Warfare was probably the rule rather than the exception even for paleo HGs
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10278703Hunter-gatherers
Noble or savage?
Dec 19th 2007
The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental
Eden that some suggest
Hemis.fr
HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as
hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of
agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with
gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in
the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only
hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world.
Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except
for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model
of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman
islanders have been isolated since the very first expansion out of
Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called
agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never
recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin
deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually
shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the
Near East. So was agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the
human race", as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of
geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?
Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of
Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had
originated in Africa and had colonised first their own continent, then
Asia, Australia and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the
Americas. They had spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They
painted pictures, decorated their bodies and believed in spirits. They
traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, told
stories and prepared herbal medicines.
They were "hunter-gatherers". On the whole the men hunted and the
women gathered: a sexual division of labour is still universal among
non-farming people and was probably not shared by their Homo erectus
predecessors. This enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever
trick because it combines quality with reliability.
Why change? In the late 1970s Mark Cohen, an archaeologist, first
suggested that agriculture was born of desperation, rather than
inspiration. Evidence from the Fertile Crescent seems to support him.
Rising human population density, combined perhaps with a cooling,
drying climate, left the Natufian hunter-gatherers of the region short
of acorns, gazelles and wild grass seeds. Somebody started trying to
preserve and enhance a field of chickpeas or wheat-grass and soon
planting, weeding, reaping and threshing were born.
Quite independently, people took the same step in at least six other
parts of the world over the next few thousand years: the Yangzi
valley, the central valley of New Guinea, Mexico, the Andes, West
Africa and the Amazon basin. And it seems that Eden came to an end.
Not only had hunter-gatherers enjoyed plenty of protein, not much fat
and ample vitamins in their diet, but it also seems they did not have
to work very hard. The Hadza of Tanzania "work" about 14 hours a week,
the !Kung of Botswana not much more.
The first farmers were less healthy than the hunter-gatherers had been
in their heyday. Aside from their shorter stature, they had more
skeletal wear and tear from the hard work, their teeth rotted more,
they were short of protein and vitamins and they caught diseases from
domesticated animals: measles from cattle, flu from ducks, plague from
rats and worms from using their own excrement as fertiliser.
They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time.
Hunter-gatherers' dependence on sharing each other's hunting and
gathering luck makes them remarkably egalitarian. A successful farmer,
however, can afford to buy the labour of others, and that makes him
more successful still, until eventually—especially in an irrigated
river valley, where he controls the water—he can become an emperor
imposing his despotic whim upon subjects. Friedrich Engels was
probably right to identify agriculture with a loss of political innocence.
Agriculture also stands accused of exacerbating sexual inequality. In
many peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard
work. Among hunter-gathering folk, men usually bring fewer calories
than women, and have a tiresome tendency to prefer catching big and
infrequent prey so they can show off, rather than small and frequent
catches that do not rot before they are eaten. But the men do at least
contribute.
Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that
the invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found
the serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage.
Maybe it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all.
Hemis.fr
In 2006 two Indian fishermen, in a drunken sleep aboard their little
boat, drifted over the reef and fetched up on the shore of North
Sentinel Island. They were promptly killed by the inhabitants. Their
bodies are still there: the helicopter that went to collect them was
driven away by a hail of arrows and spears. The Sentinelese do not
welcome trespassers. Only very occasionally have they been lured down
to the beach of their tiny island home by gifts of coconuts and only
once or twice have they taken these gifts without sending a shower of
arrows in return.
Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was
much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent
eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in
Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of
almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once
a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of
posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult
males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the
population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois
calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2
billion people dying during the 20th century.
At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern
pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural
state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees
and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in
co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar
in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian
wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant
violence.
MEPL I know it's a drag Godric, but it's progress
Not so many women as men die in warfare, it is true. But that is
because they are often the object of the fighting. To be abducted as a
sexual prize was almost certainly a common female fate in
hunter-gatherer society. Forget the Garden of Eden; think Mad Max.
Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one
person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density.
Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak
were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled
society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing
people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind
out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural
peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did
it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories
replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and
illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were
overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in
factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell
of their birth.
Homo sapiens wrought havoc on many ecosystems as Homo erectus had not
Eighteenth-century rural England was a place where people starved each
spring as the winter stores ran out, where in bad years and poor
districts long hours of agricultural labour—if it could be got—barely
paid enough to keep body and soul together, and a place where the
"putting-out" system of textile manufacture at home drove workers
harder for lower pay than even the factories would. (Ask Zambians
today why they take ill-paid jobs in Chinese-managed mines, or
Vietnamese why they sew shirts in multinational-owned factories.) The
industrial revolution caused a population explosion because it enabled
more babies to survive—malnourished, perhaps, but at least alive.
Returning to hunter-gatherers, Mr LeBlanc argues (in his book
"Constant Battles") that all was not well in ecological terms, either.
Homo sapiens wrought havoc on many ecosystems as Homo erectus had not.
