In my recent series of posts about the redheaded "giants" of Lovelock Cave, Nevada, I mentioned that they had developed a lifestyle adapted to living by and on the lakes (dwindling after the Last Ice Age) of the Great Basin Region. They thrived on bulrushes. The Paiute people, who exterminated the last bands of these people called them Si-te-cah or tule-eaters, after the bulrushes known as tule, that they exploited in their lacustrine and fluvial territory.
Early humans, who lived a hunter-gatherer life, included bulrushes as part of their diet. They ate the tender shoots, and cooked, baked, and ground the roots or rhizomes of these plants into flour. They also used the stems to make mats, baskets, huts, and boats. The Si-te-cah people lived on floating rush islands, in a similar way to the Uro people of Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia.
The map above shows the global distribution of the cattail family, the Typhaceae. They are found in wetlands across the world, from New Zealand to Canada. Their name Typha comes from the Greek word for marsh. They can survive in wet, hot, cold, and continental climates, even in freezing icy conditions.
An ancient lifestyle
The oldest proof of bulrush exploitation has been found at Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe, dating back 30,000 years (30 ky).
In a research paper, Revedin et al., 2010, (Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107 (44) 18815-18819, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1006993107) discuss the discovery of grinding implements used at European sites:
Bilancino II (Italy), Kostenki 16–Uglyanka (Russia), and Pavlov VI (Czech Republic). They ground different kinds of plants, and these have been identified: Bilancino II is 28 ky old, and the "highly specialized tool types were probably used for the separation of the vegetable fibers from cattail (Typha) leaves... Considering the size distribution of the morphotype e grains, the mode of the measured values is closer to that calculated for Typha angustifolia (narrow leaf cattail) than to that of Typha latifolia (broadleaf cattail) ."
Kostenki site is roughly 31 ky old, moonworts were processed with stone mortars. At Pavlov VI (29 ky old), moonworts and cattails were pounded into flour.
The authors point out that "the practices that we can reconstruct demonstrate knowledge in the Gravettian populations of Europe of the starch-rich portions of edible plants, combined with the ability to transform them to produce a complex dried product (flour). This would have allowed them greater independence from environmental and seasonal fluctuations." Did other hominins adopt this lifestyle?
Neanderthals and rushes
A paper (Hardy BL, Moncel MH. Neanderthal use of fish, mammals, birds, starchy plants and wood 125-250,000 years ago. PLoS One. 2011;6(8):e23768. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023768. Epub 2011 Aug 24. PMID: 21887315; PMCID: PMC3161061.) reported that Neanderthals living in the Rhone Valley in France 250,000 to 125,000 years ago, processed the starchy roots of plants using stone tools. Were they bulrushes? We don't know for certain. But this site, at Payre shows they were well equipped to obtain starchy carbohydrates from local plants.
China 10,000 years BP
More recently, rushes were used as food in China as reported by Zhang et al., 2020 (Typha as a wetland food resource: evidence from the Tianluoshan site, Lower Yangtze Region, China some 10,000 years ago). The article discusses the people who inhabited the wetlands along the Yangtze River in China. They found "extremely high percentages of Typha" (bulrush) pollen in their fossilized feces. This site is more recent than those discussed in the previous section, and belong to Neolithic humans. This is close to the birth of agriculture ~10 kya, and these people were also exploiting rice. They note that "The coexistence of Typha and rice also gives clues about the environmental background and agricultural management of early rice paddy, with respect to eutrophication, weeding and inundation." Hinting at agricultural practices regarding the bulrushes.
Australian Aboriginals (past 60 ky)
Ken Macintyre and Barb Dobson, 2023 report that the original people of Australia added Typha rhizomes to their diet. They processed these roots into edible flour, and baked bread from it. They also managed the bulrush growth by burning the dry stands during the dry season. This "muck" burning returned nutrients to the soil and promoted the growth of larger rhizomes which had fewer "hairs" and were thicker.
This was a very ancient practice, and Macintyre & Dobson suggest that "We would assume given the antiquity of Australian Aboriginal culture that if such archaeological research were to be systematically conducted on grinding materials from southwestern Australia that the results could well predate these European findings", in other words, they would be older than the 30,000 years reported by Revedin et al.
