Myth vs. Fact in the State of Nature: Hunter-Gatherers and Life Before the State
What was life like before government?
Philosophers have romanticized this period as the “state of nature”, and we’re usually told it was a time of desperation and bloodshed. But does the evidence back them up? That’s what we aim to examine here.
If we can find clues as to what life was like before the state, we will know what most of human history was like. From the emergence of Homo sapiens around 300,000 BC up until around 3,000 BC(only about 5,000 years ago!), people were stateless.
Unfortunately, writing — and thus recorded history — evolved alongside the centralized state. So we have no records of how most of our ancestors thought, what stories they told, and what their ideas were about life. We can reconstruct vague details of how they lived, using artifacts and bones; or we can talk to modern peoples who continue living in the ancient ways — albeit, in much more limited contexts. But that’s pretty much it. So it’s not surprising that many of us rely on a philosopher’s stereotype to conjure up our perceptions of this forgotten world.
THE STATE OF NATURE
Schools across the United States teach the philosophy of the “state of nature”, typically beginning around the 6th-7th grade, and as part of their curriculum on the ideas that inspired America’s founders. “America’s founding documents” and “Foundational American literature” are listed as critical content for any states that have adopted the Common Core Standards. In particular, John Locke’s and Thomas Hobbes’ ideas on the state of nature (and how it leads to the necessity of government) are considered highly influential in inspiring America’s founders.¹
A 6th grade lesson plan distributed by Scholastic reads:
“Locke asserted that the purpose of government was to protect the rights of the people. Without a government of laws, he wrote, society could be considered in a state of nature.
Locke and many of his contemporaries believed that, in such a situation, stronger and smarter people take away the natural rights of others, and/or weaker people work together to defend themselves or take away the natural rights of the stronger and smarter people. In either situation, everyone would feel insecure and unsafe.”
Another K-12 lesson plan by the North Carolina Civic Education Consortium asks the teacher to:
“Facilitate discussion based on [the questions in the lesson plan]. Note possible disadvantages of living in a state of nature: stronger or smarter people might take away other peoples’ lives, liberty, and property, or weaker people might band together and take away the lives, liberty, and property of stronger or smarter people. Also note advantages: people have unlimited freedom to do whatever they please.”
Hobbes describes our now-classic view of the “state of nature” in his Leviathan, saying, “During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe […] There Is Always Warre Of Every One Against Every One” (1).
Thus these ideas wedge themselves into the minds of many Americans, starting from a relatively early age. People come to assume that life without government would be a life of fear and conflict — a life without rights, and full of war.
The problem with using this idea as a reference for understanding life without government is that it is a philosophical idea. Philosophy is great for coming up with hypotheses that can be tested scientifically; but it is not a substitute for evidence-based investigation.
In addition to this idea of constant warfare in the state of nature, we are led to believe that the time before the state was a time of short lives, hardship, and starvation. We are told that ancient and present-day hunter-gatherers work long, hard days for food, only to fail to meet their basic needs. We are told that civilization gave us the leisure time necessary to create “culture”, feeding us with less labor and freeing us up to participate in other pursuits. But is this image of historical progression true?
WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCE SUGGEST?
Marshall Sahlins was one of the first anthropologists to directly challenge this theory. In 1972, Sahlins published Stone Age Economics, a book of essays which examined anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers and their semi-nomadic agriculturalist counterparts.
In contrast with the more traditional philosophical pictures painted above, Sahlins calls the historical world of the hunter-gatherer “the original affluent society”. He argues that hunter-gatherers probably worked less than their civilized counterparts (including most of us!), had more leisure time, and still fulfilled all of their needs.
For his analysis, Sahlins used field research published across more than a hundred-year span, from social groups all over the world who still practice hunting and gathering or semi-nomadic agriculture.² Examined populations include the !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari, Australian hunter-gatherers in Arnhem Land, the Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego, and the Hadza of Tanzania, among others.
