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January 1, 2008

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Anthopologist describes fascinating bison kills at a site showing human's love of meat.

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Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plain

Jack W Brink

URL:

https://justmeat.co/docs/imagining-head-smashed-in-jack-w-brink.pdf

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At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below. Author Jack Brink, who devoted 25 years of his career to “The Jump,” has chronicled the cunning, danger, and triumph in the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported. He also recounts the excavation of the site and the development of the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre, which has hosted 2 million visitors since it opened in 1987. Brink’s masterful blend of scholarship and public appeal is rare in any discipline, but especially in North American pre-contact archaeology.

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	Pemmican	Pemmican is a condensed carnivore food that was popular in the past to trappers and hunters, as well as the Native Americans that made it from bison. One bison could be rendered and chopped and dried down into a 90 pound clump stored in its hide - made of rendered fat mixed with lean dried meat that is pounded into a powder. Pemmican represents the perfect fat:protein ratio and keeps for a long time as the stable saturated fat protects the dried out meat, which, devoid of moisture, cannot rot. It could be left in a cache for years at a time and still be eaten. Wars have been fought over it.
	Facultative Carnivore	Facultative Carnivore describes the concept of animals that are technically omnivores but who thrive off of all meat diets. Humans may just be facultative carnivores - who need no plant products for long-term nutrition.
	Anthropology	Anthropology is the scientific study of humans, human behavior, and societies in the past and present. It is a broad discipline that encompasses various subfields, including cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Anthropologists seek to understand the full range of human diversity, from our biological origins to our cultural practices and social structures.
	Carnivore Diet	The carnivore diet involves eating only animal products such as meat, fish, dairy, eggs, marrow, meat broths, organs. There are little to no plants in the diet.