Hunter-Gatherers and Human Resilience: An Homage to the OG Wanderers and the Problem of Assessing “Progress”
What does “progress” mean from the perspective of the earliest human wanderers?
“[H]unter-gatherers may well be able to teach us something, not only about past ways of life but also about long-term human futures.”
-Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers
In the eyes of many archaeologists, recorded history is but a blink of the eye. Like geologists, the map of time in our heads isn’t always measured in hundreds or even thousands of years but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of years. This perspective therefore has a dramatic effect on our worldview.
Hunting, gathering, foraging, and fishing were the dominant modes of human existence for millennia—hell for entire geological epochs if you include our hominin cousins in the mix such as Homo erectus which I’ve written about in the Enigmatic Homo erectus: The First Transcontinental Wanderer. Before approximately 12,000 years ago, virtually everyone lived in small groups without centralized authority, acquired all their food from hunting, fishing, and foraging, and traveled consistently, albeit variably, throughout the year depending on where one found themselves on the world stage.
An important consideration when thinking about hunter-gatherers is to be aware that the world’s hunter-gatherers were not pushed to the margins as they have been in recent history but were free to inhabit the best ecological environments they could find before they came to be displaced by later agricultural, pastoral, and industrial societies. Thus, two important points to remember throughout the rest of this post are that:
1) population density was low and
2) virtually everyone had access to prime real estate on the varying inhabitable portions of the globe.
These factors make for a very different social, cultural, and political world–one which many of us struggle to imagine.
Of all the various ways humans have organized themselves throughout human history—from agriculturalists growing crops to pastoralists following their herds of cattle or sheep to merchants, artisans, and city-dwellers to modern industrialists and tech entrepreneurs—hunter-gatherers have been my favorite human lifestyle to study anthropologically.
Part of this interest is the result of scratching an academic itch because this was our species' default mode of life for such a long period. This intellectual outlook draws from insights in various academic disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology. Any self-respecting anthropologist must be aware of this context. As professors Richard Lee and Richard Daly document in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers,
“[H]unting and gathering represent the original condition of humankind and 90 percent of human history…”
At a timescale of millions of years, one could argue that our time since adopting agriculture–the last 10,000 years or so–is a minute aberration in the full context of human history. Much of my perspective on current politics, society, culture, human psychology, religion, and philosophy of life, is therefore informed by my understanding of how humans evolved during this incredibly long interim of hunting and gathering.
Everything from how states become formed and maintain power to infrastructure and technological developments to the foods we eat and how we come to perceive our social and cultural world would ideally be rooted in a deeper understanding of how humans evolved and under what environmental conditions. As I reflected in a previous post on travel and pilgrimage,
Given our extensive evolutionary history being nomadic hunter-gatherers, I can’t help but think that part of the reason so many of us feel restless, anxious, depressed, angry, cynical, or lacking inspiration nowadays is that the structure of our society and culture is no longer fully in line with how we are physically and psychologically primed.
Might a lot of the problems we see today from increased geopolitical tensions to environmental crises to disease epidemics, crime, addiction, and mental and physical health disorders have something to do with the fact that most modern humans are no longer living in the social, cultural, and ecological milieus in which so many previous generations of humans adapted to? Needless to say, this is a dense and challenging subject matter with many moving parts to consider and I can’t cover everything in one fell swoop. But I’ll give it a try.
The other part of why I’m so fascinated with hunter-gatherers is because I’m deeply interested and concerned about human well-being. I suspect that it was during this tremendously long interval of time that humans were most confident and comfortable with their state of being. Now a quick note of caution: such speculation is incredibly difficult to assess and this isn’t to argue that life was necessarily simple and easy, but that we were much more in tune physically and mentally with our environments. It might be wise to better understand this past if there is any chance of it benefiting our present or future.
