Lol your caveman
2009 January 15
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Today’s troll wisdom:
How many cavemen were fat? Think about it.
Seriously, y’all! THINK ABOUT IT.
134 Responses
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Yeah, and how many of them lived past forty? What a twit.
I’m thinking. I’m thinking!
I’m thinking about stick figure cave drawings and ancient statues of fat women. . .
Is that helping?
Isn’t the answer – “None! BMI wasn’t invented yet” ?
I don’t know, how many were fat? Can he e-mail me the photos? And maybe the census data? Because I’d really be interested
How many cavemen dieted! ?!? How many used antidepressants?!?! How many lived to middle-age?!?!
I don’t know, but I bet a lot of them were fat.
They’d be lucky to be fat!
That troll is dumb. Cavemen practiced HAES. They ate good unprocessed meat, fish, plants, and then for exercise, they carried and dragged women all over the place.
are we talking Neanderthals or Cro Magnon?
(Trolls: if you’re going to try to bring these kinds of historical things up, be ready to provide footnotes.)
DRST
Three?
I laughed so loud my bf wanted to know what the hell I was reading.
I want to know how this guy knew what cavemen looked like, because seriously, is he bogarting the time-travel tech? JERK! I say we go back and get some awesome clothes to make the reenactors jealous! WHO IS WITH ME?!
You there, yes you my fine fellow, give me your shirt and I will give you THIS CHICKEN.
…btw this is likely the only time you’ll ever see me get excited about clothing so you may want to mark it on your calendars. ;)
Wasn’t Fred Flintstone fat?
And Barney too?
……………………..
:O
It is obvious that cave men were not fat because this is what they look like when we find them. DO YOU SEE AN OUNCE OF FAT ON THAT BODY?
66%.
The same number of cavemen who had the internet, duh! He should check his facts…online…
Fred Flintstone is a large gentleman, as is Barney Rubble. They are both cavemen.
Eesh.
I’m sure the cavemen (none of the prehistoric people we are talking about were women – people reproduced differently back in the good old days, until Eve came and fucked that shit up) were skinny like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Of course, it being prehistorical and them not having scales or measuring tapes, we may never know for sure.
Has this troll really lived under a fucking rock all hir life not to have heard of the Venus of Willendorf?
Anyway, cavepersons aspired to be fat, mang. You need insulation to get through the winters on those windswept steppes, and also enough flesh to sustain you in case the herds leave early and come back late.
But re: their average life expectancy being low, the thing about that is that it includes the however-many-percent that died before reaching a year of age. High infant mortality, let me show you it. If you made it to ten, you were probably making it significantly past 40.
Actually, you ought to seriously be able to tell about how much they weighed by their bones I think. Fat people are heavier and they’d be carrying more weight around, so the bones would be thicker. Might be too subtle for science, I’m not an anthro geek; but gee it seems like Bones would find out pretty quickly. (Edutainment TV style!)
And I agree that it’d be the lucky ones who were fat, though I remember reading somewhere that the average hunter-gatherer skeleton shows better nourishment than the early agricultural skeletons. So assuming the cavemen were hunter gather types probably quite a few of them.
Meanwhile, if this troll wishes to attempt to stay thin via emulating cavemen, he doesn’t need my permission. Me, I like libraries, computers, cars, and health care.
This troll has plumbed the depths of dumb.
I suspect he has also been watching too many Geico commercials and has been left with pixilated braincrap where his gray matter used to be.
(I have been wrestling with a draft and a deadline today and am in no mood.)
“If you made it to ten, you were probably making it significantly past 40.”
I love this though, and might have it put on a shirt.
“I made it to ten!”
Oh great – ANOTHER reason to be jealous of cavemen – not only did they get to wear fur, guilt-free, with no PETA activists on their case, but they were also enviably THIN. Well, as Thag said, “No can be too rich, or too thin… now pass me mastodon rib.”
Well, as Thag said, “No can be too rich, or too thin… now pass me mastodon rib.”
HAH!
You’ve said it, shapelings. Not only did they wish they wish they were fat, for those pesky winters and caves without central heating, but they worshiped fat chicks. The first piece of art we studied in my art history course? Fat chick with her boobs and belly all hanging out.
