3. A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
TO UNDERSTAND OUR NATURE, HISTORY and psychology, we must
get inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For nearly the entire
history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers. The past 200 years, during
which ever increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as
urban labourers and office workers, and the preceding 10,000 years, during
which most Sapiens lived as farmers and herders, are the blink of an eye
compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted
and gathered.
The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our
present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this
long pre-agricultural era. Even today, scholars in this field claim, our brains and
minds are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. Our eating habits, our
conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds
interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities,
aeroplanes, telephones and computers. This environment gives us more material
resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it
often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured. To understand why,
evolutionary psychologists argue, we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer
world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit.
Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little
good to their bodies? Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of a plague of
obesity, which is rapidly spreading to developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we
binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the
eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they
inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in
short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of
sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with
figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the
spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on
high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in
high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we
are in the savannah. That’s what makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben &
Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.
This ‘gorging gene’ theory is widely accepted. Other theories are far more
contentious. For example, some evolutionary psychologists argue that ancient
foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centred on monogamous
couples.
Rather, foragers lived in communes devoid of private property,
monogamous relationships and even fatherhood. In such a band, a woman could
have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and women)
simultaneously, and all of the band’s adults cooperated in parenting its children.
Since no man knew definitively which of the children were his, men showed
equal concern for all youngsters.
Such a social structure is not an Aquarian utopia. It’s well documented
among animals, notably our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos.
There are even a number of present-day human cultures in which collective
fatherhood is practised, as for example among the Barí Indians. According to the
beliefs of such societies, a child is not born from the sperm of a single man, but
from the accumulation of sperm in a woman’s womb. A good mother will make
a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is
pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely
of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the
most considerate lover. If this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the
development of modern embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that
babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many.
The proponents of this ‘ancient commune’ theory argue that the frequent
infidelities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates of divorce, not
to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from which both children
and adults suffer, all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families and
monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software.1
Many scholars vehemently reject this theory, insisting that both monogamy
and the forming of nuclear families are core human behaviours. Though ancient
hunter-gatherer societies tended to be more communal and egalitarian than
modern societies, these researchers argue, they were nevertheless comprised of
separate cells, each containing a jealous couple and the children they held in
common. This is why today monogamous relationships and nuclear families are
the norm in the vast majority of cultures, why men and women tend to be very
possessive of their partners and children, and why even in modern states such as
North Korea and Syria political authority passes from father to son.
In order to resolve this controversy and understand our sexuality, society and
politics, we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors,
to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years
ago, and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago.
Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager
ancestors. The debate between the ‘ancient commune’ and ‘eternal monogamy
schools is based on flimsy evidence. We obviously have no written records from
the age of foragers, and the archaeological evidence consists mainly of fossilised
bones and stone tools. Artefacts made of more perishable materials – such as
wood, bamboo or leather – survive only under unique conditions. The common
impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a
misconception based on this archaeological bias.
The Stone Age should more
accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient
hunter-gatherers were made of wood.
Any reconstruction of the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers from the
surviving artefacts is extremely problematic. One of the most glaring differences
between the ancient foragers and their agricultural and industrial descendants is
that foragers had very few artefacts to begin with, and these played a
comparatively modest role in their lives. Over the course of his or her life, a
typical member of a modern affluent society will own several million artefacts –
from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons. There’s hardly an
activity, a belief, or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own
devising. Our eating habits are mediated by a mind-boggling collection of such
items, from spoons and glasses to genetic engineering labs and gigantic oceangoing
ships. In play, we use a plethora of toys, from plastic cards to 100,000-
seater stadiums. Our romantic and sexual relations are accoutred by rings, beds,
nice clothes, sexy underwear, condoms, fashionable restaurants, cheap motels,
airport lounges, wedding halls and catering companies. Religions bring the
sacred into our lives with Gothic churches, Muslim mosques, Hindu ashrams,
Torah scrolls, Tibetan prayer wheels, priestly cassocks, candles, incense,
Christmas trees, matzah balls, tombstones and icons.
