Read Live Long, Die Short Online
Authors: Roger Landry
We can get more than a speculative view of the hunter-gatherer environment through the observations of anthropologists like Hugh Brody and Marjorie Shostak, both of whom lived in current-day hunter-gatherer societies. Brody, a writer, anthropologist, and filmmaker, lived with the Inuit in the Arctic and with the salmon-fishing tribes of the Canadian Northwest. In his book
The Other Side of Eden
, Brody dispels myths of hunter-gatherer societies as primitive and brutish, nomadic in the sense that they were never connected to place: “The thing about being with the Inuit is that you have a sense of being with the most gracious, most generous, most sophisticated of human beings. So far from being simple, they are very, very rich and complex.” Likewise, he describes their culture as respectful to both the planet and its people. Rather than having a drifter mentality, “hunter-gatherers are completely committed to one place because their success depends on their knowledge of the one place and their knowledge is not transferable.”
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Marjorie Shostak lived with the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southwestern Africa and focused on the status of women in this hunter-gatherer society, concluding that !Kung San women had higher status and autonomy than women in Western cultures because of their food contributions.
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Rather than describing primitive people, the observations of these authors give us a rich look into our human mirror and help us understand why we are the way we are. What it is, in fact, that makes us human. Whether we can attribute the characteristics of modern-day hunter-gather populations to our distant ancestors might be debatable, but I believe most would concede that they are culturally as closely connected to our ancestral past as any other group of humans currently living.
Even a cursory review of the literature about current hunter-gatherer cultures leads one to make some general conclusions that are both surprising and revealing.
Hunter-gatherer cultures …
Although today’s hunter-gatherer cultures are doubtless affected in some ways by modern-day civilization, it seems rational to assume that these cultures reflect, at least to some degree, and to a degree much more than our current society, the culture of our distant ancestors and—because of the sheer predominance of this culture in our overall history—the environment to which we as humans are most adapted.
So, what generalizations can we make about our ancestors? First, most of their activities were geared toward survival: their own, that of their tribe, and without their being aware of it, that of our very species. They worked hard for food. In most environments, even when food was plentiful, it took much work to gather and transport it back to the rest of the tribe or village. Whether gathering or hunting, obtaining food required much greater expenditure of energy than it does today.
Our ancestors moved
—a lot—in search of food and shelter. Because food could not be preserved, there was a tendency to eat heavily when it was available. Even though it was very rare, our ancestors preferred high-fat food, because it was calorie rich and able to sustain them for when food was not available—a trait that causes difficulty today. Their diets consisted of mainly fruits, wild vegetables, nuts, fish, and the occasional meat from a small animal or the leftovers from a predator’s kill. Remembering locations for food and water was a critical skill (which explains why our memory for images and locations is much better than
for numbers and names). They ate often, foraging for whatever food was available. Sugar, other than that found naturally in foods, was foreign to their physiology.
Exposure to the elements was a major concern, especially in northern latitudes. Infant deaths were very common, and conception and nurturing of the young were a major focus of the entire group, yet they could not preclude the mother’s role in gathering and preparing food. Basically, it took a village to survive and thrive. Everyone had a role in this survival scenario. Everyone had a place, a status, and a familiarity with all others in the band. There was a social compact: I help you and you help me. Sharing was core to how our ancestors interacted with each other. Helping others in the group was not viewed as a service but was expected. (My friend Alison McReynolds spent time in Mauritania and was surprised to learn there was no word for
volunteering
in the language of the village people she worked with.) There was great respect for others in the tribe or village but a suspicion of others not in their tribe, a xenophobia that made sense given that each tribe was competing for the limited resources they needed to survive.
Actions that benefited the individual over the greater good of the tribe were considered heinous and could result in banishment, the ultimate punishment and an almost guaranteed death sentence. Members of the group, tribe, and even village had little concept of themselves as single entities in the world, but only as part of group. That group, in fact, gave them their only chance for survival.
Time had little meaning beyond the seasons, the cycle of the moon, and availability of food. Our ancestors were intimately tied to the rhythms of nature. They woke not to alarm clocks but to the light. They spent dark hours, when work was not possible, telling stories, propagating their own history, usually around a fire. Communication was oral and face-to-face, even before language was known and certainly after. Stress was similar to that experienced by their mammal cousins: It came from the hunt or being hunted, the potential threat from strangers, storms, famine. When these threats weren’t present, their lives were peaceful and in harmony with nature.
Infections and accidents were the primary killers. Average life expectancy then, and for most of time man has been on earth up until recent millennia, was two, perhaps three decades. Infections and accidents or childhood diseases killed most—and usually fairly quickly.
In today’s hunter-gatherer cultures, the older in the tribe are not marginalized but rather celebrated, and it would make sense that it would be similar with our ancestors. Old age was rare and therefore revered, respected,
and associated with high stature. Life on the move was harsh, however, and any reverence for the older was tempered by the reality of this life. Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1970 book
The Coming of Age
,
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bore witness to this harshness toward elders when they could no longer move with the group and therefore threatened the survival of all. Despite these rare instances of elder pruning, living long was a great accomplishment and lucky indeed was a tribe that had an elder to advise them on the best course of action when the tribe was challenged. In fact, older adults had a key role in the overall functioning of the tribe. This role was viewed as a responsibility, neither optional nor insignificant. It would essentially remain this way in subsequent societies, until the mid-eighteenth century.