Yes, times could of course be harsh. We succumbed to painful and grotesque illnesses without understanding the germ theory of disease, much less how to adequately treat them. We suffered from conflict and violence then too–albeit not with the planet-destroying capabilities we live with now in our nuclear age and other advanced weaponry.
Here’s the thing though. We’re still suffering from many of the same ailments to one degree or another. While life has undoubtedly improved for a lot of us in terms of our material conditions, we are still wracked with many anxieties and fears we just can’t seem to shake. Many of us seem to be suffering from a “crisis of meaning” in our lives. Thus, it’s questionable whether we’ve progressed as much as we think given that with each step forward in technology or culture, we often tend to introduce a new set of problems. Progress after all isn’t an escalator always ascending but more like a teeter-totter, attempting to keep things balanced at the least or ideally having the good outweigh the bad.
I tend to favor a worldview that takes into account the tradeoffs we are making, rather than notions of linear progress. The most obvious case is with the introduction of nuclear power—one side grants us incredibly efficient green energy, albeit with its own risks of potential meltdown and where to store radioactive waste, and the other grants us mushroom clouds of horrendous death and destruction.
Another example is the invention and refinement of automobiles. On the one hand, they’ve given us great benefits in travel and transportation. Still, they’ve also come with hundreds of thousands of deaths over the years from motor vehicle accidents and contributed to significant air pollution since their inception. Artificial intelligence is just the next stage of tradeoffs making our lives simultaneously better and worse and introducing a vast array of disquieting uncertainties.
This all segues into something I see and hear quite a bit in discussions of societal progress. In a recent New York Times opinion piece on ‘The Case for Hope’ journalist Nicolas Kristof states this common claim,
“The truth is that if you had to pick a time to be alive in the past few hundred thousand years of human history, it would probably be now.”
Is that the truth though? And, for the record, I’m not “anti-hope.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say I balk when I hear this assertion but I do always want to chime in at these moments like the pedantic and nerdy anthropologist I am to lend some nuance to this idea because there is quite a lot embedded in a statement like this. To gloss over a “few hundred thousand years” and suggest there were no other periods of human flourishing comparable to today provokes just a little skepticism in me.
For instance, how can we be so sure that between 32,500 BCE and 31,700 BCE, there wasn’t some kind of hunter-gatherer Upper Paleolithic Renaissance in Europe for 800 years? Indeed we do see an explosion of arts, crafts, and music occurring over much of this vast period in the archaeological record but the Upper Paleolithic is often highly condensed in our minds with few of us realizing we’re talking about many thousands of years of human social, cultural, and political activity. Our sense of time at this scale is hard for the human brain to appreciate fully and it’s even more difficult to imagine what it was truly like to live at this time, even if you are well-versed in the archaeology of the region and period.
Thus, most of our history remains enigmatic or inaccessible to us at the level of meaning we’d need to properly evaluate what the “best” time to be alive is. There is a vast amount of human history we are all simply too ignorant of. We compartmentalize huge stretches of history so they can conveniently sit in our minds, like on a bookshelf, as the ‘Upper Paleolithic.’ Taking a microscope to the past is not entirely feasible and so we come away with the impression that one century wasn’t all that different from the next. A lot of that is true. Much of the same technology remained the same for millennia, that much is clear, but what was different were the individuals who lived and died over centuries. What can we say about their well-being or how they might report on their life satisfaction? The vast array of human personalities and social dynamics are things we cannot evaluate in the archaeological record, but they were nonetheless forces shaping human history.
All that to say, I would be cautious about making too many grand assumptions about what life was like during this vast stretch of human history given that there were plausibly many social and cultural changes occurring that simply cannot be inferred from archaeological remains alone.
To put it another way, if we could send back in time platoons of anthropologists, historians, and journalists to record in detail all our history from the first moment hominins began walking and knocking stones around to make tools, how might that alter our views of human progress or development? Rather than a smooth linear uptick in “progress” might it look more like an elevation profile of a mountain with many ups, downs, and switchbacks across the ages?