We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a
new house. Foragers moved house every month, every week, and sometimes
even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. There were no moving
companies, wagons, or even pack animals to share the burden. They
consequently had to make do with only the most essential possessions. It’s
reasonable to presume, then, that the greater part of their mental, religious and
emotional lives was conducted without the help of artefacts. An archaeologist
working 100,000 years from now could piece together a reasonable picture of
Muslim belief and practice from the myriad objects he unearthed in a ruined
mosque. But we are largely at a loss in trying to comprehend the beliefs and
rituals of ancient hunter-gatherers. It’s much the same dilemma that a future
historian would face if he had to depict the social world of twenty-first-century
teenagers solely on the basis of their surviving snail mail – since no records will
remain of their phone conversations, emails, blogs and text messages.
A reliance on artefacts will thus bias an account of ancient hunter-gatherer
life. One way to remedy this is to look at modern forager societies. These can be
studied directly, by anthropological observation. But there are good reasons to
be very careful in extrapolating from modern forager societies to ancient ones.
Firstly, all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been
influenced by neighbouring agricultural and industrial societies. Consequently,
it’s risky to assume that what is true of them was also true tens of thousands of
years ago.
Secondly, modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with
difficult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture.
Societies that have adapted to the extreme conditions of places such as the
Kalahari Desert in southern Africa may well provide a very misleading model
for understanding ancient societies in fertile areas such as the Yangtze River
Valley. In particular, population density in an area like the Kalahari Desert is far
lower than it was around the ancient Yangtze, and this has far-reaching
implications for key questions about the size and structure of human bands and
the relations between them.
Thirdly, the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how
different they are one from the other. They differ not only from one part of the
world to another but even in the same region. One good example is the huge
variety the first European settlers found among the Aborigine peoples of
Australia. Just before the British conquest, between 300,000 and 700,000 huntergatherers
lived on the continent in 200–600 tribes, each of which was further
divided into several bands.2 Each tribe had its own language, religion, norms and
customs. Living around what is now Adelaide in southern Australia were several
patrilineal clans that reckoned descent from the father’s side. These clans bonded
together into tribes on a strictly territorial basis. In contrast, some tribes in
northern Australia gave more importance to a person’s maternal ancestry, and a
person’s tribal identity depended on his or her totem rather than his territory.
It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient huntergatherers
was equally impressive, and that the 5 million to 8 million foragers
who populated the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution were divided
into thousands of separate tribes with thousands of different languages and
cultures.3 This, after all, was one of the main legacies of the Cognitive
Revolution. Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same
genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to
create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different
norms and values.
For example, there’s every reason to believe that a forager band that lived
30,000 years ago on the spot where Oxford University now stands would have
spoken a different language from one living where Cambridge is now situated.
One band might have been belligerent and the other peaceful. Perhaps the
Cambridge band was communal while the one at Oxford was based on nuclear
families. The Cantabrigians might have spent long hours carving wooden statues
of their guardian spirits, whereas the Oxonians may have worshipped through
dance. The former perhaps believed in reincarnation, while the latter thought this
was nonsense. In one society, homosexual relationships might have been
accepted, while in the other they were taboo.
In other words, while anthropological observations of modern foragers can
help us understand some of the possibilities available to ancient foragers, the
ancient horizon of possibilities was much broader, and most of it is hidden from
our view.* The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss
the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single
natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a
bewildering palette of possibilities.
The Original Affluent Society
What generalisations can we make about life in the pre-agricultural world
nevertheless? It seems safe to say that the vast majority of people lived in small
bands numbering several dozen or at most several hundred individuals, and that
all these individuals were humans. It is important to note this last point, because
it is far from obvious. Most members of agricultural and industrial societies are
domesticated animals. They are not equal to their masters, of course, but they are
members all the same. Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of
4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep.
There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the
first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the
Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have
incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago.
They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.
