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| Wildflowers blooming in Albion Basin, Utah |
Discussion of hunter-gatherer societies necessarily invites as many questions as it provides answers. In our industrialized, modern societies, we are so far removed from the hunter-gatherer age that it is essentially a foreign concept, despite existing in the shared evolutionary history of humanity.
One of the primary questions that arises in discussion of hunter-gatherer societies is whether we were happier as foragers than as producers of food. This is an idea popularized by such writers as Jared Diamond in his now infamous 1987 article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," where he makes the argument that humanity was happier and even, initially, healthier as hunter-gatherers than as agriculturalists. Diamond points out that hunter-gatherers eat a more varied diet than farmers who cultivate only a limited range of crops, which further puts said farmers at risk of starvation if a single crop were to fail.
A question often brought up at this point in the discussion surrounds the notion of leisure time and the subsequent cultivation of arts and literature. Doesn't foraging require a lot more effort and time compared to farming? Studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies such as the Kalahari Bushmen reveal that they actually work less than the average person in an industrialized society: an average of 12-19 hours foraging per week, compared to 40+ hours per week for the standard office worker. We can't say definitively, then, that the works of art and literature that we have today are superior to what may have been produced under a different way of life.
In addition to lengthened working hours, agriculture also led to inequalities in society that were previously few and far between. As Diamond notes, "Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others." That's a pretty damning interpretation of what might otherwise be called "prosperity."
The notion of hunter-gatherer societies as a sort of golden age of humanity also receives ample discussion from the anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens.
Harari provides a more all-encompassing view of work, including in his estimate such things as time for domestic chores; cleaning and carrying the kill back to camp after a successful hunt; cooking what has been foraged, fished, or hunted; etc. Still, Harari estimates that hunter-gatherers work only 35-45 hours per week in total, even accounting for all tasks.
It should also be noted that this is spread across seven days per week; there is presumably no notion of a weekend in a subsistence society. Because things that constitute "work" are more directly linked to survival, it is likewise conceivable that the lines between work and play are more blurred than in our modern societies. Furthermore, assuming nutritional needs are met, this leaves ample time for leisure pursuits such as art, music, and storytelling, or even reading and writing. The limiting factor in pursuits such as the fine arts in a foraging society would appear to be one of mobility – as societal groups continually move to where plants and animals are abundant – rather than time.
Harari also does a deep dive into differences in health outcomes between hunter-gatherer societies and early agricultural societies, noting that life expectancies were low in both hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, mostly due to a high child mortality rate. Beyond that, hunter-gatherer peoples lived just as long, had a more varied diet, and generally were less prone to disease than their early agriculturalist counterparts.
In all, I identified 11 key takeaways from Harari's discussion of hunter-gatherer societies. In much the same way as Diamond's essay, these takeaways largely paint a positive picture of hunter-gatherer societies relative to their agricultural counterparts.
- Work 35-45 hours per week
- Hunt approximately 1 in 3 days
- Forage 4-6 hours per day
- Better nourished than future peasants/farmers of early and middle ages
- Greater variety of work than the modern worker
- Life expectancy was 30-40 due to high child mortality rate, otherwise people lived from 60-80
- People were more dispersed than in modern agricultural societies and thus not as exposed to disease and did not sustain epidemics
- Had domesticated dogs (about 15k years ago) but not other animals and so weren't as prone to diseases that originated in modern domestic animals
- More varied diet than future farmers
- Farming prioritizes the survival and thriving of the species, not the individual
- Wheat, sorghum, beans, etc. domesticated Homo sapiens, not the other way around
The points that stand out to me are numbers 5 and 10. The lack of immediacy and variety in our day to day industrialized existence, coupled with the prioritization of the species over the individual, are key elements that plague the modern workplace as well as mass movements such as the effort to address climate change.
While we all intuitively understand that writing that report, completing those calculations, or serving that next table are the activities that will earn us money and thus the ability to feed and shelter ourselves and our families, there is often times too much distance between the effort and the reward for us to see any direct connection. Aside from generally meeting deadlines and performance requirements, there can quickly emerge an ability and willingness to put off until tomorrow what isn't immediately necessary today.
And this isn't laziness or a moral defect; it's an understandable malaise that enters our overly-routinized existence. Lacking variety (and in many cases beholden to the interests of Diamond's aptly termed "social parasites"), it can be difficult to summon internal motivation, and we quickly fall to a carrot and stick system of motivation. The carrot, in this case, is earning enough money to maintain your existence. The stick is losing your ability to earn a living.
Through collaborative efforts, we create things like highways, safety oversight boards, and make medical advances that benefit society and the species as a whole. These all undoubtedly raise our collective standards of living, but do they result in a better day to day existence for each individual? It probably depends on which day you ask the question and to which individual, and what, precisely, you mean by "better."
For instance, those same highways that we create that lead to better mobility also lead to negative consequences such as urban sprawl, increased carbon emissions from traffic, and safety issues, both for humans and wildlife. Collectively, emissions from our cars, homes, and factories are making our planet increasingly inhospitable. However, the negative consequence of increasing temperatures is sufficiently far removed (we think) for us to alter our day to day existence and drive less. Perhaps it's even impossible for us to drive less, as we have to continue commuting to our job on behalf of our role in society. The species thrives (for now); the individual languishes, perhaps setting aside his or her personal aspirations in the name of species-wide "progress."
This all begs a natural set of follow-on questions. Why do we view hunter-gatherer societies as less advanced than agricultural societies – primitive even? Do we actually know what "progress" means? Can we say definitively that wonderful works of music, art, and culture would not have arisen under hunter-gatherer conditions, or that our society would not be more fair and free?
These are, perhaps, unanswerable questions. The only glimpse of an answer I can see is that we – in America, especially – equate "progress" with production, and an agricultural society lays the groundwork for an industrial society which is, by its nature, more productive than a hunter-gatherer society. We see it in the language of our modern society. We are no longer "individuals," but "consumers" in a commercial society. Food and goods have become commodities rather than necessities.
In the words of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "It is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind." For agriculture to flourish, "labour became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling fields, which it was found necessary to water with human sweat..." For Rousseau, and perhaps for modern thinkers like Diamond and Harari, "Nothing is more peaceable than man in his natural state..." Perhaps our "natural state," that state in which we would be most gentle – most peaceable – is as hunter-gatherers.
