"Pure" Rain Forest Hunter-Gatherers?

In a curious reversal of the long-standing trend towards abandoning the notion that a pure hunter-gatherer lifestyle existed in the past, Bahuchet, McKey, and de Garine (“Wild Yams Revisited: Is Independence from Agriculture Possible for Rain Forest Hunter-Gatherers?”) ask anthropologists to entertain the idea that hunter-gatherers in tropical rain forests could have once survived in isolation. In this article the authors present evidence against the “cultivated calories hypothesis” proposed in papers by Headland (1987) and Bailey et al. (1989). According to the cultivated calories hypothesis, subsistence based solely on foraging is difficult in tropical rain forests because of the low availability of energy-rich wild foods. Proponents of the hypothesis go on to claim that humans have never lived in tropical rain forests independently of domesticated plants and animals.

Bahuchet et al. propose an alternative hypothesis regarding rain forest hunter-gatherers and their food resources : (1) Wild plant foods are not used to their exploitative limit by extant hunter-gatherers. In the absence of cultivated plant foods, hunter-gatherers could rely more heavily on wild plants. (2) With long-term access to cultivated foods, lower-preference wild foods may have “fallen off the radar” and no longer even be recognized as a resource. According to the authors, the historical development of relationships between hunter-gatherers (Baka and Aka) and Bantu farmers in the Western Congo Basin provides ecological, ethnohistoric and linguistic evidence that contemporary pygmy populations were present in rain forest environments before the advent of farming villages.

In this article Bahuchet et al. draw an important distinction between the observable relationship between extant hunter-gatherers and their food resources, and the potential existence of the same relationship in their pasts. We might observe that contemporary rain forest hunter-gatherers typically enter into extensive relationships with sedentary farmers to fulfill their subsistence needs, but we should keep a critical distance between this observation and the idea that foraging peoples could not exist independently in the rain forests in pre-agricultural times. While this makes intuitive sense, the authors are correct in noting that archaeological evidence for the availability of wild plant foods in the past is scarce. For this reason, their hypothesis would be difficult to prove non-ethnographically. Also, while their paper is in support of temporal relativism, the authors acknowledge that they make a tacit (but unproven) assumption that contemporary and past Aka meals had similar components. As Brian Hayden would argue, dietary “needs” are by no means constant through time (2003: 458-9). Despite these shortcomings, Bahuchet, McKey and de Garine present a compelling and well-supported argument for the potential independence of hunter-gatherers from other modes of subsistence and leave us with a question familiar from our last seminar: Is the present hunter-gatherer/farmer relationship one of choice or necessity?


References Cited:

Bahuchet, Serge, Doyle McKey and Igor de Garine. 1991. Wild Yams Revisited: Is Independence from Agriculture Possible for Rainforest Hunter-Gatherers? Human Ecology 19(2):213-243.

Hayden, Brian. 2003. Were Luxury Foods the First Domesticates? Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives from Southeast Asia. World Archaeology 34(3):458-469.