Cavepeople were probably not fat, though as someone mentioned, they aspired to be. It would indicate wealth and prosperity for your tribe. Cavepeople, or anyone living a hunter-gatherer existence (as seen in some peoples living today) rarely get fat but neither are they dangerously thin or under-nourished. You eat what you have available to stay alive and thin or fat be damned because it just doesn’t matter!
Waitwaitwait, maybe this is some kind of “what is the sound of one hand clapping”-conundrum!
Apparently Neanderthals might have been cannibalistic. What’s the fat content of your average Neanderthal? Is it South Beach Diet approved?
Who cares how many cavepeople were fat? What in God’s name does that have to do with NOW?
Let’s just say for argument’s sake that none were fat.
How many cavepeople used the internet? Drove Cars? Built skyscrapers? paved roads? wrote poems? penned songs? took pictures with their fancy digital cameras? Exercised on a treadmill? Spoke french? Read Shakespeare?
None? Well, shit. Tear it all down folks. Burn the books! Get out the asphalt eater and get rid of the roads!
I snorted so hard I choked a little.
Awesome. Way to make my day.
I wonder if, when the trolls are being so angry and troll-y, they know they’re bringing joy to a bunch of (apparently evolutionarily irrelevant) fatties?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
I’m guessing more than a few cavemen/women were fat…
Actually, this troll claimed to be a lady troll who used to be fat but now is all skinny and so can you! Not all trolls are dudes, though most seem to be.
You there, yes you my fine fellow, give me your shirt and I will give you THIS CHICKEN.
Do you think your boyfriend would mind awfully if you married me?
Here’s something to think about.
Cavemen are extinct (except in obnoxious Geico ads).
Hee! Quickly logging on while traveling, and am delighted to discover that “fat cavepeople” can be rearranged to spell “flop, pee, vacate.” Which tickles me no end, because now I’m imagining fat cavepeople making to-do lists reminding them to flop, pee, and vacate.
Sorry, I’m really low on sleep. Anyway, it amused me.
I’ve always thought cavepeople would have been at least solidly built. *shrug*
AMER – I – CAN!
So either she’s from Mount Rose, Minnesota or she’s taking the lovely Colbert Report waaaaay too seriously.
Oh, littlem, those are my words, not hers. :-) Alas.
hmmm hunting/gathering…
I can see it now…
Fat cave-person- “Would you like some berries? I just gathered them this morning!”
Skinny Caver-person “No! Only lean bones and and grub worms for me!”
6 months later in the throes of winter…
Skinny Cave-person “I’m starving todeath and I’m cold!”
Fat Cave-person “Should have eaten those berries…”
This stuff gets funnier and funnier…
Only the *successful* ones, troll.
Don’t forget the third one Wilma’s mother, she was fat too. So it’s Fred, Barney and Wilma’s mother so that is 3. Nancy.
Good thing i have this time machine right here so we can all go find out…
Yay! Chrono-vacations with tigi!!
Only the ones who switched to Progressive.
What I want to know is – where the thin cavepersons meanymeanheads to the fat cavepersons? Did they tell them that there where no fat apes?
Urg – the thing that people forget is that “cave”people are US – they do not represent a lesser version of us – they simply didn’t practice totalitarian agriculture. So whether they were all trim and lean or whatever else, they were human. Thus, probably both as smart and wonderful as all of us and as idiotic as this cavetroll. ;)
Maybe Trollette had a picture of Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC taped to her fridge as thinspiration?
Venus of Willendorf – actually being fat was a DESIRED trait among the cavepeople. Why oh why can’t the trolls be a little bit educated from time to time, just for a change…
“No fat cavemen” is about the mental level of “No fat people in prison camps”.
*headdesk*
For FUCK’S SAKE, someone come up with a punchline to this. It sounds like the setup for a joke.
Naamah Darling:
A caveman, a troll and a mastodon went into a bar…
“Weight loss is so easy, even a caveman could do it”?? Perhaps this is a new ad campaign for Jenny/WW/Nutrisys/whatever.
Ick.
Who cares how many cavepeople were fat? What in God’s name does that have to do with NOW?
Haha, yes.
Why should we model ourselves after cavepeople? Why should we strive to look, act, or live like cavepeople? WE AREN’T FUCKING CAVEPEOPLE (not that there’s anything wrong with cavepeople).
