The fact that specialized caribou hunting has been possible among some groups for 40,000 years indicates that the animal is capable of satisfying human subsistence requirements (Burch 1972). However, rarely did historically known groups subsist solely on
Figure II. G.4.1. Seasonal variation in the fat content of caribou. Mature bulls are represented by a solid line, mature females by a dashed line, and young bulls by a dotted line. (From Spiess 1979: 28; used by permission of Academic Press.)
A caribou meat diet. Past caribou-hunting specialists of the arctic region, such as the Arctic Small Tool peoples (also known as the Denbigh peoples in Alaska and the Dorset peoples in Canada), were historically replaced by more efficient coastal hunters, such as the Thule peoples (ancestral to modern Arctic Eskimos), who combined caribou and sea-mammal hunting. There is also historical and archaeological evidence suggesting that contemporary groups - such as the Nunamiut Eskimos of Alaska, the Caribou Eskimos of Canada, and even the so-called Reindeer Lapps of northern Scandinavia - have developed their specialized life-ways only in the past few hundred years, and that until recently, they migrated between coastal and interior regions, combining caribou hunting with fishing and sea-mammal hunting.
The Caribou Eskimos, living to the west of Hudson Bay in an area where whaling or walrus hunting is less possible today than in other areas (and where shore-fast ice requires individual stalking of seals in winter), have been particularly dependent on caribou. They are, however, a group with smaller human populations, simpler technologies, and less complex political structures than other Eskimo peoples. Similarly, among Alaskan Athapaskan groups, those involved primarily with caribou hunting (for example, the Gwich’in) have been more mobile, with a simpler technology, and have been fewer in numbers than other groups that were also involved with salmon fishing and/or seal hunting. Such caribou-dependent groups tends to be very mobile, occupying in the course of a year several different base camps, where they have utilized relatively unsophisticated dwellings such as caribou-hide tents (or even brush lean-tos).
Widespread concern over the availability of caribou was especially characteristic of groups occupying boreal forest regions, where the animals were often scarce (cf. Smith 1978). Such concern took the form of specialized ritual and may have stimulated the development of divination as a technique in caribou hunting. The effect of divination was to randomize the impact of such hunting and therefore minimize the likelihood of overexploitation (Moore 1969). Some authors have even linked the so-called Windigo Psychosis of subarctic Cree peoples to concerns over starvation in the boreal forest.
That caribou-hunting groups occasionally met with starvation is well documented in the ethnographic record. In part, this was a result of the naturally cyclical patterns of caribou abundance in arctic regions. Although it is difficult to establish the antiquity of these patterns, there is some suggestion that they go back hundreds of years in interior Alaska (Yesner 1980), Labrador (Fitzhugh 1972), and Greenland (Gronnow, Meldgaard, and Nielsen 1983; Meldgaard 1983), and they may even have occurred during the Upper Paleolithic in France (David 1973). During caribou population highs, such as in late-nineteenth-century Alaska, intensification of hunting, including widespread construction of “caribou fences,” seems to have taken place. At times of population lows, caribou-hunting groups apparently shifted to a more diverse diet that included small game and birds (Yesner 1989). Within the last 150 years, habitat disturbance has led to population expansion of other cervids such as the moose, which subsequently filled the dietary niche formerly occupied by caribou in some parts of interior Alaska.
Because higher metabolic rates are required for human survival under cold conditions, dietary requirements of high-caloric foods are significantly greater in the Arctic region (Draper 1974). Calories are usually provided by fats, which have twice the caloric density of protein or carbohydrates (about 9 calories per gram). However, except for deposits around viscera, under the skin, and in bone marrow, caribou are generally lean, yielding fat at only 10 percent of body weight (Hall 1971). Between 40 and 55 percent of a caribou carcass is meat (White 1953; Hill 1967; Binford 1978). Caribou weights vary from about 35 kilograms (kg) for a juvenile to 150 kg for a large adult male (Kelsall 1968). Such a range provides from 20 to 80 kg of meat but only 3 to 10 kg of fat (Table n. G.4.1).
There is some physical evidence that nutritional deprivation was occasionally associated with those groups that were more caribou-dependent. In the Canadian High Arctic, for example, a greater dependence on caribou may be linked to relatively shorter statures in that region (Laughlin 1966). Although there is evidence for episodic nutritional stress in human skeletons from throughout the Arctic and Subarctic (Yesner 1994), the Caribou Eskimos have shown some of the strongest patterns of development of growth arrest lines, indicative of starvation, of any Eskimo peoples (Buikstra 1976). In addition, studies by the. Alaska Dietary Survey (Mann et al. 1962) and by Edward Foulks (1972) have suggested that a caribou diet may be deficient in thiamine and other vitamins.
World History
