilizer.  In 1635, someone made the same comment about Indians in Virginia.  In the Cuzco Valley of Peru, folks dried human excrement, pulverized it, and stored it until planting time.  In some regions, manure from alpacas and llamas was also used.  In the history of poop, many chapters have yet to be written.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration



My mother, who was born in 1916, had a “sweet tooth.”  When I was born, she had dentures, no teeth.  White flour and sugar were common ingredients in many meals I consumed between childhood and into my 40s.  She got diabetes, and I did too.  My first dentist said I had teeth like a horse.  They are crowded and crooked.  All four of my wisdom teeth were surgically removed, because they were growing sideways, toward the molar next door.  I brushed my teeth, but still got cavities.

Back in the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth also had a sweet tooth.  Sidney Mintz told an amusing story about her meeting with a German gentleman, who was deeply impressed when her smile revealed a mouthful of black teeth.  The peasants looked much healthier than the royalty, because they couldn’t afford sugar, which was an expensive luxury in those days.

In 1893, Weston Price became a dentist in Cleveland, Ohio.  As the years passed, Price became aware of a highly unusual trend — the amount of tooth decay that he observed was growing sharply.  Something strange was happening.  He was watching a serious health crisis emerge right before his eyes, and he didn’t understand the cause.  Price suspected that the problem was related to dietary changes.

His curiosity grew.  Finally, he decided to do some travelling, in search of healthy people, to see how they lived differently.  He spent much of the 1930s visiting many lands, examining the teeth of the residents, taking photographs of them, and studying their diets.  He went to remote places where people continued to live in their traditional manner, in regions including Switzerland, Ireland, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Arctic, and Peru.  He found many people with beautiful perfect teeth, and he found many with serious dental problems, like his patients in Cleveland.  Importantly, he discovered a clear difference in the diets of the two groups.

The people with happy teeth ate the traditional diet of their region, never used a toothbrush, and never saw a dentist.  The people with crappy teeth ate a “modernized” diet, including white flour, refined sugar, canned vegetables, jams, and marmalades.  Those who lived in remote villages in the hills were fine, but those who lived by the shore, and ate imported modern foods, suffered for it.  If one brother stayed in the hills, and the other brother moved to the city by the sea, the difference in their dental health was often striking.  Among those eating the modernized diet, the incidence of problems varied from place to place.  In some locations, only 25 percent of them had problems, but in other locations up to 75 percent were affected.

The children of those who ate modernized diets had even worse problems.  In addition to tooth decay, their dental arches were deformed, so their teeth were crowded and crooked (like mine).  Their nostrils were narrower, forcing some to be mouth breathers.  Their skulls formed in unusual shapes and sizes, often narrower than normal.  Their hips and pelvic bones formed abnormally, making childbirth more difficult.  They suffered from far higher rates of chronic and degenerative disease, including cancer, heart disease, and tuberculosis.  Their overall health was often weak or sickly.  Some were mentally deficient.

Price finally went home and wrote a book to document his findings.  Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was published in 1939.  The book is loaded with stunning photos.  Readers will never forget the powerful pictures.  Most of the book’s contents, including the pictures, are available HERE.  Click through the pages.  His writing includes some racist language that was common in that era.

For the first 200 pages, the chapters proceed, region by region, comparing the health of the people, based on their diet.  His descriptions get repetitive, because wherever he goes, he reports the same findings — people who ate their traditional diet had healthy teeth, and people who ate the modern diet more often had lousy teeth and other problems.  

All of those enjoying good health included some animal-based foods in their diet.  He noted, “It is significant that I have as yet found no group that was building and maintaining good bodies exclusively on plant foods.  A number of groups are endeavoring to do so with marked evidence of failure.”

I did some research to see if white flour and sugar were newer foods for the working class and poor.  Yes, they were.  By the late nineteenth century, both products had become widely available and inexpensive.  The primary reason for this was new technology, steam-powered steel roller mills, which appeared around 1890.  Melissa Smith and Steven Gundry wrote about the unintended consequences of roller mills.