I personally don’t want a return to the good old prehistoric days.
Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone has told Valerie Bertinelli that she could be replace in the ads by a caveman?
Not to be a pill or anything but… At what time of year was he talking about? Cavemen (or anyone who lives a subsistence-only lifestyle) would have a tendency to gain weight over the spring through fall so they could survive the winter when food was scarce.
So… As one commenter said… Let’s see the footnotes.
In my opinion — depending upon the time of year, a lot of them could be fat or just a few.
–Andy Jo–
Conveniently forgetting that the prehistoric people’s idol of worship was typically a fat woman. (The Venus of Willendorf, indeed.)
From the article FJ linked to
“one interesting thing was that these are kind of a short, squat people. These guys had no waist at all — they were compact, dwarfy-like beings.”
Well, so much for calculating their waist-to-hip ratios.
If we’re going to accept this line of questioning as valid, why stop with cavepeople? Why not consider apes and other large primates? Have you ever seen an orangutan without a belly?
Wow. I’m thinking about it. And personally, since I’m a woman of the NOW I really don’t give a *ahem* what cave men had in the way of fat. But gee it sure seems from statues and carvings, from the general era said troll wishes to bring our minds back to, that women sure were able to become beautifully fat.
Wonder if cave men sat around the fire staring at that last piece of juicy fattened mammoth meat and kept bemoaning, “YOU eats! if Thog eats, go straight to hips.” “No, YOU eats. Me almost no fit fur wrap!”
Um, yeah, wevs. Everyone knows that cavemen are English, and drummers, and married Barbara Bach.
ATUUUUUUUUUK!!!
I’m still not getting this. What, is this person advocating an all-mastodon diet? Does this person think we should go back to knapping flint and dying incredibly young?
Or does this person just think we should starve ourselves like cavepeople so that we aren’t horrible and fat? Possibly because it’s more “natural.”
What the fuck ever. I don’t get it.
And for the record, I read an article recently that talked about a cavewoman reconstruction they did, and they discussed body shape and size and caloric intake, and these were, like, cobby, barrel-shaped people who needed at LEAST . . . I forget . . . it was, like, 5,000 calories a day or something. They ate a LOT.
So were they fat? They sure as fuck would not have been modeling in Vogue, I will tell you that. And as others have pointed out, they probably developed a tendency to store fat for times of famine, which would mean that yeah, some of them probably would have had lots of fat. It’s a SURVIVAL TRAIT that MOST animals have. We have evolved away from being cavemen (“cave” men, ugh, the anthropological ignorance), but we haven’t evolved away from it completely. There have been famines throughout recent human (err, the last 2,000 years, let’s say) history. Our genetics have not had time to change to adapt to having enough.
And I don’t think they SHOULD. I think, things being as they are, we are going to need that fat-storing as a species again, probably before much longer. So, you know, I’m fine with my body doing what it was designed to do.
pshaw, Raquel Welch in 10000000000000000000 years BC was not skinny. Va Va Voom.
It’s 10 degrees in Pittsburgh today. I am grateful to be well insulated! If I were a prehistoric human, people would be flocking to me for warmth, ahahahahaha.
Sorry to Debbie Downer the thread, but this just reminds me too much of my friend’s recent visit to the doctor …
Where she was told that she really didn’t need to be eating more than 1000 cal/day….
Because you never saw any pictures of fat concentration camp inmates.
I am not making this shit up.
Yeah, pyewacketsid, “No fat cavemen” and “No fatties in concentration camps” kinda go hand in hand. People really think they’re the ultimate “Gotcha!” arguments. I think the logic is, “If there are no fat starving people, then you should be able to eat just what it takes not to starve, and only be a little fatter than them, i.e., thin!” Except for how it completely doesn’t work that way. And for how incredibly offensive it is.
It really gets me that pyewacketsid’s friend’s DOCTOR said that shit to her. Kelly Smash!
Fred Flintstone is a large gentleman, as is Barney Rubble. They are both cavemen.
This is precisely as scientifically valid as “there were no fat cavemen, think about it.”
