Biogeography of Hunter-Gatherer Diet

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For long, anthropologists have recognized latitudinal pattern in hunter-gatherer diet, where plant use increases toward tropics. However, causes of the dietary variability remain unclear reflecting the fact that ecology in general lacks robust theory for predicting geographical variation in the balance of plant and animal foods that omnivores consume. Here, we use large ethnographic data to gain insight into the causes of global-scale variation in hunter-gatherer diet composition by analyzing its relationship with environmental variables that reflect the availability of resources and with metrics of population pressure. Our results show that climate and other environmental factors are clearly more important than demographic factors in explaining large-scale diet variability. We also compare the patterns observed in hunter-gatherers to patterns of diet composition among other mammals. Our results show that a latitudinal gradient of increasing plant use toward lower latitudes is a general phenomenon among omnivorous mammals. Furthermore, we find that geographic variation in hunter-gatherer diet mirrors patterns in the functional composition of mammal communities globally. Together, our findings indicate that the environmental factors shaping the feeding ecology and distribution of mammals generally have been a dominant force in driving resource use in hunter-gatherers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39497.0