What do you think?
Rate this book
Man the Hunter
Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.
- GenresAnthropologySociology
432 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1968
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
April 7, 2024I'm not sure that the character limit here will let me record all of the notes that I might need to take against this book, which is a collection of papers and discussions presented at a 1960s symposium gathering up ethnographers and anthropologists working on extant "hunter-gatherer" cultures, which were then quickly being forced into sedentary agricultural existences.
I'm interested in this topic as I was raised as a hunter, proud of the idea that my skills were contiguous with ancestral providers of vital, life-giving meat for their communities.
Through a long, circuitous route, I have come to believe that this cod history of mankind might be powering wrong-headed developments across the world with respect to health and resource scarcity.
The paper that fundamentally changed my view on this subject, "The Seed Eaters," by Clifford Jolly, had not been published at the time that this symposium occurred, and anyway may have been too heterodox to justify inclusion.
I'm reading this work to try to understand the mindset of anthropologists with firsthand view on extant hunter-gatherer communities.
Right off the bat, before the introduction by the editors is even finished, an unresolved disagreement casts a pall over the following pages:
"The symposium considered the definition of 'hunters' but did not succeed in satisfying everyone...[to] confine hunters to those populations with strictly Pleistocene economies...would effectively eliminate most, if not all, of the peoples reported at the symposium." Further: "The symposium agreed to consider as hunters all cases presented, despite the fact that the majority...subsisted primarily on sources other than meat" (Italics theirs.)
More: "Our unacculturated hunter-gatherer life has been largely drawn from peoples no longer living in the optimum portion of their traditional range...the majority of precontact Eskimos, Australian aborigines, and Bushmen lived in much better environments."
And: "The hunting of mammals has been considered the characteristic feature of the subsistence of early man...Modern hunters, however, depend on...vegetable foods, fish and shellfish. Only in the arctic and subarctic areas where vegetable foods are unavailable do we find the textbook examples of mammal hunters. Over the rest of the world, hunting appears to provide only 20 to 40 percent of the diet." Take that, keto-wienies.
"Binford, Washburn, and Lancaster, and others expressed the view that fishing, seed-grinding, and hunting with dogs are late adaptations dating from the Mesolithic and therefore not characteristic of Pleistocene conditions." Authors answer with my very own thoughts: "Our own view is that vegetable foods in the form of nuts, berries, and roots were always available to early man and were easily exploited by even the simplest technologies."
Quoting from a paper book is hard so I'll leave it there for now, but it's an interesting moment in anthropology. A few of the authors in the book seem quite ready to throw over the evidence of their eyes, that extant so-called "HUNTER-gatherers" are in fact eating 80% gathered foods and 20% hunted foods, and trying to argue instead for a No True Scotsman view of hunter-gatherers, where in the deep past, unexcavated populations subsisted almost entirely on the meat of wild pigs, birds, and ruminants, resorting to plant collection only in the last resort. The fact that no society living at this time in its historical range behaves that way does not seem to shake their fidelity to that assumption, but rather to prove that "true" hunter-gathering went extinct before anyone was there to record its existence.
An interesting adjunct of the foregoing discussion is mentioned soon after: the symposium votes to redefine the acquisition of aquatic mammals (seals, whales) as hunting, when it had previously been considered fishing., and to redefine the collection of sessile bivalves (clams, molluscs) as "gathering." These redefinitions permit some tribes of far-north people to remain classified as hunter-gatherers even though they don't fit many of the other criteria posited (such as having a nomadic mode of living, making no use of metals or post-contact technologies, etc.) and also serve to systematically exclude women from the "hunter" column by diminishing the foods they provided by collecting (what I consider to be) meat from beaches and streambeds.
The modes of thinking of some of the authors sound outdated and at times ambiguously racist, but it's their thought processes, and not their conclusions, that most interest me.
---
Page 43: "...the basis of Bushman diet is derived from sources other than meat...since a 30 to 40 per cent input of meat is such a consistent target for modern hunters in a variety of habitats, is it not reasonable to postulate a similar percentage for prehistoric hunters? Certainly the absence of plant remains on archeological sites is by itself not sufficient evident for the absence of gathering. Recently-abandoned Bushman campsites show a similar absence of vegetable remains, although this paper has clearly shown that plant foods comprise over 60 per cent of the actual diet."
