Chapter 4 - 9

09 Anthropology

Listen to a lecture in an anthropology class. Fill in the diagram with the information that you hear.

M: Major changes in how people gathered food occurred during a period of time known as the Pleistocene Epoch, which was, oh, it was from about 1.6 million years ago to roughly 10,000 years ago.

And as with anything in anthropology, well, there was a good reason for this change.

You see, during this time, the population exploded. More people meant that the old methods of gathering food were no longer sufficient.

Yeah, so, it was during this time that people came up with the idea of broad-spectrum collecting.

Suddenly, people started eating things they hadn’t before … oh, things like shellfish, clams and oysters, for instance.

And really, they ate anything they could find! Well, that was edible, anyway.

Let me explain broad-spectrum collecting now.

You see, during much of the Pleistocene Epoch, people could more easily gather enough food to feed their families.

They picked berries or gathered different fruits, and dug up nutritious roots and vegetables to eat.

they also hunted for large game, um, animals, a lot. But for some reason, toward the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, people began to look for more varied sources of food.

This is what is known as broad-spectrum collecting.

This… this, is uh, basically just a fancy name for eating a broader spectrum – oh, sorry − for eating a greater variety of foods than they used to.

They sought out a more diverse selection of food types.

Now, there are a lot of different ideas about why people started looking for different sources of food.

The population increase isn’t in question: it is really an acknowledged fact that there was a larger number of people in the Pleistocene era.

But it’s actually kind of controversial about why broad-spectrum collecting began to develop, and how this population explosion impacted the hunting and gathering of food.

Some people, for example, they, um, think that the population increase caused people to hunt too many of the larger animals.

So many, in fact, that the animals weren’t able to reproduce fast enough to maintain their numbers.

This is what is known as the overkill hypothesis, and it’s really, well, if you ask me, it’s the most reasonable.

Basically, all kinds of animals seem to become extinct − or at least, there were a lot fewer of them−during this time.

but hey, regardless what I think, this idea is disputed by a lot of people, who think that these extinctions were simply the result of climate changes.

They say that in order for such large numbers of varied species to become extinct, the climate would have to be the reason for the change in gathering habits, but − listen up − these extinctions followed the movement of human beings around the world.

So I mean as people moved into the until-then uninhabited parts of the world, oh, like North America and Australia, well, the extinctions followed.

This really seemed to indicate that hunting had a large part in these die-offs. So yeah, these extinctions, well, they happened worldwide−wherever there were humans.

Now, unless the climate changes were uniform around the globe, it is far less likely that they were responsible for broad-spectrum gathering.

Human population, on the other hand, was consistent in its trends: it was going up.

Broad-spectrum collecting also accounts for the fact that much of the food people began to eat was work-intensive to gather or hunt.

If other sources of food were more readily available, it is much less likely that people would invest the time necessary to track down these other sources of food and prepare them for eating.

A good example is shellfish. A lot of kinds of shellfish have an outer shell, which makes preparation far more time consuming.

With all the demands already placed on humans’ time, it seems… what’s the word?

Unlikely, I guess. It seems unlikely they would take extra time to find this food and prepare it unless their other options were limited due to overkill.

OK… I know there are a few more things I wanted to cover. Oh, yes. There’s one more reason the overkill theory seems plausible to me, and that is that people were simply not eating so well… they weren’t getting the nutrition they needed.

Now, you might think that if they were eating from a wider variety of food sources, they should have had better diets.

But the fact is, if these people were used to eating easily accessible food, and that food started dying off, they would be forced to begin finding alternate food sources.

It’s not that they were eating different foods that they liked better; they were eating whatever they could find, regardless of whether it was good for them or not.

1) What is the professor’s opinion of broad-spectrum collecting?

2) Listen again to part of the lecture. Then answer the question.

This really seemed to indicate that hunting had a large part in these die-offs. So yeah, these extinctions, well, they happened worldwide−wherever there were humans.

Now, unless the climate changes were uniform around the globe, it is far less likely that they were responsible for broad-spectrum gathering.

What is the professor’s attitude toward climate changes?

3) What is the professor’s opinion of people’s diets after they adopted broad-spectrum gathering?