Acorns and Health in California

Acknowledging that debate continues, Chapter 3 estimated that humans entered North America some 15,000years ago. They first settled what is today California between roughly 10,000 and 8000 BCE, congregating near lakes to target waterfowl and thirsty mammals.¹¹³ Perhaps to access the most calories and nutrients per kill, these hunters sought the largest game. Plants supplemented diets. Few skeletons exist of the founder populations, precluding attempts to pinpoint health, though

American anthropologist Phillip Lee Walker (1947-2009) and Cherokee-American anthropologist Russell Thornton (b. 1942) suspected that early populations had ample food and were too sparse to sustain many pathogens and parasites.¹¹⁴ But surpluses may have been irregular, and storage may have been limited, causing hunger during scarcity.

Rainfall began to diminish around 7500 BCE, drying lakes that had lured birds and mammals.¹¹⁵ Amerindians compensated by broadening plant gathering. Between around 3000 and 2000 BCE mortars and pestles appeared in the archaeological record. Anthropologists interpreted them as evidence of acorns, which were ground, in diets. These dates may not mark the origins of balanophagy (acorn eating) because earlier tools might have removed shell and cupule. This possibility may put acorn consumption before 3000 BCE, though British-American anthropologist Brian Murray Fagan (b. 1936)—mentioned in Chapter 5—dated its beginning around 2000 BCE in response to increasing populations’ need for more food.¹¹⁶ Canadian anthropologist Aubrey Cannon believed that the second date marked acorn eating’s intensification rather than genesis.¹¹⁷ California then was wetter and cooler than today, hindering grasses whose seeds Amerindians ate. Acorns filled the void, and by roughly 1 CE, they sustained peoples in the region that now encompasses Oregon in the north and California to the Mojave and Colorado deserts in the southeast.¹¹⁸

Belief that acorns were eaten only after climate change reduced the hunt’s bounty contradicts Merriam’s 1918 pronouncement that in California “the acorn is, and always has been, the staff of life.”¹¹⁹ He emphasized that this dependence persisted into the twentieth century, when Amerindians made cornbread with one part acorn flour to four parts cornmeal.¹²⁰ Absent gluten, cornmeal does not cohere to form dough. Despite gluten’s absence, acorn flour coheres when wet, enabling corn- bread to be made. Merriam described acorns as native sustenance from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico in eastern North America.¹²¹ In Canada’s Quebec and Ontario provinces, the Algonquin made acorn bread and combined the nuts with fish or game. Louisiana’s Choctaw likewise ate acorn bread. In 1841, American geologist James Dwight Dana (1813-1895)—while in California with the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842)—sampled the bread, remarking that “the taste, though not very pleasing, is not positively disagreeable.”¹²² Other indigenes combined acorns with potatoes and squashes (Cucurbita species). As late as 1972, California Amerindians added acorns to bread and soup.¹²³

Trading with Southwestern peoples millennia earlier, these Californians knew about farming but chose to remain hunter-gatherers because a few weeks in autumn yielded a year’s acorns, according to Fagan.¹²⁴ American anthropologist Stephen Le estimated that such efforts furnished acorns for two or three years.¹²⁵ Amerindians’ teeth recorded intensification of collecting and consuming acorns; their carbohydrates caused cavities uncommon among fish and game eaters.¹²⁶ Although previous sections indicated worldwide balanophagy, nowhere were acorns as important as in California. “By 500 CE, thousands of California Indians depended heavily on the immense acorn harvest,” wrote Fagan.¹²⁷ Sixteenth-century Europeans in the region observed that acorns constituted up to half Amerindian diets. By then the annual harvest totaled around 60,000 metric tons (66,000 tons).

