Dr. Raven Garvey, UMMAA curator of high latitude and western North American archaeology and an affiliate of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research, has just published a paper in Evolutionary Anthropology exploring an underappreciated food source with important and wide-ranging implications: digesta, or the vegetal material undergoing digestion in the stomachs and intestines of large-bodied herbivores. Large game are usually seen as “meat packages,” but Garvey uses a bison model to demonstrates that a group of 25 adults could derive USDA-recommended amounts of both protein and carbohydrates for three days without supplementation from a 1000-lb bison. This finding complicates the standard plant-animal dichotomy common in foraging theory and has important implications for our understanding of sex-divided subsistence labor, the North American “Archaic turn,” and a host of other models.
Read more here and here. Read the article (institutional access) here.
