Hi, I thought I would introduce myself and my research on hunter-gatherer economies a bit more fully here. My thesis supervisor was Richard B. Lee. He trained me - so I systematically weighed and then itemized the contents of the kaross used by women in gathering wild plant foods. (they also collected bird’s eggs and wild grubs). Each kind of plant food, beans, tubers, stems. nuts, corms, bulbs, berries, larger tree fruit, greens, and wild cereals, were all sampled and sent to laboratory analysis for nutrient content, unless this had already been done by previous researchers. Meat from animals trapped, snared, netted, or shot on hunting trips was weighed and the species identification was recorded. Butchering was observed and samples taken for nutrient analysis also. I followed the same protocols during three years of fieldwork with a different group of Kalahari foragers. People were also weighed and measured for height, and records were kept of daily activities so caloric outlay could be assessed. My results were well within the same range as the similar statistics for Hadza, !Kung, G/wi, and a number of other foragers for whom similar data sets were gathered. Meat accounted for between 15 and 35% of all calories consumed. Nuts and wild beans also supplied protein and fat to the diet. One hunt in four was successful. Diets adjusted seasonally, as different foods became more plentiful. I recorded a two week period during a hartebeest migration when meat accounted for over 80% of calories.. and this was supplied by men - and also another period of ten days when women went out every morning to gather the larvae feeding on a particular species of tree, and the diet of the camps I visited over a period of 32 days was based predominantly (up to 60% of calories of calories consumed per day) on these roasted grubs (they are delicious by the way, sort of like shrimp) as they could be stored after roasting. Below is photo of one of the women waiting to have her kaross of gathered food weighed by me, a photo of some of the wild foods sampled, a picture taken by a visiting Palaeo-anthropologist while I was observing the butchering of a small antelope called a duiker, and a picture from my earliest time in the Kalahari, assisting Robert Hitchcock weighing the daily fish catch of the Nata river San in NE Botswana. Hitchcock was one of the students of Pat Draper and Henry Harpending whose Kalahari Project overlapped the first two moths of my own fieldwork. I was able to take over one of the vehicles used for their research, for which gift I have always been extremely grateful.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 03:23:40 +0000
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