An interesting analysis. I have read elsewhere something along similar lines. The idea being that settled agriculture allowed food to be 'commoditised' (ie. turned to commercial or other advantage), as we could store the food long-term. This in turn lead to society becoming stratified - and so everyone was no longer equal.

Stratification of society leads to concentration of power and as soon as individuals have an unfair proportion of power and influence, disproportionate behaviours follow (the law of unintended consequences). Power and influence can displace wisdom and knowledge.

We see this in commodity bubbles where individuals can manipulate whole markets for their own gain - and so it is that an individual with absolutely no skill or knowledge in farming can manipulate the living of an agricultrual worker on the other side of the world.

"50% of women are in a polygamous marriage...Extramarital sex is also usually common, though it is usually not acceptable for women....wife-beating exists...Mothers are usually the main, but not only caregiver of kids."

As a woman, this certainly doesn't sound idyllic to me!

I just love this. Thank you. Have you read Paul Shepard? He said very much the same things throughout his many books. "It’s like using a Formula 1 car to pull a plow."

I'm not entirely comfortable with the idealistic (or it is the "Noble Savage") depiction of H-G groups. (Yeah, I know, the guy's got credentials -- and so his livelihood DEPENDS on him fitting into his academic milieu. Isn't this just the obverse of an ad hominen argument, or maybe it IS ad hominem?) (That's an ongoing problem, to detour away for a sec, with *all* current academic research: the researchers DARE not publish stuff that conflicts with "the conventional wisdom" and jeopardize their reach for tenure or their status in their group. Don't we see that all the time in nutrition?)

"These oh-so-gentle, noble egalitarians rarely, if ever, had wars." Just as with chimps, when an "outsider" band enters their territory -- jeopardizes their resources -- they (absolutely) have wars. Because there were so FEW bands, and so much territory, they rarely had wars. When their neck-of-the-woods was invaded, they went to war. I'm certainly not applauding agriculture, which requires wars, but the rose-colored-glasses depiction of H-G groups may very well be ... contaminated ... by modern-day financial and status considerations on the part of the person doing the describing. How are we to tell?

And yes, I see that the researcher allows for small-scale warfare – and for the same reasons as large-scale warfare. Is that a function of group size or do they intend to point to some functional difference in the cause(s)? IF there are so few H-Gs, and so few women and so little competition for other resources, then of course there's no reason for bride capture/war. If, on the other hand, there IS pressure and competition, then there will be those negative (or is that necessary) results. That's NOT a function of H-G lifestyle; rather the lifestyle is a function of the small group size and lack of a need for resource control.

The idea that territorial control automatically requires war – or the protection of resources and the driving off of interlopers (and those description differ in *size,* not kind!) – seems to me to be the driving factor, and not that, in some weird way, H-Ging allows for a peaceful "Noble Savage" way of life.

Their two major problems with that analysis, though. One is that the data is based on modern ethnographies. Two is that the assumptions underlying their exclusion criteria for the societies they included. They disqualified societies from their analysis for having fixed settlements, or for using fishing in their subsistence strategy. I am not convinced that these cultural features could not have been part of our evolutionary history. I wonder if an inaccurately narrow definition of hunter-gatherer societies biased their conclusions.

I think we need to consider more strongly the point (acknowledged by the authors) that the best-documented h-g groups are peoples in modern times who live in marginal land areas (often pushed their by agricultural neighbors). I think that the most salient feature of the groups from which the authors draw their conclusions about pacifist, egalitarian groups is that they have not-great natural resources available. I think I'd need to have it proved to me that groups that lived in areas with un-abundant natural resources were the dominant populations that were naturally selected and our main evolutionary ancestors.

It is clear that a group that had access to a significant concentration of natural resources could, without agriculture, naturally develop fixed settlements and denser populations. The Haida of the Pacific Northwest, for example, developed a stratified society that engaged in warfare and slavery; they enjoyed abundant marine resources that offered an easily acquired surplus.

Also, I'm not sure that I consider seven groups to be an adequate sample size to be making generalizations about prehistoric populations.

Also also, I'd feel more confident about their conclusions if they made at least an attempt to look at archaeological evidence for our prehistoric ancestors.

I enjoyed your essay, but would temper its message with some of Elenor and Adria’s caveats.

Re. Elenor’s comments on academics, I agree that they’re mostly herd animals with some nauseating habits. I’ve known Robin for long time, however, and he’s an exception to most rules, a maverick who entered academia late and from another field.

(J., Did you mention Robin’s PhD from Caltech?)

Re. themandus.org, Jan has it right: rubbish.

Re. Michelle’s notes on non-idyllic lives for women, well, nothing is very close to perfect. Whatever the defects of polygamy, it occurs to me that it does ensure that all women can marry without some of them being forced to pair up with the least-desirable males.

Re. The astoundingly positive aspects of some of the pre-European societies in North America, there’s an anomaly in their situation: Abundant resources, allowing societies to operate far from the long-term ecological limit. This allowed people to split off and live elsewhere without struggling against others, and by the same token, temporarily relieved pressures for inter-group conflict.

The cause for this abundance (much commented on by Europeans at the time) way the catastrophic collapse of population that resulted from successive waves of deadly Old-World diseases. This collapse preceded by generations European encounters with of most of these societies.

The book 1491 is well grounded and turned my view of the pre-Columbian New World upside down. I recommend it.

Re. your post in general: A big Bravo! for helping to spread understanding of the many ways in which the Neolithic was a catastrophe for human life.

"Modern non-sectarian Western democracy" is far closer to idyllic for womankind than the foraging society you put forth as idyllic in the article.

I'll take civilization, thanks!

i understand that most polygamous societies were largely a way of "taking care of" the "extra" women in a group in which monogamy would leave a number unpaired, and thus unprovided-for. when male society-members engage in higher risk activities, and there's a slightly higher rate of female births.... it didn't originate as a wife-collecting, show-off activity, whatever it has declined into.

it's interesting to note, also, that islam originally afforded rights to women that they didn't have in europe, at the time. 🙂