It’s important to recognize that these people differ necessarily from the ancient, pre-state hunter-gatherer we are trying to imagine. For one thing, expanding civilization and development has drastically reduced their access to land and resources. The modern hunter-gatherer lacks the immense freedom to roam that their predecessors had, and often they are confined on reserves to some of the least desirable patches of land in the world. They are relegated to civilization’s “leftovers”, so if anything we would expect them to starve more than their ancestors. Secondly, their lifestyles are often altered by contact with civilization. They gain access to tools and learn farming practices that their predecessors would not have known. They also occasionally interact with outside economies and currencies.
But they are the only living models we have, so we will have to extrapolate a little, keeping our limitations in mind. Probably some of them help to cancel each other out — for example, modern tools that increase foraging and cultivating efficiency might help balance out some of the resource deprivation and territorial scarcity that modern nomads and semi-nomads experience. But we cannot be sure whether that is the case, or to what extent.
What Sahlins found is that, on average, researchers recorded 3–5 hour workdays for the social groups they studied.
“Hunters keep banker’s hours,” he writes, “notably less than modern industrial workers (unionized), who would surely settle for a 21–35 hour week.” (2)³
Sir George Grey, for example — a British explorer writing in 1841 — recorded an average of 2–3 hours of work per day for the Australian social groups he studied; his research included some undesirable parts of Australia, as well. John Edward Eyre, in 1845, marked an average of 3–4 hours per day (also in Australia). James Woodburn, who studied the Hadza in Africa, found that people typically worked less than 2 hours per day. And Lee, in his 1968 study in Dobe, found that the norm was two 6-hour workdays per week.
This work was not necessarily daily or regular. Members of social groups would sometimes work for three or four days straight, going for a long hunt or gathering in the woods. Then, they might rest for several days afterward, chatting and gambling and feasting. Or, community members might work a mere two hours one day and six hours the next. One researcher noted:
“Since the Kapauku have a conception of balance in life, only every other day is supposed to be a working day. Such a day is followed by a day of rest in order to ‘regain the lost power and health.’ This monotonous fluctuation of leisure and work is made more appealing to the Kapauku by inserting into their schedule periods of more prolonged holidays (spent in dancing, visiting, fishing, or hunting…). Consequently, we usually find only some of the people departing for their gardens in the morning, the others are taking their ‘day off.’ However, many individuals do not rigidly conform to this ideal. The more conscientious cultivators often work intensively for several days in order to complete clearing a plot, making a fence, or digging a ditch. After such a task is accomplished, they relax for a period of several days, thus compensating for their ‘missed’ days of rest (Pospisil, 1963, p. 145).”
In addition, researchers consistently found that the available workforce of these communities was significantly underutilized. In many groups, young adults would not begin contributing to food production until they were married — sometimes not until their 20s. Among the Lele, adult males were only found to work between the ages of about 30 and 50!
Lee writes:
“Another significant feature of the composition of the [!Kung Bushmen] work force is the late assumption of adult responsibility by the adolescents. Young people are not expected to provide food regularly until they are married. Girls typically marry between the ages of 15 and 20, and boys about five years later, so that it is not unusual to find healthy, active teenagers visiting from camp to camp while their older relatives provide food for them (Lee, 1968, p. 36).”
But it’s not just the labor force that is underutilized; the land and its resources typically are, as well. Hunter-gatherers don’t gather more than they need to eat that day, or perhaps for one or two days coming. In the off chance they end up with more food than they need, they invite a neighboring camp to feast. And cultivators, likewise, rarely plant fields and gardens to their maximum capacity. The hunter-gatherer and the semi-permanent agriculturalist are not hoarders. Their lifestyle — or what Sahlins calls the DMP or “Domestic Mode of Production” — “harbors an antisurplus principle. Geared to the production of livelihood, it is endowed with the tendency to come to a halt at that point. Hence if ‘surplus’ is defined as output above the producers’ requirements, the household system is not organized for it”.
These habits aren’t suggestive of the habits of starving people. Working sporadically, along with underutilizing both labor resources and land productivity, does not imply a sense of desperation.
