Читать книгу Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker - Страница 22

We should not be surprised if gathering peoples know a lot about plants. They are the real “professional botanists”; for them, life depends on an adequate knowledge of plants. We have seen that gatherers are familiar with hundreds of species and their uses for food. We have noted that many are poisonous and must be detoxified before they can be eaten.

Since “ignorance” is part of the stereotype developed by agricultural people about gatherers, I would like to call attention to an episode described with some apparent pleasure by Sir George Grey (1841). Some of the crew of Captain Cook's expedition of the 1770s observed the Aborigines eating seeds of Zamia (a cycad). The crew tried some of their own harvest of Zamia and became very ill. They concluded that the Aborigines must have very strong constitutions to be able to live on such food. Later, on shipboard, they fed Zamia seeds to some pigs, and a few died. Their admiration for the physical stamina of the natives increased substantially. The Aborigines, of course, had removed the poison before eating their seeds, and were, no doubt, amused at the “ignorance” of their European visitors.

Detoxification is required for a considerable number of plants used by the native people of North American, the Australian Aborigines, and gatherers in tropical zones. Some plants are deadly poisonous without treatment, others only unpleasant. Several acorn species are sweet and need no treatment, while others contain various amounts of tannins. Among California Native Americans, some of the bitterest oaks were the most popular; when properly leached, the original tannin content did not cause any harm. Tribes on the edge of the “acorn belt” were often more selective since they did not depend much on acorns and did not want to go to the trouble of leaching. Leguminous seeds, Solanaceous fruits, Dioscorea spp., and Aroid tubers are still among the more common poisonous foods consumed by gatherers.

Detoxification is usually by heat, leaching, or both. The plant material is frequently reduced by grinding or pounding in a mortar to facilitate treatment. Boiling water may be poured through the meal, the material may be boiled in several changes of water, or sometimes prolonged soaking in cold water is enough. Some foods are roasted, pounded, and then leached. Sieves, strainers, cloth sacks, wooden troughs, or sandbeds may be produced for the purpose. Pottery is not necessary; water may be boiled in baskets, hides, wooden boxes, or pits in the ground by dropping fire‐heated rocks into the water.

Gatherers not only know how to make poisonous foods safe, but they also know a great deal about drugs, narcotics, medicines, fish poisons, arrow poisons, gums, resins, glues, dyes and paints, bark cloth, and woods for spears, arrows, bows, shields, fire sticks, and canoes. They have also used their botanical knowledge in spinning and weaving, basket‐making, and constructing household utensils, fish traps and weirs, masks, figurines, and ceremonial objects.

The Australian Aborigine was fond of chewing a wild tobacco (mostly Nicotiana suaveolens Lehm.). Wood of Acacia salicina Lindl. was burned to provide ash to mix with the quid. Why this particular species out of dozens of Acacia? Johnston and Cleland (1933) analyzed the ash and found it extraordinarily high in calcium sulfate, “sulfuric anhydride 30.09% and lime 40.70%.” The alkaloids are more soluble in alkaline solutions. Perhaps any source of lime would do, but the practice reminds one of the custom in India of burning heartwood of Senegalia catechu (L. f.) P. J. H. Hunter and Mebb (syn: Acacia catechu (L.f.) Wild, Oliv.) to obtain “cutch” which is mixed with other ingredients and used when betel nuts are chewed.

Another masticatory of the Aborigines was Duboisia hopwoodii (F. Muell) F. Muell. This is of a different order of drug potency and contains hyoscyamine and norhyoscyamine, with scopolamine in the younger leaves (Johnston & Cleland, 1933). Both narcotics were confounded under the general name “pituri” and were important articles of trade over great distances; “shields, boomerangs, spears and other articles being sent in return for them.”

In the late 19th century, Father Trilles, a French missionary to Gabon, West Africa, observed pygmies making arrow poison. The process was long, complex, and dangerous, for the poisons were extremely potent. Ingredients of 10 different plants were used; eight were poisonous and two were gums to be impregnated with poison and stuck to the arrow heads. Two animal poisons were also included: beetle larvae and venom of a horned viper. The procedure is described in The Hunting Peoples by Coon (1971) who added this comment:

A tourist driving along a forest‐lined road, seeing an elderly, diminutive black man clad in a bark‐cloth breechclout, would have no reason to suspect that this child of nature knew the properties of many medicinal plants, some still undescribed in Western science, and how to combine them for their greatest effect. With the forest and marsh his pharmacy, his laboratory a secret nook in the shade of tall trees, and a minimum of equipment, the Pygmy poison‐maker performs a delicate, dangerous, and highly skilled sequence of operations as exacting as some modern professions.

An indication of ecological sophistication is reported by Levitt (1981) for Aborigines of Groote Eylandt. Some common grasses were used as “calendar plants”—when grains of Chrysopogon spp. are ripe, it is time to dig yams; or when grains of Heteropogon triticerus R. Br. start to shatter, it is time to dig yams; and when all grains have fallen, it is time to stop. When Heteropogon contortus (L.) P. Beauv. ex Roem. & Schult. begins to flower, the rainy season will soon be over. Other hunter‐gatherers receive similar signals from their knowledge of plant growth and reproduction.

The more one studies the wealth of plant lore of gathering peoples the more one is impressed by the extent and coverage of their botanical knowledge. Man knows what he needs to know or learns what he must or else he dies. The security and stability of gathering economies are from necessity, rooted in an extensive body of information about plants.