Like all estimates, this one disguises fluctuations. If a good year yielded about 784 kilograms per hectare (691.2 pounds per acre)—a quantity that exceeded ancient grain yields and approximated medieval production—a year or two of smaller harvests might follow.¹²⁸ Writing about southwestern Spain, British archaeologist Sarah Louise Rhoda Mason estimated acorn production between 500 and 700 kilograms per hectare (440.8 and 617.1 pounds per acre).¹²⁹

Adversity depressed output, especially because the Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, discussed in Chapters 6 and 8, diminished rainfall in North America.¹³⁰ Droughts caused fires that killed oaks. Moreover, frail trees were especially vulnerable to insects. Although droughts’ effects on prehistoric acorn production cannot be pinpointed, estimation is possible given that between 1986 and 1992 perhaps one-tenth of central California oaks perished from insufficient rainfall. Although plentiful, reliable production might have supported fifty to sixty times more people in prehistoric California, subpar yields kept population below the hypothetical maximum.

These risks were not unique to acorn eaters because, this book emphasizes, uncertainty characterized food acquisition and production for almost everyone until recent times. Earlier chapters noted the prevalence of famine, which plagued the decades before and after the Black Death and the decades before the Irish Potato Famine, treated in Chapters 1 and 3. Beyond discussing famine throughout the past, Chapter 3 quoted French historian Fernand Paul Braudel (1902-1985) that it “recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life.”¹³¹

Focusing on central California—defined as the middle third of the state—as a region of oaks and acorns, American anthropologists David N. Dickel, Peter D. Schulz, and Henry Malcolm McHenry (b. 1944) divided habitation into three periods: an early phase between roughly 2000 and 1000 BCE, the middle around 1000 BCE to 1000 CE, and the late covering subsequent centuries.¹³²

A previous paragraph mentioned that California’s earliest inhabitants enjoyed abundance. Central California, our immediate concern, had ample edible plants, game, fish, and shellfish.¹³³ Insects furnished additional nutrients and calories.¹³⁴ The coast supplied seafood and marine mammals, notably seals (species in the families Phocidae and Otariidae), sea otters (Enhydra lutris), and an occasional beached whale (species in infraorder Cetacea). These resources may have deterred plant and animal domestication, though humans managed the environment, for example, by igniting fires to drive insects from oaks and to kill competing vegetation.¹³⁵ Such efforts safeguarded central California’s “balanophagous” economies.¹³⁶

Early research documented these acorn eaters’ vitality. In 1966, American anthropologist Alice Mossie Brues (1913-2007) lamented that they “were so healthy that it is somewhat discouraging to work with them [their skeletons].”¹³⁷ Two years later, American anthropologist Bert Alfred Gerow (1915-2001) noted skeletal pathologies’ near absence.¹³⁸ In a study unpublished as of 1984, Dickel and Schulz remarked that “cribra orbitalia and cranial porotic hyperostosis are so rare that meaningful comparisons across age, sex, and temporal samples were not possible.”¹³⁹ Chapter 1 defined these deformities.

In 1984, Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry reassessed over 900 skeletons.¹⁴⁰ This number belies the rarity of sizable cemeteries given that these Amerindians preferred cremation, a practice that increased over time.¹⁴¹ Cremation complicated research because native Californians may have reserved the practice for elites, especially prominent men.¹⁴² Under this circumstance, skeletons revealed the poor’s health—which this book emphasizes as usually worse than the wealthy’s—and indicated nothing about the affluent. This stipulation is important because this book affirms that the poor far outnumbered the rich such that skeletons, even if only of paupers, furnished information about almost everyone. Consequently, this book contends that cremation, and elimination as evidence, of the few elites did not weaken skeletons as representations of the population and therefore as evidence about prehistoric Californians’ diet, nutrition, and health.

Burials’ chronology and number demonstrated that populations increased over time. In the sixteenth century, density may have been between 3.4 and 4.4 people per square kilometer (km²).¹⁴³ Even these estimates may underreport crowding, which may have rivaled farm communities.¹⁴⁴ Chapter 6 mentioned that when Europeans entered California in 1542, Amerindians totaled between roughly 310,000 and 705,000.¹⁴⁵ Like farmers, these Californians were sedentary because food was abundant and reliable enough to end nomadism, though they never adopted agriculture and animal husbandry. Emphasizing sedentism, Fagan supposed that by roughly 900 CE, most natives never ventured beyond 8 kilometers (5 miles) from home.¹⁴⁶

Population expansion’s pace is difficult to quantify. When number of settlements is plotted over time in Graph 9.1 growth looks exponential in accelerating through time.¹⁴⁷

GRAPH 9.1 # of precontact settlements in central California. Courtesy of Dietra Cumo.

