Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores it and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.