-Lee, "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources"
---
"...I guessed that in the diet of adults, vegetable foods would have amounted to less than 10 per cent of volume but might have been higher for children, who probably foraged for such things as cattail roots and thimble berries that adults would be less likely to bother with. I assume that in the diet of all, even small amounts of certain vegetable foods may have been very important to health. I was surprised then to note, in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas estimates of 20 per cent dependence on gathering for the Nootka and 30 per cent for the Kwakiutl...I am willing to admit that my guess of 10 per cent...may be too low, but the Kwakiutl figure given in the Atlas is surely too high."
-Suttles, "Coping with Abundance: Subsistence on the Northwest Coast", page 61
Here's an interesting study of primarily fish and meat-eating tribes of the Pacific Northwest. These are presumably about as close to the assumed "keto" diet, eating highly fatty sea mammals and fishes and relatively little plant matter (as the mature conifer forests of the high Pacific Northwest present relatively little opportunity for gathering them.
I was a bit surprised by the assertion made by Suttles that only 10% of the volume of food comes from vegetable matter, even in this area. One problem I see is that he is estimating consumption by volume, though elsewhere in the book others do the same, often citing studies done several decades before under unreproducible conditions.
Ethnobotanic studies cite the bulbs of Camas species as a source of carbohydrates and extensive berry collection in this area, and Sutters cites cattails as a food source that adults would not "bother" with, although elsewhere in the country it was used as food. The amounts of foods that Sutters "guesses" or "assumes" are eaten makes this an interesting example of what I expected to find in papers of this time, which is an implicit assumption by the researchers than animal foods are objectively more valuable than plant ones, and therefore that plants only make up for the hunting shortfall and certain deficiencies that would otherwise occur from a meat-only diet.
The title of the paper is the tell: "Coping with Abundance." The tribes of the Pacific Northwest are coping with a very specific type of abundance, that of meat and fish. But they're facing up to a dearth of available plant foods, and it's interesting that Sutters does not think of the issue in that way. They are in a zone where agriculture is not justified, where foods that grow in a place where humans can collect them are limited to the seashore and forest margins, and where cold temperatures make the risk of starvation that much more perilous than it is at warmer climates.
Sutters reports periods of starvation and food storage and barter, a phenomenon reported in the foregoing chapters on plant-centric societies in Africa. And yet the paper emphasizes the abundance of meat animals available and the emphasis on grease in the diet (for lack of carbohydrate energy.)
I have many questions about this paper, beginning with how the diet of these tribes breaks down in calories contributed by micronutrient. Per cent volume of food eaten is not precise enough. It would also be interesting to have this reexamined by someone with more qualifications in ethnobotany, or maybe a woman, as Sutters's main focus is clearly on tribe dynamics associated with prestige, and preserved meat foods as a way of creating wealth that can buy prestige. It's a worthy subject of study, but I have my doubts that the diets and activities of women and children really received the attention in it that they merit.
---
Done. I couldn't continue as above, there were too many papers.
The authors disagree over so many truly fundamental points about human development that it's surprising how many make sweeping assertions that seem to have little consensus and in fact contradictory evidence presented at the symposium.
For example, in one paper the author will mention that that use of many of the early stone tools is still unclear. And in another paper, an author totally convinced that hunting caused the divergence of humans from other primates, will argue that objects like stone hand-axes were clearly implements for hunting, although we're not sure how they were used.
Only some of the authors seem to have crunched the numbers on questions like energy economy in hunting and collecting, although you'd think this would be a major concern for all researchers, especially since most of them approached anthropology with the idea that hunting was a constant struggle against starvation.
For example, some authors seem to be struck by the efficiency of "pursuit hunting," which is when a group of hunters run down an animal over the course of a few days until it runs out of energy. Let's be generous and say that the average big game animal pursued this way has 50 pounds of meat on it when it starts running away. This amounts to a potential of about 90,000kCal of food. 4 men in a relay spend 3 days chasing it and one day hauling it back to camp, burning about 3500kCal a piece per day from constant running, and the animal loses the same. So the animal represents a net gain of only 23,500kCal, not even enough to feed a tribe of 20 people on meat for a single day.
Some of the authors point these contradictions up explicitly. It's only the groups that are required by environmental conditions to rely on meat that face constant struggles against starvation, even though they inhabit areas of great animal abundance. The hunter-gatherers of even low-quality warm climates do not starve even when hunts fail, although at times they may go without food.