But the number of burials increased most rapidly in the early phase, slowing during middle and late periods.¹⁴⁸ The second curve—Graph 9.2—suggests an early spurt as humans had ample food and reproduced quickly.¹⁴⁹ As population approached the land’s carrying capacity, growth slowed.

GRAPH 9.2 # of precontact burials in central California. Courtesy of Dietra Cumo.

But both scenarios cannot be true. Perhaps cremation increased over time, reducing the number of burials even as population enlarged from early to late phases. This claim is unconvincing if Amerindians reserved cremation for elites, who were too small a group to affect the curve. For example, an August 20,2019, estimate that the world has around 7.7 billion people would not change with the addition or subtraction of several thousand people.¹⁵⁰ That is, inclusion or exclusion of Vatican City and places like it from the total would modify the count in only the tiniest way.

Whatever the growth rate, population increases only when births exceed deaths. Other chapters emphasize that premodern mortality was high. Such a situation demanded exceptional fertility, which necessitated adequate food to permit early menarche, reduce the interval between births, and feed more mouths. For example, Chapter 15 states that the average woman who reached menopause had to birth between 4.5 and 6.5 children just to replace the losses from antiquity’s mortality.¹⁵¹ Expansion required still greater fertility.

An earlier paragraph indicated that California diets varied over time. The initial emphasis on hunting left people little time to fish and collect acorns and other plant foods.¹⁵² Before roughly 1000 BCE, native Californians ate fewer acorns than afterward. Even during the early phase, however, tools near what is today San Francisco processed acorns.¹⁵³ People without these technologies may not have eaten acorns because aridity reduced the number of oaks.¹⁵⁴ After about 1000 BCE, rainfall and acorn intake increased, prompting Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry to report that these nuts “presumably played a prominent role in the increase of population densities.”¹⁵⁵

Density depended on overall population and sedentism. Oaks affected these factors by providing a reliable harvest and by being stationary. That is, Amerindians did not need to migrate in pursuit of trees as they had done when hunting game. Dropping acorns in autumn, oaks supplied food for immediate needs and for storage against winter’s lean months.

Adequate food during winter lessened seasonal shortages that had undermined health. When aridity made acorns scarce during the early phase, 80 percent of central California interments were in winter.¹⁵⁶ Later burials, however, cannot be pinpointed by season, preventing evaluation of the hypothesis that acorns lessened winter deaths. But Harris lines on bones, signaling temporary growth cessation, were traced through time. Bones may have stopped lengthening because of insufficient food, too many pathogens, parasites, or both, or synergy among too little food, diseases, and parasites. Harris lines became less frequent over time, with the greatest decrease between early and middle phases. As noted, the transition between these periods witnessed increases in acorn consumption. The inverse relationship between acorn intake and Harris lines strengthens the inference that acorns lessened seasonal shortages and undernutrition by supplying food for winter.

Yet nature never guaranteed the harvest. As noted, Amerindians could not expect uniform production over time, as two Yokut Indian cemeteries in central California’s San Joaquin Valley revealed. Burials around 1 CE—when acorns were a staple—had skeletons with stout femurs and few pathologies, evincing adequate nutrition.¹⁵⁷ Skeletons dating roughly 850 years later exhibited more disease, lighter femurs, and shorter lifespan, betraying undernutrition and illness, likely because drought reduced acorn output.

Besides skeletal information, enamel hypoplasia—defined in Chapter 1—supplied additional health data, diminishing from early to middle phases but increasing thereafter, according to Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry.¹⁵⁸ Reduction from early to middle periods correlated with growing reliance on acorns, but late phase increases occurred as acorn intake continued to enlarge. If acorns improved nutrition early, reducing hypoplasia, this effect should have persisted throughout California prehistory. Yet as populations expanded over time, settlements grew crowded; contagion and parasites spread, undermining health even amid nourishing food. Problems multiplied during the late phase when Europeans introduced Old-World pathogens and parasites into California, a tragedy mentioned in Chapter 6.

But this explanation may be doubted. Because the same stresses caused Harris lines and enamel hypoplasia, they should have exhibited the same pattern. Both declined from early to middle phases, but from middle to late periods Harris lines diminished whereas enamel hypoplasia worsened, as noted, according to Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry. This divergence, if real, has no ready resolution. Yet, Dickel and coauthors’ data may be incorrect because Walker and Thornton asserted that hypoplasia decreased with increases in acorn intake between roughly 600 BCE and 1250 CE.¹⁵⁹ Their view entails an inverse relationship between acorn consumption on one hand and Harris lines and hypoplasia on the other. If correct, Walker and Thornton’s stance strengthens confidence in acorns’ healthfulness.

Related to diseases and parasites is longevity, which “may have decreased as acorn specialization increased.”¹⁶⁰ This reversal merits scrutiny given emphasis on longevity as health index, Chapter 1 noted. This perspective holds that if acorns, or any food, enhanced vitality, then people should have lived longer. But Chapter 1 described another interpretation. Increases in food raised birthrate, as observed earlier, causing the number of new'borns and infants to enlarge more rapidly than adults. But a large youth population yields appreciable juvenile deaths even without ghastly child mortality. These fatalities diminish life expectancy at birth (e°) even amid satisfactory diet and nutrition, causing e° to understate nutrition and health. The problem with this explanation is that over time California Indian mortality increased most between ages twenty and forty-five.¹⁶¹ Such deaths, unconnected to juvenile mortality, prevent this section from generalizing about acorns’ effect on longevity.

Retaining a focus on youths, prepubescent mortality diminished from early to middle phases, thereafter plateauing.¹⁶² This trend implies adequate nutrition during childhood, when growth demands calories and nutrients. Survival gains came after age four, diminishing overall youth mortality. This improvement should not obscure that deaths before age two increased throughout all phases. Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry specified no age at weaning, leaving unknown whether deaths rose then. If so, acorns and other edibles were inadequate first solid foods.

Beyond these considerations, longevity data came from California natives who probably fished more than gathered acorns, complicating the relationship between acorns and lifespan.¹⁶³ Where acorns were the staple, men lived shorter lives over time whereas women’s lifespans lengthened from early to middle phases but decreased thereafter. Dissimilar survival should eliminate acorns, and food generally, from consideration given the implausibility that men and women ate different diets during early and middle phases, when survivability diverged, but the same in the late period when longevity fell for both. If practiced more later and more often for prominent men than women, cremation might explain worse male longevity because over time burials would have disproportionately preserved poor men’s skeletons, thereby magnifying the contributions of inadequate diets, nutrition, and health to the late phase. Again, this explanation is unpersuasive because elites were few.

Another health gauge is height, which this book describes as dependent on nutrition. As elsewhere, this section emphasizes that nutrition involves more than food because diseases and parasites worsen what might be termed net nutrition by forcing the body to expend calories and nutrients to combat them. That is, a nourishing diet may not avail when pathogens and parasites are prevalent.

