Ecological functions served by humans from homo erectus to h. Sapiens until roughly 20,000 years ago?

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@jpm

It does remind us of how succepible we are to relying on our cultural biases and putting our own spin to the interpretation. In this case, our patriarical culture sees men as the hunters and providers therefore we project that bias onto other cultures and times.

Here’s the recent research.

Sources:
Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence
Woman the hunter: The physiological evidence

@St.Roymond

Yes and no (back again to the Willamette): berries ripening early were collected by women and children; it was when they reported that most of the bushes of a given species were ripening that “all hands on deck” applied.

Fascinating stuff. The Willamette is incredibly fertile. Where I live, the indigenous Pueblo people along the Rio Grande have been farming and living in settled communities for centuries. (See Chaco Canyon, Taos Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo.) They were flanked on one side by the Navajo Apache and on the other by the Comanche. Those aren’t exactly fertile regions, and until the Spanish reintroduced the horse, those peoples were nomadic scavengers scraping a hardscrabble existence on foot. The Pueblo tribes considered them barely human, and the Navajo to this day call the Pueblo people “Pebbles” as a derogatory term.

Edit: And by accident of geography, the Pueblo tribes along the Rio Grande now have huge casinos stringing from Santa Fe to Isleta south of Albuquerque, while the Navajo don’t have running water or electricity to most of their reservations in NM/AZ. Hence the resentment.

[Terry_Sampson]

• AND you can make banjos out of them: How to Build a Gourd Banjo - Part 1 of 4

[St.Roymond]

@Jay313

The National Forest Service did a “controlled” burn last year that set off the largest forest fire in New Mexico history.

They had an advantage in having a huge lake to draw on: before they started each burn, everything along the edges for fifty feet got drenched.
Farther south on the trail there were two spaces where the trail had actually been relocated, spots where the prescribed burns got a bit out of hand and spread. Once the trail actually went through a burned area because there was no way to go around it – kind of eerie, and a bit strange because every now and then we passed a tree with a burned-out top but lower branches that were still green. In evolutionary terms, it will be the seeds from those few rare trees that will provide the ongoing generations of trees and at least one species in the forest will be a little more fire resistant.