Dogs were used for hunting and fighting, and as an alarm system against
wild beasts and human intruders. With the passing of generations, the two
species co-evolved to communicate well with each other. Dogs that were most
attentive to the needs and feelings of their human companions got extra care and
food, and were more likely to survive. Simultaneously, dogs learned to
manipulate people for their own needs. A 15,000-year bond has yielded a much
deeper understanding and affection between humans and dogs than between
humans and any other animal.4 In some cases dead dogs were even buried
ceremoniously, much like humans.
Members of a band knew each other very intimately, and were surrounded
throughout their lives by friends and relatives. Loneliness and privacy were rare.
Neighbouring bands probably competed for resources and even fought one
another, but they also had friendly contacts. They exchanged members, hunted
together, traded rare luxuries, cemented political alliances and celebrated
religious festivals. Such cooperation was one of the important trademarks of
Homo sapiens, and gave it a crucial edge over other human species. Sometimes
relations with neighbouring bands were tight enough that together they
constituted a single tribe, sharing a common language, common myths, and
common norms and values.
Yet we should not overestimate the importance of such external relations.
Even if in times of crisis neighbouring bands drew closer together, and even if
they occasionally gathered to hunt or feast together, they still spent the vast
majority of their time in complete isolation and independence. Trade was mostly
limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigments. There is no
evidence that people traded staple goods like fruits and meat, or that the
existence of one band depended on the importing of goods from another.
Sociopolitical relations, too, tended to be sporadic.
The tribe did not serve as a
permanent political framework, and even if it had seasonal meeting places, there
were no permanent towns or institutions. The average person lived many months
without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band, and she
encountered throughout her life no more than a few hundred humans. The
Sapiens population was thinly spread over vast territories. Before the
Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller
than that of today’s Cairo.
7. First pet? A 12,000-year-old tomb found in northern Israel. It
contains the skeleton of a fifty-year-old woman next to that of a puppy
(bottom left corner). The puppy was buried close to the woman’s head. Her
left hand is resting on the dog in a way that might indicate an emotional
connection. There are, of course, other possible explanations. Perhaps, for
example, the puppy was a gift to the gatekeeper of the next world.
Most Sapiens bands lived on the road, roaming from place to place in search
of food. Their movements were influenced by the changing seasons, the annual
migrations of animals and the growth cycles of plants. They usually travelled
back and forth across the same home territory, an area of between several dozen
and many hundreds of square kilometres.
Occasionally, bands wandered outside their turf and explored new lands,
whether due to natural calamities, violent conflicts, demographic pressures or the
initiative of a charismatic leader. These wanderings were the engine of human
worldwide expansion. If a forager band split once every forty years and its
splinter group migrated to a new territory a hundred kilometres to the east, the
distance from East Africa to China would have been covered in about 10,000
years.
In some exceptional cases, when food sources were particularly rich, bands
settled down in seasonal and even permanent camps. Techniques for drying,
smoking and freezing food also made it possible to stay put for longer periods.
Most importantly, alongside seas and rivers rich in seafood and waterfowl,
humans set up permanent fishing villages – the first permanent settlements in
history, long predating the Agricultural Revolution. Fishing villages might have
appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago. These
may have been the base from which Homo sapiens launched its first transoceanic
enterprise: the invasion of Australia.
In most habitats, Sapiens bands fed themselves in an elastic and
opportunistic fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots,
stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular
image of ‘man the hunter’, gathering was Sapiens’ main activity, and it provided
most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood and bamboo.
Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for
knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their
territory. To maximise the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required
information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each
animal. They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you
sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the
seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell.
They
studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone
deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone
knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face
avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Mastery of each of these many skills
required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could
turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this
feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking
properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them
precisely.
In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied
knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants.
Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the
natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to
get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory
worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for
the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other
experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The
human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the
individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful
people in history.
There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has
actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required
superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came
along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new
‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your
unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an
assembly-line worker.
Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and
objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened
to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking
there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits,
beehives and bird nests. They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and
knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. Varied and
constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had
physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of
practising yoga or t’ai chi.
