The cross-cultural use of poison by hunter-gatherers
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Human beings are extremely proficient at utilizing every available tool in their surrounding environment in creative ways. Poison is a perfect example of these creative solutions being directed at the ever-present problem of extracting food from the landscape. This comparative analysis examines how poison is used to assist in food extraction technologies of the groups from Lewis Binford's dataset of 339 hunter-gatherer groups (information on poison use or not is available for 118 of these groups). Using this categorical data, I address the research question: what is the relationship between plant diversity, latitude, and the productive use of poison to aid in traditional food extraction? This study examines how traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) plays a role in the use of poison as a resource to aid in food acquisition, as well as how the community protects itself from the danger of accidental poisonings. This paper aims to shed light on the transmission of information within these groups on how this resource can remain effective without being a detriment. While several instances of poison use for hunting purposes are well known, such as the Hadza and various groups in Amazonia, my aim to understand how geographically widespread this hunting practice is. The study also touches on Optimal Foraging Theory and how poison assists hunters in having tools that are more lethal, and because of this heightened lethality, they are more efficient at extracting food from the environment. My initial hypothesis was that latitude would be a strong predictor for where we would find poison use, in particular lower latitudinal regions. I hypothesized that plant diversity could have some predictive abilities for poison use, however, my assumption was it would be far weaker than latitude. Poison use is a well spread hunting technology around the globe, out of 118 groups 83 (70 percent) use poison while 35 (29.6 percent) do not. Poison is not a localized hunting technology, but a widespread cross culturally used technology.
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M.A.