Re: selection criteria for obesity

From: Pauline M Ross (pmross_at_ross-software.co.uk)
Date: 12/22/04 

Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 13:54:45 +0000

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 01:06:27 GMT, "Charles" <lmno@mindspring.com>
wrote:

>> [firstjois]They may not have had all the fine points of female anatomy just
>> right but this is a better depiction of pregnancy than obesity. Note the
>> arms.
>
>[Charles]I must respectfully disagree. This has nothing to do with the old tendency
>of men in anthrolpolgy to make definitions of this or that. This Venus is
>an obese woman. Maybe I should have said it like this: This Venus is an
>obese woman who may also be pregnant. Pregnancy very rarely protrudes
>sideways. [Snip]

I have to agree with you. I find it interesting that anyone would
defend the nothing-but-pregnancy line for the Venuses, because anyone
who has seen an obese woman and a slim-but-pregnant woman can surely
see the difference. The fat Venuses I have seen are *clearly* obese,
although there are some which are skinny (and visibly non-pregnant),
too.

>Of course, none of us can say whether a female of this sort was the norm for
>30,000 ya, but we know that at least one person looked like this in order
>for the artist to have depicted her. [Snip]
> My point is that these Venus statues are *evidence* that obesity
>existed.

Yes, exactly. And your point that the large human brain is evidence
for continuous abundance is also a good one.

>> [firstjois]Agriculture what? 170,000 ya?
>[Charles] oh, its just a thought, a speculation. Suppose that agriculture was
>invented/discovered way back then and we just haven't yet found any...
>harrrrumph!... evidence!

Colin Tudge wrote a small book about this idea a while back - called
something like 'Neandertals, Bandits and Farmers'. He proposed that
some kind of low-level of agriculture (weeding, pruning and defending,
say) could have been going on for a long time without leaving a mark
on the archaeological record. He dated it to 40 kya, but it could
easily go back a lot further than that.

I find it interesting that 'agriculture' is known to have arisen a
number of times independently in far-flung parts of the globe within a
few thousand years. Even groups widely thought to be pre-agricultural
(like the Australian Aboriginals) had eel-farms and such like. Call me
cynical, but I don't believe in coincidences. Far more likely, to my
mind, that some kind of pre-agriculture was practised universally by
early modern humans, and simply intensified to noticeable levels at
different times.

There is also the issue of fire, which could potentially have been
used to manage the environment in a pre-agricultural way, and dates
back to before the advent of Hss.

Nice to have a proper thread about paleoanthropology on this group :-) 

-- 
Pauline Ross

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