There is no longer much doubt that people were the cause of the
extinction of the megafauna in North America 11,000 years ago and
Australia 30,000 years before that. The mammoths and giant kangaroos
never stood a chance against co-ordinated ambush with stone-tipped
spears and relentless pursuit by endurance runners.
This was also true in Eurasia. The earliest of the great cave
painters, working at Chauvet in southern France, 32,000 years ago, was
obsessed with rhinoceroses. A later artist, working at Lascaux 15,000
years later, depicted mostly bison, bulls and horses—rhinoceroses must
have been driven close to extinction by then. At first, modern human
beings around the Mediterranean relied almost entirely on large
mammals for meat. They ate small game only if it was slow
moving—tortoises and limpets were popular. Then, gradually and
inexorably, starting in the Middle East, they switched their attention
to smaller animals, and especially to warm-blooded, fast-breeding
species, such as rabbits, hares, partridges and smaller gazelles. The
archaeological record tells this same story at sites in Israel, Turkey
and Italy.
Bridgeman Art Library Another fine environmental mess we've got
ourselves into
The reason for this shift, say Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn of the
University of Arizona, was that human population densities were
growing too high for the slower-reproducing prey such as tortoises,
horses and rhinos. Only the fast-breeding rabbits, hares and
partridges, and for a while gazelles, could cope with such hunting
pressure. This trend accelerated about 15,000 years ago as large game
and tortoises disappeared from the Mediterranean diet
altogether—driven to the brink of extinction by human predation.
In times of prey scarcity, Homo erectus, like other predators, had
simply suffered local extinction; these new people could innovate
their way out of trouble—they could shift their niche. In response to
demographic pressure, they developed better weapons which enabled them
to catch smaller, faster prey, which in turn enabled them to survive
at high densities, though at the expense of extinguishing many larger
and slower-breeding prey. Under this theory, the atlatl or
spear-throwing stick was invented 18,000 years ago as a response to a
Malthusian crisis, not just because it seemed like a good idea.
Soon collecting wild grass seeds evolved into planting and reaping
crops, which meant fewer proteins and vitamins but ample calories
What's more, the famously "affluent society" of hunter-gatherers, with
plenty of time to gossip by the fire between hunts and gathers, turns
out to be a bit of a myth, or at least an artefact of modern life. The
measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted
food-processing time and travel time, partly because the
anthropologists gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles and lent
them metal knives to process food.
Agriculture was presumably just another response to demographic
pressure. A new threat of starvation—probably during the
millennium-long dry, cold "snap" known as the Younger Dryas about
13,000 years ago—prompted some hunter-gatherers in the Levant to turn
much more vegetarian. Soon collecting wild grass seeds evolved into
planting and reaping crops, which reduced people's intake of proteins
and vitamins, but brought ample calories, survival and fertility.
The fact that something similar happened six more times in human
history over the next few thousand years—in Asia, New Guinea, at least
three places in the Americas and one in Africa—supports the notion of
invention as a response to demographic pressure. In each case the
early farmers, though they might be short, sick and subjugated, could
at least survive and breed, enabling them eventually to overwhelm the
remaining hunter-gatherers of their respective continents.
It is irrelevant to ask whether we would have been better off to stay
as hunter-gatherers. Being a niche-shifting species, we could not help
moving on. Willingly or not, humanity had embarked 50,000 years ago on
the road called "progress" with constant change in habits driven by
invention mothered by necessity. Even 40,000 years ago, technology and
lifestyle were in a state of continuous change, especially in western
Eurasia. By 34,000 years ago people were making bone points for
spears, and by 26,000 years ago they were making needles. Harpoons and
other fishing tackle appear at 18,000 years ago, as do bone spear
throwers, or atlatls. String was almost certainly in use then—how do
you catch rabbits except in nets and snares?
Nor was this virtuosity confined to practicalities. A horse, carved
from mammoth-ivory and worn smooth by being used as a pendant, dates
from 32,000 years ago in Germany. By the time of Sungir, an open-air
settlement from 28,000 years ago at a spot near the city of Vladimir,
north-east of Moscow, people were being buried with thousands of
laboriously carved ivory beads and even little wheel-shaped bone
ornaments.
Incessant innovation is a characteristic of human beings. Agriculture,
the domestication of animals and plants, must be seen in the context
of this progressive change. It was just another step: hunter-gatherers
may have been using fire to encourage the growth of root plants in
southern Africa 80,000 years ago. At 15,000 years ago people first
domesticated another species—the wolf (though it was probably the
wolves that took the initiative). After 12,000 years ago came crops.
The internet and the mobile phone were in some vague sense almost
predestined 50,000 years ago to appear eventually.
There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating
ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands
of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out
that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis,
optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we
rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more
numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early
20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the
population was a billion people, but can now look forward with
confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic
nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we
eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be
another issue waiting for us.
Topic: COMMON CRITICISMS DIRECTED AT PALEO DIET PROPONENTS (Read 22233 times)