rearticulation of point: Hunter Gatherer “bliss”

Saturday evening (which rapidly became sunday morning), Rohan, Josh and I sat around discussing. Eventually, Aaron, and finally Simon, became entangled in the conversation.

We spanned several topics including homelessness, intentional living, inequality, and military intervention in Iraq. But one especially vigorous topic was the quality of life in hunter/gatherer societies. The debate continued in a post in Josh’s livejournal.

There are some interesting points here, so I thought I’d bring it back here. Josh apparently thinks that Rohan and I believe h/g’s to be living in utopia, despite our protestations to the contrary. We each claimed that there were many desireable elements of h/g society in contrast to modern society. Neither of us argued that the converse was not also true. (I’ve certainly benefited from modern medicine, directly and indirectly, as the most trivial example).

We did claim that modern Americans had lots of bad stuff going on. Isolation from our fellow human being perhaps the most significant of these problems. I would also cite the host of diet and habit related diseases related to excessive, inappropriate consumption, as well as inadequate physical activity. These particular problems are not present in the conditions under which homo sapiens have spent the most time evolving, hunter-gatherer society.

Bone and dental records indicate that agricultural societies tended to have significantly worse nutrition than hunter-gatherer societies. What made agricultural societies work was the ability to mass produce humans, and stick them in a more compact than ideal setup. Hard to move to the next hunting ground if the women are constantly pregnant. There are also suspicions that that is when the gender equity gap really took off, for related reasons.

For references regarding the dietary consequences inherent in the switch to agriculture, I point you towards:
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfford/342WorstMistake.htm
http://anthro.fullerton.edu/sjohnson/anth315/Lecture%205%20Outline.htm
as well as Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

So, great, it rocks to be a hunter gatherer*, so what?. Do I want to become a hunter-gatherer? Not really. I’m pretty used to living here and now. I could probably adapt to living in such a society, given a few years. Primarily I use it to provide hope and ideas regarding the problems facing me as a less than fully satisfied member of modern American society. My perspective on that factor in another post.

* at least, until you’re overrun by a more populous civilization with better tools, which wants your hunting grounds for farmland, factories, or mini-malls.