In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MARK N. COHEN The Significance of Long-Term Changes in Human Diet and Food Economy HUMAN BEINGS INHERIT FROM THEIR PRIMATE ANCESTORS A common set of nutritive needs as well as a set of limited physiological capabilities for intake, absorption, storage, and excretion and a sensory apparatus that guides food choice. All appear in part anachronistically geared to the ancestral primate environment, with some modifications from the period of early hominid adaptation. We also inherit from our ancestors the capacity for flexible, widely ranging, omnivorous solutions to nutritive problems and a habit , already observable in other primates, of forming culturally determined food lists - that is, of learning food habits, which are determined as much by the experience of our parents and peers as by our physiological limits. Given this heritage, the range of human dietary habits can be viewed as an aggregation of localized, idiosyncratic cultural solutions to common nutritive problems (minor, recently evolved differences in food tolerance and utilization, such as variations in lactase or sucrase production or the tasting/non-tasting of goitrogenic compounds notwithstanding). Each "successful" solution must approximate adequate and balanced nutrition for enough members of the population , particularly those in critical roles or at critical life periods, to live and reproduce; and it is the requirements for this success that selectively limit the range of idiosyncratic variation in diet. 1 But it is clear that to be "successful" a solution need not provide equally for all and need not provide what we would consider a "healthy" diet. Moreover, it is clear that any group's choices serve a number of functions other than good nutrition and thus that nutritional values are always compromised by competing functions in the design of food strategies . Indeed, part of a group's successful adaptation may lie in the nutritional deprivation of some of its members (Cassidy 1980, 1983, 1984). Local variations in strategy occur in part because of local variations in the distribution and timing of potential resources. "Optimal foraging" theorists have, during the past few years, given us a handle with which to approach 261 IV. Pre-State Foodways these local variations by asserting a series of propositions about common animal behavioral tendencies through which the adjustment of common human needs and predilections to different environmental circumstances can be assessed (Winterhalder and Smith 1981). But optimal foraging theory can, at best, recognize limited parallels among varying local economies. It can identify the expression of basic needs and of common adaptive strategies and common behavioral principles, such as the "principle" of maximizing calorie returns for labor. In this way it can explain the "systematic" fraction of any food economy; however, it can at best isolate, but not explain, the non-systematic (or "noise") fraction of any local adaptation resulting from competing cultural purposes or the baggage of taste, tradition, and habit. The noise fraction represents, I suspect, a far larger portion of human behavior than most anthropologists are willing to allow. Much behavior witnessed much of the time, whether through archaeological or ethnographic techniques, is, I believe, noise at the level of most of our explanatory paradigms. We cannot hope to explain the specifics of what people eat through any means other than a study of the histories of individual cultures. What we can do is recognize some limited parallels across systems that are expressible as statistical trends and tendencies across populations. Optimal foraging theory is in fact a set of such statements recognizing common solutions to certain adaptive problems across species and across living human cultures. At least two other major sets of predictive statements have been offered describing alternative sets of limited parallels among human food economies (sets that complement one another and the theorems of optimal foraging rather than being contradicted by either). These are statements about regional or latitudinal variations (such as the latitudinal predictions of Lee 1968) and statements of temporal or sequential variation (Cohen 1977; Hayden 1981a, 1981b). The latter, which provide the focus of this paper, suggest that amidst the variety of human cultures, and cutting across regularities of both latitude and local optimization, there are recognizable trends in human food preferences over time. Human Food Economies Through Time Recent syntheses of world prehistory (see Cohen 1977; Fagan 1983; Hayden 1981a, 1981b) largely agree about what the archaeological record appears to show concerning changes in human food habits through time. The earliest fully human groups in most world regions appear to have been selective in their use of biomes, preferring open savanna...

Share