Yeah, which is related to the idea that fat is fuel:
“What the hell are you doing eating when you quite clearly have fuel stored as fat? Use all that fat up first before you eat. I don’t care if you are hungry. Have a glass of water instead.”
pyewacketsid – a doctor once told me the same thing…minus the concentration camp thing. His logic was, I suppose, that starving would make me thin, which would enhance my quality of life so much that I wouldn’t mind starving. I’ve tried this exact technique several times and lost weight doing it, only to have it come back plus 10 pounds if I ever stray from it. STARVING ISN”T WORTH IT!
I’ve gone from 130 pounds last year to 150 this year, and I’m not freaking cold all the time like I was then. I wouldn’t want to be a skinny caveman in January. You need some reserves, damn it. There’s a reason I survived the illness I had – because I started at 200 pounds. If I’d started at “normal weight” of 130 pounds and lost 70, I’d be dead. Our bodies are made to store fat. Your caveman argument makes ours. Asshole.
I bet cavemen spend a lot of time in pilates class!
Fillyjonk, glad to contribute to the scientific data collection.
I am to understand cave women also had really droopy breasts, leathery and chapped skin, and ratty hair. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but hardly a basis for beauty ideals, are they?
I’m sorry, I have an advanced degree and I am not following the caveman/concentration camp survivor logic. Can someone please explain it to me. What is the point they are trying to make by pointing this out?
littlem, it was -24F in Minnesota this morning. I need my fat!
littlem, it was -24F in Minnesota this morning.
Don’t tell me that! I’m going to Minnesota tomorrow and was hoping to get a little reprieve. Like, say, 4 degrees ABOVE zero, vs. 10 below with a 30-odd below windchill. Sigh.
Actually, I think the Troll is accidentally making the opposite point, as trolls are wont to do.
I do remember a theory that populations that practiced a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the more recent past were more likely to be fat as their ancestors had more recently needed to be efficient at storing nutrients.
The ‘naturally thin’ genetic variation needed more time to develop in periods of long abundance, something hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have experienced.
Because, obviously, the first famine would wipe out everyone who wasn’t storing their nutrients efficiently, so the ‘thin’ people would be selected against for reproduction.
Northern Europe, for example, not as long or efficiently agrarian (and Venus of W’s home region) would have fetishized fat as something to keep them HEALTHY, more than, say, the Indus valley, which early on was producing enough food for a large and complex society.
Just a theory, of course, but it seems reasonable.
Faith, from what I can tell, the conversation goes like this:
You: Look, some people are fat even though they don’t really eat more than “normal.” It’s just human variation.
Idiot: (something about thermodynamics, which of course don’t even apply to open biological systems like the human body, but they love the calories in, calories out idea.)
You: That doesn’t apply to biology. Really. There are fat people who eat healthy and exercise, and just don’t have the same metabolism you do.
Idiot: Oh, yeah? How come there were no fat people in concentration camps? If it was genetic, there would have been!
You: AAAAAAAACK! (this is where you come to SP for a dose of sanity.)
Well, I was ‘thinking about it’ and woke up with my face in my oatmeal. I think I too, must suffer from a form of “diet triggered narcolepsy”
That is what we healthcare administration professionals call a “malpractice lawsuit”.
BUT! Back to the important things! Namely, what Bree said:
No more walking? Having my own chauffer at my beck and call? SIGN ME UP!
(Yes, I have always wanted to be carried to work in a sedan chair, how did you guess?)
The estimate on that article Fillyjonk linked was 5 foot 6, and 142 pounds. That’s the high end of BMI “normal”, right? So the doctor would probably tell him to go easy on the mammoth doughnuts or something. ;-)
How many cavemen were fat?
42.
Is it appropriate to thank a troll for the laughs?
Baby mammoth flavored doughnuts at that!
Emmy. Thanks, I think. I don’t know where these trolls learn to logic. It’s pretty outstanding.
Well at least this very famous stone age woman was fat: the Venus of Willendorf.
http://artsaroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2007/11/stone-age-art-or-stone-age-art_05.html
But you know, that’s only one of the earliest stone age human representations there is. Such evidence should not get in the way of your learned correspondent. Think about it.
it’s that gaining weight and being efficient with your metabolism that enabled “cavemen” to survive in times of severe famine –> diabeetus-ready genotype. being able to survive on extremely little amounts of low calorie food mean probably LIVING until the next time quality food turned up.
also, i hatehatehate the term cavemen. i’m an anthro geek. omg, most people didn’t live in caves. those that did lived there because it was ready-made shelter. tons of people lived all over the damn place in tents and other types of shelter… their belongings/remains/etc haven’t survived because they weren’t protected by a cave environment. and don’t even get me started on the geico cavemen… they look more like an australopithecine than Homo anything. rawr!
