Genesis 9: Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The
fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on
all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground,
and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.
Text from biblegateway.com, NIV UK version .
Or maybe meat was a better food source than veggies. Or maybe there was a difference in lifestyle between gatherer and hunter. Or maybe there were a thousand other reasons, and meat/survival were never linked and are purely co-incidental. We'll never know.
Been pondering this - some time back I recall reading a piece that suggested the biggest advantage humans had, in the hunter gatherer days, was stamina. While there are lots of animals that can outrun a human, there are very that, once wounded or subjected to intense tracking, can outlast a human or group of humans.
ReplyDeleteCertainly if we imagine the perfect human physic for hunter gathers the image I get in my mind is the long, lean, able to go for days human. But, once we get into settled farming, maybe other physiques, stronger or repetitive lifting physiques were also really important to the group.
It's speculation of course, but it makes sense to me fundamentally different ways of living and working would call for different diets & maybe "reward" different body shapes.
Thanks Fern. I remember hearing someone comment a while back that agrarian lifestyle is much less efficient and healthy than one that hunts, not least because the food supply requires such a big investment up front, with such a high risk of failing to provide a return. I'd not considered this the other way round though - we usually think of hunters turning to farming, rather than vegetarians eating meat.
ReplyDeleteYou could be right that hunting would tend to develop endurance against all kinds of hardship, while farming might well build powerful physiques that had higher energy demands to maintain.