Hunter-Gatherer Life - Old Worlds

 

or

 

Agricultural, Industrial and technological Life - New worlds

  

 llpathways@btinternet.com

 

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Speaking to the BBC World Service programme Outlook writer and anthropologist Hugh Brody, talking about his book The Other Side Of Eden, a book that introduces us to the hunter-gatherer way of life and explores the misunderstandings, and the historic division between hunter-gatherers and farmers states:

 

'The thing about being with the Inuit is that you have a sense of being with the most gracious, most generous, most sophisticated of human beings. So far from being simple, they are very, very rich and complex.'

It is a sad fact that hunter-gatherers have more or less being seen as primitive, whilst the farming, or agricultural, way of life - that has practically put an end to hunter-gatherer existence - is somehow perceived as a step in the advancement of human society.

 

Living and working with the Inuit people Brody was able to challenged modern man's arrogant approach to the Inuit's considered ignorant way of life and instead he asked the Inuit to teach him about their ways.

He learned their language, language being the key to understanding other cultures. Language, Brody claims 'reveals different ways of knowing the world.' He elaborates:  'Colonialism constitutes them as ignoramuses – vessels to be filled with the truth. But if you ask them to teach you their language you give them a chance to reverse this – you are the one who doesn't know anything.'

'Hunter-gatherer language doesn't have categories, they don't have conceptual terms like snow – they have very specific words such as “snow that has recently fallen” or “snow that is falling through the air”, “snow that has been driven in the wind” and it goes on and on. But they are all very specific pieces of information about the environment.'

For Brody, these are far from idle academic points. They expose how hunter-gatherer languages "express and celebrate the importance of detailed knowledge of their natural world". They demonstrate a complex and profound respect for their land and the creatures they hunt. Far from the miserable subsistence living imagined by colonists, Brody meets an almost spiritual connection to the land.

For hunter-gatherers generally there’s a close interdependence between the natural and spiritual worlds.

The hunter-gatherer culture is a culture of respectful of the planet and of its people and of the life that supports people.

 

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 Important lessons for the future of humanity.

We could say that there is a profound difference between hunter-gatherers’ attitude to the earth and that of modern man. Theirs is an intimate knowledge of the land’s contours, its seasons and creatures.  Whereas for modern man what he sees is a transformed landscape, dominated by his activities.

All too often racism and prejudice dismiss hunter-gatherers as backward people too ignorant to settle the land. Over the years, Brody (See above) has lived with and studied several hunter-gatherer societies. He has become convinced that the hunter-gatherer world-view contains important lessons for humanity’s future.

Those appropriating hunter-gatherers’ land pour contempt on their culture, dehumanizing them by reference to their lack of discipline towards children and their subsistence living. Again, it is a sad fact for both them and us that the hunter-gatherers’ language and culture have been misunderstood, silenced, and even repressed, by those who have appropriated their lands.

In the case of the Inuit, as with the Aboriginal people of Australia ,along with all too many hunter-gatherer peoples across the world they had to suffer the plight of their children being forcibly taken away from their parents and familiar surroundings and made to attend residential schools far from their homes. There they were made to imitate the norms of the 'civilized' society that included being beaten every time they used their own much richer language. For many, the terror and pain of separation from their culture remains palpable more than a generation later.

Via his research and experiences Brody is convinced the fundamental division in human history is between that of the hunter-gatherers’ and their oppressors, the agriculturalists. For him the farming culture is accompanied by "a longing to be settled, a defensive holding of ground.” Genesis, says Brody, is the ultimate agriculturalists’ myth, embodying their continuing quest to reshape nature as a lost Eden. Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, do not seek to reshape and dominate their landscape. Their conviction is that their land is "already Eden and exile must be avoided".

Again, Brody postulates that agriculturalists spread out from one place, a combative and imperialist culture which eventually drove hunter-gatherers to the edge of habitable land. He concludes that the fate of the hunter-gatherers is a hugely important part of human history. This is not a primitive culture surpassed by superior forms. Instead, it embodies an equally significant aspect of the human condition.

Finally, the 'Other Side of Eden' is a passionate argument in support of recognizing and nurturing the hunter-gatherer world-view. At a time when nature is so under threat from humanity, there are invaluable environmental lessons to be learnt from cultures which seek to survive from the land but also leave it as they find it.

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Lost Garden of Eden

 

An article in 'The Independent' (27 March 2008) by Steve Connor, Science Editor, called: 'Jawbone of oldest known European found in Spain' we learn that scientists have found a jawbone belonging to the oldest known human inhabitants of Europe who lived in a lush, game-rich region of what is now northern Spain about 1.2 million years ago.

 

The researchers who made the discovery at the archaeological site of Atapuerca have provisionally placed the first residents of the continent in a species called Homo antecessor, or "pioneer man", which was first named 10 years ago from remains found in one of the limestone caves at the same site.

