Anthropologists and archeologists know well that our early human ancestors, were essentially hunters and.scavengers who primarily consumed meat which they either killed on their own or or which they stole from the kills of larger predators. The Neanderthals ( who are related to all humans who came from Eurasian stock) were certainly excellent big game hunters who subsisted almost exclusively on meat. Their robust and sturdy skeletons are all we have of them, but their longevity (130,00 to 40,000 YA) suggest that their diet provided more than adequate nutrition.
.Archeologists and anthropologists make a great fuss about when and under what.circumstances early humans or human communities achieved what they considered to be a “pinnacle” of cultural development: the abandonment of the wandering and “dead end” hunting culture to settle down and turn to a diet derived from agriculture dominated by carbohydrates, vegetable, and non meat sources of protein. Meat in the form of game would become only a small part of the diet of these settled people.
Was it such a achievement? Or were these early people simply forced by desperate hunger into the laborious, difficult and time consuming task of agriculture. This life style requires digging up the earth, planting seeds, nurturing the young plants, protecting them from depredations of insects, disease and wildlife. Then when the crop matures other problems arise such as the need to store and protect the products of their labor (food) from pests and more concerning other humans who may not have been as industrious and responsible.
Were these settled societies better off, more vital, taller, bigger or healthier? The archeological record can not provide a definitive answer.
However, a unique historical circumstance in western USA does support the idea of the superiority of natural meat diet or what is often referred to as the “paleo-diet” over that of an agricultural diet. That unique circumstance was the impact of the arrival of the horse in the late 15th century on the settled Native American tribes of the Great Plains.
Let us first compare the agricultural life with that of the big game hunter, who ate meat, a few roots and leafy herbs and occasionally a handful of berries or wild fruit. These hunter (gatherer) societies had an ideal lifestyle: plenty of free time, lots of healthy exercise in the open air and at the end of their day a hearty nutritious meal of grilled meat, comprising flavorful, satisfying and nutritious protein, coated with sizzling. tasty, high calorie fat. These meat eaters had no food storage problems, no conflict with others over land use or allotments. Furthermore their isolated small groups inhibited the spread of communicable disease as a result they were more likely to be disease free. There was no need to protect their hoard of food from others. They were free, free to go where they wanted following the game they hunted. THIER food sources requires low effort, for high quality food free for the taking. In modern day terms: high return in energy and nutrition for modest input in calories. A win win situation.
The support for this idea comes from the 19th and early 20th century archeologists and anthropologists who studied the buffalo hunting societies of the Great Plains of North America The unique cultural history of the Great Plain tribes Is a story of settled agricultural societies reverting to the life of the big game hunter when they had the opportunity.
The native Americans of the Great Plains, we were to eventually to know as: the Blackfeet, Assiniboin, Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee, Kansas, Osage and Comanche and others lived in the vast north-south “sea of grass” reaching from Texas to Canada and bounded in the east by the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and on the west the Front Ranges of the Rockies.
As early as 850 AD, most of these tribes and their precursors had begun to give up hunter gathering for subsistence farming and a “settled down” life. They built sturdy, permanent earth-bermed wood frame houses, took up agriculture and inhabited small villages located along the wooded courses of the tributaries of the Missouri and. Mississippi Rivers. By 1250 AD almost all these tribes were settled and occupied by farming. Some lived in larger communities. Almost all of them grew corn, beans, squash and sunflowers on the rich river bottom-lands along the tributary rivers. They hunted small game, and though scarce in the areas that they inhabited occasionally took some larger game such as elk and deer. But like all settled people their principal source of food energy was the produce from their small plots of land. Though the American Bison, or buffalo lived in these areas and roamed these vast grasslands in immense herds, hunting these huge beasts (6-7 feet at the shoulders and thousands of pounds in weight) was very difficult and very dangerous for men on foot. The buffalo, though sometimes driven over cliffs and taken occasionally by bow hunters “, was not a large part of the food of these settled people they remained settled in their riverside communities.
