Marlowe Frank W, Berbesque J Colette, Wood Brian, Crittenden Alyssa, Porter Claire, Mabulla Audax
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Rm. 2.3, Henry Wellcome Building, Cambridge CB2 1QH, UK.
Centre for Research in Evolutionary and Environmental Anthropology, University of Roehampton, London, UK.
J Hum Evol. 2014 Jun;71:119-28. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.03.006. Epub 2014 Apr 17.
Honey is the most energy dense food in nature. It is therefore not surprising that, where it exists, honey is an important food for almost all hunter-gatherers. Here we describe and analyze widespread honey collecting among foragers and show that where it is absent, in arctic and subarctic habitats, honey bees are also rare to absent. Second, we focus on one hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza of Tanzania. Hadza men and women both rank honey as their favorite food. Hadza acquire seven types of honey. Hadza women usually acquire honey that is close to the ground while men often climb tall baobab trees to raid the largest bee hives with stinging bees. Honey accounts for a substantial proportion of the kilocalories in the Hadza diet, especially that of Hadza men. Cross-cultural forager data reveal that in most hunter-gatherers, men acquire more honey than women but often, as with the Hadza, women do acquire some. Virtually all warm-climate foragers consume honey. Our closest living relatives, the great apes, take honey when they can. We suggest that honey has been part of the diet of our ancestors dating back to at least the earliest hominins. The earliest hominins, however, would have surely been less capable of acquiring as much honey as more recent, fully modern human hunter-gatherers. We discuss reasons for thinking our early ancestors would have acquired less honey than foragers ethnographically described, yet still significantly more than our great ape relatives.
蜂蜜是自然界中能量密度最高的食物。因此，在其存在的地方，蜂蜜几乎是所有狩猎采集者的重要食物，这并不奇怪。在此，我们描述并分析了觅食者中普遍存在的蜂蜜采集行为，并表明在北极和亚北极栖息地等蜂蜜不存在的地方，蜜蜂也很少见或根本不存在。其次，我们聚焦于一个狩猎采集社会——坦桑尼亚的哈扎人。哈扎族的男性和女性都将蜂蜜列为他们最喜欢的食物。哈扎人获取七种蜂蜜。哈扎族女性通常获取靠近地面的蜂蜜，而男性则经常爬上高大的猴面包树去袭击有蜜蜂蜇人的最大蜂巢。蜂蜜在哈扎族的饮食中占了相当大比例的千卡热量，尤其是哈扎族男性的饮食。跨文化的觅食者数据显示，在大多数狩猎采集者中，男性获取的蜂蜜比女性多，但通常像哈扎人一样，女性也会获取一些蜂蜜。几乎所有生活在温暖气候地区的觅食者都食用蜂蜜。与我们亲缘关系最近的现存物种——大猩猩，也会尽可能地获取蜂蜜。我们认为，蜂蜜至少从最早的原始人类开始就一直是我们祖先饮食的一部分。然而，最早的原始人类获取蜂蜜的能力肯定不如近代完全现代的人类狩猎采集者。我们讨论了一些原因，这些原因表明我们的早期祖先获取的蜂蜜比民族志描述的觅食者要少，但仍然比我们的大猩猩近亲多得多。