A book by the historian of anthropology, George W. Stocking Jr. titled Victorian Anthropology traces this problem of “progress” in far more detail than I have time to elaborate here. Stocking gives an extensive tour of 18th and 19th-century European thinking around notions of “civilization” and “progress.” In a nutshell, our ideas of “progress” and “civilization” are deeply rooted in this period of intellectual development occurring in places like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany and their portrayal of “primitive” peoples as “savages” or “barbarians” greatly influenced how people came to think about the evolution of culture and society. Deep philosophical questions such as the state of human nature or the purpose of society, government, and the function of the state all stem from the time of the Enlightenment which still heavily colors our preconceived ideas about “progress” today.
Despite our supposedly sophisticated “politically correct” attitudes today, many of us retain some semblance of this Victorianesque outlook today and still hold on to these notions whether we’re conscious of it or not, looking down our noses at our hunter-gatherer ancestors with a hint of conceit when we try to imagine how they lived such a “primitive” or “crude” existence.
As much as I agree with the general spirit of this claim that today is the “best” time to be alive, there are some critical points to unpack that lend a bit more nuance than one might first expect. Let’s first set out three rhetorical questions to reflect on:
1) How much do we truly know about the “past few thousand years of human history”?
2) Why are we confident that now is the “best” time to be alive?
3) By what metrics do we measure things like human progress, well-being, and life satisfaction?
This focus on “progress” gets to the heart of why we tend to see many stuffy academics like anthropologists getting hot and bothered all the time by popular writers, scientists, and historians such as Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, or Yuval Noah Harari when they make assessments about human history and how they frame progress. (And as a disclaimer, I might be a bit of a rogue anthropologist because I enjoy a lot of the work of these three scholars, something that can be taboo to admit in the field of anthropology today). Perhaps I’ll explore more of the case of Anthropologists v. Pinker, Diamond, and Harari at a later date but suffice it to say that they are nonetheless fantastic writers and have ideas worth engaging with.
To help answer these three questions more succinctly, let’s invoke a broader question. What was it like to be a hunter-gatherer living on a planet with low population densities and with prime real estate and game aplenty?
As a whole, hunter-gatherers faced incredible hardships, especially during the ice ages. From numerous skeletons of Neanderthals living primarily in Europe and parts of the Middle East from about 430,000 years ago up until around 40,000 years ago, we can infer many members of their group suffered numerous injuries while obtaining their food living in the depths of a chilled landscape. There is no disputing the fact that with many of our advancements in technology, healthcare, and medicine, we’ve allowed far more people to survive and thrive in ways that wouldn’t have been possible thousands and even just a few centuries ago. So if billions of lives saved through these mediums is our metric for progress, it is difficult, if not impossible, to argue against that.
However, we must also bear in mind we’d be whittling away many negative attributes of our current society as well the further back in time we traveled. Nuclear weapons and advanced military applications would be gone from the world. That’s a relief. Widespread disease pandemics and epidemics were likely rare or nonexistent with low population densities–many viruses originated largely due to the raising of livestock or interactions with exotic creatures brought to food markets in cramped conditions alongside evermore crowds of humans. Much of this risk from zoonotic viruses would have been limited and rare before the development of cities.
What’s more, drug addiction and overdoses wouldn’t be conceivable (the opioid crisis has claimed hundreds of thousands in recent years). Mass incarceration is also a modern phenomenon and many health ailments such as obesity, heart disease, and lung cancer affect millions and correlate with a poor Western diet. We would not be living in a surveillance state worried about government overreach or some obnoxious online mob on social media dredging up unseemly videos and messages you made when you were a teenager and holding you hostage with blackmail or threatening to get you fired. Again, tradeoffs make for a much more useful framework to assess the question of “progress”.
Now to the question of what life would be like living as a hunter-gatherer–what would we all be doing with our time?
