08-26-2017, 02:11 PM
There weren't as many people back then but they were spread out evenly and every single one got their food from the land or the sea. There wasn't anything growing in the forest that was good to eat. All the food came from people and all the people would have nabbed any stray pig. They would have eaten any pig that got too comfortable rooting in their fields. Pork is yummy but must have been a luxury given that you get more food per square foot from eating the crops directly.
It is hard to believe but everything I have read says that there wasn't much in the native forest to eat for either humans or pigs. Pigs get a large part of their food eating earthworms today which is why they roto-till yards. There were no earthworms back then. Pigs eat a lot of guava which was not in Hawaii back then. It sounds like if you let a pig go back then he would stick around looking for scraps and what not. I have to assume that if he got into the garden you would shoo him away, fence him out, or kill him for dinner, much like a free range chicken.
I set about finding evidence of competition for resources in Hawaii in ancient times because I can't imagine that there would have been pigs left to hunt in an environment where people were already making maximum use of all available resources. Sort of a reality check. Not sure I found it but the link below makes some interesting reading. The article claims that the Hawaiian population peaked at something under 200,000 around 1450 and declined slowly after that. Anyway, lots of people presumably making use of every resource available. Anyway if cavemen killed off woolly mammoths early in the human colonization of the Americas and the Maori killed off the moas
early in the human colonization of New Zealand then I find it hard to believe that the Hawaiians would have been hunting anything so late in the human colonization of Hawaii, even if we pretend that pigs were not the closely coveted property that they were.
http://www.pelagicos.net/BIOL3010/readings/Dye_1994.pdf
It is hard to believe but everything I have read says that there wasn't much in the native forest to eat for either humans or pigs. Pigs get a large part of their food eating earthworms today which is why they roto-till yards. There were no earthworms back then. Pigs eat a lot of guava which was not in Hawaii back then. It sounds like if you let a pig go back then he would stick around looking for scraps and what not. I have to assume that if he got into the garden you would shoo him away, fence him out, or kill him for dinner, much like a free range chicken.
I set about finding evidence of competition for resources in Hawaii in ancient times because I can't imagine that there would have been pigs left to hunt in an environment where people were already making maximum use of all available resources. Sort of a reality check. Not sure I found it but the link below makes some interesting reading. The article claims that the Hawaiian population peaked at something under 200,000 around 1450 and declined slowly after that. Anyway, lots of people presumably making use of every resource available. Anyway if cavemen killed off woolly mammoths early in the human colonization of the Americas and the Maori killed off the moas
early in the human colonization of New Zealand then I find it hard to believe that the Hawaiians would have been hunting anything so late in the human colonization of Hawaii, even if we pretend that pigs were not the closely coveted property that they were.
http://www.pelagicos.net/BIOL3010/readings/Dye_1994.pdf