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The Evolution of the Human Diet Lecture 7 Coastal Migration and Aquatic Resources Anthro 4962/5962 Instructor Helen Alvarez |
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| The mosaic habitats shown in this photograph of Rajegwesi in Meru Betiri National Park on the south coast of Java illustrate the paleoecology hypothesized for H. erectus in Java by O. Frank Huffman and his colleagues. The photo is from from www.eastjava.com |
Populations of H. erectus were the first human emigrants from Africa. Traveling a route that must have been much the same as that hypothesized for moderns, Lecture 6, they reached the islands of Indonesia (review the map in lecture 5) where fossil crania have been found at Trinil, Ngandong, Sangiran, and Perning near the city of Mojokerto. A group of investigators led by O. Frank Huffman and Yahdi Zaim have just undertaken a major multi-disciplinary project to properly describe the Mojokerto site where the partial skull of a juvenile was found. In the latest publication of this project the authors describe a paleolandscape similar to a modern landscape from Mojokerto pictured above.
“The good condition of the skull and the large size of the ancient Mojokerto Delta favor the conclusion that the hominin died in the deltaic environment in which it was deposited. The Mojokerto child therefore provides evidence for a seacoast Homo erectus population in Southeast Asia, and raises interest in the role that maritime adaptation might have played in the dispersal and paleoecology of early hominins (Huffman et al. 2006 449).”
The preliminary analysis of the fauna and flora in the beds at the site indicate an environment very much similar to that pictured above where mangrove vegetation, grassland and montane forest provided a variety of resources including small and large bovids, Asian elephants, deer, and turtles.
Bantengs (wild oxen) would have come to gaze on the grassy plains between the water and the montane forest inhabited by large cats, monkeys, and pigs. The oxen shared their grazing ground with muntjaks, antelope, rhinos and hippos, some of which foraged on smaller shrubs. Preliminary analysis of fossil teeth from the site indicate that the grasses on these grazing grounds were primarily C4 tropical grasses. The analysis of phytoliths in the sediments reveal two types of grasses, open-land taxa from the subfamilies Panicoidae and Arundinoidae and the temperate climate subfamily Pooideae which probably drifted in from montane habitats. Notice from the opening photograph in this lecture the habitat diversity within a short distance from shore line to ridge line. Early humans might have varied their foraging strategies with the seasons depending upon which resources were most abundant in each habitat. Notice also that the presence of large herbivores near the shore doesn’t rule out big game hunting in habitats characterized by aquatic resources that women and children could collect.
As rivers flowed off the highlands they formed deltas characterized by mangrove swamps with several species of trees including Nypa fruticans palms and the sugar palm Arenga, with flowers that produce a sugary juice, and shrubs of Passiflora with edible passion fruit, and edible climbing ferns, Stenochlaena palustris. The trunks of the Nypa are submerged so the fruit, which is edible when it is immature, would have been accessible to terrestrial hominids. The delta facies contain shells of edible mollusks including oyster shells but at low density and scattered distribution. Crocodile and turtle fossils have been reported from the same sediments at other places in the Perning district. To date only one fish fossil has been identified. The photos of bantengs and nypa palm were taken from a web site of photographs of Ujung Kulon National Park but unfortunately the web site is no long available.
At other locations in Java where crania of H. erectus have been found, a succession of dry and wet climatic regimes can be documented in the fossil pollen record. The stratigraphy of the Sangiran dome, near where Sangiran 17 was found, documents a record from 2.6 M. A to 0.2 M. A. (Semah et al. 2003 ). The sediments at the Plio-Pleistocene boundary indicate the retreat of the seas and emergent land bridges between mainland Southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands. At all times, the habitat of East Java was characterized by high diversity with the hominid fossils dating to 800,000 years associated with pollen documenting a drier climate but tropical rain forest taxa still present. “In the area outside Sangiran, an Indonesian-French team has worked in the Southern Mountains of Java documenting a long sequence of occupation and adaptation to wet tropical environments from the late middle Pleistocene to the Holocene (Semah et al. 2003 p. 161).”
