In the warm, clear waters of the Torres Strait, between the northern tip of Australia and southern tip of New Guinea, a small aluminum dinghy heads towards a distant reef, carrying three men and a rope. Suddenly, a green sea turtle is spotted in the shallow water above the reef. The hunters maneuver their craft alongside the creature and one of them, with the rope tied to his shoulder, jumps onto the turtle's back, and embraces the animal tightly, hanging on for dear life as it struggles. The two other men in the boat, while keeping an eye out for tiger and hammerhead sharks attracted by the commotion, pull on their end of the rope until they can grab the turtle and haul the 330 pound animal aboard, nearly capsizing their small craft as they do so. From their catch they could get about 132 pounds of edible meat. These hunters might be expected to divide the hard-won food among their three families, with the guy who leapt onto the turtle getting the biggest cut. Instead, they share the meat with others in their village. Do they get something in return or is this a shining example of community spirit? Professor John Beaton and his students, Douglas Bird and Rebecca Bliege-Bird, from the Dept. of Anthropology, UC, Davis wanted to find out.
Bird and Bliege-Bird spent almost a year studying the hunting/gathering economy of the Meriam, a Melanesian people living on Mer, a tiny island in the Torres Strait. While the Meriam are part-time cultivators of yams, manioc and bananas, they get most of their food from the sea, fishing with lines and nets, combing the nearby reef for shellfish, and hunting large marine prey such as sea turtles. The way in which they hunt and share turtle meat depends on the time of year.
During the nesting season from October to April, when large numbers of turtles drag themselves onto the beaches to lay eggs, the animals are easy prey, and men, women and children participate in catching them. A "turtle-owning" family shares the meat with other nearby households, but still ends up with a sizable portion of food for itself.
In the feeding/mating season, from May to September, turtles feed far from shore and are difficult, indeed dangerous to catch, as I described earlier. There is a 33% failure rate for these kinds of hunts in which only men participate. The anthropologists recorded only 9 successful hunts at this time of year compared to 114 successful hunts in the nesting season. Nevertheless, when the rare turtle is captured, it is shared even more extensively than in the nesting season. Indeed, the hunters and their households see little of the meat. Instead, they roast the turtle whole and throw a public feast.
Why do the Meriam, whose survival depends on what food they can grow or catch, share such a highly-prized resource, especially since the village has a freezer where it would be possible to store the meat ? Good providers of turtle meat don't necessarily get large amounts in return. Likewise, there's no guard against free-loaders - people who accept turtle from others, but never provide any themselves. Clearly, on Mer there are benefits to turtle meat that have nothing to do with nutrition.
These benefits are related to social standing. Men gain prestige by providing food for public consumption, especially during feasts. The more difficult the food is to obtain, the higher the kudos garnered. For the married men who are the heads of established households, social status is important in forming alliances with other households who then provide support in disputes over land. For bachelors, a reputation as a good turtle-hunter might help them find a wife. Indeed, unmarried men give away more turtle meat to other households than do married men.
The behavior of sharing is universal in human societies, but very
rare in other animals, although it has been observed in our closest
relatives, the chimpanzees. In these apes, as in humans, food-sharing
is not always about food. Males, for example, may influence their
social rank by sharing meat; food-for-sex exchanges have also
been documented. These observations suggest that food-sharing
as a social strategy made an appearance early in our ancestry.
Studies of its role in different societies of present-day humans
will help us to understand how the behavior evolved.
Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616.
e-mail: kjstewart@ucdavis.edu