Hacker News Reader

Comment by slicktux | Hacker News Reader

There’s many theories but one that I learned was that women and children provides the bulk of the calories for Early Humans. While the men went out and hunted for meat they also relied on the fruit harvested by the women and children. That would give them the energy necessary for trekking and hunting.

View on HN

Fruit were completely different and a lot less sugary and more starchy than they are today. We wouldn’t recognize most fruit neither by look nor by taste.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-foods-looked-like-befor...

Everyone participated in everything. Getting food was basically 90% of everyone's day. When berries were in season, which might only be a week or two, everyone picked berries. When the salmon migrated, everyone worked the river. And then, when there were no plants in season and the only calories were from hunting, everyone supported the hunt.

The idea of four guys going into the woods and spearing a deer is a myth, a false parallel to modern sport hunting. Beaters pushed the prey towards kill zones. Fires could be set to get game moving. Fences would be biult to funnel game. And everyone was involved in processing the kill. Sure, maybe the big guys threw the spears but that was actually a small part of the process. The safest kill would always have been that where the animal injured itself first, no big guy muscles required. So there were plenty of jobs for all abilities.

And yet present day hunter gatherer societies tend to have extremely strict gender roles. For example the idea of a woman going on a hunt is not taboo, but simply unthinkable, maybe similar to what we would think about a man taking lactose pills to breastfeed. At least that is what I read in Sabine Kugler's excellent books. So somehow I doubt everyone participated in everything.

Selection bias. Notice how most present day groups are in hot and relatively stable climates, areas where one can hunt/gather all year. Look to past groups in the north where seasonal changes meant the window for any particular food source was always limited. When there is only a short window, it is maximum effort from everyone.

The same is true for agriculture. Even today, with all of our mechanical wizardry, farmers on the plains still pull their kids out of school to help during harvest.

Your previous comment was far too absolute in its wording and was thus incorrect, as evidenced by GPs counterexample. "Four guys going into the woods and spearing an [animal]" is definitely not "a myth".

Note that many early humans lived in "hot and relatively stable climates".

How do you know this? Anthropology?

Well, there are heaps of hunting structures left out there, and infamous places where animals were run off cliffs. But also, just watch anyone trying to catch an animal, be it a dog or a buffalo. Good luck trying to sneek within spear range. What most do is get a bunch of people together to scare the animal into a particular direction or place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite

https://explorersweb.com/hiker-discovers-iron-age-reindeer-f...

https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/northern-yukon...

>> The most technologically sophisticated is the caribou fence complex. Ten of these complexes have been studied by archaeologists in the northern Yukon and nearly 40 others have been recorded in adjacent Alaska. The oldest surviving fences date to the early 1800s, but oral history suggests fences may have been used for thousands of years; they were last used about 1910.

>But also, just watch anyone trying to catch an animal

Have you seen non-tech office workers solving computer problems? Gathering around, hitting the case, pressing random buttons, calling their friends, who are also clueless, on the phone, everyone advising everyone else on what to do next? This is exactly how programmers and SREs deal with the same problems according to you.

> fruit harvested

Also tubers.

So we’re expected to believe each man is carry a basket of rapidly deteriorating fruit (and tubers).

Or a knapsack of dried fatty meat with a fairly indefinite shelf life.

The Inca had a method of drying potatoes such that they were stable for multiple years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o

But the Inca lived to late for this discussion. They already had advanced agriculture. For evolutionary terms, the time before agriculture and the time of the predecessors of homo sapiens are more relevant, because that time span was larger by orders of magnitude.

Fruit doesn't go bad in a day.

Maybe they took dried fruit

Maybe they took both.

Ok.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com