North American Natives
In my Lovelock series I mentioned the Umatilla people as also being named "tule-eaters" by the Paiute. They lived in Oregon, and although they were not lacustrine like the Tulares or the Lake Tule (Modocs), they also exploited the tule bulrushes. The picture below, by Lee Moorhouse (1850-1926) is captioned "Indian camps on Columbia river, opposite Umatilla c.1900-1910 and depicts "a tipi made of boards, poles, mats and cloth is located on the flat, rocky shore of the Columbia River. Nearby are two horses." The tipi is made of bulrush reed mats. They were light, strong, and provided insulation. They swelled up when wet, provided a waterproof roof.
Below is Lake Tule, where the Modocs lived (Source), by the way, the scenery is magnificent.
Many natives lived in reed huts and we have a drawing by F. Wikersheim described as Californie, rancheria des Indiens d' hocks sur les bords de la rivière de la plume. (cluster of huts of the Hocks Indians. California, on the banks of Feather River, near Yuba city, drawn c.1850 during the California Gold Rush.
In this same area (close to Yuba City), we have another drawing of a native encampment (Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection, c.1850s). Both images correspond to the Sacramento River valley.
The Yokut people of Lake Tulare and the San Joaquin River basin also built tule huts. The following image, from Contributions to North American ethnology. Vol. III, by John W. Powell, 1873, p. 231 shows "Yo'-kuts Tule Lodges":
Powell describes their lifestyle: "In the mountain streams which empty into Tulare Lake they catch lake trout, chubs, and suckers... On Tulare Lake they construct very rude, frail punts or mere troughs of tule, about ten feet long, in which they cruise timidly about near the shore... Their range of food is extensive. Around the lake they cut and dry the seed-stalks of a kind of flag (Typha) which has a head something like a teasel, thresh out the seed and make flour of if; also wild rye and wild sunflower seed...."
The Paiute once again try to exterminate the tule-eaters
Interestingly, Powell also records that the Yokuts were under attack by "the more powerful and warlike Paiuti of Nevada" who managed to bypass the Sierra Nevada through the "the passes which occur at the northern and southern points of junction between the Sierra and the Coast Range... allowed ... the Paiuti... to swarm in toward the rich and tempting plains of California, dispossessing the feebler peoples who were there before them. Living as they do at the lower end of the great basin, the Yokuts received the brunt of the Paiuti attacks. So severe were the latter that the Yokuts, as a geographically solid body of allied tribes, were cut in two in one place and nearly in another. Their habitat stretched originally from the Fresno River to Fort Tejon; but the Paiuti tribes, swarming through Ta-hi’-cha-pa, Tejon, and Walker's Passes, seized and occupied Kern River, White River, Posa Creek, and Kern Lake, thus completely severing the Yokuts nation, and leaving an isolated fragment of it at Fort Tejon, in a nook of the mountains. Doubtless they would eventually have seized all the streams emptying into Tulare Lake, but they seem to have become enervated by the malaria, and reduced to the same condition of sluggishness as the people whom they displaced." Once again, as with the redheaded giants, the Paiute were aggressive and fought against the peaceful tule-eaters of California.
Ancient links between humans and wetlands
The oldest human footprints in America were discovered in White Sands, New Mexico. Now a barren gypsum dune field, 24,000 years ago it was a freshwater lake (Lake Otero) that covered an area of 4,150 km2 (1,600 sq. mi.). This was a suitable habitat. Wetlands provide fish, water fowl, and attract large animals (drink, and vegetation for foraging). Maybe these very ancient paleoindians also used the tule rushes of the lake (the basin is now known as Tularosa (from "tule" and "rosa" = "pink" in Spanish).
Comments
Rushes are a valuable resource, providing fiber for thatching, mats, footwear, canoes, huts, and baskets. Tender shoots, starchy roots, and the food-rich wetland enviornment surely attracted archaic hominins to this kind of habitat.
In an era that preceded agriculture, controlled burns and a stable settlement by a wetland ensured a year-round food supply. It is very likely that hominins exploited these resources in Eurasia, and after entering America did so in North America. The map at the beginning of this post shows that bulrushes were widely distributed across all of Europe, parts of cental Asia, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and most of North America. Did hominins that exploited this environment move along this corridor? In Africa, it is mostly absent, and also in southern and souteastern Asia, as well as South and Central America. Were Neanderhtals and Denisovans adapted to using this type of resource?
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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