Spanish explorers confirmed the settled life style of the Plains people in their reports of exploration in the southwest and Great Plains. In 1540, the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ,his troops mounted on horses and using horses for transport explored the southern portions of the Great Plains. Many other Spanish explorers followed into these same areas. These adventurers reported that the Plains “Indians” lived in settled villages along water courses where they grew corn beans and squash and built sturdy houses of mud and wood, insulted with soil mounded up around the outer walls. They described a life ways of what we now call the “Plains Village Culture” They found in these settlements little gold, and nothing much of value for them, but they did take note of the numerous villages and settled life, farms and the elaborate and complex trade networks these tribes maintained which they eventually planed to use.
Native American exploitation of the buffalo, as common and numerous as it was, as a source of food and meat was impossible until the plains people had been introduced to the horse. In these times prior to the 15th century there were no horses in North America.
The horse (Equus) first evolved in North America about 4 million years ago during the Pliocene of the Cenozoic Era. Over millions of years of evolution they became well adapted to the grassy plains of North America and by about 2 million years ago they had spread to South America. By the early Pleistocene or ice age (around 2 million years ago) they spread into Eurasia by crossing the Bering land bridge (going west) the where they proliferated. They survived for much of the ice age in North America, but for some unknown reason they became extinct in North America (and South America) near the end of the ice age or about 8 to 10 thousand years ago. Interestingly, their early ancestor species may have passed early human groups on the Bering Land Bridge who were-migrating east from Asia into North America as the horses went west.
Perhaps ten thousand years were to pass before the Spanish brought Equus, the horse, back into North America. Late in the 15th century Christopher Columbus himself, bought horses to Hispaniola and Cuba. But it was Hernando Cortez, who in 1519, actually introduced horses into mainland North America in Mexico, returning the genus Equus back into the area in which it had originally evolved.
This species. very quickly became an absolute waste necessity for life in the west. The horse quickly became an important trade animal, with a particularly high demand among the southern Plains tribes such as the Osage and Comanche. The Spanish settlements in Mexico continued to import herds from Spain which were needed for transport and as part of their plans for conquest and domination. (So many horses were transported to Spanish possessions that certain parts of the sea lanes the Spanish unused, where calms were common, became known as the “Horse Latitudes”. For the floating bodies of dead livestock. For when ships were becalmed their cargo of large animals soon ate and drank the bulky stores of water and sealed their fate. ).
Often times some of the introduced horses escaped from captivity and became feral in Mexico, southwestern North America and eventually wild herds roamed the Great Plains. These hardy, grass eating, animals were well adapted to the open plains where food was plentiful, and as an introduced species had few natural and effective predators.
While the Spanish were left relatively unchanged by their contact with the plains tribes, the impact on Native Americans first view of horses was to be earth shattering and transformative. For the Spanish exposed the natives to the concept of men on the backs of horses and that idea was to change the culture and life ways of these native people in a way similar to the way the advent of the automobile or the iPhone would have on other societies which lived in more recent times ..
With a horse a mounted hunter could effectively and safely exploit the huge herds of buffalo for their meat. The horse became an obsession, as well as essential “tool”, to every young brave just as a sports car, motorcycle or iPhone would be to modern day societies.
The Comanche and other southern Great Plains tribes were soon making raids into Mexico to stealing or trading areas for horses. Between the mid 1600 to the mid 1700s horses became essential for survival of the Plains tribes.