The second wave of human emigrants from Africa, H. sapiens, surely passed along these shores as they reached southern Australia by at least 40,000 years ago. The use of coastal, marine, and estuary resources by sapiens in Southeast Asia has been little considered as most of the focus in Asian archaeology has been on H. erectus in China and later populations transitioning from hunting-gathering strategies to farming. Erlandson (2001) attributes this neglect of coastal and aquatic adaptations to two factors, the widespread perception that hominids did not adapt to aquatic habitats before around 15,000 years ago and the obsessive attention to the idea that male-dominated big game hunting explained the origin of tool use, the formation of the nuclear family, and in its most recent incarnation the evolution of large brains. Erlandson labels one set of ideas about aquatic resources the “Gates of Hell” model as theorists proposed that humans only began to use lower quality aquatic resources when forced into marginal habitats by declining returns from hunting and/or by density dependent population growth, that is when they were forced from more desirable habitats. In the next section we are going to ask if foraging returns derived from one habitat can be used to guide inferences about returns in another time and place. This issue is especially relevant to the claims that evidence for the use of aquatic resources is evidence for habitat stress and decline of higher ranked resources.
Last resort scenarios ignore the evidence for the nutritional value of aquatic resources, the cultural complexity of societies subsisting on those resources, high human population densities in some of the most widely exploited riverine and coastal habitats, and the emerging archaeological data suggesting early adoption of aquatic resources. Instead proponents, of the last resort hypothesis, cite the small size of many of the marine resources such as mollusks, crabs, sea urchins, barnacles, and shrimp while ignoring the giant clams available on the reefs of the southern oceans, the abundance of individuals in extensive mollusk beds that characterize rocky coastlines north and south, the large number of stranded fish that can be acquired in drying pools, and nesting sea turtles as a source of eggs and meat.
Since many of the aquatic resources are sessile and predictable in time and space little search and no pursuit is involved in their harvest and interactions with other predators are rare. Further shell fish gathering requires no prior tool production, maintenance or preparation. Shellfish in particular are characterized by low variance, high density, and ease of collection, the very qualities that meet the daily nutritional requirements of growing children who can gather many of these resources for themselves. Erlandson cites a study by Jones and Richman (1995) showing that “mussel beds produce one of the highest rates of biomass production on earth (Erlandson 2001 p 294).” The supposed low quality of marine resources is derived from an estimate by Bailey (1978) “that 156,800 cockles were required to provide the caloric yield of one red deer (Erlandson 2001 p. 294).” Erlandson questions the accuracy of these estimates and later notes the analysis by Lindstrom (1996) of returns from the Truckee River fishery that are higher than return rates calculated by Simms (1987) for terrestrial Great Basin habitats. Shell fish are low calorie foods so would rank low in foraging models based on net energetic return but they have high nutritional value as sources of protein, calcium, and omega fatty acids. Ordinarily I would not post information from commercial sources but the chart comes from a USDA handbook and is a useful comparison of beef and shellfish. Later in the semester we will review arguments over the value of marine resources in the diet when we consider the research from the Okinawan centenarian study.
When you read the assigned pages in Erlandson pay attention to arguments over aquatic resources, the ambiguity of the archaeological record, the theoretical prejudices of the investigators, the nature of the resource in question, and the problem of changes in sea level with high interglacial levels destroying whatever archaeological evidence there might have been from periods of lower seas. Remember from Walter et al. (2000), Lecture 6, that the Pleistocene reef terrace at Eritrea was preserved by tectonic activity that uplifted a portion of the former shallow water reef. Notice, from Table 1 page 306 Erlandson (2001), that the sites with evidence of use of aquatic strategies span the time from 2.3M to 16.5K, a considerable time frame for the occupation of “marginal” habitats. Instead of regarding these habitats and strategies as marginal, new evidence and new hypotheses call for serious consideration of aquatic resources as central to the evolution of human dietary strategies. Often the most obvious fact of human subsistence is unmentioned because it is so taken for granted. Erlandson calls our attention to the fact that freshwater for drinking is the “single most important aquatic resource for humans (Erlandson 2001 p. 293).”