Adult stature decreased between the early and middle phases, though Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry rated the magnitude insignificant.¹⁶⁴ Additional data concerned the Pacific Ocean’s Channel Islands, west of what are today Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles and southwest of central California, which may be remembered as Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry’s focus. On these islands, men and women shrank gradually from roughly 600 BCE to 1250 CE.¹⁶⁵ These reductions, beginning at least 1,400years after mortars and pestles appeared, were probably unrelated to acorn consumption. Moreover, islanders also ate seafood, excluding acorns as sole stature determiner even had nut intake and height reduction coincided.¹⁶⁶

Diseases may have amplified the trend toward shortness, with nonvenereal syphilis present as early as 2600 BCE and worsening over time.¹⁶⁷ Other diseases in prehistoric California included streptococcal infections, staphylococcal infections, and coccidioidomycosis. Another factor may have been warfare, with conflicts escalating after bow and arrow replaced club about 500 CE. Over one-tenth of burials between then and 1250 had skeletons with arrow' wounds.¹⁶⁸

Stature comparisons reveal that northern Californians were taller than those in the south, represented by the islanders.¹⁶⁹ To the extent that diet contributed to this contrast, northerners concentrated on acorns whereas seafood sustained the south.¹⁷⁰ The generalization that acorns were more nourishing than fish and shellfish is gratuitous, however, because diet and nutrition may not have been the crucial factors. Different waves of northeast Asians peopled north and south during the last ice age, raising the possibility that genetic differences between them contributed to height disparities. Moreover, southern skeletons betrayed more arrow' w'ounds and other evidence of violent deaths than those in the north.¹⁷¹ Warfare and instability marred health, exacerbating height differences. In any event, native nutrition was unlikely to have been excellent given that Europeans who entered California in the eighteenth century averaged almost 8 centimeters (3.1 inches) taller than indigenes.

The best stature statistics came from measurements of thirty-six groups of California Indians between roughly 1905 and 1925.¹⁷² Omitting tribes that supplied under eleven men or women as too small a sample reduces the list from thirty-six to eight. Of them and as Table 9.6 shows, the Mojave had the tallest mean at 171 centimeters (67.3 inches) for men and 158 centimeters (62.2 inches) for women.¹⁷³ Below them, male means ages nineteen to sixty were 169 centimeters (66.5 inches) for the Luiseno, 168 centimeters (66.1 inches) for the Cupeno and Yokuts, 167 centimeters (65.7 inches)

TABLE 9.6

California Indian Heights

for the Cahuilla, 166 centimeters (65.4 inches) for the Hupa, 164 centimeters (64.6 inches) for the Yuroks, and 157 centimeters (61.8 inches) for the Yuki.

In descending order beneath Mojave and Cahuilla women at 158 centimeters, female means ages seventeen to sixty were 157 centimeters for the Luiseno, 156 centimeters (61.4 inches) for the Cupeno, 155 centimeters (61 inches) for the Yokuts, 153 centimeters (60.2 inches) for the Yuroks, 152 centimeters (59.8 inches) for the Hupa, and 148 centimeters (58.3 inches) for the Yuki. The means of these averages are 166.3 centimeters (65.4 inches) for men and 154.6 centimeters (60.9 inches) for women and are thought typical of early-twentieth-century California natives. This book cannot determine whether these averages represent earlier populations because publications about them did not pinpoint their stature. The important point is that these means described stature among peoples for whom acorns were still the staple, as Merriam stated in 1918.

Comparison between these averages and those of other Amerindians suggests that California men were taller than Southwestern men at Mesa Verde, Colorado, from around 500-650 CE and at Delores, Colorado, between about 600 and 980.¹⁷⁴ California men also stood above men at prehistoric Tlatilco, Cuicuilco, Tlajinga, and Cholula, Mexico and in Maya communities at Tikal, Guatemala, Jaina, Mexico, Copan, Honduras, and the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize but shorter than men at precontact Tehuacan, Mexico.¹⁷⁵ California women were taller on average than women at Tlatilco, Cuicuilco, Tlajinga, Cholula, Tikal, Jaina, and the Yucatan but shorter than those at Tehuacan and Copan.

These comparisons imply that indigenous Californians were healthier on average than their counterparts in many precontact Southwestern, Mexican, and Central American communities and that acorns may have provided nutrition superior to the turkeys that sustained the Southwest and the corn (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus vulgaris, P. lunatus, P. acutifolius, and P. coccineus), and squashes that fed pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Chapter 6 detailed diets, nutrition, and health in the Southwest. Chapters 8 and 12 discuss beans and corn’s health effects, respectively. Chapter 14 omits squashes, which are fruits, for brevity.

