Seafood, Makeup, and Now: Chocolate
Filed under: Uncategorized — Giulianna Maria Lamanna @ 7:26 PM
Remember all the way back to three days ago when I posted a news article about recent archaeological discoveries showing that humans have been eating seafood and putting on makeup for thousands of years longer than previously thought? Well, ditto chocolate.
Residents of Central America were enjoying chocolate drinks more than 3,000 years ago, a half millennium earlier than previously thought.
Not that this is particularly surprising. It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to nibble a little on the plants in an ecosystem once you’ve moved into it. If good food is there, living creatures will find it. I don’t understand why we’d assume you’d need a particular level of intelligence–or complexity of culture–to figure out that, hey, chocolate is delicious.
The strange thing with discovery of plants like that of the cacao tree is that they are in fact poisonous. So they have had to go through quite a process for testing them. I do not agree with people who says that we have a natural affinity for discovering what plants are edible and not. But rather that many hunter gatherer societies had intricate ways of testing new plants for edibility. This has for example been recorded among Native American tribes.
Comment by Torjus Gaaren — 13 November 2007 @ 12:28 AM
Isn’t chocolate not paleo, though, it being a bean and all?
Don’t get me wrong. I love me some chocolate, and still eat it on occaison, paleo be damned. But now we’re entering a slippery slope in which we’re maybe also eating sprouted rye berries and fermented lentils. If we’re for this, then I see little reason why having some injera with my ethiopian food is no good.
Comment by Archangel — 13 November 2007 @ 10:26 AM
Lots of hunter-gatherers even ate all-out cereal grains, including wheat and rice … as a starvation food to get them through the winter, for the most part. There’s the key: no food should ever be a staple, though we did choose for our first quite a doozy of an “in extreme moderation” crop. Very few things are really all that awful for you if you only eat them once in a while. But note, even though “all things in moderation” is the take-home message, a moderate amount of grain might be a bagel or two per year.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 November 2007 @ 5:35 PM
Don’t I remember reading somewhere that the “cacao bean” is actually a berry? Or maybe I mean coffee…
Comment by Vicky — 13 November 2007 @ 7:11 PM
Cacao is in the Sterculiaceae family, which is close to the Malvaceae that includes things like Hibiscus and Okra. Its generally relatively edible though can be more prone to having irritating spines and hairs than the Malva family. The Stercs include edible seeded species such as Sterculia from our Australian rainforests and Brachychiton from our drier regions. The Brachychiton seeds are protected by irritating hairs that need to be carefully roasted and sifted off. Kola nut is in the same family as well. Doubtless there are other edible or stimulant species in the group.
Comment by void_genesis — 13 November 2007 @ 7:25 PM
I’m pondering too the usefulness of the modern word “chocolate” (which means the highly sweetened and processed version to modern readers) in talking about ancient cacao products. Similarly calling ochre “make-up”. Comparisons of seafood are a little easier to relate across time at least.
I’m just perplexed about why the paleo ethos has to be pimped and moulded into our modern attitudes toward luxury and leisure. Especially when what is really relevant is how a paleo approach to living is going to actually pay off going into the future where I doubt any of us will be sucking down oysters and adjusting our eyeliner for much of our time.
A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but what are we actually swallowing?
Comment by void_genesis — 13 November 2007 @ 7:32 PM
Primitive living isn’t about privation. I want to live primitively because it means living better. I’ve never bought this ascetic, monkish interpretation that primitive life somehow equates to foregoing comfort, or even those nice luxuries that we all enjoy. That’s what this blog is all about. It isn’t about trying to sugar-coat the truth, it’s about correcting the fundamental misunderstanding that primitive life is somehow this austere experience. Primitive people certainly didn’t think of themselves in such ways. They thought of their lives as luxurious, their lands as paradise. They did spend most of their time sucking down oysters and adjusting their eyeliner. It’s our baseless assumptions vs. the realities of primitive life, and this blog is all about standing up for the realities of primitive life, baseless assumptions be damned.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 November 2007 @ 9:52 PM
I take your point that the paleolithic primitivist world may have been like that (though I would probably argue that in most regions certain seasons were plentiful and luxurious and others were comparatively lean and harsh).
My main question is “how is a historic notion of luxury relevant to likely future primitivist lifestyles?” given that at least in our lifetimes we will be living in a massively degraded and shifting landscape compared to that of our paleolithic ancestors.
The past was a paradise of sorts, but what is likely to be the future?
Comment by void_genesis — 13 November 2007 @ 10:38 PM
Well, even the !Kung lived in luxury and described the Kalahari as paradise. Granted, the Tuppeek-hanne we’re living in now has suffered greatly, but do you seriously want to contend that the Allegheny National Forest is more desolate than the Kalahari Desert? Even massively degraded, most of the world still fits easily into the “lap of luxury” range, assuming you have a tribe, and take the time to learn how to live in that place.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 November 2007 @ 10:57 PM
The kalahari is a relatively undisturbed environment, so I don’t think it makes a useful comparison. It is harsh in some ways but the the Kung have had a long time to adapt to it.
The Allegheny national forest is an ironic example as it *was* recently more desolate than the kalahari desert. It was completely deforested in the early 1900s by logging.