Previously, grain had been milled between stones, which ground together all parts of the wheat berry, resulting in whole wheat flour.  White flour had been made by bolting — sieving whole wheat flour through fine cloth.  This was a time-consuming process, so white flour was expensive.  White bread was a luxury that only the rich could afford.  The waste byproduct of the bolting process was the super-nutritious bran and germ, which was usually fed to livestock.

The new roller mills crushed the grain, rather than finely pulverizing it.  This made it much easier to separate the bran and germ from the powdered endosperm (white flour).  Because of this, white flour could now be cheaply mass produced.  Since people perceived white flour to be a desirable luxury food, they eagerly consumed it.

Gundry noted that the new process eliminated both the fiber-rich bran, and the germ, which was rich in oil and vitamins.  White flour was little more than highly refined carbs, which rapidly enter the bloodstream — empty calories.  White flour had a much longer shelf life than whole wheat, because it had no oil which would go rancid over time.  White flour could be shipped to the ends of the Earth, and stored indefinitely.

By the 1920s, folks realized that white flour was crap.  New regulations required that white flour be “enriched” with nutrients, including thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, and iron.  Despite enrichment, white flour remains nutritionally inferior to whole wheat.

With regard to sugar, the steel roller mill was a big improvement.  It could extract up to 85 percent of the juice from the cane.  The previous technology could extract only 20 percent.  So, each ton of cane could produce much more sugar, which lowered the price, and enabled mass production.

Sugar became a major component of the working class diet.  By 1900, 20 percent of the calories in the English diet were provided by sugar.  Many factory workers started their day with a slice of white bread spread with sugar-packed jam, marmalade, or treacle — many calories, few nutrients.  According to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, the average annual consumption of caloric sweeteners per person in the U.S. peaked in 1999 at 151.6 pounds (68.7 kg).  In 2016, it was down to a mere 128.1 pounds (58 kg).

Sugar consumption nearly doubled in the U.S. between 1890 and the early 1920s — an era of rapid growth in the candy and soft drink industries.  In some U.S. cities, diabetes deaths quadrupled between 1900 and 1920.  By the 1930s, the cancer rates in the U.S. were clearly on the rise.  Diabetes and cancer are far less common in societies that do not eat a Western diet.

Smith discussed Dr. Thomas Cleave’s “Rule of 20 Years.”  The old doctor noted a spooky pattern.  In numerous locations, 20 years after the arrival of white flour and white sugar, primitive people started to suffer from heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, gallbladder disease, and colitis.

You are what you eat!

Price, Weston, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 1939, Reprint, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, La Mesa, California, 2008.  LINK

Mintz, Sidney W., Sweetness and Power — The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin Books, New York, 1985.

Gundry, Steven R., Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution, Crown Publishers, New York, 2008.

Smith, Melissa Diane, Going Against the Grain, Contemporary Books, Chicago, 2002.

Weston Price Foundation — info on nutrition and health.

Hunting Strategies in Central Europe



Hunter-gatherer cultures differed widely in their dependence on technology.  The persistence hunters of the Kalahari used almost none, while those inhabiting cold regions required huge survival toolboxes — weatherproof shelters, warm hearths, fur clothing, canoes, specialized weaponry, food storage.  In the far north, hunting clans also required dozens of large sled dogs, and feeding them required killing many additional wild animals, all year long.  The utterly simple Kalahari way of life was practiced by our hominid ancestors for two or three million years.  These tropical primates had coevolved with their tropical ecosystem, and elegantly danced to the beat of the land, a vital key for their long-term success.

