Comments on: Richard Wrangham on Cooking and Human Origins – plus Ray Mears’ Fruit Gums

By: Helga Vierich

Helga Vierich — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:31:24 +0000

Sorry to take so long to answer, I am still finding my way around the internet… Oh yes, they value the whole animal and make use of it if they can get it home. The only things they did not eat were the teeth, gut contents, horns, hooves… and hide. The hooves are often consumed by the dogs, as are any bones that the people leave for them. Skins are made into leather or tanned for sale, intestines and gut are cleaned and cooked, and even genitalia are consumed.

Odd that the people did not bother with small common animals like guinea fowl and hares. Those were left for the children’s target practice. But they may also have social and spiritual reasons for using the whole animal carefully – after all it has sacrificed itself that they might eat.

By: Wednesday Round Up #73 « Neuroanthropology

Wednesday Round Up #73 « Neuroanthropology — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:43:28 +0000

[...] Jones, Richard Wrangham on Cooking and Human Origins – plus Ray Mears’ Fruit Gums Wrangham on how barbequing made all the difference in human [...]

By: Tim Jones

Tim Jones — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:33:29 +0000

Very interesting comments, worthy of a blog post in their own right – I forgot to ask in a related post whether modern hunters of game only go for the meat component, or whether they use other parts such as the skin, or sinews etc for clothing or sundry other applications.

By: Helga Vierich

Helga Vierich — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:32:36 +0000

First of all, cooking would have developed as a way of making certain starchy roots more digestible. And making some of the harder nuts and wild beans easier to crack open. It is possible that the cooking of meat was a bit of an afterthought, and that drying meat in the sun came first as it made the meat much lighter and easy to transport along during camp moves.

The development of the “in-love” program that appears to be a human universal would have brought couples together regardless of cooking arrangements. Among the hunter-gatherers I lived with, even small kids know how to cook. I doubt very much that different women would have been raiding each other’s hearths for food, since if there were dangerous predators around, as there certainly always were in Africa, women prefer to go out gathering in groups, without the toddlers and other children. Children’s higher voices and loudness attract predators, whereas a group of women armed with their sharpened digging sticks (and often knives and the means to make fire) are generally left unmolested by the local big cats and wild dogs. In the camp, there would always be at least one adult to monitor the kids in their play.

Women coming home with their capes stuffed with vegetables, roots, fruit, eggs and other items, each head for their own hearthes, build up the fire if needed and then begin to cook a snack for themselves and the kids as well as the care-takers. The women might send some special treats to the hearths of older relations, and might receive gifts back. Kids loved to run from fire to fire with these kinds of special dainties.

It is not likely that the women would need to go out gathering again for the next two or even three days. Men, meanwhile eat with their wives and children and do not necessarily hunt every day. Only about one hunt in four is successful, but this is a statistical average, and sometimes individual men get very discouraged and need to be cajoled into trying again. At such times everyone may help by gathering to dance and make a plea to the spirits of the animals to let themselves be killed so that the hunger of the people can be stilled. This may be accompanied by dances which imitate the movements of the hunted animal and the act of its self sacrifice to “run into the hunter’s arrow”.