The Real People
Or, why I so often ask, “How do indigenous people handle this?”
We can’t really draw a definitive line in time and say, “Human evolution began here,” for all the same reasons that we can’t really say what “separates humans from the animals.” Nothing separates us; we are animals. For the same reason, we can’t neatly draw a line and say that our ancestors on this side of it count as human and those don’t.
Usually anthropologists look at Homo habilis, who emerged about 2.3 million years ago in eastern Africa. They bear a striking resemblance to Australopithecus afarensis, but with a significantly larger cranial capacity. However, the division between the genera Homo and Australopithecus often seems murky and ill-defined, owing more to our need to differentiate ourselves than any solid taxonomy, just as some biologists question the division between the genera Homo and Pan.
Nonetheless, let’s take for granted that “human evolution” (whatever that may mean) goes back about two million years. In that time, the human brain hasn’t evolved a very good way to intuitively grasp numbers, much less very big numbers, so when we hear that humans have existed for two million years, that impresses us as a very big number. Likewise, when we hear that our civilization has existed for ten thousand years, that, too, impresses us as a very big number. However, we have little intuitive grasp of how those numbers really relate to each other.
10,000 years represents just half a percent (0.5%) of two million years.
Or, in visual form, consider this diagram. The total line covers the two million years of human evolution. Each pixel in height represents a single millennium. We’ve indicated the roughly 5,000 years from the Agricultural Revolution to the beginning of recorded history in red, and the past 5,000 years of recorded history in blue.
And yet even this overstates the importance of the Agricultural Revolution in the human experience, by suggesting that in that last 0.5% of our time on earth all or nearly all of humanity adopted this project. Only in the last half a pixel could one reasonably claim that even a majority of the human population had a stake in this undertaking. For most of even that last, tiny bit the world remained predominantly in the hands of hunter-gatherers.
From this, we can draw a nearly inarguable conclusion:
Hunting and gathering represents the normal mode of human life.
I believe something else, derived from this but certainly more debatable:
The egalitarian, hunter-gatherer band represents the only human institution that has truly stood the test of time. Every other human institution remains untested and unproven. We should treat them with suspicion.
I sometimes hear people claim that this or that institution has stood the test of time, by which they mean a few centuries, or even a few decades. I find this a remarkably short-sighted view.
In a short 10,000 years, the Agricultural Revolution has claimed 75% of the global land surface outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and is now driving the sixth mass extinction in the history of the world. This would seem, by far and away, the most disastrous course of events ever undertaken by any community of organisms, and even at the break-neck pace it has proceeded, far beyond any previous mass extinction, it has still taken 10,000 years to play out.
10,000 years represents the time it takes just to see the most obvious impacts that a new institution might have, without any regard whatsoever for its more subtle implications. How could anyone seriously suggest that any institution has proven itself in any real way in just a few centuries?
Many have asserted, however, that the context of human evolution has become irrelevant to us today. After all, the past 10,000 years have seen genetic change 100 times faster than any other period in human evolution. As John Hawks put it, “We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”
That can certainly seem damning, but I think we’ve again fallen prey to our brains’ natural difficulty with big numbers. Let’s say that each year produced one abstract unit of evolutionary change, so before the Agricultural Revolution we stocked up 1,990,000 units of evolutionary change. In the years since, we’ve stocked up 100 such abstract, undefined units each year, for a total of 1,000,000. In other words, even after 10,000 years of evolutionary change 100 times faster than any other period in our history, the impact of our previous hunter-gatherer existence still outweighs it by nearly two to one.
In The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending discuss a wide array of genetic changes prompted by the Agricultural Revolution, from changes in skin color to lactose tolerance to reduced physical endurance, enhanced long-term planning, and increased docility. They discuss how the varying history of agriculture and civilization from one group to another creates genetic differences today.
In fact, I believe this last point illustrates how little such genetic changes really matter. We don’t find any real biological differences between people descended from the earliest agriculturalists in the Middle East and Australian aborigines. None of the differences between them rise above the individual variation within either group, showing that our common heritage as Homo sapiens—a heritage undeniably dominated by our hunter-gatherer experience—overshadows all other such factors.
Their discussion of the specific genetic changes associated with the rise of agriculture and civilization, however, seem important. While they tend to present them in a very positive light, I believe they illustrate something else.
Skin color: We now know that light skin appeared very recently in Europe, around the time of the Agricultural Revolution. Anthropologists once conjectured that light skin evolved so that people at more northerly latitudes could absorb enough vitamin D from the sun. This new evidence reveals that this did not change until the diet changed, though, suggesting that the first hunter-gatherer settlers in Europe found plenty of food that could provide all the vitamin D they needed. Only when they adopted agriculture did their diet become so impoverished that they needed to absorb more vitamin D from the sun, resulting in a sudden crash in melanin levels. In short, white skin provides visible testament to the impoverished diet, near-starvation, and ultimately wretched conditions of one’s ancestors.
