Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking

Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking......................................

Lecture 1

T

hroughout this course, you will analyze what people ate and why, how

they made the best of their material resources, which technologies

they used to transform food, and most importantly, what ideas they

had about food. By the end of the course, your relationship to the food

you eat—and to human history as a whole—may be quite different and,

hopefully, far richer. This lecture begins at the very beginning, even before

human history, with a discussion of food in prehistoric times.

Prehistoric Diets

 Looking at the diet of prehistoric people raises fundamental

questions about what we were meant to eat according to nature. This

is a question that most civilizations at one point or another address:

Are we primarily sharp-toothed carnivores or benign vegetarians?

 It had long been assumed that our prehistoric forebears were

primarily hunters, judging from archaeological remains of animal

bones and arrow tips and pictures of game depicted on cave walls.

However, from the emergence of Homo sapiens about 200,

years ago to only about 10,000 years ago—the vast majority

of our time on this planet—humans got their food by gathering

and hunting.

 Humans are omnivores—and always have been. Sophisticated

methods of analyzing tissue remains and fossilized bits of food

are now giving us a more complete image of the prehistoric diet,

and the surprise is that prehistoric humans were well fed; they ate

everything and anything that offered nutritional value, including

meat of animals large and small, insects, fi sh, wild greens, nuts,

berries, and seeds.

 Other evidence is provided by plant and animal remains left at

archaeological sites, including bits of bones, heaps of shells, and