Hunter-Gatherers R (Still) Us
The autonomous vs. the obedient, the generalist vs. the specialist, the rural vs. the urban, the left vs. the right – these are all just variations on the same basic hunter-gatherer theme
Introduction
Comparisons of prehistoric/pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer behaviors and tendencies -- with those of more sedentary, more ‘modern’ versions of humanity -- have been carried out by anthropologists since at least the late 1960s.
This previously strictly academic concern achieved wider public interest at the turn-of-the-century with the popularization of the low-carb or Paleolithic diet. By returning to the apparently evolutionarily-fixed eating habits of our Paleolithic ancestors, most such ‘paleodiet’ adopters came to experience quite noticeable and rapid improvements in their general state of health. These concrete results alone indicated that modern man’s modern nature is not quite so free from the effects of ancestral influence as it sometimes seems.
Like our ancestral dietary appetites, it has been shown by anthropologists and archeologists that the evolved behavioral range of our earliest hunter-gatherer forebears also survives as a limited set of predispositions controlling the behavior of the people of this day. Given only one very simple variation in social living conditions, one of two distinctly different ancient behavioral patterns will naturally come to the fore and determine the general culture and actions of the people pursuing life under those conditions.
Carol Ember has summarized the anthropological literature of the last half century describing the evolved range of humanity’s ancestral habits, attitudes, and behaviors. For her original material, see https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc/summaries/hunter-gatherers. What follows is a pointed summary of Dr. Ember’s own 2020 summary.
General Statements
Dr. Ember first relates:
Based on the ethnographic data and cross-cultural comparisons, it is widely accepted that recent hunter-gatherer societies generally:
are fully or semi-nomadic.
live in small communities.
have low population densities.
do not have specialized political officials.
have little wealth differentiation.
are economically specialized only by age and gender.
usually divide labor by gender, with women gathering wild plants and men fishing and almost always doing the hunting.
have animistic religions — that is, believe that all natural things have intentionality or a vital force that can affect humans.1
The single factor that determines at the start whether or not a human population lives as hunter-gatherers in the present day, according to Dr. Ember, is the continued unsuitability of their home territories to agriculture.
We know about hunter-gatherers of recent times from anthropologists who have lived and worked with hunting and gathering groups. Some of the recent and frequently discussed cases are the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest (central Africa), the San of the Kalahari Desert (southern Africa) and the Copper Inuit of the Arctic (North America). These hunter-gatherers live in environments that are not conducive to agriculture.
Note, however, that prior to the global warming that began at the end of the Pleistocene about 10 to 12 thousand years ago, most of the earth was not conducive to agriculture due to colder average air temperatures and generally drier weather. Therefore, during the Pleistocene ice age conditions and the simultaneously long (~2,600,000 m.y.) co-evolution of the Homo genus, all of humanity necessarily became genetically tailored to the somewhat limited scope of the hunter-gatherer way of life.
Even before the development of agriculture near the end of the last glacial maximum (see below), archeological evidence shows that many old hunter-gatherer societies were able to become incrementally more complex and slightly larger, however. The basic social and cultural character of these larger “complex hunter-gatherer” communities is very similar to that dominating current sedentary Western civilization. As Dr. Ember further reports:
Complex hunter-gatherer societies, in contrast to simpler hunter-gatherers, generally have the following traits (Hayden and Villeneuve 2011, 334–35):
higher population densities (.2 to 10 people per square mile).
fully sedentary or seasonally sedentary communities.
more complex sociopolitical organization primarily based on economic production.
significant socioeconomic differences.
some private ownership of resources and individual storage.
competitive displays and feasts.
elites try to control access to the supernatural.
while almost all hunter-gatherers have some kind of astronomical system, complex hunter gatherer groups generally exhibit some solstice observation or calendars.
The Dual Nature of H. sapiens Communities
The increased organizational complexity, greater community size, and more sedentary nature of complex hunter-gatherers was possible well before the development of agriculture -- due to the human use of freshwater or marine food resources (Rowley-Conwy 2001). Rather than humans constantly moving across the landscape to find and secure their scattered and migrating foods in the simple hunter-gatherer way, humans of the complex hunter-gatherer sort gathered in more concentrated human numbers at different habitat edge zones where a very large, self-renewing supply of their prey/food resource also reliably and/or seasonally congregated. Think, for an example, of salmon runs (or, more recently, of artificially concentrated field crops).
The archeological evidence shows that groups of people living as a simple hunter-gatherers could opportunistically and reversibly adopt the more sedentary and more elaborate food-producing and food-storing logistics of complex hunter-gatherers. In other words, the employment of either a simple hunter-gatherer or complex hunter-gatherer way of life in the Pleistocene was (and still is) a matter of opportunity and emergent need, not genetically pre-determined (Rowley-Conwy 2001).
