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ABSTRACT
Subsistence of the first inhabitants of the New World has been largely debated among researchers interested in past lifeways. In this article, we focus on the subsistence of these early inhabitants using skeletal material excavated at Lagoa Santa, central Brazil. To contextualize these data, we provide a thorough review of Paleoamerican diet, discussing the big-game hunting hypothesis in light of botanical and zooarchaeological data from North and South America. This review shows a diversity of subsistence strategies in the first inhabitants of the New World as responses to variable ecological conditions. Our skeletal study shows that Lagoa Santa has significantly higher prevalence of dental caries than hunter–gatherer series from the Americas. These results strongly suggest that the big-game hunting hypothesis does not hold for central Brazil, showing the importance of plant resources in the subsistence of Paleoamericans.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Pedro Da-Gloria obtained his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University, and his research focused on the study of health and lifestyle of the early human groups from Lagoa Santa. He is researcher of the Laboratory of Human Evolutionary and Ecological Studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, currently leading a project with rural populations from the Amazon, dedicated to creating health models to be applied to living and past populations. His main areas of interest are bioarchaeology, bioanthropology, health, and human evolution.
Clark Spencer Larsen is a Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Chair of the Anthropology Department at The Ohio State University. He is a biological anthropologist primarily interested in the history of the human condition, viewed from the perspective of health, quality of life, adaptation, and lifestyle during the last 10,000 years of human evolution. He is the author of Our Origins: Discovering Physical Anthropology, now in its third edition (W. W. Norton), and Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, in its second edition (Cambridge University Press).
ORCID
Pedro Da-Gloria http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6282-7826
Notes
1 The term “Paleoindian” is very common in archaeology literature, associated with the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods in the New World. However, the implicit notion of biological continuity between early and modern Native Americans leads us to prefer the more neutral term “Paleoamerican” for the skeletons. When we are referring to the archaeology of the first Americans, however, we use the term “Paleoindian.”
2 All the radiocarbon dates in this article are non-calibrated and provided in radiocarbon years before present (14C yr BP), establishing the present as AD 1950.
3 Da-Gloria and Larsen (Citation2014) reported an area of 20 km2 for the main cluster of sites of Lagoa Santa. In fact, the real number is 200 km2.
4 Due to small sample size, SPSS did not provide the 95th percentile value.
5 The Real Alto site (OSCH-12) is an early Formative site dated to 5400–3500 14C yr BP (Ubelaker and Newson Citation2002). The inhabitants of this site were classified as hunter–gatherers following the coding of the WHP project. Real Alto is reported in the WHP as having no plant domestication, but showing animal domestication. However, recent studies at this site show evidence of domestication of maize (Zea mays), manioc (Manihot esculenta), arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea), and llerén (Calathea sp.) (Chandler-Ezell, Pearsall, and Zeidler Citation2006; Pearsall, Chandler-Ezell, and Zeidler Citation2004). To keep consistency with the other populations in the database, the WHP original classification was maintained.
6 See note 4.
7 The denominator 75 represents the total number of carious lesions, while the remaining analyses use the number of carious teeth, which is 72 (see ). There are three teeth with two carious lesions.
8 See note 7.
9 The sample utilized here (n = 915) is lower than the total sample (n = 917) because two teeth have unknown types.
10 The correction was calculated using the following steps. First, the proportion of anterior teeth, premolars, and molars for each skeletal sample (n = 30) was averaged by tooth type (see Table 5). Second, the Lagoa Santa prevalence of caries by tooth type (anterior = 2.68%; premolars = 5.22%; molars = 13.90%; see raw data in Da-Gloria and Larsen Citation2014) was weighted according to the averaged proportions of the 30 skeletal samples.