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Course: Big History Project > Unit 6
Lesson 4: How Did the First Humans Live? | 6.3- ACTIVITY: DQ Notebook 6.3
- WATCH: How Did The First Humans Live?
- READ: Foraging
- WATCH: From Foraging to Food Shopping
- ACTIVITY: Hunter Gatherer Menu
- WATCH: Why Human Ancestry Matters
- ACTIVITY: Human Migration Patterns
- READ: Ales Hrdlicka - Graphic Biography
- READ: George McJunkin - Graphic Biography
- READ: Gallery — How Did the First Humans Live?
- Quiz: How Did the First Humans Live?
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ACTIVITY: Hunter Gatherer Menu
Purpose
Through this exercise, you’ll understand what our foraging ancestors’ diet was like, and how different it is from our diet today.
Process
Your job is to come up with one dish for a restaurant that serves only food that a hunter-gatherer would be able to put together.
Open a new browser window and do some research on hunting and foraging diets. Then, create a menu item that a typical forager might have hunted and gathered in a location that you specify. You must include the following information as part of your menu item:
- The tools that were used to forage or hunt the food item or items.
- The location where the ingredients are found.
- How long it would take to gather enough of these foods to feed 25 people.
- The time of year you could serve this menu item.
For Further Discussion
In the Questions Area below, share the menu item that you came up with. Also share one other piece of information that you came up with for your menu item. Then, look at someone else’s menu item and comment on how similar or different it is from yours. Would you put these two dishes on the same menu?
Want to join the conversation?
did our ancestors realy eat bacon?(12 votes)
um i dont think so?Bacon is proccesssed food that appeared in modern times(2 votes)
- What tool did they use to gather food(2 votes)
The tools used by different foraging parties varied depending on the landscape. The tools necessary to collect berries in a rain forest aren't the same as those you might use to hunt mammoths in tundra environments. That being said, some tools were extremely common. For instance, most primitive groups developed some sort of basket or pouch to store what they gathered. Many other groups developed tools such as spears, clubs, and axes that helped when they were hunting animals. The only limitation to the tools they used were their imaginations and the resources at hand.(5 votes)
how did they domesticate animals?(2 votes)
Selective breeding. Basically selecting out those animals that had more docile, easier to manage, traits and only breeding those.
Here is a recent experiment on domesticating foxes in Russia that illustrates how this works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox(4 votes)
- Would hunter and gathers try new food when they find something they could eat?(3 votes)
They'd try anything they could find that looked appetizing. Through trial and error did they find what was good and what was not.(2 votes)
How many people would be in a hunting group?(3 votes)- Cooked Olives, Sliced Plums, Sliced Pears, Seeds, Nuts, Cooked Tubers, Cooked Grass, Cooked Fish, Cooked rabbits, and Cooked Snails are the food items that are listed on my menu. I used Bow and arrows, a harpoon, and projectile points to hunt some of my food.(2 votes)
- My menu item is bird eggs, it can mostly be found in wet and humid climates.(2 votes)
- whould huters and gathers try new meats when they see them(2 votes)
My food item would be a spread of berries, found in many parts of the world. It would take a few hours to collect enough berries if you have some help, and this item can be served in almost all year except for the end of winter(1 vote)- Ancient Americans foraged for Bison. They did this by chasing the bison off a cliff. They did this in Africa. It would take about 30 minutes to get food for 25 people. Also if 50 bison fell of the cliff that´s roughly 11,000 - 20,000 pounds of meat. You can hunt/forage this item year round.(1 vote)