The reason for this was that with a horse, a native hunter could very effectively exploit the uncountable herds of American bison or Buffalo that lived in these vast grasslands. In a few short decades they had become the ultimate equestrians, riding bareback, with no stirrups, and controlling their mounts mostly with knee pressure. To improve their ability to kill the buffalo they will developed a powerful, short bow which they could use while riding horseback among the stampeding beasts. As they rode among the stampeding herd they would ride close to one of the huge beasts and as they directed their mount with knee pressure the could deploy their short but powerful bow to deliver arrow into the chest, then move on to another animal and be able to kill several of these beasts in a one hunting day. They had access in time to muzzle loading flintlock muskets but shunned these as ineffective in comparison to their short bow with which they could harvest several beasts (the musket was a one shot only weapon)
The horse and the short bow opened up a great “pantry” of fresh meat to the Plains Indians a source of food which had been unavailable to them prior to the introduction of the horse. With such a source of rich protein and calories now available to them they very quickly abandoned the drudgery of farming for the freedom and high quality foods of the buffalo hunt. The horse ( and dogs as well) were also used to transport their belonging when they were on the move . They built a travois of long springy poles, the butt ends were joined by a tie over the back of the horse and the springy tips were permitted to drag along the ground. Cross bars provided a place to secure their folded teepee and other belongings and even their children.
In a rapid succession from south to north, first the Comanche, the Osages and later the more central tribes such as the Sioux and Cheyenne were to abandon their settled “advanced” agricultural life style and “revert” to big game hunting and to a life of wandering over the wide “sea of grass” in pursuit of the almost limitless buffalo herds of those times.
Their diet became almost exclusively meat, that is buffalo meat. They were specialist hunters killing only one species and consuming almost every part of the beast. They ate the muscle meat, the liver, was other organ meats, the brains, the tongue, marrow of the bones, intestines and the stored fats. They even used the bile in the gall bladder for seasoning. They grilled boiled and baked the meat and ate some parts raw. For future use they cut the meat into thin strips and dried it in the sun. They used the bones for tools and implements, the hide for their clothing and shelters. They no longer reside in the earth-bermed and solid and stationary “hogans”, but using the tanned hides of buffalo they built the light airy, warm and wonderfully effective and easily transported “teepee”. The buffalo hunting plains tribes were the only natives in North America to made such structures. Traveling over the open plains where no trees grew they even used the sun-dried solid waste of the buffalo, the droppings (called buffalo chips) as fuel for their cooking and heating fires. Studies of their dietary habits have revealed that for most tribes meat comprised about 80 % what they consumed, the rest was fish or reptiles, leafy vegetables, nuts, roots and wild fruit.
Even more interesting was that anthropological studies of the Plains tribes indicated they were much taller than the average European of the time. Reports indicate that almost every male Sioux or Comanche often stood over six feet tall, were well muscled, slim and with healthy teeth.
Sadly the eventual expansion of Europeans into the Great Plains during the early and middle of the 19th century caused drastic conflict and tragedy. The buffalo herds which were counted in the millions upon millions in the 1750s were by the 1860s nearly exterminated. It was not the result of native hunting but by purposeful and shameful extermination by European settlers and potential settlers. The hunting life ways of the Great Plains tribes was over. In an 1860 traveler’s report going west by conestoga wagon to California emigrants were often trailed by “ Indians”. These once great hunters were so reduced by hunger they turned to begging for scraps of food from the travelers.
- An interesting side light to this story is that the northern tribes far from the sources of horse trading and Mexico were late to adapt to the horse and the buffalo hunting culture. Some of the far northern tribes (some in southern Canada) never abandoned the Plains Village Culture and continued living in small village settlements along the banks of river tributaries and maintained their agricultural activities.
- When anthropologists and other observed these communities and compared the stature and health of these northern tribes to those of the central and southern tribes they reported that these northern tribes never achieved the stature of the buffalo hunters. It was the meat diet!
- The paleodiet of the Comanche and Sioux were of course “organic” and not comparable to what we might use to facilitate such a diet I;modern times. The buffalo ate only pure unaltered, wild grasses. There were no pesticides or antibiotics or genetically modified products to get into their bodies and their meat and fats. These parts of the animal were what we would term organic. Buffalo were not cooped up in pens and fed high calorie concentrated pesticide laden processed feeds enriched with meat products from other animals. Their meat was as is all wild game meats relatively low in fats in comparison to commercial meat cuts. Furthermore they ate all of the animal not just certain portions of the animal.
- Thus though there is good reason to assume that a meat diet is healthful modern paleo dieters beware….you may be ingesting more pesticide laden fats and protein than is good for you.
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