Buzz by Thor Hanson

Author:Thor Hanson [Thor Hanson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785783753
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2018-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

“My platform is nutrition,” Alyssa Crittenden told me. “Everything builds from there. Diet is not where the story of human evolution ends, it’s where it begins.” I found Alyssa’s door at the end of a narrow hallway in the anthropology building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her credentials include a prestigious named professorship as a nutritional anthropologist, but she has also studied ecology. That dual perspective helps Alyssa put questions about human eating habits into an environmental context. In conversation, she uses interesting phrases like “mapping people onto their food resources,” and makes a convincing case that what our ancestors chose to eat helped define what we are today. If that’s true, then people and honeyguides might have a great deal in common.

“If you want to study hunter-gatherers living in the same landscape where people evolved, that narrows things down pretty quickly,” Alyssa told me, explaining how she’d begun her long association with Tanzania’s Hadza tribe. Among the Hadza, roughly three hundred individuals live a strictly traditional lifestyle, ranging in small bands across the arid plains and woodlands that surround Lake Eyasi. Their homeland lies less than twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) from Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, sites where fossils, footprints, and stone tools have documented the presence of human ancestors back more than three million years. Alyssa is quick to point out that groups like the Hadza are modern and culturally distinct. But as people getting their nutrition from a subsistence way of life in the same location where our species arose, they have a lot to teach us.

Alyssa spent her first season with the Hadza weighing and cataloging their daily harvest, from the fruits and tubers brought in by women and children to the various antelope, birds, and other animals hunted down by the men. She was interested in how seasonal fluctuations in food resources affected family life, particularly the women’s decisions about when and with whom to have children. At the time, most nutritional studies in anthropology were preoccupied with what Alyssa calls “the meat versus potato debate,” a long-standing clash about whether the calories from hunting or gathering contributed more to early human behavior and development. She suspected that there was more to the story, and like any good scientist, she kept her eyes and ears open. “I always follow the data,” she said. But even Alyssa was surprised at the turn her research took when the data began pointing at honey.

“I was slack-jawed,” Alyssa recalled, describing her first glimpse of a traditional Hadza honey hunt. She watched, fascinated, while the men scrambled up a massive baobab trunk on a series of rough wooden pegs, smoked out the hive with a torch, and brought down comb after comb dripping with golden honey. But that was nothing compared to people’s reaction when the prize was brought back into camp. “The kids all started singing, and dancing, and horsing around. Everyone was so excited to share it, choosing out good bits to give to each other, and to me.

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