Even as our earliest ancestors exploited the resources of the woodlands and grasslands, they must have stayed close to sources of water. The important archaeological sites of Africa are all in riverine or lacustrine environments. It is hard to imagine wild foragers ignoring the resources in and and around water sources especially when those resources could be captured and processed with very simple tools. Where simple tools were not adequate to the job, early sapiens were capable of making more sophisticated tools as evidenced by the hafted bone point technology from Katanda.
Although I have emphasized coastal strategies in this lecture we know that early anatomically modern humans did move into other ecological niches as shown by the occupation of Niah Cave in Borneo. The Deep Skull, tentatively dated to the time period between 43,000 – 40,000 B.P., has been found in late Pleistocene sediments of the cave. Niah cave is one of a series of caverns in sheer-sided limestone walls that rise nearly 400 m above the lowland rain 
forest. The present climate in the vicinity of the cave is tropical super wet with mean annual rainfall greater than 3000 mm and rare or very short seasonal dry periods. The Pleistocene climate may have been more seasonal but changes in rainfall and temperature regimes at this site, through time, have not been resolved. At the time of Pleistocene occupation, the cave may have been about 30 km from the sea. Floral and faunal elements recovered from the late Pleistocene levels suggest that “humans were foraging in a mosaic of closed forest, scrub, grassland, swamp, and freshwater lakes and rivers (Crangrook 2000:83, cited in Barton 2005:57).” Barton, along with others interested in drawing as much information as possible from the archaeological record, has been involved in the development of a new line of evidence from archaeological assemblages, the identification of starch grains through the comparison of grains found in sediments and on tools with grains from modern starches.
Though the evidence from Niah is scanty, starch grains from palm pith and deep-rooted species of yams have been identified from the site. At other sites in Melanesia, starch grains of elephant yams, taro, ginger, and swamp taro have been identified. Some of these taros require cooking, drying or leaching to remove toxic calcium oxalate crystals but the pith of certain palms can be eating raw. These palms have high energetic yields but some processing costs as the palms have to be felled and the fiber pounded or otherwise extracted from the trunk. Evidence from sites in Southeast Asia and the evidence we will discuss in Lecture 9 from the Ache demonstrates that forest environments provided rich habitats for human foragers. Recall from Lecture 6 that the islands of Indonesia were accessible by land during glacial periods when water was locked up in northern hemisphere ice shields.
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Assigned Reading |
| Erlandson, Jon M., 2001. The archaeology of aquatic adaptations: Paradigms for a new millennium. J Arch. Research. 9(4): 287- 350. For this lecture read pages 287-321. |
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Also Recommended |
| Barton, H., 2005. The case for rainforest foragers: The starch record from Niah Cave, Sarawak. Asian Perspectives 44(1): 56-72. (Asian Perspectives available as electronic edition Marriott Library) Huffman, O. F., Y. Zaim, J. Kappelman, D. R. Ruez Jr., J. de Vos, Y. Rizal, F. Aziz, C. Hertler. 2006. Relocation of the 1936 Mojokerto skull discovery site near Perning, East Java. J. Hum. Evol. 50: 431-451.
Huffman, O. F., and Yahdi Zaim. 2003. Mojokerto Delta, East Jawa: Paleoenvironment of Homo modjokertensis First Results Semah, Francois, Semah, Anne-Marie and Simanjuntak, Truman, 2003. More than a million years of human occupation in insular Southeast Asia. In Under the Canopy: The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests. pp 161-190. ed. J. Mercader New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (available from Marriott Library, Course Reserves) |