I was curious to learn more about the hunting cultures of my prehistoric ancestors in snowy Europe, so I plowed through a pile of scholarly books, papers, and websites.  The Stránská skála site near Brno, Czech Republic looked promising.  It held the remains of bison, horses, mammoths, elk, rhinos, bears, and giant deer.  I came across Hunting Strategies in Central Europe During the Last Glacial Maximum, by Dixie West.  Most of the book focused on stone tools and bone fragments found at Stránská skála and another site.  I didn’t find what I was looking for, but the info I found was important for better understanding this chapter of the human saga.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the frigid peak of the last ice age, which occurred between 20,000 to 15,000 years ago.  Glaciers retained so much water that sea levels were 410 feet (125 m) lower than today.  A lass could walk from Ireland to Scandinavia or France without getting her feet wet (MAP).  During the LGM, climate became cooler and more arid, which had a serious impact on vegetation, and the animals that depended on it.  Many species that had survived a number of earlier ice ages began to go extinct.  Climate was an important actor in this drama.  Notably, highly skilled human hunters, with state of the art technology, were now well-established residents of Europa.

Once upon a time, mammoth country ranged from Western Europe to Alaska, New England, and Mexico.  Mammoths needed to stay close to water.  Because they were huge, and moved slowly, they couldn’t utilize sparse scattered patches of vegetation, or food too distant from water sources.  Difficult terrain was also off limits for the huge critters.  Each day, an adult needed to eat 440 to 660 pounds (200 – 300 kg) of moist feed, preferably grass.  A horse could get by on 22 pounds (10 kg) per day.

Frozen mammoths have been found, and their guts contained larch, birch, willow, sedge, mosses, and grasses.  They were able to digest both low fiber fresh grasses and high fiber wood, and quickly convert them into mammoth poop.  As the climate became cooler and more arid, their food supply diminished.  European mammoths were stressed by 24,000 years ago.  As the harsh climate intensified, the slow-moving animals had to migrate to warmer regions, which were already occupied by other large herbivores.

In a dryer climate, vegetation became more fibrous, or went dormant.  Seasonal bottlenecks in the food supply for grazing animals increased.  Bison, aurochs (cattle), sheep, and goats digest their preferred food slowly, and a diet higher in fiber would have been a threat to survival, in the driest periods.  They joined the mammoths in drifting toward greener pastures.

Similarly, reindeer had a limited ability to digest cellulose, but they were able to survive because they could quickly travel long distances each day, selectively dining at smaller patches of the most nutritious food.  Another plus was their ability to digest forages that other species could not, like lichens.

Horses were also lucky, because they could thrive on a high fiber, low protein diet.  They had to spend more time grazing on lower quality food, consume larger amounts of it, and expand the size of the territory they grazed.

The LGM made life more challenging for hunters.  Game animals declined in numbers and variety, so more time was spent searching for them.  The lads preferred to take larger animals that provided generous amounts of meat, body fat, marrow, and bone grease.  Fat was very important.  When a carcass provided little fat, more meat had to be consumed to acquire necessary nutrients.  West noted, “If fat is totally absent in the diet, very lean meat should be avoided as it takes a higher metabolism to digest purely lean meat, and predators, including humans, can readily lose weight on a lean meat diet.”

At the kill site, animals were often dismembered, making it easier to haul them back to camp.  They hauled away the prime stuff, and left behind low quality stuff for scavengers to enjoy and recycle.  Marrow was prized, and reindeer bones contained a lot of it.  Horses were twice the size of reindeer, but the deer had 13 times more marrow.  Horses provided lots of protein, but had minimal body fat or marrow.  It wasn’t worth the effort to haul away horse bones and break them apart at camp.

There were two types of horse groups, harems and bachelor herds.  The dominant stallion protected his harem of mares, and the young colts.  Colts were prime targets for predators, but stallions were big, strong, and aggressive — kicking, biting, and stomping all threats.  When hunters attacked a harem, the stallion had to be killed first.  Hunters were less likely to die when attacking bachelors, but less likely to get meat, because bachelors rapidly dispersed in every direction.

For ambush hunting, waterholes were a prime location.  Hunters waited, concealed in blinds.  As the LGM squeezed plant communities, horse herds were forced to scatter more for grazing, making them harder for hunters to find.  During fall and spring migrations, herds could swell to thousands of animals.  They were fattest in the late autumn.  Hunters could kill many by driving them into box canyons, ravines, stone corrals, and other traps.