Found on the innerweb:
“The Caveman Power Diet increases energy, the ability to burn fat, and gets you in touch with your natural instincts. It’s not just a way to lose weight, it’s a healthy approach to making your body indestructable.”
sic
Wow. I must say I find the prospect of indestructibility kind of appealing.
Wouldn’t a nice, titanium coating be easier?
I demand adamantium for my indestructability needs.
It’s not just a way to lose weight, it’s a healthy approach to making your body indestructable.
You know, so in case you get eaten by a giant ground sloth, it won’t be able to digest you. (Which, by the way, is why you NEVER see fat giant ground sloths.)
Wouldn’t a nice, titanium coating be easier?
With diamond studding for that little extra protection.
But emeralds bring out the red highlights in my hair!
Hee! This really cracks me up.
The right answer to “there are no fat people in prison camps/famine zones/concentration camps” is always “AND THERE ARE NO HEALTHY PEOPLE THERE, EITHER.”
Especially to a doctor. I mean, I would be all over that with my awesome lawyer in a second. “MY DOCTOR TOLD ME TO EMULATE PEOPLE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP. FOR MY HEALTH.”
The right answer to “there are no fat people in prison camps/famine zones/concentration camps” is always “AND THERE ARE NO HEALTHY PEOPLE THERE, EITHER.”
ALSO OH HEY THE DOCTORS KIND OF SUCKED JUST LIKE YOU
That response might get you Godwinned, but for a good cause.
[i]ALSO OH HEY THE DOCTORS KIND OF SUCKED JUST LIKE YOU[/i]
Ahahahaha.
[i]Lois Waller, on January 15th, 2009 at 12:25 pm Said:
(not that there’s anything wrong with cavepeople).[/i]
Haha, I love this! Like there might be any cavepeople out there reading this that might take offense :D
Oh FUCK, I messed up the tags AGAIN.
ALSO OH HEY THE DOCTORS KIND OF SUCKED JUST LIKE YOU
Oh God, brilliant and hilarious.
Whenever someone trots out the concentration camp argument, I’m increasingly driven to scream, “You know all those really skeletal folks you see in concentration camp pictures? Those are the fat people. The thin people died first.”
What I usually do is ask them if they’ve ever seen film footage of Cold War era Russians queueing up for food and ask them if they noticed many thin ones standing in line. No troll has ever taken me up on that question. Funny that.
Those are the fat people. The thin people died first.
*boggle*
You know, even though I know this is true, I have not seen it spelled out like that and it kinda blows my mind. The obviousness once you think about it is why this is such a brilliant response.
Those are the fat people. The thin people died first.
Even more likely, I think, most of the significantly fat people were probably deemed ‘genetically unfit’ and killed almost immediately. (Has anyone done research on the Nazis’ criteria for work camp versus death camp?)
“How many cavemen were fat? Think about it.”
Think About it? You want ME to think about it, what, FOR you? Because you, obviously, haven’t. Tell you what, why don’t go do that now and, if you manage not to sustain serious brain injury trying to force too much voltage through your underused brain, then come back and we’ll talk.
Actually, Vidya, I don’t know if that was necessarily the case back in those days. I know the Nazis were fixated with the body beautiful as part of the Aryan ideal but I don’t think fat = unhealthy was ingrained in public consciousness to the degree it is now. That’s purely speculation on my part. I’m lucky enough that the Austrian branch of my family relocated in the UK before they got into a position to find out.
Yes, I don’t think that’s accurate, Vidya.
No, dude’s got the argument all wrong. The correct wording is, “Have you ever seen an obese wild animal?”
To which we respond how, friends?
Records from that era are spotty at best! /Nelson Muntz
And before someone accuses me of trolling (because I probably worded my post weird), I’ve actually heard people use this argument before. My response to them is usually as follows:
“I don’t see too many animals driving cars or working for pay, or too many humans still fighting for survival amidst predators and harsh elements, do you? Modern homonids have long since moved beyond the constraints of the natural world that other animals must endure. If you want to live outside of civilization, be my guest. I give you a week before you come crawling back to your high speed internet.”
