Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking
half a million hominids in existence; by 30,000 years ago, there
were about three million. Despite the smaller populations, hunter-
gatherers were on the whole better nourished, had fewer diseases,
and probably had a lot more spare time than their agricultural-
pastoral descendants. Regarding free time, a hunting-gathering economy provides about
10,000 to 15,000 calories per hour of labor. Subsistence farmers,
growing mostly grain, get between 3,000 and 5,000. You have to
work much harder when farming—and you have to eat a lot more
vegetables to be properly nourished. To capture or kill an animal requires a high level of sophistication.
Making such tools as bows and arrows are skills that are passed
down from generation to generation. Presumably, these skills give
some peoples an evolutionary advantage over others, and this
may be why we replaced Neanderthals. Sophisticated toolmakers
survive and pass on their genes at a greater rate. It is generally believed that there was a gender-specifi c division
of labor among these people—as there often is among nomadic
hunter-gatherers today. Men went out to hunt while women did the
gathering because they were also involved with child rearing. Cooking was essential to our becoming human and was the fi rst
major food revolution. Cooking involves the development of
ritual, and a more complex social organization results from regular
cooking with fi re. Many foods, including meat, starches, and wild
grasses, were made more digestible (or digestible for the fi rst time)
with the advent of cooking with fi re. Cooking also kills pathogens
in food, so those who cooked survived at greater rates than those
who didn’t—a real evolutionary advantage over all other animals. In fact, even before pottery and metallurgy, a core repertoire of
cooking methods had already come into use.
○ Roasting.