Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory

by Kristen J. Gremillion

• ISBN13: 9780521727075
• ISBN10: 0521727073
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book explores the relationship between prehistoric people and their food what they ate, why they ate it and how researchers have pieced together the story of past foodways from material traces. Contemporary human food traditions encompass a seemingly infinite variety, but all are essentially strategies for meeting basic nutritional needs developed over millions of years. Humans are designed by evolution to adjust our feeding behaviour and food technology to meet the demands of a wide range of environments through a combination of social and experiential learning. In this book, Kristen J. Gremillion demonstrates how these evolutionary processes have shaped the diversification of human diet over several million years of prehistory. She draws on evidence extracted from the material remains that provide the only direct evidence of how people procured, prepared, presented and consumed food in prehistoric times.

Author Biography

Kristen J. Gremillion is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. She has published many articles on human dietary variability in journals including American Antiquity, Current Anthropology, and Journal of Archaeological Science as well as chapters in several edited volumes.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. ix
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Ancestors	p. 5
Our Ancient Heritage	p. 6
Our Unique Heritage	p. 9
Beginnings	p. 12
The Australopithecines and Their Kin	p. 13
Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer	p. 15
Bones, Butchery, and the Scavenging Hypothesis	p. 18
A Closer Look at the Fossil Record	p. 19
History in the Body: Evolutionary Anatomy and Molecular Markers	p. 22
Cooking	p. 24
Foraging	p. 31
The Upper Paleolithic Revolution?	p. 31
The Late Pleistocene World	p. 34
New Tools, New Tactics: The Food Quest in the Late Pleistocene	p. 36
Farmers	p. 48
The Questions	p. 49
The Natural History of Agriculture	p. 50
The Human Factor: Decisions and Revisions	p. 56
Better Living through Chemistry	p. 65
Agriculture: Adaptation, Strategy, and Tradition	p. 69
Hunger	p. 71
Food Supply in a Changing Environment	p. 72
Hunger in Nature	p. 73
Hunger and Human Societies	p. 75
Fighting Hunger: Culture and Creativity	p. 91
Abundance	p. 93
Abundance in Nature	p. 94
Surplus, Sharing, and Human Societies	p. 98
The Uses of Abundance	p. 101
Abundance, Diet, and Health: The Effects of Social Inequality	p. 110
Beyond Storage and Sharing: Surplus as Symbol	p. 112
Contacts	p. 115
Acceptance and Dispersal of Novel Foods	p. 116
The Spread of Agriculture in Prehistoric Europe	p. 119
Eating, Drinking, and Roman Expansion	p. 123
Peaches, Cowpeas, Melons, and Hogs: Old World Foods in Southeastern North America	p. 126
The Global Reach of Foodways	p. 130
Extinctions	p. 132
Man versus Mammoth	p. 136
Invasion of the Island Snatchers	p. 139
Firestarters	p. 143
Chewing the Scenery	p. 144
Final Thoughts	p. 146
Nostalgia for the Pleistocene	p. 146
Hunger on a Crowded Planet	p. 148
The Conservation Conundrum	p. 149
Food, Prehistory, and Human Nature	p. 151
Notes	p. 153
References Cited	p. 161
Index	p. 177
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.