Re: A.robustus diet included sedges


Chapstick wrote:


I am a layman... when it comes to paleoanthropology... but love the subject.
So, from my perspective, what have we got out there? How did we evolve into
this big brained, obligate bipedal creature? One of the popular theories
about our encephalization is that the consumption of raw bone marrow led
directly to an increase in brain size in our early ancestry. And part of
why marrow consumption is frequently bantered about is specifically to have
an argument against the AAT people that claim that consumption of seafood
lead directly to our larger brains.
I appreciate Su's sense of humor, and always enjoy that picture... the
guy is wincing as he eats the marrow.
My point is that marrow is not often consumed in the raw form, by
current humans. Maybe, if early humns DID consume the stuff, and it tastes
positively awful, then it lead directly to the taming of fire in order to
cook it! <smile>
our natural history museum has a bug-tasting every year... a very
popular event... and they eat an amazing variety of things.

OK, that is the part I'm having trouble with, "current humans." Current
humans are not hunter gatherers for the most part. As I was trying to
point out with my ghoulish friends, they think nothing of eating live
bugs because they learned to eat them at a very young age, if dad eats
it, it must be good. Taste is like beauty, in the eye of the beholder.
Just because you think the taste of marrow is bad, doesn't mean
hominids thought that 3 mya. If you found just one site on the entire
planet with broken bone, you could argue that guy was starving,
desperate and hated marrow. This is not the case, there is no shortage
of broken bone throughout the archaeological record, it is ubiquitous.
There is no other known reason to smash up bone other than to get at
the marrow.
Why pick on the raw condition of marrow as opposed to say raw liver or
raw fish for that matter? There are simply too many ethnographic
examples of hunter gathers eating all kinds of things that people in
industrialized societies think of as gross, raw and cooked.

What is "not often consumed in the raw form" today does not erase the
smoking gun evidence of the past.

For the lower Pleistocene Isaac (1989:134):
"2. The marks occur on a variety of taxa that vary in size from
relatively small animals (e.g. gazelles) to very large animals
(e.g. giraffes, hippos, and elephants).
3. Marks have been found on a wide variety of different anatomical
parts (e.g. skulls, mandibles, vertebrae, humeri, femora, cannon bones
and phlanges)."

Hury et al. (1959:29):
"Masses of smashed brain case bones were found, but no whole skulls
survived."
This evidence matches the conclusion of the paper
http://www.thepaleodiet.com/articles/Encephalization%20Final%20PDF.pdf

Hury et al. 1959. The Lehner Mammoth Site. American Antiquity
Vol.25(1). 2-30

Glynn Isaac (1937-1985)
The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glynn Isaac
Edited by Barbara Isaac. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.








--chap

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: A.robustus diet included sedges
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  • Re: A.robustus diet included sedges
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  • Re: A.robustus diet included sedges
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