Reindeer also gathered in large herds for seasonal migrations.  Autumn was the prime season for hunting.  Reindeer were much easier to kill, but these smaller animals provided less protein.  Hunters consumed their meat, blood, fat, marrow, and the milk of (killed) lactating cows.  West adds, “Modern caribou hunters provide evidence that ancient humans could have relied on partially digested gut contents and feces of reindeer to fulfill nutritional requirements.”  Yum!

Antlers were used to make tools.  They could be eaten while in summer velvet.  Fat was burned for light.  After the hunt, hides were prepared for tanning, and meat was butchered for drying or smoking.  Bones were broken to get marrow, and then crushed and boiled to extract the bone grease.  Containers were made from hides, bladders, and guts.  Cordage was made from tendons and sinews.  Hides were used to make blankets, boots, and clothing.

Caribou are close relatives of reindeer.  Each year, 24 hides were needed to maintain a caribou hunter’s wardrobe.  At least 20 hides were needed to make a tent.  Boiled hides were famine food.  From time to time, when adequate vegetation became scarce, the routes of seasonal migrations might change suddenly without warning.  It only took a few weeks for a hunting group to die from starvation.

For me, the moral of this story is that life is vastly easier when tropical primates remain in their tropical motherland, and live as their ancestors had for several million years, relying on a few very simple tools.  Migrating into non-tropical ecosystems, like Europe, demanded serious technological innovation, a dark juju that proceeds slowly at first, gradually accelerates, and then explodes.  Innovation is highly contagious, demonically addictive, and phenomenally destructive in its advanced stages.  Old-fashioned cultures that wisely nurtured voluntary restraint and simple lifestyles were helpless deer in the headlights of runaway innovation, forcing them to leap aboard the Oblivion Express or die.

In her book, The Old Way, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas reported that the traditional Kalahari way of life is over.  Clever lads discovered that enslaved dogs made tracking and hunting much easier.  Later they got enslaved horses, eliminating the need for long distance running.  Then they got guns, which were far deadlier than bows and arrows.  Progress never sleeps.  Guess what happened to the game.  Only a few elders still remember the art of tracking, a million years of time-proven knowledge.

Year after year, we’ve been zooming past countless red warning signs.  Wrong way!  Do not enter!  The path of human-centered thinking is approaching its clearly marked dead end.  Beliefs, spells, and madness got us into this mess — not genes.  Devastating epidemics of status fever are spread via stupid ideas.  Sane ideas are an effective cure.  Imagine that.

West, Dixie, Hunting Strategies in Central Europe During the Last Glacial Maximum, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 1997.

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2006.

Woolly mammoth image above (source).

Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers

 

 

Colin Tudge wrote Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers, a book that presents his theories on the dawn of progress and perpetual growth, focusing on how agriculture really began.  At the time, he was employed by the London School of Economics, an institution focused on capitalism, not ecological sustainability.

The book vibrates with cognitive dissonance.  Tudge has been studying agriculture for many years.  On one hand, it was a magnificent achievement that threw open the door to the wonders of modernity.  On the other hand, modernity has become a victim of its own success, with seven billion humans dangerously rocking the boat.  As Pandora once discovered, some magnificent achievements are best left in the box.

For most of the human journey, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, whom Tudge likens to bandits.  They lived by their wits, snatched what the ecosystem had to offer, and had plenty of leisure time in their lives.  The prudent path was to live within the carrying capacity of their ecosystem.  If they had been ambitious and hard working, they would have wiped out their prey and starved.

Farmers were ambitious, hard working control freaks.  They manipulated the ecosystem to increase its carrying capacity, temporarily, via soil mining.  More work produced more rewards, and more food could feed more people.  Wild critters frequently molested their precious crops, so farmers responded with pest control — overhunting.  Eventually, the human mob got large, wildlife became scarce, wild land became cropland, and returning to hunting was no longer an option.

