The lessons we can learn from the ancient foragers. Link of Harari’s book Sapien, published in 2014.
Bushmen (San) indigenous hunter-gatherer group, primarily located in Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa.
Hunter-Gather Genes:
Every time I go to the dentist, the dental hygienist would ask me about my sugar intake. Similarly, when I go to the doctors for checkup, they would ask me to have a blood test to check my blood glucose and and blood cholesterol. It is grilled in my mind that sweets and greasy food are bad for my health. Yet, I often wonder why we as a species binge on sweetest and greasiest food. According to Harrari’s Sapien, we have inherited the gorging gene.
In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food — ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare.
The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.
While the “gorging gene” theory is widely accepted, other theories are much more contentious. One of them is the theory that ancient foraging communities have no private property, monogamous relationship and fatherhood. Women can form multiple bonds with men and women, and all the adults co-parent their children, such structure is well-documented in chimpanzees and bonobos. In fact, collective fatherhood is still practiced among the Bari Indians. Before studies of modern embryo development, there was no solid evidence that babies were sired by one man and not by many.
The proponents of this ‘ancient commune’ theory argue that the frequent infidelities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates of divorce,not to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from which both children and adults suffer, all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families and monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software. Many scholars vehemently reject this theory, insisting that both monogamy and the forming of nuclear families are core human behaviours.
In order to resolve this debate, Harari set out to understand the living conditions of our ancestor between 70,000 years ago (the start of the cognitive revolution) and 12,000 years ago (the start of the agricultural revolution). Unfortunately, there were no written records of foragers and their living arrangements, with the existence of very few artifacts. A typical member of an affluent society will own millions of artifacts (every emotional, religious, cultural activity…). We hardly notice the accumulation of our stuff until we move. Foragers moved house every week, every day, totaling whatever they have on their backs, which were mostly essential possessions. Thus, their mental emotional and religious lives were conducted without the help of artifacts.
Hunter-gatherers are different whether or not they are from different parts of the world or within the same region. The five to eight million foragers who populated the world on the eve of agricultural revolution were divided in thousands of different tribes, languages and cultures. In order words, people with the same genetic makeup who lived under similar ecological conditions can create very different imagined realities, which manifested into different norms and values. And precisely for that reason, Harari argued that we should bypass the debate and pay attention to multi-faceted ways in which ancient foragers walked this earth.
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 original affluent society
Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.
As a result, Harari notes the evidence of the decreased size in average Sapien brain since the age of foraging. When agriculture and industry came along, superb mental abilities were replaced by the skills of a variety of experts. For the first time, people can rely on the skills of other for survival, and pass on their unremarkable genes to the next generation.
Another advantageous characteristic of foragers is that they know intricately both the external world of animals, plants & objects and the internal world of their body and senses. They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, knew how to walk, sit and run in the most agile, efficient manner. As a result, they are more dexterous than modern humans who have practice yoga and tai chi for years.
While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats — such as the Kalahari Desert work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three,and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily…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.
In addition to living more more interesting lives than their counterparts in the agricultural and industrial societies, the foragers also had the ideal nutrition. The foragers rarely suffered from malnutrition and starvation because of their varied diet. In contrast to farmers who tend to eat an unbalanced diet of a single crop (i.e: wheat, potato, rice), ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different food groups a day. They might have berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits,snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. The menu of tomorrow would be entirely different from today, which ensured that ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients.
Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies(such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements — ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics
The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.’
However, Harari cautioned readers not to idealize foragers’ lives as easy and not to condemn it as barbaric and primitive. Their child mortality was high and in many occasions, foragers have to abandon disabled old people or slain unwanted babies, such as the Aché people. The Aché lived in Paraguay until 1960s and was accustomed to such reality to avoid being killed by Paraguayan farmers.
The Agriculture Revolution: History’s Biggest Fraud
For 2.5 million years human fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention…Homo sapiens spread from East Africa to the Middle East, to Europe and Asia, and finally to Australia and America — but everywhere they went, Sapiens too continued to live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics? All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species. From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived — the Agricultural Revolution.
