Noble or savage?

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Noble or savage?

Dec 19th 2007

From The Economist print edition

_http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10278703_

(http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10278703)

The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden

that some suggest.

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 raceâ€, 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-gatherersâ€. 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 “workâ€

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.

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.

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.

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.

Homo sapiens wrought havoc on many ecosystems as Homo erectus had not

Returning to hunter-gatherers, Mr LeBlanc argues (in his book “Constant

Battlesâ€) 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.

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.

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.

Soon collecting wild grass seeds evolved into planting and reaping crops,

which meant fewer proteins and vitamins but ample calories

Agriculture was presumably just another response to demographic pressure. A

new threat of starvation—probably during the millennium-long dry, cold

“snapâ€

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.