Contrary to popular opinion, most hunters and gatherers were likely not exhausting themselves spending all their time searching for food and struggling to survive. The famous anthropologist Marshall Sahlins famously argued (based on the ethnographic evidence up to 1968) that hunter-gatherers were the “original affluent society” and defined affluence as
“[O]ne in which all the people’s wants are easily satisfied…For wants are ‘easily satisfied’ by producing much or desiring little.”
In short, Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers worked less, enjoyed more leisure time, spent less time obtaining food, and got more sleep and that “the amount of work per capita increases with evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases.”
Another common sentiment derived from the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his magnum opus Leviathan is the assumption that life before “civilization” was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The quick rebuttal is, “Sometimes yes, probably mostly no.” In actuality, we can never know the precise resolution of the day-to-day experiences of people living 10,000 or 100,00 years ago much less all the intervening years and at all locales on the globe. But here is what we do know.
Hunter-gatherers were (and still are) incredibly well-adapted to the places they inhabit. They are profoundly resilient and proficient in obtaining everything needed to not just survive but thrive. A book I consumed heavily during my thesis research on hunter-gatherers in graduate school was Robert L. Kelly’s The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. In it, there is a ton of ethnographic data compiled from many decades of research on many modern hunter-gatherer societies across the globe. The picture that is revealed of all these groups is one of variation and captured by the last word in the title, a ‘spectrum.’ There are also two wonderful illustrations of the technology of the Ju/’hoan and Nuvugmiut that will blow your mind if you reflect on those images long enough. Talk about human invention and innovation.
If you have ever watched someone adept at a craft or skill whether it be woodworking, bricklaying, constructing a cabin, or even just making food or practicing martial arts or a sport, you will know something of what it means to master a set of skills. Now apply that to all aspects of hunting and gathering.
People knew exactly what they were doing when they were hunter-gatherers. They knew how to efficiently gather and store food, manufacture tools and clothing, organize their home spaces, and quickly construct fires to cook and keep warm through the cold nights. They lived in small to large groups of between 50 and 150 members and were wise in the ways of politics, perhaps more so than we are today. They knew how to navigate the landscape and didn’t need GPS or maps to do it. Humans then are what we are now: resilient. We, living in the comfortable conditions we inherited today, have forgotten that fact, but I do not doubt it is still there within us.
Now try to imagine inhabiting this world. Not from the perspective of your life today, but of being born into a hunter-gatherer world and raised to become as adept as a person then in this lifestyle. Like family and society today, your kin and culture would ensure you knew the basics of how to live and make it in the world. They would show you how to hunt game and obtain stone and other materials to manufacture all the tools you could want or need. You’d know how to make fire wherever you found yourself on the landscape. Moving around all the time, your mind and body would be incredibly lean and healthy and you wouldn’t need to be paying all those outrageous gym memberships, or personal trainers, or getting hooked on the next bogus diet fad to keep you fit.
You’d occasionally travel to hunt or to meet up with another group of relatives for a seasonal ceremonial gathering where you’d combine resources in a potluck fashion, swapping stories of what happened that year, and taking part in annual dances and rituals of music and feasting that were the modern equivalent of seeing your favorite artist perform at the Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver, Colorado. You’d be spending far more time with all your closest friends and family than we seem to have time for today. You would sleep under the stars every night and have a whole cosmology, religion, and philosophy of life to keep your mind and body wondering and wandering.
The point I’m hoping to illustrate is that only if we could live multiple lives would we truly be able to assess the question of whether now is the “best” time to be alive versus all the other generations of human history. There is a lot packed into qualifying the “best” time to be alive. Many of us might actually be more content with life as hunter-gatherers. Were there major conflicts, acts of violence, instances of slavery, and inequalities during our hunter-gatherer phase as well? Of course. Given such a prolonged period as it was, it would be incredible if there wasn’t. Sometimes there were and sometimes not.
We should neither be in the business of romanticizing the past nor glorifying the present, but humanizing who we have been and who we are so that we have sound foundations to build better worlds and realistic expectations of who we can become. Human well-being and life satisfaction, I would argue, ought to be some of the more important metrics by which we measure progress.
We know, generally speaking, hunter-gatherers were living egalitarian lifestyles. But there were also nonegalitarian hunter-gatherers with rigid political and social hierarchies. Many were nomadic, but a few were completely sedentary. Some lived in warm, tropical environments. Others lived in Arctic and tundra environments. Some moved twice a year and some moved more than 40 times a year. Some had disputes over territory which escalated into violence. Others found ways to get along that would approximate a hunter-gatherer utopia. Sometimes the environment changed for the worse, and the game was hard to find. People starved or had to travel great distances with the hopes of finding greener pastures to settle. Thus when and where are important factors when assessing hunting and gathering societies because there is a lot of variation to consider and things weren’t always the same.
Bear in mind that many of us also seem to loathe much of modern life and coping in today’s world is a challenge for many of us, even if we are fortunate. Many of us find it difficult to accept that we have to work monotonous jobs from 9-5 for 40 years or more until we can hopefully retire with our minds, bodies, and finances intact enough to enjoy some peace. There is a real “crisis of meaning” today and I suspect it is related somehow to living a more constrained and less authentic and autonomous kind of life–qualities that pertain most to the hunter-gatherer lifeway. I don’t see many of us returning to the hunter-gatherer way of life any time soon nor would the industrial scale and structure of society allow for it, but there is something to the notion that Lee and Daly hint at–that by learning more about hunter-gatherers we may one day see our way into a more sustainable and liberated future.
Perhaps hunter-gatherers can remind us that we can live a more frugal life and not be so fixated on a consumer culture that helps clutter our garages and landfills. Do we have to have so many possessions after all? Long before Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club, hunter-gatherers knew well the sentiment that “the things you own, end up owning you.” Nomadism demands a Buddhist-like nonattachment to the world of things. Knowing that hunter-gatherers lived a high-quality life with very few possessions and strong attachments to their kin groups is a model that many of us still retain within us.
Many of us report that we desire to spend more time with the people we love and we know deep down we don’t need much to be happy—that most of the things that bring us life satisfaction are not things that can be purchased, but must be cultivated through life experiences. What if we could switch our culture and mindset to investing more in quality experiences and our well-being than we invest in ever more luxury goods, trinkets, and all that stuff crammed into a storage facility we’ve long forgotten about?
Ultimately, trying to assess things like what is “better” or what represents “progress” becomes a bit of a fool’s errand because we don’t have access to a whole host of previous historical lives and data to adequately compare and contrast. Evaluating whether now is the “best” time to be alive is like claiming that your country is the best place to live even though you’ve only ever lived in one country. How would you know without an honest survey of other places?
I have come to appreciate the world through the lens of tradeoffs. I ask myself, would I make the trade to live as a hunter-gatherer if I had a time machine? On some days I’d say no way because I’ve adapted to a lifestyle that allows me to do incredible things like read books and take great pride in constructing things like my own bookcase.
I get to hike or run while listening to an endless supply of wonderful podcasts and music. Throughout my week I get to practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and write on Substack! I love coffee, wine, whiskey, and cuisine from all over the world too much, and traveling and seeing the world are far too important to throw it all away. Plus there’s camping and backpacking to scratch that itch of being outdoors and on the move. I’m sure if we could ask hunter-gatherers from several thousand years ago if they’d swap lives, we’d see a few weighing their options too but most likely coming up with hundreds of reasons why they’d prefer to keep living the lifestyle they’re most accustomed to, too.
However, on other days, when I’m deeply depressed staring at a screen from work and following the news on all the horrible ways humans are treating each other across the planet, I wish desperately to escape. I think of how many tedious and senseless tasks we all do in our modern times and how many numbers we all have to store in our heads to get by in the world, from countless passwords we can no longer keep track of to social security numbers, my member ID to the co-op, and endless addresses–and why is there a spot in my brain that still needs to remember my phone number from childhood (767-2398)!? Let’s face it, modern life can be insufferable and tedious at times.
