Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.
The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.
This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. It’s only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then it’s both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.
While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take what’s an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.
Just for starters, there’s almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. There’s a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the student’s advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.
Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say “Hmm, that’s interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,” or even “I wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.”
For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in don’t resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. There’s less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.
I’m very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldn’t ride too far on this particular horse.
On a tad bit related note I remember reading that it was common for people to be buried with all of their possessions and that women occasionally had hunting equipment buried with them.
I’m just adding it here because I feel it’s connected to the idea that eating lots of meat is naturally manly. Apparently it’s just an exaggerated fantasy that’s part of our own modern culture and the reality seems to be that we were effectively ‘flexitarians’ and that women to some extent hunted too.
I passed on the opportunity to go down there to study the pyramids back in my college days. I was a few years into anthropology studies and really would have loved to go, but came up with too many excuses not to go… My Spanish wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want to fall behind on classes and push back my graduation. Fucking idiot that I was passed on an opportunity some people only dream of.
One of my Mexican friends was just saying how worried she is to go back down to visit her family and boyfriend.
Yes and they should have fixed it all the way in my opinion, but that would have been bad for tourism.
The granite was looted thousands of years ago, so the pyramid is long overdue for some maintenance.
I know archaeologists debate this, since many say that the pyramids have been known as ruins since antiquity, but it’s kind of weird to say “well it’s been that way forever and people like it, so let’s leave it”.
We have a very good understanding of how they were originally, and they would still be amazing if fixed. Just doing one of the smaller pyramids is a great way to dip our toes into restoration.
Like if you had an old rusty classic car in your front yard, and you and your neighbors thought it was cool looking to have it there. But if it were restored, people could really see its beauty, and it would last longer. Both are valid things to do; I just happen to think that the restored car is better.
Funnel beaker culture then? The dolman points to that as well as the date, I think.
I don’t know though. I just like prehistory.
EDIT: No mention of grave goods, though the article mentions that the dolman is not typical of the passage graves found around 200 years later.
I find this region fascinating because it lies on the outskirts of the Neolithic farmer expansion (and other explanations from the East), so the arising culture seems to be more of a conversation between new cultures and preexisting cultures.
The megalithic neolithic Atlantic culture that seems to stretch from Portugal to Scandinavia is fascinating too.
The actual “doc” is a pseudo archeologist bullshitting, so it’s not the same.
My dirty pleasure was watching Ancient Aliens for some time. I always paused the show when they started to speak about a new topic, read the actual facts on wikipedia, than laughed through the episode. In this kind of shows they mix facts with legends and theorems and straight up bullshit, and don’t tell you what is what. So no, it’s absolutely not the same.
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