Judging from historical ethnographic records summarized by Dr. Ember, however, degree of mobility and methods of natural resource utilization of human groups have important ramifications on the personality and characteristic attitudes held by them towards the outside world and themselves. Not surprisingly, then, the nature of threats, weaknesses, and opportunities met by human groups with fundamentally different ways of ‘making a living’ is directly conditioned by their community structure and its characteristic mode of operation.
As already related, simple hunter-gatherers do not rely on social hierarchy/elites or politics for economic functionality or for individual religious understanding; exhibit little, if any, wealth differentiation; live in low density, small communities; and, except for limitations imposed by biology and age – are economic generalists, not specialists.
Children of nomadic hunter-gatherers are consequently encouraged from a very early age to share with the others in their group. In addition, hunter-gatherer children are especially encouraged to be independent, self-reliant, innovative, and achievement-oriented (e.g., as in achieving always difficult hunting success). Obedience and responsibility to others – very important personal qualities in other societies that depend more on application of elaborate, multi-step food accumulation and storage technologies and procedures for their existence – are not strongly emphasized in hunter-gatherer childhood education and training. This is, of course, because simple hunter-gatherers are continuously collecting and then immediately consuming collected food stuffs. Consequently, feedback from error in action is received directly and immediately from the non-human environment, making humanly-imposed rules or chronic external management by others unnecessary.
Given the overwhelming importance of hands-on experience and close personal observation in learning hunter-gatherer skills, the voiced thoughts of parents and elders – recorded or not – are also not so critical to the education of young hunter-gatherers as they are in larger human societies.
Unlike in the case with agriculturalists and pastoralists, hunter-gatherer marriages are more likely to occur between unrelated people. Genetic and behavioral in-breeding associated with the assortative mating much more frequently encountered with sedentary populations is neither a danger or advantage with nomadic simple hunter-gatherers. This particular characteristic of simple hunter-gatherers likely was particularly important in the evolution and maintenance of humankind’s genetics during the Pleistocene when human population numbers were extremely difficult to maintain and global human numbers quite often became dangerously low.
Being more flexible and intrepid in their methods of obtaining food, modern hunter-gatherers go hungry less frequently, and thus tend to have to fight relatively less often and acutely with others than do other human groups. The archeological record appears to confirm this advantage of the lifestyle.
According to Ember, occurrences of increased resource unpredictability are generally reliable predictors of warfare in the human record. However, Ember further reports that:
Hunter-gatherers with higher population densities have more warfare than those with lower population densities. Similarly, more complex hunter-gatherer societies have more warfare than simple hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherers with a high dependence on fishing are more likely to have internal warfare than external warfare.
Amongst prehistoric hunter-gatherers in central California, resource scarcity predicts more violence as indicated by sharp force skeletal trauma in burial sites. This parallels worldwide research on a sample including all subsistence types that finds that unpredictable food-destroying disasters are a major predictor of higher warfare frequency.
Among foragers, as in other societies, patrilocal residence is predicted by internal (within society) warfare or a high male contribution to subsistence; matrilocality is predicted by a combination of purely external warfare and a high female contribution to subsistence.
The Table below summarizes the facultative behaviors, characteristics, and differing abilities archeologically and historically displayed by H. sapiens as a function of the behavioral dominance of the two -- simple and complex --ancestral hunter-gatherer extended phenotypes.
Joint Tenancy with Right of Survivorship
As already observed, archeological and ethnographic evidence demonstrates that H. sapiens, just like light that can behave as a particle or wave, has the ability to volitionally adopt and use the guiding habits and attitudes of either simple hunter-gatherers or complex hunter-gatherers.
In this context, then, it appears that the modern cultural divide between rural communities and more urban communities -- or even that of the political ‘left’ and ‘right’ -- is nothing more complicated than a continued, but more pronounced expression of the ancestrally bimodally communitarian nature of H. sapiens.
For the sake of effective problem-solving and thus the continuation of the species, and given the current conditions of general cultural disarray and malfunction, the continuing dual nature of man as hunter-gatherer seems extremely fortunate. Two basically different parties are working on the problems, using two quite different approaches to solving those same problems. Same as it ever was (for the last 2.5 million years or so, anyway). Any bets on which approach will win out this time around? There’s probably still enough time to switch teams.
Excellent post. This is one of my favorite subjects.
I truly believe that the majority of modern errors of thought (and probably all of the existential angst) are a result of not being fully integrated in the ancestral environment, particularly the simple HG system.
We have an ancestral shaped hole in our lives, and right now it is being filled with many poor replacements.
Thank you for this post.