Energy in Human

History
An Overview

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Our Ancestors and Us

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Time line for various human species

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Human Energy Use
● Homo Sapiens are at least 200,000 years old.
○ Fossil records in Africa 195,000 years ago;
○ Molecular biology says divergence from the immediate ancestor was
200,000 years ago.
● We started migrating out of Africa about the same time and
reached South Asia about 70,000 years ago.
● For about 95% of our history we were foragers (hunters &
gatherers). Essentially roaming nomads.
● Relied on muscular energy and reasoning to get food, defend
against wild animals and other enemies, construct shelters, and
produce a variety of simple stone artefacts.
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Human Migration out of Africa

From Wikipedia 5
Hunter Gatherer Style of Living
● The stone artefacts were followed
by clubs and wooden digging
sticks, bows and arrows, and
spears and tools carved
from bone. These tools
magnified the limited capacities
of human muscle.
● Fire was used (by homo erectus)
more than 1.5 million years ago.
● Arrows are about 25,000 years
old and fishing nets about
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12,000 years old.
Agriculture, Domestication of Animals
● Agriculture &
domestication of
animals was invented
About 12,000 years ago
and this allowed the
humans to settle down.
● The first fundamental
extension of human
capacity to do work came from the domestication of large animals
(cattle around 8000 years ago & then horses ~ 2000 years later).
● These animals were first used for draft (to pull carts, wagons and
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agricultural implements such as wooden plows).
Traditional Farming
● Farming and related tasks required long hours of hard labor.
● This situation started changing radically only quite recently with the
invention of the internal combustion engine towards the end of 19th
century.
● It was installed in tractors at the beginning of the twentieth century
making life easier for the farmers.

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Modern Ploughing
Western Style

Eastern Style

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Pre-Industrial Mechanization
● Many stationary tasks
such as milling grain,
pumping water etc.
began to be
mechanized > 2000
years ago thanks to
water wheels and
windmills.
● Mechanization for moving vehicles had to wait till 19th century for
the invention of the steam engine.
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Wind Mill
● This was used for grinding
grain, pumping water etc in
Europe centuries ago.
● Later they were used in many
mining,
metallurgical and
manufacturing tasks.
● Modern day wind turbines
generate electricity.
● An old windmill preserved as
a tourist attraction(?) 11
Hunter Gatherer Society
● For more than 95% of their time on earth, the homo sapiens were
hunter gatherers.
● A hunter gatherer (HG) society gets its food by gathering, hunting &
fishing. These activities are collectively referred to as foraging.
● Most of the HG societies were to a large extent vegetarian. This can
be understood using energetic considerations. Primary consumers
get access to food energy that is more than an order of magnitude
greater than what would be available if one goes up one trophic level
and eat animals feeding on that same phytomass.
● Digging tubers, collecting seeds, gathering nuts and picking fruits
were how HG society gathered most of their food. 12
Main HG Foods
● Energy 5
content in 5
25
MJ/kg is
indicated.
● Meat was 15
essentially a
luxury item for
most of the
2
HG societies.
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HG Societies
● HG societies consisted social of groups of 25 to 50 people.
● From the studies on modern HG societies it emerges that they
were highly democratic.
● There was little specialization
except that gatherers were
mainly women and children
and the hunters were men.
● In the picture shown here
the women and children
are shown collecting
tubers.
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 HG’s of the Present Day
A woman gathering berries in Okavango, Africa.
Modern day gatherers are rarely part of an HG
society. They engage in other activities such as
agriculture & trade.

