For most of human (pre)history we were hunter-gatherers. As the name suggests, this is a society where some people are hunters whilst others go and gather plants and grubs.
These two strategies appear to complement each other very well. Hunting is high risk but high reward. Gathering is lower risk but you won't get that meaty goodness.
However a new anthropological study reveals that hunting is actually be a lot less risky than it first appears.
This challenges a lot of ideas about hunter-gatherer society and our evolution. It also raises a bunch of interesting questions. Like why bother with gathering?
Good hunters don't hunt
Hunter-gatherer hunters seem like they have a risky job.
Most of the prey they bring back to camp is small. It can't feed themselves, let alone their family or friends. 80% of their kills weigh less than a paltry 10 kg. They only manage to kill something large enough to share with others about once a month. Compare this to the sensible gatherers, who can consistently produce all the food they need. And often there's plenty left over to give to their family as well.
However, it turns out that hunters are actually a lot more successful than we thought. Their secret: be selfish. And avoid hunting.
If you look at how much prey they bring back to camp, hunters seem like sub-par providers. But a group of anthropologists followed some Hadza men out to see what they ate whilst they hunted and found an entirely different story. These men were able to find all they food they needed whilst they were out and about. The paltry scraps they brought back was just all the surplus food they managed to get from the Savannah. Most of the food went straight to their belly.
As an interesting aside, this tactic seems to have been made possible by bees. Most of the food they found on the trail came from honey. The sugary goodness makes it a common favourite amongst hunter-gatherers and these Hadza were no exception. 85% of the calories they found on the road came from honey.
A sugary, satisfying diet seems a far cry from the "classic" model of hunters as basically worthless.
Reviewing reasons for animal murder
The fact that hunters took a "risky" strategy seemed a bit odd to anthropologists. Many thought there must be some other factors at play. This led to the development of many ideas about why hunters really hunt.
Potential explanations include:
- Hunting leads to a surplus of resources that can be given to family. This is the most common form of food sharing in other animals. However, in those species food is only shared with direct relatives, whilst hunter-gatherers share amongst the whole group.
- Killing large game requires skill, demonstrating they're a good provider to potential mates. Although no known society openly trades "meat for sex", women in hunter-gatherer communities know who the best hunters are.
- The surplus of food produced by hunting can be shared reciprocally. One person gives another part of their kill with the understanding it will be repaid later. This appears to be a common driver of food sharing in hunter-gatherer children.
Yet if hunting actually provides more calories than we thought these explanations become unnecessary. Explaining the existence of hunters becomes easy: it provides a lot of food.
Selfish hunters?
The male Hadza studied could find most - if not all - of their food whilst they were hunting. But they still go above and beyond the call of duty.
They could just eat enough honey to sate themselves and call it a day. But they don't. They still produce a surplus of food (often by hunting the risky large game) and bring it back to camp to share. The actual hunters don't tend to benefit much from this kill since they've already stuffed themselves on food. But their family does.
It seems that hunting isn't one broad activity that can be explained by one of those broad explanations. Instead, it seems like there's two components to it.
The first is the selfish side of hunting, where the hunters feed themselves as they march through the wilderness. The priority here is number uno. For example, the men who feed themselves like to do so with honey. This is also the favourite food of everyone else, yet suspiciously little of it makes it back to camp for sharing.
But whilst they might keep the honey for themselves they do make effort to bring other food back to camp. This is primarily shared with their household, with some bits finding their way to the rest of the camp.
It's easy to imagine our ancestors following a similar tactic. Eating food as they go, whilst still working to bring down the mammoth that will feed their family.
A note of caution
When studying a group of humans there's always a problem: can these results be applied to other groups?
When it comes to studying hunter-gatherers this problem is even worse. Groups living very close together can have wildly different toolkits, strategies, and behaviours. For example, Indigenous Tazmanians didn't fish, didn't sew, and didn't use stone-tipped spears; even though all these things were being done in Mainland Australia a few miles away.
So we're not in a position to declare hunters are always great. A group living nearby - perhaps without the access to honey the Hadza have - might be "classic" high risk/high reward hunters.
Rather, these results show that this classic model shouldn't be assumed. Care must be taken when studying our ancestors and their lifestyle. We can't extrapolate from a single modern population, whether that's to say hunters are great or not so great.
tl;dr
Hunter-gatherer hunters were thought to be high risk/high reward. For one group at least, it's much less risky than we thought.
References
Berbesque, J.C., Wood, B.M., Crittenden, A.N., Mabulla, A. and Marlowe, F.W., 2016. Eat first, share later: Hadza hunter-gatherer men consume more while foraging than in central places. Evolution and Human Behavior.
Bird, D. W., & O'Connell, J. F. (2006). Behavioral ecology and archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Research, 14(2), 143-188.
Boyd, R., & Silk, J. B. (2015). How Humans Evolved. WW Norton & Company, New York.
Crittenden AN, Zes DA (2015) Food Sharing among Hadza Hunter-Gatherer Children. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0131996. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131996
Henrich, J. (2004). Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses-The Tasmanian case. American Antiquity, 69(2), 197-214.
Wood, B.M. and Marlowe, F.W., 2013. Household and kin provisioning by Hadza men. Human Nature, 24(3), pp.280-317.