So, we have these early humans, who looked a lot like us—our family tree. We are happy indeed that they survived in a very difficult environment. Had they not, of course, I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading. We would not exist. In fact, everything they did had a survival purpose: having
connections with others
helped each survive; constantly
moving
and searching for food kept them from starving; having a
purpose
that involved the greater good of the tribe helped the group survive; behavior that fostered the
conception and nurturing of children
helped them survive as a tribe and as a race. And so these traits were deeply embedded in our human brains as instinctual preferences. And although our world today is radically different, we maintain the basic makeup that helped them adapt to and survive in their world.
And then, approximately ten thousand years ago, we began to gather in villages as we started to grow crops and domesticate animals. We became agrarian societies and were now able to stay in place. We exchanged the nomadic
lifestyle
for more permanent and effective shelters, the increased availability of food, and more types of food, with more meat and cultivated crops. What did not change appreciably was the tight social fabric of the group, the social compact, the high level of physical movement, and the necessity to work together for the common good—i.e., a harvest that would sustain the village. Your great (times four hundred) grandmother worked in the fields or tended animals most of the day until she was older and then was in charge of the youngest children, who could not yet work in the fields. The harvest was the most important concern of the entire village, and she had an important role to play. To not do her part was unthinkable.
Hunter-gatherer
Agrarian
And then, after approximately four hundred generations of this agrarian culture, and only ten generations ago, the Industrial Revolution arrived and everything changed—truly everything. Virtually every aspect of the daily life of most humans was altered by this massive shift in how we humans lived. Humans found themselves in environments very foreign to what they, their parents, and their earlier ancestors had experienced—not only fish out of water, but fish thrown into a cesspool.
He rose before dawn, as did the whole family. The sounds of his neighbors also rising early was insurance against sleeping too long. To be late was to be jobless; to be jobless was to be destitute. Breakfast was meager but filling. He left the apartment with his two sons, twelve and ten, who had been able to get jobs picking up scraps of material. His wife would be sewing all day, repairing the clothing of their neighbors for money or food. He and his sons walked in the dark, alongside other men and sons who lived nearby but whom he didn’t know very well. They punched in at the sheet-metal factory and began their twelve-hour shift. If he was lucky he
could get a sixteen-hour shift occasionally. They had it better than other workers. They had three breaks, two for the bathroom and another fifteen minutes to eat the lunch his wife had packed. He wouldn’t see his boys until the shift was over.
This ancestor was a very good worker, turning out higher numbers than others and therefore never getting close to being fired for low output. He stood in one place all day punching holes in pieces of metal. He had come close to missing his quota when he had influenza last year. Many of the workers in his area had been fired. Many had died of influenza. In fact, they had lost many of their friends—fathers, mothers, children—as the disease spread rapidly through the neighborhood. He was terrified when his three-year-old daughter began coughing. He had her seen by a midwife, who had told them to boil water to make steam for her to breath. She had lost weight but survived.
They were saving the money from his wife’s sewing and hoped someday to join his brother in Toledo, who said wages were higher and shifts shorter. Maybe they could rent a larger house with a yard. He was convinced they could do this if he could stay healthy.
At the end of the shift a whistle blew and he met his sons at the gate and they walked home quietly with the same group from the morning. Dinner would be ready. They would sit at the table talking. His wife would do some lessons with the boys, hoping they would become good enough readers to get steady jobs when they were older. Sleep came early and easy after a long day of monotonous work.
A PBS special on Andrew Carnegie described the even more challenging life of steel workers, who labored every day of the week in twelve-hour shifts. They got one holiday a year: the Fourth of July. The TV program highlighted the workers’ perspectives on their jobs in the steel mills: “Hard! I guess it’s hard,” said a laborer at the Homestead mill. “I lost forty pounds the first three months I came into this business. It sweats the life out of a man.” … “You don’t notice any old men here,” said a Homestead laborer in 1894. “The long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up.” Sociologist John A. Fitch called it “old age at forty.”
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Postindustrial life, then, represented a dramatic shift from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and even from the more recent agrarian lifestyle that preceded industrialization.
Postindustrial urban cultures …
With the industrialization of Europe and America, we moved from our rural homes to cities. Work now was tedious, done under noisy and dirty conditions, and determined by the clock. And not only work was affected: Meals, school, sleep, recreation were all tied to the work clock. Shifts were ten to twelve—even sixteen—hours with few breaks. Factory smoke frequently blocked the sun, and cities were gloomy and dark. Stress rose as the demand for production drove employers to demand more and more from workers. Although there was some banding together of ethnic groups or former village members, for the most part families found themselves on their own, with no village to rely on if health or finances took a bad turn. Individuals had to provide for themselves and their families. Women whose husbands died found themselves destitute and out of options. Income rose, but so did the cost of food, shelter, and basic necessities. Illness or injury could result in loss of work, with devastating consequences. Children were exploited as a cheap labor source.