Lecture: “Diet & Human Population Density in Paleolithic Mediterranean”

Anthropologist Mary Stiner lectures at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Mar. 7, 2011:

What is the legacy of the human ecological footprint in deep time? Our speaker explores the question by sorting out some features of Paleolithic meat diets in Mediterranean Eurasia. These involve predator-prey dynamics, transitions in energy acquisition, and the allocation of labor. By the Late Pleistocene, foragers were restructuring the living communities around them, with consequences for both diet and demographic robustness. These changes in turn altered social relations within early forager societies and also affected the development of cooperative networks across human society.

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Rare look at Paleoindian burial, housing, and nutrition

White-tailed Ptarmigan. Image: Footwarrior11,500 years ago in the Tanana lowlands of central Alaska, a three-year-old child died. The cause of death is not known. According to Natasha Pinol, writing for EurekaAlert, “the remains showed no signs of injury or illness, though that isn't surprising, since most health problems don't leave traces in bones.” The child, a member of a Paleoindian family or clan that was “among the first to colonize the Americas”, lived in a house.

Colored stains in the sediment suggest that poles may have been used to support the walls or roof, though it's not clear what the latter would have been made of. The entire house has not yet been fully excavated, so its total size is still unknown. (Pinol) 

After cremation, the child was buried “in a large pit in the center of the home.” Archeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, one of the discoverers, notes:

All the evidence indicates that they went through some effort. The burial was within the house. If you think of the house as the center of many residential activities: cooking, eating, sleeping, and the fact that they abandoned the house soon afterward the cremation, this is pretty compelling evidence of the careful treatment of the child.

Pinol writes:

In contrast to the temporary hunting camps and other specialized work sites that have produced much of the evidence of North America's early habitation, the newly discovered house appears to have been a seasonal home, used during the summer. Its inhabitants, who included women and children, foraged for fish, birds and small mammals nearby, according to Potter's team.

Evidence of a Paleolithic diet was discovered in sediment at the bottom of the 18-inch deep pit, specifically bone of “salmon, ground squirrels, ptarmigan and other small animals.”

The discovery provides a rare look at domestic life of the Paleoindians that crossed, or, more likely, descended from those that crossed the Beringian Land Bridge to Alaska. The report of the find will be published 25 February issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Source: Child's cremation site reveals domestic life in Paleoindian Alaska at EurekaAlert

More young adults staying home

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers organized in bands that included several families and consisted of 20-30 people, although some were larger. This closeness afforded protection and a survival advantage. When a couple married they usually lived in the band of one of the spouses. Bands included all generations from infants to the elderly. With the advent of civilization and the protection provided, living in nuclear families, or alone, became possible.

Modern life provides vastly greater opportunities for young adults than the Paleolithic era, yet the path to those opportunities is predictable. For the typical boomer it included high school, college or a job, marriage and having children. Moving out of the family home was a mark of adulthood. However, more recently, many young adults are staying home.

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Paleo parenting

Image adapted from Notra Dame Symposium poster.Are you a Paleo parent? Do you frequently carry your infant, provide hours of unstructured play, positive touch, and spread child rearing among caregivers in your family group?  Does this type of child rearing develop better-adjusted and more empathetic children? Darcia F. Narvaez, Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Notra Dame and specialist on the moral development of children, thinks so. At a recent symposium, Human Nature and Early Experience: Addressing the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness,” Dr. Narvaez presented her and co-author Tracy Gleason’s views in the presentation Early Experience, Moral Development and Human Nature.

As Joan Raymond writes for MSNBC: 

While our hunter-gatherer ancestors may not have been big on dental hygiene, they did get it right when it came to raising well-adjusted, empathetic children, says lead researcher Darcia Narvaez.

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