If history did somehow fast forward to leaving a small remnant human population in a world much like our current one I can see how having primitivist skills would be a great advantage. But the immediate future seems more likely to see us clinging to industrialisation and going back to the coal age. What is to stop us leveling places like the Allegheny forest again and beyond? Add in climate change and it gets even more complex. This doesnt make civilisation look any better but it is consistent with my position that no-one other than the super rich can expect easy luxury in the coming decades (and even they risk mobs and guillotines).
Comment by void_genesis — 14 November 2007 @ 12:06 AM
“Disturbed” isn’t really a useful measure. Every ecology is “disturbed” on a daily basis. Ecologies are the products of disturbance. If not humans, then wolves, badgers, deer and every other living thing continues with that disturbance.
Yes, people called it the “Pennsylvania Desert,” but more desolate than the Kalahari? Seriously? Even at its worse, that comparison is absolutely ridiculous.
That’s not going to work out as well as the proponents expect, as we’ve already discussed on Anthropik.
Lack of energy. There is some amount going on right now, but now there’s a tension against the amount of energy it takes to decimate it. But even if it goes back to the Allegheny Briar Patch, you’re still not looking at anything even remotely like the desolation of a place like the Kalahari Desert.
Climate change simply means you have to be quick and adapt quickly. Which is something hunter-gatherers are in a better position to do than anyone else.
The super-rich currently enjoy easy luxury because they have a civilization to provide it to them. They’re precisely the people who can’t expect an easy life in the future. But those who choose to rewild, choose to live the way humans have adapted, which is a fairly easy, carefree way of life, even in places where no other way of life can even survive.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 November 2007 @ 7:22 AM
“They did spend most of their time sucking down oysters and adjusting their eyeliner. It’s our baseless assumptions vs. the realities of primitive life, and this blog is all about standing up for the realities of primitive life, baseless assumptions be damned.”
Indeed! (and lets damn all the based-marginally-in-reality-but-disregarding-all-evidence to-the-contrary assumptions as well!)
Sure you can find anecdotal reports of this lifestyle (decadent food and preoccupation with appearance) but the idea that paleolithic peoples lived healthier, longer lives than the life that is possible for first-world people today is ridiculous. On the global biocentric scale, paleolithic people lived a “better” life, but if you want to be “prissy” then you’d better aspire to the life of a health conscious postmodern japanese, european, canadia-merican, etc.
Primitive lifestyles are better for the overall ecology because primitive peoples are subject to the same painful evolutionary selective pressures that all other life is. Parasites, predation, starvation, trauma, disease, etc….even considering zoonotics and the common cold, we (as first-world people - hey lets not kid ourselves, none of us are posting from Darfur) have it much easier than primitive peoples did.
Comment by Michael G — 17 November 2007 @ 4:37 AM
Points to consider….
…if the environmental destruction of the 20th century has no significant impact on the ability of a landscape to support human life then what is so worrisome about it?
How many people could the Allegheny forest support, and what would be the impact if a sizeable portion of new people beyond this carrying capacity (say 10-20% more) kept wandering into it from the degrading industrial world year after year?
What if people cut down the forests with hand saws for fuel and timber? What if people sent in herds of goats to nibble down the brush?
On one hand you acknowledge the massive environmental degradation that occurred in the fertile crescent with primitive agriculture (but avoid that agriculture continued to be the dominant form of society there) while on the other hand you deny that a similar fate could befall much of the rest of the world (and again fail to consider that primitive agriculture could hang on and make life difficult or impossible for HGers).
Comment by void_genesis — 18 November 2007 @ 11:33 PM
The evidence is against you here, but I’m not going to rehash it yet again. The Thirty Theses already went through this in extensive detail. If by “prissy” you mean using petrochemical cosmetics, then you have a point. But no modern model spends as much time on her appearance as the average, traditional Haudenosaunee man, who had practically all day to dote on his hair and makeup. That’s what we mean by “prissy.”
Except for the shorter life expectancies, greater incidence of disease, chronic malnutrition, and far, far shorter amounts of liesure time … to name a few. Again, take a look at the Thirty Theses. There’s far too much evidence disproving your baseless assertions here to go through it yet again. It’s time to move on.
Didn’t say it hadn’t. The old-growth forest that used to grow on the Allegheny Plateau has been greatly diminished. But at its height, it supported the Seneca, the most populous tribe of the Haudenosaunee, who were one of the most populous groups north of the Rio Grande. How many people are going to be trying to hunt and gather there in the next few decades? If it’s even 10% of the old Seneca population, I will be shocked. The bottle-neck of imagination is much more restrictive than the ecological resources.
If we get to the point where the Allegheny Plateau is worse off than the Kalahari, just give up. Life on earth is at an end.
Why would people wander in? As things get more desperate, people flock to the cities more, not less. There’s never been a collapse before where these wandering hordes appear–people always flock to the cities. So why will this time be any different? People are still people, and they still act and react like people.
It took trains to make lumbering the Allegheny feasible, because sure, you can cut it down, but then you need to drag the wood back home. If there’s less energy, then you don’t have energy to get the wood back home, either, for all the same reasons people weren’t cutting down those trees before the railroads the first time around. The mountains haven’t moved.
You’re glossing over a lot there.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 November 2007 @ 7:24 PM