Lactose tolerance: In most mammals, lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose) comes from a band in the small intestine that closes up later in life. As a result, all other mammals lose their ability to digest milk in adulthood. Even among humans, it remains far more common to lack the ability to digest milk. As recently as the Roman era, medical texts prescribed milk as a purgative. Among agricultural groups, however, the ability to digest milk provided a much-needed source of protein and calories. The evolutionary pressure that led to the emergence of this bizarre trait would, then, come from an impoverished diet, near-starvation, and ultimately wretched conditions.
Temperament: While I do not disagree with Cochran and Harpending that reduced physical endurance and increased docility will certainly make a group of people easier to govern, I do disagree on their view that this represents a positive development. Human beings evolved in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, and even today we naturally stifle under other conditions, like the oft-repeated claim that we “need” one form of hierarchical control or another (the evidence of the vast swath of human evolution notwithstanding, and more often pointedly ignored). As such, people must become more docile in order to even accept such a state of affairs in the first place. The long history of indigenous people choosing to fight to the death rather than accept such a life, to say nothing of the long history of such people abandoning their society to join indigenous groups whenever the chance arose, only seems to reinforce how necessary such changes to psychological temperament would seem.
Each of these changes illustrate to me the driving reason behind this rapid pace of evolutionary change: that the new institutions set themselves so completely at odds with human nature, have proven so dehumanizing, so impoverished, and so catastrophic, that it takes this sort of break-neck evolutionary pace just to keep them going even for just 10,000 years, an evolutionary blink of an eye.
While some writers would like us to believe that this pace of change has made us naturally domesticated, civilized people, I believe instead it illustrates how poorly adapted to it we remain. We have reached the level where it doesn’t immediately kill us or explode, but that sort of minimum remains quite a distance from an acceptable human life.
I certainly don’t consider the life of egalitarian, hunter-gatherer bands perfect or idyllic, although they sometimes seem to think so. Colin Turnbull quotes a Mbuti pygmy named Moke who said, “The forest is a mother and father to us, and like a father or mother it gives us everything we need — food, clothing, shelter, warmth … and affection.” It seems undeniable, though, that egalitarian, hunter-gatherer bands represent the normal human experience, and the only evolutionary legacy bequeathed to the human race. As Daniel Quinn put it, “Nothing evolution brings forth is perfect; it’s just damnably hard to improve upon.”
Modern hunter-gatherers do not represent “living fossils” of our pre-agricultural past. Calling them “primitive” or “pre-modern” fails to address the fact that they have continued to evolve, change, learn, and grow through the past 10,000 years as much as any other groups. They’ve also been changed by their contact with agricultural, domesticated, and civilized people (though rarely to their benefit). They don’t represent a throw-back, but a divergent path. They don’t show us how humans lived 10,000 years ago, but each one a different way that we might live today if our ancestors had made different choices.
Consider how easily we can translate terms like “emperor” from English to Chinese, despite the geographical, historical, and cultural distance between London and Beijing. We can translate them so easily because we have so much in common. Everywhere in the world, the emergence of agriculture came with the emergence of hierarchy and the state. For every other social arrangement possible we must look to groups that we so condescendingly refer to as “pre-state” peoples. We, the civilizations of the world, seem almost indistinguishable compared to the vast diversity that they represent. The differences between one civilization and another seem superficial by comparison. They represent the real breadth of human cultural diversity.
Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan published an article in 2010 titled “The weirdest people in the world?” [PDF] that caused quite a stir across the social sciences. They pointed out how subjects from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) countries have very different ideas about moral decision making, reasoning style, fairness, and even visual perception compared to people from just about anywhere else. This has had an enormous influence on fields like psychology, which has traditionally not shied away from studies on WEIRD college students and then extrapolating the findings to humanity in general. I think its conclusions also speak to the idea that our civilization, our experience, even our ideas about “human nature” represent one small dot in the wide field of human experience.
I find I keep asking questions that begin, “How do indigenous people…?” The institutions I live in have proven themselves utterly unsustainable, dehumanizing, and catastrophic in a remarkably short period of time. This makes everything around me—the institutions I live with and inside of, as well as the patterns of thought, my ideas about fairness and morality and even ontology and perception—suspect. I keep asking myself how indigenous people think about something or deal with something to help me differentiate between the implications of the dysfunctional traditions I find myself enmeshed in and what really does connect to a shared human experience.
We rarely accord indigenous people the basic respect of referring to them by the names they use for themselves. Most often, we take the insults used by the neighbors who never much cared for them and turn them into our primary identifiers for them. Most of the time, they call themselves something that translates in their own language to “the real people” or “the genuine people.” I think they’ve capured something important with such names. They’ve remained real, genuine. They follow “the way of the human being” (yuuyaraq in Yup’ik, a term Calvin Luther Martin took for the name of a fascinating book with immense relevance to this topic).
And so, on just about every topic or issue I can think of, I almost always begin with the question: “How do the real people do it?”
