(Essay) Woman the Gatherer by Moses Seenarine

[Excerpt from Cyborgs Versus the Earth Goddess: Men’s Domestication of Women and Animals and Female Resistance  by Moses Seenarine.]

Woman-the-Gatherer

Throughout the course of prehistory, women and children constituted 75 percent of the population, on average. The over-emphasizing of activities conducted by 25 percent of community members, sperm-producers, creates a fictitious view of ancient societies and neglects egg-producers’ contribution to human evolution.

There are few studies on Paleolithic females, or on hominin feminist theory. This academic oversight is remarkable given the fact that the young-bearing sex are the creators of life in the species. Female hominins exercised enormous power in sex selection, and under gynocentric socialization, they would have been the primary determinants of our evolution.

The production by hominin egg-producers in food provision and gathering of plant foods have garnered far less attention than they deserve. Edible plants, eggs, and shellfish often makeup 80 percent of the contemporary gatherer-‘hunter’ diet. In Woman the Gatherer, Frances Dahlberg discusses the roles and activities of women in prehistoric groups and among four contemporary gatherer-‘hunter’ communities. She found that gathering was used as the principal form of food security.

Egg-producing hominins were the keepers of a vast botanical knowledge, and they used it to help their families and communities survive and thrive. Foraging and botanical knowledge may have led to the development of memory, communication, language, and a bigger brain.

1. sapiens females observed other animals burying food in the ground to preserve it for winter, and they imitated this behavior by hiding roots and tubers in holes dug in the ground. During winter, they stored an assortment of tubers, wild carrots, onions, seeds, nuts, herbs, grains, vegetables, and other plant-based foods in caves, root cellars, and other places relatively safe from insects and other animals.

The young-bearing sex were far from sedentary homemakers waiting for men to show up with rapidly decomposing animal carcass. Egg-producers were the primary providers for hominins’ plant-based diet. Mothers were actively moving around the environment, gathering food, and carrying infants while doing so. Woman-the-gatherer may have traveled for millennia along established routes to gather wild plants in well-scheduled assemblies.

Successful gathering required skills of discrimination, evaluation, and memory. The range of seeds, nuts, shells, and grasses discovered at primeval sites indicate careful and knowledgeable selection rather than random gleaning. While traveling and foraging, woman-the-gatherer had to protect herself and children, and her sharpened digging-stick was a primary weapon.

A hominin child’s survival depended upon its mother’s ability to carry it great distances for several years, her skill in finding and gathering food, using tools, her ability to space infants, to feed her weaned offspring, and to maintain social ties with the clan or community. Child-centered, egalitarian groups allowed for cooperative breeding and equal distribution of resources to ensure a stable food supply and avoid famine.

In addition to gathering, females were doing a lot of plant based processing in the Stone Age. Vegetable foods were usually available to hominids and were exploited easily with simple tools. Women used seeds, nuts, and grains to make cakes, breads and other portable and preserved edibles that would keep during travel over long distances. And, they used fire to bake and cook hard plant-based foods like roots and tubers.

Paleo Carb Diet

Chimpanzees are close to H. sapiens sapiens genetically, sharing more than 96 percent of their DNA code with humans, and their digestive tract is functionally very similar to that of humans. Pans are primarily frugivores. Their actual diet in nature is just about 95 percent plant-based, with the remaining 5 percent filled with insects, eggs, and baby animals. Given the similarity to Pans, what then did hominins eat, and which sex was more responsible for meeting their nutritional needs?

The Stone Age diet was primarily plant-based. Earlier hominins ate a diet of mostly raw, fiber-rich plants, grains, and legumes, and not that much flesh, for millennia. As part of the Paleolithic diet, carbohydrate tubers, the underground storage organs of plants, may have been eaten in high amounts by pre-agricultural humans. The Stone Age diet may have included as much as 3.6 to 4.1 pounds (1.65 to 1.9 kg) of fruit and vegetables per day.

During the Early Stone Age, tubers, seeds, fruits, nuts and other starchy foods were readily available and contributed to the evolution of humans’ oversized brains. Cooked starch, a source of preformed glucose, substantially enhanced energy availability to human tissues with high glucose demands, such as the brain, red blood cells, and the developing fetus. Since the human brain uses as much as 25 percent of the body’s energy and up to 60 percent of blood glucose, it probably could not have grown so massive on a low-carbohydrate diet.

Also, pregnancy and lactation require more glucose, and low maternal blood glucose compromises the health of females and their fetus. Plus, analysis of European DNA show they had extra copies of amylase genes to break down starchy foods, long before the intensive cultivation of plants. Lactase persistence emerged only 7,500 years ago, which proves that prior to animal colonization, H. sapiens were not regularly consuming the milk of other-than-human animals.

