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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.
Firstly, all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been influenced by neighbouring agricultural and industrial societies.
Secondly, modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with difficult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture.
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.
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.
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
The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution.
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.
If all eighteen indeed died violently, it means that about 4.5 per cent of deaths in the ancient Danube Valley were caused by human violence. Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent, taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence – and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history. If
Their first achievement was the colonisation of Australia some 45,000 years ago.
The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain and became the deadliest species ever in the four-billion-year history of life on Earth. Up
Marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme. Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing 100 pounds or more, twenty-three became extinct.
mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia
For example, the megafauna of New Zealand – which had weathered the alleged ‘climate change’ of c.45,000 years ago without a scratch – suffered devastating blows immediately after the first humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris, New Zealand’s first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species. A
the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.
marsupial lions, diprotodons and giant kangaroos.
As the findings from Sungir testify, mammoth-hunters did not just survive in the frozen north – they thrived. As time passed, the bands spread far and wide, pursuing mammoths, mastodons, rhinoceroses and reindeer.
Around 14,000 BC, the chase took some of them from north-eastern Siberia to Alaska. Of course, they didn’t know they were discovering a new world. For mammoth and man alike, Alaska was a mere extension of Siberia. At
When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to eight tons and reached a height of twenty feet. South America hosted an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles and birds.
Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens arrival, most of these unique species were gone.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
we have invented countless time-saving devices that are supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email.
We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.
the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.
The above scenario explains the Agricultural Revolution as a miscalculation. It’s
Stonehenge dates to 2500 BC, and was built by a developed agricultural society. The structures at Göbekli Tepe are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers.
the world contains about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens. And they are all over the globe. The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever. Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world.
This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
Individuals are created by social constructs. Community comes first.....
The earth’s surface measures about 200 million square miles, of which 60 million is land. As late as AD 1400, the vast majority of farmers, along with their plants and animals, clustered together in an area of just 4.25 million square miles – 2 per cent of the planet’s surface.2 Everywhere else was too cold, too hot, too dry, too wet, or otherwise unsuited for cultivation. This minuscule 2 per cent of the earth’s surface constituted the stage on which history unfolded.
Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites –
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
All these cooperation networks – from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the Qin and Roman empires – were ‘imagined orders’.
There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.
Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order. If
‘You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.’ A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers – far more cheaply and effectively.
The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy.
Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.
Medieval noblemen did not believe in individualism. Someone’s worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy,
The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room on the castle’s second floor,
He slept alongside many other youths in a large hall.
man’s true worth was determined by his place in the social hierarchy and by what other people said of him.
b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries.
the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this.
elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon
