Venison meatball day?
Lex Anteinternet: Evidence for the cooking of fish 780,000 years ago...: Evidence for the cooking of fish 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel Yup. And. . . The early Middle Pleistocene site of Ge...
By most reckonings, the humans, and they were humans, who were grilling up the carp were not members of our species, Homo sapiens.
They likely would have been Homo Heidelbergensis or Homo Erectus, the former having at one time been regarded as a subspecies of the latter.
No matter, these people were a lot closer to you than you might imagine. Their brain capacity, for one thing, is just about the same as modern humans at 1200 cc. FWIW, the brain capacity of archaic Homo Sapiens was actually larger than that of current people, members of the species Homo Sapien Sapien. Our current brain sizes are pretty big, in relative terms, at about 1400 cc, although Neanderthals' were bigger, at 1500cc.
About the "archaic" members of our species, it's been said that they're not regarded their own species as they have been "admitted to membership in our species because of their almost modern-sized brains, but set off as ‘archaic' because of their primitive looking cranial morphology".1 Having said that, some people say, no, those are Homo Heidlebergensis. It can be pretty difficult to tell, actually, and as been noted:
One of the greatest challenges facing students of human evolution comes at the tail end of the Homo erectus span. After Homo erectus, there is little consensus about what taxonomic name to give the hominins that have been found. As a result, they are assigned the kitchen-sink label of “archaic Homo sapiens.”
Tattersall (2007) notes that the Kabwe skull bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the most prominent finds in Europe, the Petralona skull from Greece. In turn, as I mentioned above, the Petralona skull is very similar to one of the most complete skulls from Atapuerca, SH 5, and at least somewhat similar to the Arago skull.
Further, it is noted that the Bodo cranium from Africa shares striking similarities to the material from Gran Dolina (such as it is). This suggests that, as was the case with Homo erectus, there is widespread genetic homogeneity in these populations. Given the time depth involved, it is likely that there was considerable and persistent gene flow between them. Tattersall (2007), argues that, since the first example of this hominin form is represented by the Mauer mandible, the taxonomic designation Homo heidelbergensis should be used to designate these forms. This would stretch the limits of this taxon, however, since it would include the later forms from Africa as well. If there was considerable migration and hybridization between these populations, it could be argued that a single taxon makes sense. However, at present, there is no definitive material evidence for such migration, or widespread agreement on calling all these hominins anything other than “archaic Homo sapiens.”2
Regarding our first ancestors, of our species, appearance:
When comparing Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens, and anatomically modern Homo sapiens across several anatomical features, one can see quite clearly that archaic Homo sapiens are intermediate in their physical form. This follows the trends first seen in Homo erectus for some features and in other features having early, less developed forms of traits more clearly seen in modern Homo sapiens. For example, archaic Homo sapiens trended toward less angular and higher skulls than Homo erectus but had skulls notably not as short and globular in shape and with a less developed forehead than anatomically modern Homo sapiens. archaic Homo sapiens had smaller brow ridges and a less-projecting face than Homo erectus and slightly smaller teeth, although incisors and canines were often about as large as that of Homo erectus. Archaic Homo sapiens also had a wider nasal aperture, or opening for the nose, as well as a forward-projecting midfacial region, known as midfacial prognathism. The occipital bone often projected and the cranial bone was of intermediate thickness, somewhat reduced from Homo erectus but not nearly as thin as that of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The postcrania remained fairly robust, as well. To identify a set of features that is unique to the group archaic Homo sapiens is a challenging task, due to both individual variation—these developments were not all present to the same degree in all individuals—and the transitional nature of their features. Neanderthals will be the exception, as they have several clearly unique traits that make them notably different from modern Homo sapiens as well as their closely related archaic cousins.3
Well, what that tells us overall is that we were undergoing some changes during this period of the Pleistocene, that geologic period lasting from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago.
And that, dear reader, points out that we're a Pleistocene mammal.
It also points out that we don't have yet a really good grasp as to when our species really fully came about. We think we know what the preceding species was, but we're not super sure when we emerged from it. And of course, we didn't really emerge, but just kind of rolled along mother and father to children.
Which tells us that Heidlebergensis may have been pretty much like us, really.
Just not as photogenic.
On that, it's also been recently noted that the best explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals, which are now widely regarded as a separate species that emerged also from Heidelbergensis disappeared as they just cross bread themselves out of existence. Apparently they thought our species was hotter than their own.
Assuming they are a separate species, which I frankly doubt.
Here were definitely morphology differences between Heidelbergensis and us, but as we addressed the other day in a different context, everybody has a great, great, great . . . grandmother/grandfather who was one of them.
And another thing.
They ate a lot of meat.
A lot.
I note that as it was in vogue for a while for those adopting an unnatural diet, i.e. vegetarianism, to claim that this is what we were evolved to eat.
Not hardly. With huge brains, and cold weather burning up calories, we were, and remain, meat eaters.
Foonotes:
1. Archaic Homo sapiens Christopher J. Bae (Associate Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Hawaii-Manoa) © 2013 Nature Education Citation: Bae, C. J. (2013) . Nature Education Knowledge 4(8):4
2. By James Kidder, The Rise of Archaic Homo sapiens
3. 11.3: Defining Characteristics of Archaic Homo Sapiens
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Big news on the public access to lands front:
Now, what this isn't.
It isn't a court declaration that's binding precedent on the whole state. It's one jury, in a circuit court case. That's it.
It does mean that these four guys are not going to be convicted.
And beyond that, it shows that juries, quite frankly, are unlikely to convict anyone for corner crossing. Not only in Carbon County, but anywhere in the state.
And it doesn't end the issue, actually. A civil suit remains, and it's far more likely to have a bigger impact, as it will likely be the one that ultimately goes to the Supreme Court and the Wyoming Supreme Court will then determine the issue.
It does send a signal, however, both to courts (of course) but to the legislature on how average Wyomingites view these issues, and that likely is summed up by a comment made in court by the defendants' lawyer:
DEFENSE ATTORNEY RYAN SEMERAD ON RANCH OWNER FRED ESHELMAN
Eschelman is an entrepreneur who is noted for his charitable donations. . . and his donations to right wing politicians as well. He's apparently humble and generous. Not so generous, however, that the South Carolinian saw fit to just turn a blind eye to this matter or to generally allowing some of the less well funded access to public land, not his land, on his Wyoming ranch.
The original encounter, moreover, was caught on audio and video, with Eschelman's employee stating to law enforcement;“Do they realize how much money my boss has? …and property?”
And indeed, his having a Wyoming ranch brings to mind Thomas Wolfe's comment on that in his book A Man In Full.
On the topic of decisions, this also points out the dangers of pursuing something best left untouched, something that was pointed out a couple of years ago in the Wyoming ve. Herrera case. Sometimes, there are issues that you'd rather leave undecided.
Indeed here, the County Attorney, an elected official, made the decision to prosecute, no doubt based on prior interpretations of the law, which would have favored the same. But in doing so, she's accidentally taken the side of a wealthy out of stater against the interest of common Wyomingites. This probably never crossed her mind, but it likely has crossed the mind of a lot of locals by this point, and the effective statements of the defense now doubt have taken root. Eschelman, in the words of the defense, is a would be king and oppressor. I've now seen public comments that the County Attorney prosecuted as she was influenced by his wealth. That's extremely unlikely, she was probably influenced by the law, and may very well not be in the class to whom this issue is dear to the heart, but she's no doubt aware that it is to many now. How this also plays out is yet to be seen.
And indeed, this takes us back to the topic of allmannsretten, which we've addressed elsewhere.
As noted, this story is still playing out. It'll be very interesting to see where it goes ultimately.
It wasn't a great one, for a variety of reasons.
It was in the late waterfowl season that I had my second vehicular run in of the year, and it was similar to the first. I was duck and goose hunting on a stretch of the river. Up until the last few years, this stretch, which is 7,000 feet high, closes to fishermen because of the weather. Nobody wants to fly fish in 80 mph winds when it's 10F.
That's started to change, however.
For one thing, in spite of the high altitude, it hasn't been as cold up that high recently. It's still really windy, however. On the day I was out there, it was probably around 35F with 80 mph winds.
I'm a fisherman too, but when hunting starts, for me fishing stops. I'm more of a hunter than a fish hunter. My father was the other way around. Anyhow, I sort of figure that guys who have the run of the river from April until late August, can ease up a bit in September through December, and most in fact do. If you see a fisherman on any other stretch of the river from August on, they tend to be friendly as a rule and share the river. I try to avoid them.
On this stretch its different, however, and that's because most of the fishermen who tend to be in this stretch are from the big rectangular state to our south.
Now, I'm not the only waterfowler on this stretch of the river. A few other dedicated guys are dedicated blind hunters on the same stretch. It must be the case that they stake their claim and the fishermen avoid them. I generally avoid the fishermen.
On this day, however, I drove down to a stretch of the river in this area that I knew was empty. I got things, and the dog, out a couple of hundred yards away from the river and then, as the dog was milling about, a Rectangular State SUV came blasting down the two track and nearly hit my dog. Worse yet, they saw him.
What that was about was them getting to the river before me. They probably thought I was a fisherman too, or they knew I was a hunter and they wanted their stretch of river. I hunted it anyway. They knew they'd been assholes as they kept looking back as I walked the long stretch down and the long stretch back. On top of it, they put in on what amounts to a wind tunnel (I knew that) and had no luck.
There was no need for that.
I'm not one of those people who run around looking for challenges in life. Indeed, quite frankly, my life had plenty of challenges early on, and I don't need anymore. Frankly, for that matter, I tend to find people who claim to take up occupations because they're "challenging" to be full of bull.
Having said that, I'm completely different with outdoor endeavors. Maybe I do like a challenge, and perhaps that why I'm after chukars.
While not exactly on my seasons, my failures at chukars caused me to try to find out more about them and that lead me to this excellent blog:
It's a great read.
I wrote out a blog entry for Lex Anteinternet on what the first Thanksgiving Dinner in 1621 must have been like.
It really surprised me, even though it shouldn't. We modern Americans are so used to the "poverty of resources of our ancestors" story that, well, we believe it. In reality, that first gathering in English North America to celebrate God's bounty and give thanks for it, no matter how imperfect the Church of England and Puritan celebrants, and the native ones as well, was a really bountiful feast. I've joked in the past that it probably consisted of salt cod, but in fact it seems likely to have featured waterfowl, maybe turkey, deer, mussels and quite an abundance of other foods stuffs.
Unlike now, what it didn't feature was pie, probably, even though pies of all sorts were a feature of the English diet, although at this point I frankly wonder. What would have kept there from being pie would have been a lack of wheat, as that crop wouldn't have come around for at least a few years. And the lack of a grain crop meant that there wouldn't have been beer, if that's something your Thanksgiving usually features (mine does). It's an open question if there would have been wine. There would have been a lot of fresh vegetables, however, as well as fresh foul, venison and fresh fish.
It would have been a good meal, in some ways one we'd recognize, but also one in which we might note some things were missing. No potatoes, for example.
This set me to wondering what a killetarian/agrarian like me might end up with if allowed to do a Thanksgiving Dinner all of stuff I'd shot or gathered. Could I do it?
Well, there'd be no mussels on my table, but most years there would be fare similar to what the first celebrants had. There are wild turkeys in my region, although I failed to get one this year. Events conspired against me and I didn't get a deer (at least yet) either. But if I had a major dinner, and time, I think I could muster it. It might be pheasant rather than turkey, or a wild turkey, which is really no different in taste, only in bulk, from the domestic ones.
The challenge, however, would be vegetables, depending upon how feral I'd take this endeavor. If I went full hunter/gatherer, here I'd really be in trouble. I frankly know next to nothing about edible wild plants.
Now, starting off, I'd note that in my region, like the rest of the globe, a vegetarian would have starved to death in a few days prior to production agriculture. It's not only an unnatural diet, but it's impossible up until that time. Indeed, one of the ironies of agriculture has been the introduction of unnatural diets. When you read, for example, of the Irish poor living on potatoes and oatmeal, while that's not what their Celtic ancestors had eaten prior to 1) row crop agriculture, and 2) the English. Shoot, potatoes aren't even native to Ireland.
Anyhow, I note that as the native peoples of the plains were more heavily meat eaters than anything else, as that's what there was to eat. But there is some edible vegetation.
I just don't know much about it.
I guess I'd start off with that I knwo that there's a collection of native berries you can eat. I mostly know about this as my mohter used to collect some and make wine with them, and I've had syrup and jelly made with them as well. UW publishes a short pamphlet on them, which is available here. There are also wild leeks, which my mother and father, and at least one of my boyhood friends would recognize, which my mother inaccurately called "wild onions".
And that's about all I know about that.
Which isn't enough to make much of a meal.
Now, a person could probably research this and learn more, and I should, simply because I'd like to know. Indeed, on the Wind River Indian Reservation there's a "food sovereignty" movement which seeks to reintroduce native foods to the residents there in order to combat health problems, which is a really interesting idea and I hope it has some success. I hope that they also publish some things on this topic, assuming that they haven't already.
So, in short, at least based on what the present state of my knowledge is, the Thanksgiving fare would be pretty limited, vegetable wise.
Now, what about grow your own?
Well, if expanded out to include what I can grow myself, well now we're on to something else indeed. . . assuming that I can get my pump fixed, which I haven't, solely due to me.
If I were to do that, then I'm almost fully there for a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner, omitting only the bread and cranberry sauce.
And I'm not omitting the cranberry sauce.
I'm not omitting the bread, either.
Frankly, I think the modern "bread is bad for you" story is a pile of crap. People have incorporated grains into their diet for thousands of years. To the extent that its bad for you, it's likely because Americans don't eat bread, they eat cake. That's what American bread is.
Of course, I think the keto diet is a pile of crap too, which I discuss on another Lex Anteinternet post. So here, I'd have to make bread, or buy it, and I'd prefer to make it. Soda bread more particularly.
On this, I'd be inclined, if I could to have an alcoholic beverage for the table, which is another thing, albeit a dangerous one, that humans have been doing since . . . well too long to tell. The Mayflower sojourners started off their voyage with a stock of beer. . . ironically in a ship that had once been used to haul wine, but they were out when they put in at Plymouth Rock. By the fall of 1621 it's unlikely that they'd brewed any. as they lacked grain. The could have vinted wine, however. If they did, we don't know about it.
So in my hypothetical, if I stuck to local stocks, I could probably do the same. I don't know how to do it, but I could learn. But I'm not going to do so, as frankly my recollections of that wine aren't sufficiently warm to cause me to bother with it, and I recall it took tons of sugar, which obviously isn't something I'm going to produce myself.
I'm not going to brew beer either, although plenty of people do. I don't have the time, or the inclination, and either I'd end up with way too much or not enough.
And this reflects the nature of agrarianism, really. A life focused on nature with agriculture as part of that. I don't have to make everything myself, but I have to be focused on the land, have a land ethic, and focus on what's real.
Maybe next year I'll try this.
I'm not going to take this too far, and you definitely could, but a couple of odds and ends I've run across recently.
There are only handful of really worthwhile agrarian blogs around. That's at least better than the situation with the distributist situation, where there's nothing worthwhile whatsoever. Of the handful that are out there, the two best ones are linked in here. A third one that is also worthwhile (which is a successor to two prior blogs, just as this blog also is), is also linked in, but it's not quite as good. I'll do a thread on them some other time, or on all of these together. A fourth one would get a link for its actual agrarian posts, but it descends into "Southern Agrarianism" of the Lost Cause variety, and we're not going there. Nope, no way.
Anyhow, I thought that this entry by an agrarian California sheep rancher, who is an adult entrant into hunting, really interesting. He's also a self professed agrarian.
We've posted a lot about hunting here, from the prospective of the nearly feral agrarian who has been a hunter his entire life. It's interesting to see some similar views come about from the thoughtful agrarian adult who came to it late.
I haven't made it all the way through the back entries on Foothill Agrarian. Not by a long shot, but I was also struck by this entry:
This is a little like reading my own thoughts. Indeed, this guy is just about the same age as me (I'm a little older), and he's a rancher, not a "homesteader", which anymore conveys something else, and frankly something less serious, or perhaps less realistic. I'll be looking forward to perusing his prior entries.
I'm glad I found his blog.
Here's the other thing that caught my eye.
Helsinki says no meat will be served, single-use cutlery used at its events
This quite frankly is a deceptive headline, but that's how it generally reads, even in English language editions of Finnish newspapers. What it really means is that the City of Helsinki will be changing what it serves at official state and municipal functions, and venues it owns, and it actually still will be serving meat.
What it will serve is local fish and also local game. We don't see wild game as a restaurant item much in the US, and indeed its subject to very strict statutory provisions everywhere. Why peole make the distinction between fish and "meat" baffles me, but they have here.
This is being done, maybe, by Helsinki (its drawing a lot of criticism) to reduce, it claims, its carbon footprint. There's a certain "m'eh" quality to this as frankly the concept that bovines are farting the plant into a climate crisis is not really well thought out. Humans are omnivores and meat is part of our diet, including meat that is raised by farmers and ranchers.
Having said that, I've long been an advocate for getting your own meat directly, and therefore I'm somewhat applauding Helsinki here, probably surprisingly to those who might know me. They're emphasizing local fish, which is something that people of that city probably mostly subsisted on until the mid 20th Century. And hunting wild game has always been a big part of Finnish culture, and still is.
Now, I'm not advocating for what Helsinki did, and I suspect that the Woke city counsel of the city, or whatever its administering body is, won't have this in place long. I'm a stockman and I'm hugely skeptical of the cow fart accusations on the climate. Depending upon how cattle are fed, this is not the problem its made out to be, and so to the extent its a problem, and there's always been ungulates around all over, it can be addressed. But I find it really surprising that in 2021 I'll occasionally find even ranchers and farmers who don't hunt.
People should get their meat locally if they can, and included in that, is getting it directly from the field. Its healthy, and honest, and connects you with reality in a way that going to the stocked shelves at Sam's Club doesn't.
And:
MR. HAYEK AND A PLATE OF CHIPS
The Guardian's headline, we'd note, somewhat overdoes the story. But not completely, by any means. The irony, perhaps, is that the generally left of center Guardian has been on the ban the cow bandwagon for some time, although in semi fairness to the Guardian, that's because they are in the cow farts are going to destroy the planet camp.
That story alone is often misunderstood, and if people went to more of a grass fed cow type of consumption, it'd address a lot of that, but it all gets back, as so many things do, to nature and eating the diet you're evolved to.
Shoot and butcher a deer, plant a garden. You were meant to do that.