The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region
and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a
more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds,
labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to fortyfive
hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even
eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of
habitats – such as the Kalahari Desert work on average for just thirty-five to
forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes
up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band.
It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the
Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that,
foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash,
no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to
pay.
The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than
agriculture or industry do. Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around
seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop,
and there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten
long and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in
order to wash dishes and do the laundry.
Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese
forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning.
They’d roam the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up
edible roots, catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early
afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of
time to gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out. Of course the
tigers sometimes caught them, or a snake bit them, but on the other hand they
didn’t have to deal with automobile accidents and industrial pollution.
In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is
hardly surprising – this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of
years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised
skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation
or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant
descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years,
but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who
made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of
sixty, and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, fortyfive-
year-old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5–8 per
cent of the population is over sixty.6
The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and
malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and
unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an
agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes or rice
– that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials
humans need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice
for lunch, and rice for dinner. If she were lucky, she could expect to eat the same
on the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of
different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten
berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and
rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrows menu might have been
completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all
the necessary nutrients.
Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were
less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies
are ravaged by famine when drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual
rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters,
and suffered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal
with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs,
they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area.
Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the
infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such
as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and
were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient
foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges.
Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense,
unhygienic permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed
the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics.
The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the
rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural
forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’. It would be a mistake,
however, to idealise the lives of these ancients. Though they lived better lives
than most people in agricultural and industrial societies, their world could still be
harsh and unforgiving. Periods of want and hardship were not uncommon, child
mortality was high, and an accident which would be minor today could easily
become a death sentence. Most people probably enjoyed the close intimacy of
the roaming band, but those unfortunates who incurred the hostility or mockery
of their fellow band members probably suffered terribly.
Modern foragers
occasionally abandon and even kill old or disabled people who cannot keep up
with the band. Unwanted babies and children may be slain, and there are even
cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.
The Aché people, hunter-gatherers who lived in the jungles of Paraguay until
the 1960s, offer a glimpse into the darker side of foraging. When a valued band
member died, the Aché customarily killed a little girl and buried the two
together. Anthropologists who interviewed the Aché recorded a case in which a
band abandoned a middle-aged man who fell sick and was unable to keep up
with the others. He was left under a tree. Vultures perched above him, expecting
a hearty meal. But the man recuperated, and, walking briskly, he managed to
rejoin the band. His body was covered with the birds’ faeces, so he was
henceforth nicknamed ‘Vulture Droppings’.
When an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of the band, one of
the younger men would sneak behind her and kill her with an axe-blow to the
head. An Aché man told the inquisitive anthropologists stories of his prime years
in the jungle. ‘I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts … The
women were afraid of me … Now, here with the whites, I have become weak.’
Babies born without hair, who were considered underdeveloped, were killed
immediately. One woman recalled that her first baby girl was killed because the
men in the band did not want another girl. On another occasion a man killed a
small boy because he was ‘in a bad mood and the child was crying’. Another
child was buried alive because ‘it was funny-looking and the other children
laughed at it’.7
We should be careful, though, not to judge the Aché too quickly.
Anthropologists who lived with them for years report that violence between
adults was very rare. Both women and men were free to change partners at will.
They smiled and laughed constantly, had no leadership hierarchy, and generally
shunned domineering people. They were extremely generous with their few
possessions, and were not obsessed with success or wealth. The things they
valued most in life were good social interactions and high-quality friendships.8
They viewed the killing of children, sick people and the elderly as many people
today view abortion and euthanasia. It should also be noted that the Aché were
hunted and killed without mercy by Paraguayan farmers. The need to evade their
enemies probably caused the Aché to adopt an exceptionally harsh attitude
towards anyone who might become a liability to the band.
The truth is that Aché society, like every human society, was very complex.
We should beware of demonising or idealising it on the basis of a superficial
acquaintance. The Aché were neither angels nor fiends – they were humans. So,
too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers.