But other authors, in broadly sweeping concluding remarks, simply reject the point of view that man in his developmental range of Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Europe, might not have faced constant starvation pressure due to a diet that only used hunting as a supplementary source of food instead of a primary one. They state, without compelling evidence, that hunting is the unifying factor in man's physiological and cultural development. One even has the bizarre theory that man is, by nature of his physiology, a well-designed hunter, superior to his prey in senses and physical capabilities.
You have to wonder if guys like that have ever tried hunting in real life. It's true that humans have more ocular focus and see more colors than do horses and antelope, but that does not mean our vision is superior. Their vision is suited to their mode of life, which involves constantly evading predation, and ours is suited to our mode of life, which is focusing on small objects that we can grasp with our hands.
There's a chicken and egg problem that only a few of the writers acknowledge--did hunting predate tools, or did tools permit hunting? To an actual hunter, the answer must clearly be the second option. In a time before prey animals feared humans and before humans used tools, the first encounters would have been a well-rested prey animal against an unequipped human. Who would win? The prey animal.
The little exploration of this issue that does receive attention points to Goodall's studies of chimps and others of baboons who eat a small percentage of their diet as meat. But in their case, they steal bird eggs and young birds from nests, eat grubs, and maybe on rare occasion eat a small mammal like a much smaller monkey. And they don't share the kill.
Much of the volume has to do with social organization and kinship bonds. These are only semi-interesting to me. The idea anthropologists have in mind is that environmental factors that determine population density and cultural attainments that make food gathering more or less easy and the necessities imposed on a society by the realities of hunting, such as constantly moving to intercept prey or needing at times to move the camp to the site of a large kill that's too large to bring back to camp, determine the structures of societies. And that the genetic predispositions we have regarding socialization may tell us something about the human condition today.
But they largely can't agree on what the different levels of organization that we should define are, and patterns seem to emerge only in the broadest possible strokes. To me this is unsurprising. If you grant that humans were living in environments where subsistence was not a constant struggle against starvation, then the proposed constraints that would enforce an identifiable pattern on social structure would largely not exist. If you don't know the population density of a given settlement, and you don't know their food base, and you don't know what their tools were used for, and you don't really know what their climate was like at the time, then you can't really as much about how their social structures might have been constrained.
All in all, this is a very interesting snapshot-in-time read of where anthropologists were around 1970.
I'm interested in this topic as I was raised as a hunter, proud of the idea that my skills were contiguous with ancestral providers of vital, life-giving meat for their communities.
Through a long, circuitous route, I have come to believe that this cod history of mankind might be powering wrong-headed developments across the world with respect to health and resource scarcity.
The paper that fundamentally changed my view on this subject, "The Seed Eaters," by Clifford Jolly, had not been published at the time that this symposium occurred, and anyway may have been too heterodox to justify inclusion.
I'm reading this work to try to understand the mindset of anthropologists with firsthand view on extant hunter-gatherer communities.
Right off the bat, before the introduction by the editors is even finished, an unresolved disagreement casts a pall over the following pages:
"The symposium considered the definition of 'hunters' but did not succeed in satisfying everyone...[to] confine hunters to those populations with strictly Pleistocene economies...would effectively eliminate most, if not all, of the peoples reported at the symposium." Further: "The symposium agreed to consider as hunters all cases presented, despite the fact that the majority...subsisted primarily on sources other than meat" (Italics theirs.)
More: "Our unacculturated hunter-gatherer life has been largely drawn from peoples no longer living in the optimum portion of their traditional range...the majority of precontact Eskimos, Australian aborigines, and Bushmen lived in much better environments."
And: "The hunting of mammals has been considered the characteristic feature of the subsistence of early man...Modern hunters, however, depend on...vegetable foods, fish and shellfish. Only in the arctic and subarctic areas where vegetable foods are unavailable do we find the textbook examples of mammal hunters. Over the rest of the world, hunting appears to provide only 20 to 40 percent of the diet." Take that, keto-wienies.
"Binford, Washburn, and Lancaster, and others expressed the view that fishing, seed-grinding, and hunting with dogs are late adaptations dating from the Mesolithic and therefore not characteristic of Pleistocene conditions." Authors answer with my very own thoughts: "Our own view is that vegetable foods in the form of nuts, berries, and roots were always available to early man and were easily exploited by even the simplest technologies."