I can become disillusioned by much these days so sometimes, yes, I wish desperately to withdraw from it all, pack my bags, and call up Doc Brown for his DeLorian to whisk me somewhere into the distant past where I can simply sit around in a cave dreaming of a different future yet to come. I’d love to see a world devoid of all the landscape modifications and environmental degradations that have ensued over the centuries–in what comedian George Carlin lamented in the United States as a pristine wilderness turned into a “coast-to-coast shopping mall.”
In some sense, I can’t help but think there were long periods of human history where many of us, myself included, would be incredibly content living a lifestyle where we would be well-fed on some seared mammoth haunch, sitting around campfires, staring at the stars imagining the future or telling stories of the past and wandering the landscape with our close friends and families at a pace that wasn’t taken for granted but cherished.
But then I rewatch Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to revisit my favorite scene with Gil’s “minor insight” about the “golden ages” we all like to conjure up.
Right, these people don’t have any antibiotics! Perhaps we shouldn’t get too nostalgic for the days when public sanitation wasn’t a thing or when people never bathed or brushed their teeth. Okay, back to the future for me!
Nevertheless, I retain a lot of reverence for hunter-gatherers because they represent human resilience. They deserve our attention because they may offer us not just insight into who we’ve been for most of our existence, but what we can become. I will conclude my homage to the original human wanderers with an excerpt from my MA thesis that examined the resiliency of hunter-gatherers:
The closest I will likely ever get to living a nomadic lifestyle was a four-month 1300-mile thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail from Maine to northern Virginia in the summer of 2014. I had just graduated from Indiana University with my BA in history and anthropology and although I had just spent four years learning all about human biological and cultural adaptability in my anthropology classes and archaeological field schools in Wyoming and Montana, it took several thousand steps backpacking this famous well-trodden corridor to feel and witness the, oftentimes agonizing, physiological and psychological adaptability occurring within my mind and body. I was also taken in by the rather harrowing personal stories I listened to from many of the other modern wanderers I had the fortune to share this experience with.
What I learned from this time was that a lot of the people opting to spend months trekking in the woods had also experienced a great deal of personal suffering and tragedy and were using this trail as a medium of perseverance to overcome their misfortunes, such as war, the death of loved ones, illness, addiction, or divorce. And these epiphanies of human fortitude; of boldly facing risk and adversity; of imbuing time, space, and place with meaning and healing; gave me a surge of hope for the future and a revealing connection with the past that I suspect no amount of degrees likely ever will.
I realized from that experience that there is already a deeply embedded capacity for resilience within each one of us that transcends time and can enable humanity to endure despite the many challenges ahead. Understanding the many strategies people use to cope with their risks, how we create places of meaning, how we channel resilience socially, how we connect with the natural world, and what empowers cultures and people to ultimately persist strikes me as vitally important in today’s highly fearful, cynical, and volatile world. It is toward this continued development and refinement of the theories and methods in human resiliency and cultural persistence that I wish to contribute and dedicate my research.
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
Recommended Texts:
Cummings, Vicki, Peter Jordan, and Marek Zvelebil (eds)., The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers. (London: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Kelly, Robert L., The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Lee, Richard B. and Richard Daly (eds)., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Sahlins, Marshall “Notes on the Original Affluent Society”, Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968).
Stocking, George W., Victorian Anthropology. (London: Free Press, 1987).
Really loved this piece, you’ve done an excellent job bringing to light the idea of perspective when discussing human experience. Deeply enjoyed this well thought out, coherent, and sourced piece. Thanks for the effort here!
Progress might mean a more secure food supply, safer childbirth, better protection from the elements, medical care (including dental and vision), etc.