Interestingly, Harari emphasizes that considering our 21st century advanced technologies, more than 90% of calories that humans eat were domesticated by our ancestor before 3500 B.C. Agriculture revolution sprang up primarily in Middle East, Asia, and Central Americas, because these lands were most conducive to the domestication of the select few candidate species (wheat, beans, maize, pea, rice, millet, etc…).
We inherited the minds of foragers and hunter-gatherers, and the cuisines of ancient farmers.
By first century AD, most of the world were farmers. Many scholars considered the agricultural revolution as “a great leap forward for humanity.” They portrayed a tale fueled by the ever more evolved, intelligent Sapien, who abandoned the dangerous nomadic lifestyle to transform nature’s secret into more pleasant, abundant farmer’s life.
That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers…The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.
The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
One would imagine that the elites themselves were responsible for this fraud. Surprisingly, Harari argues that the culprits were actually wheat, rice and potatoes. Wheat was a wild grass in Middle East, yet within a couple of millennia, it has become the most successful plant in history of the earth (covering ten time the size of Britain). Around 10,000 years ago, humans settle permanently next to their wheat fields. Cultivating wheat means clearing field of rocks and pebbles, weeding under the scorching sun, watching out for worms and flies, building fence to protect wheat from locusts, digging irrigation canals, carrying water buckets, and collecting animal feces to nourish the ground. The bodies of Sapien changed to such labor-intensive task, which gave rise to a plethora of new ailments such as slip disc, hernia, arthritis. In contrast to previous experts’ praise, the agricultural revolution did not bring about the domestication of wild species. It witnessed the “domestication” (domus in Latin means house) of Sapiens.
Village life’s immediate benefits include better protection against wild animal, rain and cold. However, disadvantages (such as malnutrition and starvation due to failed crops, 15% of deaths due to human fighting) outweighed the advantages. Only after thousands of years, human violence was reduced due to the larger political frameworks (cities, kingdoms and states).
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes … The evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA…If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.
The Luxury Trap
The last Ice Age ended 18,000 years ago, which gave rise to global warming and ideal weather for growing Middle Eastern wheat and cereals. People started eating more wheat, and carrying wheat back to the campsite to cook. The wheat grains, dropped along human trails, multiplied with each forest burn that cleared away thick trees and shrubs. The abundant sources of wheat and other grains allowed human bands to settle down in seasonal camps, which gradually became permanent settlements.
Between 9500 and 8500 BC, Jericho sapiens in the Middle East shifted from gathering to cultivating wild grains. Giving up nomadic lifestyles meant not only that women can have a child every year, but also that more fields were needed to feed the extra mouths. Child mortality was rampant because more babies had to compete for food and milk, grain diets weakened the immune system and humans lived in disease-ridden settlements. ‘Wheat bargain’ became more burdensome, life in Jericho was harder for average person in 8500 BC than in 9500 BC.
Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work — say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface — people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.
To me, the more interesting question is : Why didn’t humans abandon the agricultural plan when it backfired? In response, Harari has two explanations. The first reason is small changes that transformed society took generations to accumulate. Thus, nobody remembered a different way to live. The second reason is the explosion in population growth. Who’s gonna die of starvation so they can go back to the old ways. Poignantly, the story of the Jericho is still relevant today.
The pursuit of an easier life result in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.
The lesson I learned here is that people get used to certain luxury, they count on it to a point where they can’t live without it. In the last few decades, there are numerous inventions of time-saving devices (washing machines, vacuums, dishwashers, cell phones, PC, emails). We save all that trouble and time to have a more relaxed life, right? Yet sadly not. In the snail-mail era, people only wrote letters for important things, and thus considered thoroughly before they replied. In modern day, we receive countless unimportant emails per day, all of which we are expected to reply immediately. In Harari’s analysis, saving time equates to revving up the treadmill of life ten times, and making our days more anxious and agitated.
The trade-off of Sapien history is one that reflects the story of the luxury trap:
Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.