Yanomami Amerindians (South America) gathering

food. The Yanomami live as tribal farmers,
practicing a form of shifting cultivation,
supplementing their diet with hunting & fishing.
They live in an inaccessible region of the
Amazon basin. Among the Amerindian tribes, the
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Yanomami are least exposed to the modern world.
Hunting
● Hunting Animals provided a smaller amount of edible biomass
compared to phytomass.
● There are many small and relatively abundant herbivores
(particularly rodents) but these animals are also very agile, and
once caught, yield only a small amount of meat.
● In tropical forests there are also many small herbivores living on
trees, including monkeys and larger birds, but these species, are
difficult to hunt.
● Studies of bow and arrow hunters in both African and Latin
American rainforests show very low rates of success, and hence
very low energy returns, for the whole effort (or even a net energy
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loss when the hunters return empty-handed).
One of the Last of the HG societies

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Smaller Ungulates

● Very agile and

difficult to catch
with primitive Antelope
tools such as
spears, bows and Gazelle
arrows.
● The meat of these
animals were
mostly lean (not Mule deer
much fat and
Reindeer
hence not tasty)
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Larger Ungulates
● The best targets were the larger ungulates, whose body mass
(mostly between 50–1000 kg) were large enough so that the returns
on the energy invested in an often long and demanding hunt would
be substantial.
● Larger ungulates were often abundant. More than a million
wildebeest annually migrate across the East African plains even
today.

Bison African Buffalo Wildebeest 19

Hunting Larger Ungulates
● These animals were not easily caught or killed without weapons,
or with only stones, bows and arrows or spears. The use of all
these weapons required a close approach (difficult and often
dangerous in an open grassland) and often just wounded the
animal.
● One of the methods used to hunt the
big ungulates was to chase them for
a long time (say up to an hour or so)
till they got tired and slowed down at
which point they could be killed or
captured alive for future use. 20
Chase & Kill Strategy
● The strategy of chasing down an
animal as a method of hunting has Duiker
been practiced by many modern
day tribes.
● In North America deer and antelopes, in African Kalahari desert
duikers and gemsbok and in Australia kangaroos were hunted in this
fashion.
● The unique human ability to run
long distances at variable speed
and to control body temperature
through sweating is what made
Gemsbok 21
These achievements possible.
Killing of Bison by the Red Indians
Another strategy:

● Corral a bison herd into a funnel

shaped confined space by
enticing the herd with the
imitated bleating of a lost calf.
● Channel them towards a steep
cliff.
● Stampede them over the cliff.
● This strategy was practiced for more than 5 centuries at
Head-smashed-in-buffalo-jump (USA) until the 19th century.
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Head-smashed-in-buffalo-jump
● Depictions of young men dressed
up as coyotes or wolves
intimidating and corralling buffaloes
followed by forced stampeding over
a steep cliff.
● The red Indians developed
techniques for the long term
storage of the meat and fat of these
animals.
● Head-smashed-in-buffalo-jump is a
UNESCO world heritage site now. 23
Outwitting Lions (brain vs. brawn)

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Why Hunt Huge Animals? (at Considerable Risk)
What was the driving force behind hunting large animals at
considerable risk?

● Many anthropologists argue that it is the abundance of lipids in the

body of a large animal such as a bison or a mammoth that
attracted the hunters
towards them.
● Lipids have the highest
energy content of all
foodstuffs and they are
also highly filling &
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satisfying!
Fishing
● There was only one kind of hunting
whose energy return was higher:
fishing in the coastal waters visited
by enormous number of migratory
fish or whales.
● The Pacific Northwest (of the present day USA), with its massive
salmon runs and near-shore migration of whales, offered one of the
best opportunities of this kind.
● The resulting energy surpluses allowed many tribes to stop
migratory foraging and set up semi-permanent or permanent
settlements. These groups reached the highest population densities
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for HG societies, ∼ 100/km2
HG Densities
● Typical densities were < 10/km2 for forest dwellers: the large standing
phytomass of those ecosystems is mostly inedible and the huge
variety of tropical rainforest species implies that useful trees or shrubs
will be widely dispersed.
● Foragers in arid regions had average population densities
of around one person/km2.
● Hunter gatherer societies still exist in the present day world though
they are slowly disappearing or getting absorbed into the mainstream.
● A lot of the knowledge regarding HG societies have come from
studying such communities even though they may be atypical of
ancient HG societies. 27
Hunter-Gatherer societies of 19th & 20th century

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Hadzabe tribe Tanzania: Last of the HG societies

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HG Fisherwomen

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