Archaeology, as a study of the customs of prehistoric societies, can provide us with a lot of information about the different ways of life that our ancestors led. Thanks to this, it has been discovered that the first communities in the Andes Mountains fed mainly on plants. This challenges the description that defines them as ‘hunter-gatherers’, since nearly 80% of their diet was based on products of plant origin, with tubers such as potatoes and maca being the protagonists of their usual diet.
This dietary pattern was studied by archaeologist Randy Haas, from the University of Wyoming. For this, he applied isotopic chemistry and statistical modeling on the remains of 24 individuals buried in Wilamaya Patjxa and Soro Mik’aya Patjxa, in the Peruvian Andean highlands, with an age of between 9,000 and 6,500 years. The results, published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that it would be better to call these societies ‘gatherer-hunters’, a term change that better fits their actual eating habits.
Although the first archaeological theories about Andean societies assure that “the abundance of projectile points, scrapers and lithic remains indicate a considerable investment in the hunting of large terrestrial mammals”, the new study concludes that, as a result of research into patterns of dental wear on the upper incisors, these “suggest intensive processing of tubercles.” This, the scientist assures, may be due to intensive hunting carried out by even older societies (11,000-9,000 years), which probably led to “large populations of mammals being drastically reduced.”
In addition to reaffirming the consumption of Andean tubers as the main basis of the diet of these societies, the study found that “the paleoethnobotanical evidence presented failed to find evidence of the intensive use of chenopods in the Altiplano during the Archaic period”, indicating that products like quinoa were not yet an essential part of their diet. This could be due to “the small and delicate nature of wild chenopod seeds,” according to the expert.
These findings, in addition to providing more clarity about the ways of life of the first Andean societies in Peru, also clarify the basis of modern diets such as the ‘Paleo’ diet: “Conventional wisdom holds that the first human economies were centered on hunting , an idea that has led to a number of high-protein diet fads,” explains Haas. However, the Andean diet during the Archaic period prioritized wild potatoes and other vegetables, with meat being a secondary food.
