Prehistoric Pacific Coast diets had salmon limits

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/wsu-ppc040921.php

 

News Release 12-Apr-2021
Washington State University

 

 Humans cannot live on protein alone - even for the ancient indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest whose diet was once thought to be almost all salmon.

In a new paper led by Washington State University anthropologist Shannon Tushingham, researchers document the many dietary solutions ancient Pacific Coast people in North America likely employed to avoid "salmon starvation," a toxic and potentially fatal condition brought on by eating too much lean protein.


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The researchers point to evidence in California that people offset stored salmon protein with acorns; in Oregon and Washington, they ate root crops like camas as well as more fat-heavy fish such as eulachon. Further north, where plants are more limited, communities often ate marine mammals with high fat content such as seals and walrus. In far north interior, where there are few plants and the salmon runs can go thousands of miles inland, this was particularly challenging. Lean dried salmon was an important food source, and people circumvented salmon starvation through trading for oil with coastal peoples or obtaining fat through processing bone marrow from caribou and elk.

The authors focus on the limits of salmon, which used to be considered a "prime mover" of Pacific Northwest populations, but their analysis also has implications for the study of historical human nutrition. If their argument is correct, it is unlikely that any human society was fully driven by pursuit of protein alone as their diets had to be more complex.

"People try to come up with one 'paleo-diet,' but there was no one specific ideal diet," said Tushingham. There were nutritional baselines that they had to cover, and nutritional limits that they couldn't exceed. There were many good solutions. It depended on where you lived and the history of your community."