Agriculture emerged independently in at least six widely scattered locations.  It was not invented in Uruk by a demented genius.  It began maybe 10,000 years ago in the Middle East.  Tudge suggests that it developed gradually, as proto-farming, starting maybe 40,000 years ago.  Even primitive yokels could see that plants grew from seeds, and that clearing other vegetation away from food plants promoted their growth.  Proto-farming was done on a small scale, a pleasant hobby that left behind no enduring evidence for scientists to discover thousands of years later.

In Europe, Neanderthals had been big game hunters for hundreds of thousands of years.  While surviving a roller coaster of climate shifts, they lived within carrying capacity and did not wipe out the game.  Cro-Magnons were the Homo sapiens that later migrated into Europe, maybe 45,000 years ago.  Tudge theorizes that these foreign immigrants were proto-farmers.  Because they could produce their own food, they were less vulnerable to the consequences of overhunting.  Big game species began blinking out.  This eliminated the food supply for the Neanderthals, who were forced off the stage into oblivion.  (Stringer and Finlayson have other views on Neanderthals.)

By and by, proto-farming metastasized into a more virulent form, agriculture.  The economists leap to their feet with enthusiastic applause and cheering.  Civilization, here we come!  Whee!  The fuse was lit for a joyride of skyrocketing growth — onward to ten billion!  Well, this is the schoolbook version that everyone knows, and most believe.  (See Cohen on the shift to agriculture.)

Now, the plot thickens.  A growing number of scholars have been poking holes in the glorious myth of growth and progress.  Farming was miserable backbreaking work.  While hunter-gatherers benefitted from a diverse and highly nutritious diet, the farmer’s diet was the opposite, majoring in a few staple foods.  Farmers were shorter and less healthy.  In their remains, we find that “the toes and knees are bent and arthritic and the lower back is deformed.”

Tudge acknowledges the revisionists.  “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy; they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.”  Here’s my favorite line in the book: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adapt agriculture but why anyone took it up at all when it was obviously so beastly.”

He believes that overhunting was the sole cause of the megafauna extinctions.  Native Americans had little self-restraint when it came to hunting mammoths and mastodons.  There is no evidence that climate change played any role in the die-off, he says.  But, at the end of the ice age, as the land warmed up, large areas of tundra were gradually replaced with dense forests.  This put the squeeze on species adapted to living on the tundra.

Did scruffy rednecks with homemade spears really hunt the speedy horses of North America to extinction — but not the bison, elk, and deer?  We’ll never know the full story, but I would be wary of dismissing the impact of radical climate swings, or the importation of Old World pathogens for which the American fauna had zero immunity.  (See Kolbert on extinction.)

Anyway, agriculture took root, because it worked more often than it failed.  Population gradually grew, which required more and more cropland and pasture.  Each expansion raised carrying capacity a bit, while soil depletion reduced it.  The growing mob had to work harder, and grow more.  In the cult of economists, “growth” is the god word.  Unfortunately, perpetual growth becomes a vicious spiral.  Tudge winces at the paradox.  “To condemn all of humankind to a life of full-time farming, and in particular arable farming, was a curse indeed.”  (See Montgomery, Manning, Dale, and Postel on agriculture’s drawbacks.)

Animal domestication, on the other hand, greatly benefitted the critters we enslaved, says Tudge.  For example, wild wolves are vanishing, but domesticated dogs have zoomed past a half billion.  Similarly, domesticated sheep can breed far more when well fed and defended.  If the population of a critter explodes, this is called biological success.  Dogs are a great success story, but their luckless wolf relatives keep smacking into bullets, stepping in traps, and eating poisoned bait.  Oddly, neither dogs nor sheep could survive in the wild, apart from humans.  (See Shepard on animal enslavement.)

It’s a great tragedy of history that the wild folks who adapted to their ecosystem, and lived within its carrying capacity, have been unable to withstand the constant pressure from growing mobs of farmers.  When Tudge wrote, we were approaching six billion.  The spectacular success of growth and progress was beginning to look like a Pyrrhic victory.  We might actually have real limits!  (See Bourne and Cribb on Peak Food.)

