FOOD IN HISTORY

1 - IN THE BEGINNING

In the very earliest times nature was in charge and the problem of the food supply was a good deal simpler than it is now -although perhaps it would be wiser to say 'must have been simpler', since there are as many theories about prehistory and the pattern of human evolution as there are theoreticians. Most, however, agree that the search for food was, at every stage, a crucial factor.
The currently held view is that the ape-into-man transmutation began somewhere around fifteen million years ago, after a shifting of the earth's plates brought about a change in climate. Tropical zones became temperate, jungles thinned out into open woodland, and vegetation became seasonal. Tree-dwelling apes, deprived of their year-round supply of fruits and nuts, gradually ventured out into the grasslands, where they found not only roots and seeds, but lizards and porcupines, tortoises, ground squirrels, moles, insects and grubs.
And so human history began, in the pursuit of food that was to fuel so much subsequent development.
As time passed the ground-dwelling apes made specific adjustments to suit their new environment. They learned to kill or stun what they hunted by throwing stones at it, a technique that encouraged them to move on three, and then two, legs instead of four. Their wits became sharper and their brains larger as they competed with the lion, hyena and sabre-toothed cat that shared their hunting grounds. Their teeth, no longer a primary weapon, changed shape, which ultimately led to the development of human speech. And their forefeet adapted into hands capable of making and using tools. By somewhere around two million years ago the first hominids, more ape than man, had developed into Homo erectus, more man than ape.
The most widely known specimen of Homo erectus -and the first real personality in history -was Peking Man who lived, not half a million years ago as was previously thought, but about a quarter of a million years ago. Fragmentary relics of other human ancestors, reputedly dating from considerably earlier, have been dug up else- where, but all of them -even the 3.6-million-year-old half-skeleton folksily known as Lucy - exist in a kind of anthropological vacuum. The fragments show that they lived, but not how they lived.
Peking Man, however, was a hunter and cave dweller and re- cognizably human. Only five feet tall, he still looked very much like an ape, but the evidence of his caves, excavated in the 1930S, seemed to show that he was of an almost-human race and that he had learned how to make use of fire. No more than 'make use of', however; there is no proof that he knew how to light it, and it is unlikely that he had learned how to cook. If he had, he would not have had to crack the bones of his food animals to get at the marrow, which, hot, could have been scooped out with relative ease.2 The food residues found in his caves showed that 70 per cent of his diet consisted of venison {Sinomegaceros pachyosteus, to be exact) and the other 30 per cent of whatever he was able to hunt or trap -otter, boar, wild sheep, buffalo, rhinoceros, even tiger. He was also prepared to eat his fellow men when other meat was scarce.
In effect, Peking Man was a pretty picturesque character and for fifty years remained a popular favourite until, in the late 1980S, the Chinese themselves revealed that recent uranium-series dating placed him much later than had originally been thought.
This threw the question of first-user-of-fire wide open again, which delighted archaeologists -a competitive breed. But, historically, what really mattered was knowledge of how to control fire. Reliable light and warmth would have a powerful effect on the humanizing process. There would be other benefits, too. When the polar ice sheets advanced, as they sometimes did, as far south as present-day London, New York and Kiev, the new kinds of human would not have to flee before them, but could remain on the fringes, adjusting their diet and their hunting techniques to suit the conditions. Preying on huge, cold-resistant beasts like the woolly mammoth would be a fresh challenge, necessitating close cooperation on the hunt that must have reinforced the social links forged round the hearth.
Changing conditions continued to breed changing people until, in about 200,000 BC, there appeared on the prehistoric scene a group of Homo sapiens {the larger-brained successor of Homo erectus) known as Neanderthals, familiar today less for their anthropological interest than because they became a twentieth-century cartoon cliche.
Were the Neanderthals true ancestors of modern man or an evolutionary dead end? It is a fertile source of disagreement among experts. But whether their clumsy figures represented adaptation to climate or were a sign that they suffered either from the vitamin-D deficiency disease of rickets or from some congenital venereal afflic- tion,3 they had become skilled hunters, evolved their own rites and rituals, perfected a primitive surgical technique and begun to care for the sick and aged. Even so, like their predecessors at Peking, they were prepared to dine on their fellow humans when other meat was scarce.
Much of the mystery of evolution vanishes with the arrival of the more advanced peoples who supplanted the Neanderthals in about 30,000 BC. From that point on, the academic debate shifts from the minutiae of human biology to the problem of changes in the environ- ment and how men and women adjusted to them. From that point, also, it becomes possible to build up a theoretical, if largely unverifi- able, picture of what life and food were like in the 20,000 years that preceded the series of world-changing developments collectively known as the Neolithic Revolution.