Maybe hominin ovary beings were making plant-based milks instead. Archaeologists found stone tools with thousands of wild grain residues on them in Mozambique, dated to 105,000 BP. The grains were highly processed, either boiled, fermented, or ground. This plant-based evidence shows that female foraging groups in the Middle Stone Age routinely brought starchy plants to their cave sites.

Most of the grain was sorghum, an ancestor of modern sorghum used in porridge, bread, and beer. Possibly, Paleolithic egg-producers grounded and processed grains and nuts into milk shakes and smoothies. Other plant-based foods were found, such as the African ‘potato,’ false banana, wine palm trunk, and seed from a woody tree.

By the Late Stone Age, the processing of wild cereals was routine and women invented efficient methods for cooking ground seeds. Researchers in Palestine uncovered mortars and pestles with grains embedded in the pores dating back to 23,000 BP. The foods processed were wild barley and possibly wild wheat. Large-seeded legumes were part of the Palestinian diet as well, long before the New Stone Age agrarian revolution.

Late Stone Age societies were gathering wild cereals for food 30,000 years ago. Some grindstones found were used for grinding plant tissue, proving that women were making flour 32,000 years ago from oat seeds, acorns, and the relatives of millet. There were flour residues on 30,000-year-old grinding stones found in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic. The grain residues are from a wild species of cattail and a grass called Brachypodium, which both offer a nutritional package comparable to wheat and barley. The  grains were heated as part of the processing for consumption.

Vegetal food processing and the production of flour were standard practice across Europe from 30,000 years BP onward. The food economy of mobile gatherer-‘hunters’ throughout Europe included the high energy content plant foods that were normally available. Conversion to flour helped to preserve food, and made it is easier to transport and use.

Three grinding stones from the middle Yellow River region in China were found, dated to 23,000–19,500 BP. These female tools were used to process various plants, including grasses, beans, yam, and snake-gourd roots. Tubers were essential food resources for Paleolithic gatherers-‘hunters,’ and native grasses were exploited about 12,000 years before their intensive cultivation.

Wild rice was a central part of the diets and cultures of Ojibwa peoples in Canada and North America, and an important food of the Algonquin, Dakota, Winnebago, Sioux, Fox, and many other tribes through trade. There was even a language group called the Menominee, or “Wild Rice People.”

Losing Gut Flora

Sapiens, chimps, bonobos, and gorillas all have distinct microbial fingerprints. Human stomach microorganisms have been passed down from generation to generation over millions of years, evolving right alongside us in a process called cospeciation. Like other primates, people acquire gut flora through cohabitation, social interaction, and social transmission.

As hominins separated into different species over time, their bacteria did too as well, so there is a direct line of descent between the microbes of ancient hominids and those that live in our guts today. In comparison to Pan, humans have lost microbial diversity in adapting for animal-based diets. Apes in their natural environment cultivate more species of bacteria than humans across a range of societies.

People in non-industrialized societies have gut microbiomes that are 60 percent different from those of chimpanzees. Even worse, those living in the US have stomach microbiomes that are 70 percent different from chimps. Alarmingly, research has linked a lack of microorganism diversity in human guts to various diseases such as asthma, colon cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

As one scientist notes, “It took millions of years, since humans and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor, to become 60 percent different in these colonies living in our digestive systems. On the other hand, in apparently only hundreds of years and possibly a lot fewer, people in the United States lost a great deal of diversity in the bacteria living in their gut.”

Each of person is a super-organism. The ‘germs’ that we have sought to eliminate have been there for millennia supporting hominins. More than a thousand species live inside each individual, and they comprise 90 percent of the cells in and on our bodies. What is more, plant foods are vital for microbiome diversity.

Over 100 trillion bacteria live in the oxygen-free zone of each person’s large intestines. A female’s microbiome collectively weighs more than her brain, and these microorganism play a preeminent role in digestion, metabolism, and stomach health. Gut flora can impact a woman’s sensory, signaling, and immune systems, and influence the nerve endings in her stomach that connects to the brain.

Some microbes can affect the production of serotonin, which plays a role in appetite regulation, food intake, well-being, and sleep. Emotional states in the brain are reflected at the gut level as well. For example, the pattern for an angry stomach is contraction, more acid secretion, and increased blood flow. Also, stress hormones like adrenaline can influence the behavior of intestinal microbes.

The value of gut flora, plant-based foods, and the dialogue between the stomach and the brain is recognized and addressed in ancient healing traditions, such as Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine. Modern doctors and gastroenterologists…

(Meet Mago Contributor) Dr. Moses Seenarine