The move from hunting and gathering to farming was not a story of steady progress whereby primitive cavemen were freed from ignorance and desperation. It was (and is still) a story of conquest by the powerful. Hunter-gatherers normally preferred to fight to the death rather than be assimilated, as Christopher Colombus and Captain Cook would testify.
“Well Phil, we don’t know enough about history to know if you just made most of that up, but even if it’s true we’ve come a long way from the days of Xerxes and the Pharaohs. None of us die from smallpox any more, the spread of democracy over the past 200 years has broken the grip of the despots, and we can feed ourselves dinners using food from all corners of the world for £2 in Tesco. Don’t get over-excited just because you watched Avatar.”
All true. Modern life has a lot to recommend it over hunter-gatherer life, at least in the developed world. Modern medicine. No chance of starvation. Freedom from endemic warfare (hunter-gatherers have very high rates of violent death compared to civilized people). Ipods. But, like I said before, hunter-gatherer life has a lot in its favour as well.
Imagine living in a world where you are your own boss, in fact where bosses don’t even exist. Hunter-gatherers tend to be very egalitarian; if they do have chiefs they are typically little more than figure-heads with no formal political power. Not only that, unlike 99.999% of people in civilised societies, you are actively involved in the big decisions your society makes like whether or not to go to war; you speak in a public forum, Classical Athen’s style, except your personal view carries about 100 times more weight than any ancient Greek’s (and about 1,000,000,000 times more than a citizen in a modern democracy) since your political unit is so small. Only a fool would consider the power of an infantilisingly insignificant vote every few years to be equivalent.
Perhaps this is why hunter-gatherers stand so upright and move so gracefully, as anyone who’s ever watched anthropological documentaries could hardly fail to notice, while the civilized stoop awkwardly, as if crushed beneath the awesome weight of the abstract, impersonal power against which they are utterly helpless.
Something to do with the incredible freedom of knowing you are truly self-reliant and self-determining maybe? Or perhaps that is something to do with their healthy lifestyles and diets. Compared to Westerners, most hunter-gatherers have strength and endurance approaching the super-human. I have seen a documentary in which a 60 year old Amazonian Indian (Huaorani) climbed 11 100 foot trees in a row in pursuit of a monkey, and one in which a San Bushmen pursued a springbok on foot through the desert for over a day until it was too exhausted to move.
☛ READ NEXT: Hindu Cannibal Cult
