Читать книгу Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker - Страница 13

Lee (1968) classified 58 tribes according to the percentage of dependence on hunting, fishing, or gathering. The data were taken from the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), but adjusted somewhat by transferring the pursuit of large sea mammals from fishing to hunting and shell‐fishing from fishing to gathering. The food obtained by gathering is predominantly of plant origin. The class does include small animal foods such as mice, rats, lizards, eggs, insect grubs, and snails. Tortoise and shell‐fishing is important to a few gathering tribes. In several cases where detailed analyses were made, however, plant foods contributed 60%–80% of the intake of gathering people.

In his List of Foods Used in Africa, Jardin (1967) compiled an extensive and complex list of species. I have attempted to remove cultivated plants and introductions and reduce the synonymy as much as possible. There still remain more than 1,400 species that could be grouped into classes as follows:

 Grass seeds approximately 60 spp.

 Legumes approximately 50 spp.

 Roots and tubers approximately 90 spp.

 Oil seeds approximately 60 spp.

 Fruits and nuts >550 spp.

 Vegetables and spices >600 spp.

 Total >1410 spp.

Most of Jardin's reports concerned agricultural tribes and only a small fraction of the list represented foods of gatherers. This suggests that (a) many more species have been gathered from the wild than have ever been domesticated, (b) even after agriculture is fully developed, gathering wild plant foods is still a worthwhile effort, and (c) wild plant resources are of the same general kinds as domesticated plant resources. See also Fox and Young (1982) for southern Africa.

Yanovsky (1936) in his Food Plants of the North American Indians lists 1112 species of 444 genera belonging to 120 families. About 10% of these are crops or imported weeds; the rest are native American plants. The bulk of the plants listed were gathered by nonagricultural tribes. Fernald and Kinsey (1943) listed about 1000 species for eastern North America alone. Plants gathered in Central and South America have not been conveniently compiled, but the number of species is very large. A partial listing is given by Lévi‐Strauss (1950) in The Use of Wild Plants in Tropical South America.

Our most reliable information again might come from Australian areas where agriculture was not practiced and where none of the plants had been domesticated. Lists compiled by Cribb and Cribb (1975), Irvine (1957), Levitt (1981), and Maiden (1889), are of help here, although no list is complete; there are problems of identification and synonymy, and many of the early ethnographic records contain native names because the observers were not botanists and could not identify the plants. Even so, Australians were recorded as having gathered and used over 400 species belonging to 250 or more genera.

Some observations are grouped below according to general kinds of plant food resources.