Quoting from a paper book is hard so I'll leave it there for now, but it's an interesting moment in anthropology. A few of the authors in the book seem quite ready to throw over the evidence of their eyes, that extant so-called "HUNTER-gatherers" are in fact eating 80% gathered foods and 20% hunted foods, and trying to argue instead for a No True Scotsman view of hunter-gatherers, where in the deep past, unexcavated populations subsisted almost entirely on the meat of wild pigs, birds, and ruminants, resorting to plant collection only in the last resort. The fact that no society living at this time in its historical range behaves that way does not seem to shake their fidelity to that assumption, but rather to prove that "true" hunter-gathering went extinct before anyone was there to record its existence.
An interesting adjunct of the foregoing discussion is mentioned soon after: the symposium votes to redefine the acquisition of aquatic mammals (seals, whales) as hunting, when it had previously been considered fishing., and to redefine the collection of sessile bivalves (clams, molluscs) as "gathering." These redefinitions permit some tribes of far-north people to remain classified as hunter-gatherers even though they don't fit many of the other criteria posited (such as having a nomadic mode of living, making no use of metals or post-contact technologies, etc.) and also serve to systematically exclude women from the "hunter" column by diminishing the foods they provided by collecting (what I consider to be) meat from beaches and streambeds.
The modes of thinking of some of the authors sound outdated and at times ambiguously racist, but it's their thought processes, and not their conclusions, that most interest me.
---
Page 43: "...the basis of Bushman diet is derived from sources other than meat...since a 30 to 40 per cent input of meat is such a consistent target for modern hunters in a variety of habitats, is it not reasonable to postulate a similar percentage for prehistoric hunters? Certainly the absence of plant remains on archeological sites is by itself not sufficient evident for the absence of gathering. Recently-abandoned Bushman campsites show a similar absence of vegetable remains, although this paper has clearly shown that plant foods comprise over 60 per cent of the actual diet."
-Lee, "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources"
---
"...I guessed that in the diet of adults, vegetable foods would have amounted to less than 10 per cent of volume but might have been higher for children, who probably foraged for such things as cattail roots and thimble berries that adults would be less likely to bother with. I assume that in the diet of all, even small amounts of certain vegetable foods may have been very important to health. I was surprised then to note, in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas estimates of 20 per cent dependence on gathering for the Nootka and 30 per cent for the Kwakiutl...I am willing to admit that my guess of 10 per cent...may be too low, but the Kwakiutl figure given in the Atlas is surely too high."
-Suttles, "Coping with Abundance: Subsistence on the Northwest Coast", page 61
Here's an interesting study of primarily fish and meat-eating tribes of the Pacific Northwest. These are presumably about as close to the assumed "keto" diet, eating highly fatty sea mammals and fishes and relatively little plant matter (as the mature conifer forests of the high Pacific Northwest present relatively little opportunity for gathering them.
I was a bit surprised by the assertion made by Suttles that only 10% of the volume of food comes from vegetable matter, even in this area. One problem I see is that he is estimating consumption by volume, though elsewhere in the book others do the same, often citing studies done several decades before under unreproducible conditions.
Ethnobotanic studies cite the bulbs of Camas species as a source of carbohydrates and extensive berry collection in this area, and Sutters cites cattails as a food source that adults would not "bother" with, although elsewhere in the country it was used as food. The amounts of foods that Sutters "guesses" or "assumes" are eaten makes this an interesting example of what I expected to find in papers of this time, which is an implicit assumption by the researchers than animal foods are objectively more valuable than plant ones, and therefore that plants only make up for the hunting shortfall and certain deficiencies that would otherwise occur from a meat-only diet.
The title of the paper is the tell: "Coping with Abundance." The tribes of the Pacific Northwest are coping with a very specific type of abundance, that of meat and fish. But they're facing up to a dearth of available plant foods, and it's interesting that Sutters does not think of the issue in that way. They are in a zone where agriculture is not justified, where foods that grow in a place where humans can collect them are limited to the seashore and forest margins, and where cold temperatures make the risk of starvation that much more perilous than it is at warmer climates.
Sutters reports periods of starvation and food storage and barter, a phenomenon reported in the foregoing chapters on plant-centric societies in Africa. And yet the paper emphasizes the abundance of meat animals available and the emphasis on grease in the diet (for lack of carbohydrate energy.)