Clouds of doubt swirled in his head.  “Our earliest hunting ancestors must have been lazy, as lions are.  Perhaps we should learn from them.”  It’s touching and illuminating to watch the poor lad struggle with the conflict between powerful cultural myths and his growing awareness of reality.  This struggle is a necessary challenge on the path to growth and healing.  We must stand against the strong current.

The book is just 53 pages, and easy to read.  It would be a good text for courses in eco-psychology, environmental ethics, and critical thinking.

Postscript.  In a recent online video, Tudge reveals his grand solution, Enlightened Agriculture — small organic family farms raising a wide variety of crops.  By 2050, 9.5 to 10 billion will be coming to dinner.  Can we feed them?  “The answer is a resounding yes!”  We can feed them for decades, maybe indefinitely.  Profit-driven, energy-guzzling monoculture agriculture is fantastically unsustainable.  All we need is simply a total revolution in how we live, think, breed, and produce food — as soon as possible, please.

Tudge, Colin, Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers — How Agriculture Really Began, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.





The Vegetarian Myth

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is an intense discussion about health, food, and ecosystems.  She spent 20 years of her life as a vegan.  It destroyed her body and damaged her mental health.  Her spine has irreparably degenerated, and is a source of chronic pain.  She can never have children.  Nobody warned her, not even her doctors.  Her chronic malnutrition made her incapable of clear thinking.

A primary objective of this book is to issue a loud and clear warning to current vegetarians, so that they might avoid learning important truths the hard way, before they suffer irreversible damage.  If you are a vegetarian, and your health isn't perfect — if you have joint pain, if you are often cold or tired, if you never feel full after eating, if you have memory problems, if you are depressed or anxious or angry, drop everything and read this book.  Keith critiques the fundamental vegetarian beliefs, many of which have developed a religious posture.  She believes that all life is equally sacred, not just animals that are similar to humans.  I agree.

At the same time, she is a sharp critic of the industrial manner in which animal foods are produced.  Most of the meat for sale today is not raised in a sustainable, low-cruelty, low-impact manner.  Grass-fed animals are the only ethical choice.  She writes: “It's ridiculous to the point of insanity to take that world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily subsisted on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, while building topsoil and species diversity.”

The Vegetarian Myth is a title that seems to be a bit too narrow.  The main objective of this book is to present an illuminating primer on what everyone should know about food, and how it affects our minds, bodies, and ecosystems.  This is super important information that they rarely teach in schools. 

Growing rice, wheat, and corn causes no less suffering and harm than meat.  When farmers first arrive, millions of wild animals die, and the land is skinned alive.  Corn-growing Indians caused substantial damage to soils and forests, like Old World farmers did.  Industrial farming is far worse.  It is rapidly converting wild land into cropland, cropland into wasteland, and aquatic ecosystems into dead zones.  When you eat brown rice, you’re eating dead fish and dead birds from a dying river.

Keith doesn’t discuss wild grains.  The Indians of California foraged for wild grains in a non-destructive manner that is described in M. Kat Anderson’s important book Tending the Wild.  The Anishinabe have been harvesting wild rice for centuries without harming their health or ecosystem (wild rice from California is not wild).

Eating meat in moderation provides essential nutrients and is good for your health.  Like the long-held belief in a flat Earth, the Lipid Hypothesis cult is stumbling in a rising tide conflicting evidence.  In fact, the French, Greeks, Swiss, east Africans, and Pacific islanders enjoy a diet rich in saturated fats, yet have a low incidence of heart disease.  Carbohydrates are killing our hearts, not cholesterol (be sure to read Weston Price’s masterpiece).

Our planet and its residents are being destroyed by agriculture, overpopulation, consumerism, and a lack of spiritual connection to the land.  The solution is to immediately and enthusiastically pursue revolutionary change in the way we eat, travel, think, live, and breed.  If we don’t remember how to live sustainably, we won’t have a bright future.  “These are our choices, as bare as that dead rock: accept our place as animals, a place both humble and wild, or impose ourselves and our food across our living home of land and sea and sky until the planet dies.”  Amen!

Keith, Lierre, The Vegetarian Myth — Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Flashpoint Press, Crescent City, California, 2009.