These two images reflect the ancient Colorado peoples, who lived as the earliest nomads of the region. Some exciting research from this area is challenging entrenched ideas about how our human ancestors lived.
The mammoth skeleton is from the very first peoples, known as the Paleoindians. Dating as far back as 13,000 years ago, archaeologists have noted their reliance on big game. The second is the “Magic Mountain Site” from the Archaic culture, beginning around 8,000 years ago after the last Ice Age had ended – this group, although nomadic, benefited from the gentler climate and included a greater percentage of wild plants in their diet.
The latest research comes from a group of archaeologists who dated human encampments from the Wyoming-Colorado hunter gatherers between 13,000-6,000 years ago, and found an increase in population across time that matches the population growth rate of early agriculturalists.
“But wait a minute!”, you are probably asking yourselves – “don’t farmers have a higher population than hunter-gatherers? Isn’t the ability to get more food the reason why people became farmers in the first place?” And indeed, these are my questions too. Lots of research has shown that shifting to agriculture has drawbacks — like, many more work hours go into farming versus hunting or gathering.
But since farming needs more working hands, historians have long thought that evolution would have favored this lifestyle — farming women had (we thought) way more babies because they would have had to. On the other hand, hunter-gathering women would have spaced their children’s births out, deliberately nursing as a means of birth control (p.s. this method works much better when food is scarcer, which is presumably the case in these early nomadic peoples).
We do not know what the advantage of switching to farming was. The results may not be reflective of all ancient peoples. Also, the use of radio-carbon dating for determining population size isn’t a certain methodology.
But I love the way that new evidence can really shake up my (and other scholars’) ideas of how we humans got to be here.
Source(s): _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America_, Robert L. Bettinger et al., Jan 26, 2016 113 (4) 812-814. @uncoveecolorado.com, “The Original Coloradans,” April 25, 2020, Christa Sadler. _Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: how evolution has shaped women’s health_, Wenda Trevathan, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 13.