I have many questions about this paper, beginning with how the diet of these tribes breaks down in calories contributed by micronutrient. Per cent volume of food eaten is not precise enough. It would also be interesting to have this reexamined by someone with more qualifications in ethnobotany, or maybe a woman, as Sutters's main focus is clearly on tribe dynamics associated with prestige, and preserved meat foods as a way of creating wealth that can buy prestige. It's a worthy subject of study, but I have my doubts that the diets and activities of women and children really received the attention in it that they merit.
---
Done. I couldn't continue as above, there were too many papers.
The authors disagree over so many truly fundamental points about human development that it's surprising how many make sweeping assertions that seem to have little consensus and in fact contradictory evidence presented at the symposium.
For example, in one paper the author will mention that that use of many of the early stone tools is still unclear. And in another paper, an author totally convinced that hunting caused the divergence of humans from other primates, will argue that objects like stone hand-axes were clearly implements for hunting, although we're not sure how they were used.
Only some of the authors seem to have crunched the numbers on questions like energy economy in hunting and collecting, although you'd think this would be a major concern for all researchers, especially since most of them approached anthropology with the idea that hunting was a constant struggle against starvation.
For example, some authors seem to be struck by the efficiency of "pursuit hunting," which is when a group of hunters run down an animal over the course of a few days until it runs out of energy. Let's be generous and say that the average big game animal pursued this way has 50 pounds of meat on it when it starts running away. This amounts to a potential of about 90,000kCal of food. 4 men in a relay spend 3 days chasing it and one day hauling it back to camp, burning about 3500kCal a piece per day from constant running, and the animal loses the same. So the animal represents a net gain of only 23,500kCal, not even enough to feed a tribe of 20 people on meat for a single day.
Some of the authors point these contradictions up explicitly. It's only the groups that are required by environmental conditions to rely on meat that face constant struggles against starvation, even though they inhabit areas of great animal abundance. The hunter-gatherers of even low-quality warm climates do not starve even when hunts fail, although at times they may go without food.
But other authors, in broadly sweeping concluding remarks, simply reject the point of view that man in his developmental range of Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Europe, might not have faced constant starvation pressure due to a diet that only used hunting as a supplementary source of food instead of a primary one. They state, without compelling evidence, that hunting is the unifying factor in man's physiological and cultural development. One even has the bizarre theory that man is, by nature of his physiology, a well-designed hunter, superior to his prey in senses and physical capabilities.
You have to wonder if guys like that have ever tried hunting in real life. It's true that humans have more ocular focus and see more colors than do horses and antelope, but that does not mean our vision is superior. Their vision is suited to their mode of life, which involves constantly evading predation, and ours is suited to our mode of life, which is focusing on small objects that we can grasp with our hands.
There's a chicken and egg problem that only a few of the writers acknowledge--did hunting predate tools, or did tools permit hunting? To an actual hunter, the answer must clearly be the second option. In a time before prey animals feared humans and before humans used tools, the first encounters would have been a well-rested prey animal against an unequipped human. Who would win? The prey animal.
The little exploration of this issue that does receive attention points to Goodall's studies of chimps and others of baboons who eat a small percentage of their diet as meat. But in their case, they steal bird eggs and young birds from nests, eat grubs, and maybe on rare occasion eat a small mammal like a much smaller monkey. And they don't share the kill.
Much of the volume has to do with social organization and kinship bonds. These are only semi-interesting to me. The idea anthropologists have in mind is that environmental factors that determine population density and cultural attainments that make food gathering more or less easy and the necessities imposed on a society by the realities of hunting, such as constantly moving to intercept prey or needing at times to move the camp to the site of a large kill that's too large to bring back to camp, determine the structures of societies. And that the genetic predispositions we have regarding socialization may tell us something about the human condition today.
But they largely can't agree on what the different levels of organization that we should define are, and patterns seem to emerge only in the broadest possible strokes. To me this is unsurprising. If you grant that humans were living in environments where subsistence was not a constant struggle against starvation, then the proposed constraints that would enforce an identifiable pattern on social structure would largely not exist. If you don't know the population density of a given settlement, and you don't know their food base, and you don't know what their tools were used for, and you don't really know what their climate was like at the time, then you can't really as much about how their social structures might have been constrained.
All in all, this is a very interesting snapshot-in-time read of where anthropologists were around 1970.
September 24, 2017
The importance of this book goes beyond the stories themselves. It explains a hugely important part of human being and the well-known mistake that humanity eat meat since the origin of our species.
September 19, 2007
not as applicable in 2007 as it was in the 70's, but great stories.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews