Food and Diet in Past Societies
How can archaeologists or biological anthropologists reconstruct diet in the past, and why is this information important?
Find two anthropology journal articles that date to 2010 or later that discuss how anthropologists can reconstruct past human diets. This may include isotope analyses, phytolith identification/analysis, or other methods. For this question, you should also reference general course material on the anthropology of food in your response. This means that you need to apply the course concepts we learned in the lectures.
Overview
With two billion extra people to feed by 2050, the question of which diet is best has taken on new significance. The foods we eat in the coming decades will have far-reaching consequences for the world. Simply said, a diet centered on meat and dairy, which is becoming more popular in the developing world, will deplete the world’s resources faster than one centered on unrefined grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables.
Until roughly 10,000 years ago, all humans obtained their food by hunting, collecting, and fishing. As farming spread, nomadic hunter-gatherers were gradually pushed out of valuable farmland, and they were eventually confined to the Amazon rainforest.
That is why scientists are stepping up their efforts to learn everything they can about an ancient food and way of life before they vanish. “Hunter-gatherers are not living fossils,” says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies the Hadza people of Tanzania, the last true hunter-gatherers. “That being said, there are only a few foraging populations left on the earth.” We’re almost out of time. We need to catch their cuisine now if we want to learn anything about a nomadic, foraging lifestyle.”
So far, investigations of foragers such as the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have revealed that these peoples have historically avoided excessive blood pressure, atherosclerosis, and cardiovascular illness. “A lot of people believe there is a discordance between what we consume now and what our ancestors evolved to eat,” says University of Arkansas paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar. The idea that we’re imprisoned in Stone Age bodies in a fast-food society is fueling the current Paleolithic diet trend. The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat in the same way that hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic period (roughly 2.6 million years ago to the start of the agricultural revolution), and that our genes haven’t been altered
