Satiety and hunger: Some considerations from feast and famine aboriginal (stone age men) experiences

Abstract

A recent paper in Nature by Diamond (1) has again brought up the unresolved question of physiological regulation of satiety and hunger in humans. In this paper, among other things, Diamond reports some personal experiences with aboriginal New Guineans living in rainy mountain forests: “So accostumated are we in the First World to regular meals that we find it hard to imagine the fluctuating food availability that was formerly the norm and remains so in some parts of the world. I often encountered such fluctuations during my fieldwork among New Guinea mountainers still subsisting by farming and hunting. For example, some years ago, in a memorable incident, I hired a dozen men to carry heavy equipment all day over a steep trail up to a mountain campsite. We arrived just before sunset, expecting to meet another group of porters with food, and instead found that they had not arrived because of a misunderstanding. Faced with hungry, exhausted men and no food, I expected to be lynched. Instead, my carriers just laughed and said, “ Orait, I samting nating, Yumi slip nating, enap yumi kaikai tumora (OK, it’s no big deal, we ‘ll sleep on empty stomachs tonight and wait till tomorrow to eat). “Conversely, on other occasions when pigs were slaughtered for a feast, the New Guineans would consume prodigious amounts of food. This anedocte illustrates an accommodation to the pendulum of feast and famine that was very necessary in times when that pendulum swung often but irregularly – a situation that was much more typical of our evolutionary history than the state of plenty to which we are accostomed“. These observations do not differ from those referred by a distinguished South African explorer, Professor P.J. Shoeman, in the middle of last century, while living with Heikum Bushmen, aboriginal hunters of the Kalahari desert: “I once again bent forward, pushed my hand under Xameb’s (an elderly Bushman) neck, and forced him into an upright position. He sat half erect and stand at me rather stupidly. I tried to get his brain to function by asking in a loud voice: “The men of the dance of death.... Where are they?“ He indulged in a cavernous yawn and replied, “Drunk from eating meat. See how they lie. It is but seldom that the lions give us so much marrow.” I questioned the old man further. “Are you not afraid of bursting?“ He hiccupped and waited a while before answering: “I have never heard of a Heikum bursting because he ate too much meat. There are always pieces of raw hide available to wind round a full stomach.“ “But why do you want to eat it up so hurriedly?“ “It is the law of life. What is in the stomach cannot be stolen by jackals and wolves (hyenas) or other vagabonds. And when the great hunger comes we say to one another: “Do you remember the day when we were so full that we had to crawl about on our hands and knees?“ “Does that drive the hunger off?“ “The heart that has known beautiful days on the roads of the past, finds strength for the long road of the future.“.... Some of the Bushmen had already begun eating again (2).“ In both the experiences referred above, signals of satiety and hunger are constantly