Plus, BeautifulHead, I have definitely seen fat squirrels and the like. I imagine they’re just doing a good job of surviving in the urban environment and will probably make out pretty well in the squirrelpocalypse.
LilahMorgan — the squirrels in my neighbourhood are all SUPER FAT right now. It happens every year, and every year it gets more and more adorable.
squirrelpocalypse is my new favourite word
There are lots of animals with quite a bit of fat. Once I told my 3-year-old daughter to put some clothes on because it was cold, and she said, “It’s okay I have a thick layer of fat to keep me warm.” She had just watched a documentary about penguins. She doesn’t actually have a thick layer of fat, though, so she still had to wear clothes.
Squirrels are fat as HELL.
LOL! Your fat squirrel!
My local squirrels are fat and they’ll pelt you with pecans if you try to pick up the nuts off the ground under the tree.
mean buggers ;-)
If, according to fat-haters, wild animals are never obese, then why do they taunt fatties by calling us things like “hippo” and “elephant”?
Um, I don’t want to trigger any bad memories for anyone, but don’t fat people often get compared to “fat” animals? Walruses, cows, pigs, elephants, etc. So, did these animals stop being “fat?” Or is there a hierarchy of thinness to be desired in the animal kingdom now too?
Ha, you beat me to it, Karalora! ^_^
I’ve seen loads of fat blue jays (they’re mean bullies who take all the food!) and robins, too.
Oh my god, I love you all so much right now! I’m almost glad about the trolling when it produced a thread as funny as this one.
Wonder if cave men sat around the fire staring at that last piece of juicy fattened mammoth meat and kept bemoaning, “YOU eats! if Thog eats, go straight to hips.” “No, YOU eats. Me almost no fit fur wrap!”
AprilD – I just snorted Diet Coke out through my nose.
I saw a lionness in Tanzania who had COMPLETELY porked out on a baby zebra and had a belly practically touching the ground – I bet the other lionnesses were lying on the rocks judging her. They were probably hanging round the carcass, rolling their eyes and going “No wonder she’s so fat – she just ate like half that baby zebra – she just has NO SELF-CONTROL.”
Giraffes are definitely the top of the animal kingdom hierarchy. Legs that go on forever, big eyes with long lashes, slender necks – they’re the supermodels of the animal kingdom! I bet the hippos just cry themselves to sleep at night, wishing they could be giraffes. :rolleyes:
thegirlfrommarz we’re even then I guess because “No wonder she’s so fat – she just ate like half that baby zebra – she just has NO SELF-CONTROL.” almost made me choke on my reese pb cup snack! :D
And for fat critters I totally have a cardinal that comes to my feeder that I’ve lovingly named “Mr. Fatty Cardinal”. I even switched to seedless sunflower seeds since he seemed dis-satisfied with having to work to get them out of the shells and would toss them on the deck floor. But I guess he’s just picky, he still does it! Maybe some seeds taste better?
And for the record I too have a layer of fat like a penguin, but I’ll be damned if I’m going outside today with no clothes on :)
A friend pointed out the similarity resemblance between my portly little black and white cat and a small killer whale this week – and she was right on the button. I’ve been addressing him as My Little Orca ever since. Bless.
Back when I was on the diet-go-round, I read about one called “NeanderThin” – you only ate what the average hunter-gatherer would – i.e., meat (’cause you could kill it with a club or spear, and apparently, FIRE was a given under this plan), berries & fruit, some veggies. No dairy, since livestock weren’t domesticated, and no grains, as agriculture wasn’t invented yet.
I decided pretty quickly that, if I had been a hunter-gatherer, I would have been pretty cranky most of the time, no matter what I weighed.
But what about their women? Think carefully before going on a Paleolithic diet!
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/prehistoricart/images/Venus-of-Willendorf-24000BC.jpg
That ain’t how foraging people’s diets actually work, for the record. Popular culture seems to be about 20 years, give or take, behind most scientific disciplines, and anthropology is no exception.
