Sunday, September 14, 2014

National Geographic Magazine - The Evolution of Diet







The Evolution of Diet



By Ann Gibbons
Photographs by Matthieu Paley



Some experts say modern humans should eat from a Stone Age menu. What's on it may surprise you.



It's suppertime in the Amazon of lowland Bolivia, and Ana Cuata Maito is stirring a porridge of plantains and sweet manioc over a fire smoldering on the dirt floor of her thatched hut, listening for the voice of her husband as he returns from the forest with his scrawny hunting dog. With an infant girl nursing at her breast and a seven-year-old boy tugging at her sleeve, she looks spent when she tells me that she hopes her husband, Deonicio Nate, will bring home meat tonight. "The children are sad when there is no meat," Maito says through an interpreter, as she swats away mosquitoes.





Nate left before dawn on this day in January with his rifle and machete to get an early start on the two-hour trek to the old-growth forest. There he silently scanned the canopy for brown capuchin monkeys and raccoonlike coatis, while his dog sniffed the ground for the scent of piglike peccaries or reddish brown capybaras. If he was lucky, Nate would spot one of the biggest packets of meat in the forest--tapirs, with long, prehensile snouts that rummage for buds and shoots among the damp ferns.





This evening, however, Nate emerges from the forest with no meat. At 39, he's an energetic guy who doesn't seem easily defeated--when he isn't hunting or fishing or weaving palm fronds into roof panels, he's in the woods carving a new canoe from a log. But when he finally sits down to eat his porridge from a metal bowl, he complains that it's hard to get enough meat for his family: two wives (not uncommon in the tribe) and 12 children. Loggers are scaring away the animals. He can't fish on the river because a storm washed away his canoe.





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