These considerations aside for the moment, California height reductions, gradual and protracted, implied incremental health diminution. Walker and Thornton documented that the region’s prehistoric fish and shellfish consumers had as much anemia as corn growers throughout the Americas.¹⁷⁶ Chapter 5 noted that seafood is nutrient dense whereas Chapter 12 discusses corn’s nutritional shortcomings and association with anemia among other maladies. In this context, seafood eaters should not have suffered anemia at the same rate as corn consumers. Diet being an unsatisfactory explanation, Walker and Thornton faulted sedentism and attendant buildup of pathogens, parasites, insects, and rodents. This rationale squares with their inference that acorn eaters were healthier than corn growers, both sedentary, but sicker than hunter-gatherers who remained nomads.

Besides these health indicators, Europeans disclosed their impressions about California natives. In 1579, English cleric Francis Fletcher remarked that one Coast Miwok Indian, in what are today Marin and southern Sonoma counties, had the strength of two or three white men.¹⁷⁷ Unnamed observers labeled these indigenes “muscular” and “strong.”¹⁷⁸ In 1877, American journalist Stephen Powers (1840-1904), though declaring acorns and the like inferior to “bread and beans,” praised California Indians as excellent athletes who enjoyed long, healthy lives.¹⁷⁹ He stated that they could shoot an arrow 0.4 kilometers (0.25 miles) and hold their breath twice whites’ duration while retrieving mussels. He referenced one who ran 80.5 kilometers (50 miles) in under twelve hours and another who covered 19.3 kilometers (12 miles) in slightly over an hour. An especially swift runner was reputed to have completed 321.9 kilometers (200 miles) in a single day. A Mojave needed

3.5 hours to run 33.8 kilometers (21 miles).

Some of these assertions may be fanciful. The record distance over twenty-four hours is 303.5 kilometers (188.6 miles) for men and 252.2 kilometers (156.7 miles) for women.¹⁸⁰ Even if the possibility is granted that the 321.9 kilometers took longer than 24 hours, the runner would still have displayed extraordinary stamina to achieve what no one else appears to have duplicated. Such claims of prowess are unusual enough to elicit doubt. Similarly, 0.4 kilometers for a native archer seems improbable given the record 0.34 kilometers (0.21 miles) for an arrow shot with a longbow, a weapon unknown to Amerindians and more powerful than the standard bow and arrow.¹⁸¹

Such anecdotes suggest that Europeans envied natives’ strength and endurance enough to exaggerate them but are otherwise unhelpful. Tests of hand strength measured by grip intensity and published in the early twentieth century, however, indicated that these Indians surpassed whites and Southwestern Amerindians.¹⁸² Northern Californians exhibited the greatest strength, and those from central California ranked third. Between the two were Apache in Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Whites scored below all but Arizona’s Papago, Chapter 8’s “bean people.”¹⁸³

These data do not permit unequivocal judgments about California indigenes’ health. American archaeologist Robert Fleming Heizer (1915-1979) and colleague ascribed their superior strength and stamina to a vigorous lifestyle rather than to diet and nutrition.¹⁸⁴ Noteworthy is these authors’ assertion that the Indians were more active than Americans before 1920. Afterward, fitness declined because, Chapter 12 emphasizes, Americans became inert and overweight upon purchase of automobiles. Other chapters, notably 16, discuss this deterioration.

Seeking greater clarity about native Californian health, this section considers an aspect of society that Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry mentioned in passing: Stratification increased through time.¹⁸⁵ Chapter 4 indicated that premodern societies tended to bifurcate into haves and have nots. A middle class was absent or minuscule in all but recent times. This bifurcation concentrated wealth among elites. Impoverishment undermined commoners’ health in central California and may have magnified decreases in height and lifespan and increases in enamel hypoplasia, if Dickel, Schulz, and McHenry’s statistics are right.