 

"I think this part of human history is poorly known in Europe. We have very few fossils and artefacts. But this jawbone is the oldest human fossil we have from western Europe," said Dr de Castro, of Spain's National Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, in Burgos.

 

However, what really caught my eye in reading the article was the description of the area of the find where these ancient people lived at that time of being 'a lush, game-rich region of what is now northern Spain'.

 

Is this somehow the collective memory of those who first told us about the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament?  A garden dug-up and de-faced by early agriculturists and eventually laid waste by the misuse of technology.  Just a thought.

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The Pathway to Our Survival

Challenging the power structures blocking that pathway.

Throughout recorded human history power structures have typically opposed any challenge to their elevated place in social and organisational life. More particularly if that challenge emanated from so-called lowly and ordinary people rather than simply that from other power structures.

Such an unfortunate situation has dominated our way of life going back some 10,000 years. The problem is that the make-up of power structures are constantly changing in order to disguise their basic psychopathic and destructive tendencies.

Of course such psychopathic tendencies are not confined excursively to the ruling powers. You will find such people at all levels of social and organisational life. Nevertheless, power structures reflect a much higher concentration of such personalities.

Interestingly, as often is the case, revolutions throughout history have simply replaced one power structure with another. The new power structure being often much more destructive than the one it replaced. Again, it is worth noting that power structures exist everywhere, be they political, business, the media, education, sport, entertainment, religious, community, scientific etc.

Is the answer to such power structures to throw our hands in the air saying: 'This is the way of things. There is nothing we can do about it.' If it is, then we can say goodbye to any chance that our future on the planet is a possibility. Indeed, it is all too likely that, if not present generation then, the next one or two generations will be the last to survive.

Does it really matter? Yes it does. The reason being that as an 'intelligent' life form we have the ability, indeed obligation to enhance our understanding of the nature of life itself in all its complexity and beauty. Life that has evolved over billions of years and on which we in turn ultimately depend.

There is little doubt that at present our future survival is balanced on a knife-edge, and unfortunately we are inclining very much towards destruction. We are allowing the self-interested and pathological blind to lead the disillusioned blind over the proverbial cliff. With the vast majority of those living in the so-called developed world telling themselves that 'everything is fine', while billions living in the rest of the world thinking that poverty and the daily struggle to survive is somehow their fate.

 

Is this then the last paragraph of the last chapter of the human story? Well if we are as foolish as the last 8,000 – 10,000 years of human history indicates our future is dire. However, there is a glimmer of hope. Paradoxically such hope emanates from from two very different ages of human history. The first being the era of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The second, that of today's scientific and technological era.

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THE WORST MISTAKE IN THE HISTORY OF THE
HUMAN RACE

 With thanks to Jared Diamond

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering. It was only around 10.000 years ago that humans began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

Anthropology, along with archaeology and palaeoanthropologists, are today demolishing a sacred and long held belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular. recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.

The counter view could be expressed in the argument that today we enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us, that is, those living in the so-called developed world, are safe from starvation and predators. We get most of energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat.

The question is why did our early ancestors adopt agriculture? Maybe because planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. That such crops can be stored, and since it seems to take less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, it was perceived that agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. A perception that, with a more profound understanding, certainly proved to be false, just as today's technological revolution fosters the unfounded assumption that such a revolution will offer a less burdensome and time restricting future.

We are in many ways deceived by talk of living in a time of progress, and continually being told that evidence for such progress is the simply overwhelming. The question is, how do you know that the lives of people 10,000 years ago were enriched when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Certainly, neither recent anthropological nor archaeological evidence support the progressive view. Are, alas the few, twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than the vast majority of the world's farmers?

Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive hunter-gathering peoples, like the Kalahari Bushmen, who incidentally are been increasingly pressurized to becoming farmers and labourers, their hunting and gathering grounds being infringed upon, like hunter-gatherer everywhere, being pushed into some of the world's most difficult terrain. It turns out that the hunter-gatherer life-style allowed people plenty of leisure time, struggling less than later farming communities.

While farmers concentration on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. The more we learn about the lives of the hunter-gatherers we find that they do not reflect Locke's: 'short, nasty and brutish' description of man's life. Of course the philosopher was thinking about life in Europe of the 15^th and 16^th Centuries. Indeed, over the following 2-3 centuries the life expectancy in the world's industrializing world decreased.

Numerous studies show that the early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labour.

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter- gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants - wheat, rice, and corn - provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. 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. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

To people in living in rich countries i.e. North America, most of Europe and Austro-Asia it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But, in general Americans and Europeans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that very often must be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Again, unlike in hunter-gatherer society, women in agricultural societies were, and in many places still are, made beasts of burden. 

Thus with the advent of agriculture the few became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the so-called progressive line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. We more or less chose farming rather than hunting and gathering and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it.

We can illustrate the history of mankind on a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagined existed behind agriculture's glittering façade, and as of yet,so far eluded us?

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