Of [i]course[/i] there were grains. Why, the Ojibwa people of my own region traditionally spent several weeks every year at their rice camps, canoeing up and down waterways shaking wild rice into the boat, and then doing all kinds of interesting things to it to process it into food. It was a [i]staple[/i].
Grains, seafood, fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries. It was [i]meat[/i] that they hardly ever got.
Ah, poop. Please pretend that was tagged properly.
and no grains, as agriculture wasn’t invented yet.
Because there are no wild grains. None, I tell you! *eyeroll* Where do they come up with stuff like that? They need to watch a little Les Stroud and find out just how much vegetables/grain a hunter-gatherer kind find.
P.S. Please forgive my interesting spelling of “lioness” upthread – I am very tired after two nights of attending dinners for work and not getting enough sleep (networking is not easy, dammit!).
What, they think the entire grain category just *poofed* into existence the instant people realized that they could plant seeds on purpose and harvest the results later?
Also, any self-respecting hunter-gatherer knows where to find lots of tubers. Not to mention nuts, mushrooms, the occasional clutch of eggs, and even honey, if you can figure out how to get it without being stung. This NeanderThin thing sounds more like a chimpanzee diet
I totally love everyone’s examples of fattie animals but a person could shut that down by saying they shouldn’t be fat and are only fat because they live in an environment where they get food from humans, which is “unnatural.” I don’t buy that, I’m just saying.
On the other hand, I wonder what we do with the criteria “fat” when it comes to animals. We assess animals by what is average or some otherwise normal/typical range for that species. So is a panda bear fat? Well….um….aren’t all panda bears kind of fat? Wouldn’t a skinny panda bear be abnormal/undernourished?
slythwolf – somewhere among my many books on the Pacific Northwest is one that describes the Coast Salish natives’ eating habits in some detail. They’re popularly regarded as almost entirely living on seafood, but various types of tuber and, yes, wild rice formed a substantial part of their diet, as well as berries and the rest.
Their word for the rather meagre time of year we’re in right now roughly translates as ‘time when your belly sticks to your spine (from hunger)’. Whatever size hunter-gatherers may be, they don’t idealize thinness.
Sorry to go just a wee way off topic – but the comments on the sites cited above about the possible origin of the Venus of Willendorf play into that crap about ‘thin cavemen’. From reading them it seems academics think the figure is ‘exaggerated’ and probably pregnant. I beg to differ – she looks a hell of a lot like my 130-odd kilo, 1.63 metre self. The way the breasts and belly hang, the way the thighs sit, even the extra fatty ‘covering’ between her legs. She looks like me. Which means there may well have been at least 1 fat woman… the model.
While she might have been exagerrated and possibly “pregnant”, this does not change two facts: first, she was fat to begin with, no woman would get that shape only from pregnancy, come on – these are REAL curves of a true Shapeling ;) And secondly, the cavepeople carved and painted things connected with worship, cult – Venus of Willendorf is a sculpture symbolizing fertility, health, and even if they didn’t look like that a lot, they sure considered this kind of appearance beautiful and desired – a symbol of feminine power to create life, provide warmth and safety to her man and children.
The cavemen were wiser than the majority of modern people, I’d say *lol*
Late to the game with this, but:
thegirlfrommarz:
I saw a lionness in Tanzania who had COMPLETELY porked out on a baby zebra and had a belly practically touching the ground – I bet the other lionnesses were lying on the rocks judging her.
Baby zebras: The baby doughnuts of the wild kingdom? Discuss.
Yes, persistent near starvation does make people thin. Just explain to me why, during a time of plenty, all of us have to force ourselves into near starvation just to satisfy dimwits like this guy.
I have (sadly) heard this kind of logic before, but it’s often been in the form of “How many people at Auschwitz were fat, huh???” I mean, are we seriously supposed to emulate people near death? I mean, I guess idiots often think that women should, but how on earth that has become an acceptable implication is really beyond me.
I, for one, am kind of happy about the technological and medical progress humans have made since those caveman days. Regardless of their size, obviously. Yeeeeessssh
I saw the biggest, fattest bluejay I ever saw last week. He had the roundest, whitest belly! And it wasn’t feather fluffing, because it’s quite warm out. Someone’s been hitting the birdseed pretty hard, eh? Maybe he should go on a diet so he can feel virtuous while he suffers through the cold this winter!