And indeed, people like Sir George Grey agreed, even as far back as 1841. Grey suggests that many early reports miscategorized indigenous populations as “starving”, based simply on their food choices. Observers like Captain Sturt, for example, who witnessed Aboriginals gathering mimosa gum, commented that “‘the unfortunate creatures were reduced to the last extremity, and, being unable to procure any other nourishment, had been obliged to collect this mucilaginous.’”
Grey wrote about his colleagues:
“They lament in their journals that the unfortunate Aborigines should be reduced by famine to the miserable necessity of subsisting on certain sorts of food, which they have found near their huts; whereas, in many instances, the articles thus quoted by them are those which the natives most prize, and are really neither deficient in flavour nor nutritious qualities.”
He insisted, moreover, that “generally speaking, the natives live well […] and I can only say that I have always found the greatest abundance in their huts (Grey, 1841, vol. 2, pp. 259–262, emphasis [Sahlins’]; cf. Eyre, 1845, vol. 2, p. 244f)”.
In other words, early European observers in Australia saw the natives eating things that grossed them out. They assumed the people must be on the verge of desperation — otherwise, why would they consume such items? But what Grey found is that, totally to the contrary, many of these items were highly-valued delicacies. The Aborigines weren’t starving — they just had different palates than the Europeans.
More than 100 years later, Lee tells a similar story:
“A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year. The hunters tend to work more frequently than the women, but their schedule is uneven. It is not unusual for a man to hunt avidly for a week and then do no hunting at all for two or three weeks. Since hunting is an unpredictable business and subject to magical control, hunters sometimes experience a run of bad luck and stop hunting for a month or longer. During these periods, visiting, entertaining, and especially dancing are the primary activities of men (Lee, 1968, p. 37).”
And in a simplified version of part of his PhD thesis published in Lee and DeVore (1968), James Woodburn describes the the appearance of starvation among the Hadza compared with the reality:
“Hunting and gathering tribes are often described as living on the verge of starvation. It is easy to gain such an impression after living for a short while with the Hadza; often by nightfall every scrap of food in the camp has been eaten unless a large animal happens to have been killed recently. Moreover the Hadza place such emphasis on meat as proper food and treat vegetable foods as so thoroughly unsatisfactory in comparison that they are apt to describe themselves as suffering from hunger when they have less meat than they would like. In fact, there is never any general shortage of food even in time of drought. The range of foods in the bush is so great, if one knows what these are and how to obtain them, that if weather conditions should cause the failure of some type of root or berry, or the migration of some of the game, some other type of food is always available. For a Hadza to die of hunger, or even to fail to satisfy his hunger for more than a day or two, is almost inconceivable.” (3)
As we can see, cultural factors, such as a varied diet (consisting, perhaps, of foods repulsive to European tastebuds) or a tendency to immediately consume the day’s acquired food stores, can and have contributed to the impression that hunter-gatherers are desperate. But there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that many social groups have no trouble feeding themselves. Of course, starvation and famine have been legitimately documented, as well; after all, hunter-gatherers today have a fraction of the territory they had in prehistoric times. Sometimes, communities are forced to wander deserts or other barren tracts of land in search of food. Other times, they do exhaust local supplies. But this does not seem to be the norm.
When introducing their symposium on Man the Hunter, Lee and DeVore write:
“Ever since the origin of agriculture, Neolithic peoples have been steadily expanding at the expense of the hunters. Today the latter are often found in unattractive environments, in lands which are of no use to their neighbors and which pose difficult and dramatic problems of survival […] Since a routine and reliable food base appears to be a common feature among modern hunter-gatherers, we suspect that the ancient hunters living in much better environments would have enjoyed an even more substantial food supply.”
WHAT WAS SOCIAL LIFE LIKE?
Were hunter-gatherers constantly at war?
The evidence on this subject differs. Some anthropologists argue that hunter-gatherer communities were, in fact, more peaceful than civilized societies. Others believe that conflict was common, but typically ritualistic and resulting in little bloodshed. Michael Mann tells us that in one quantitative study, “only four out of fifty primitive peoples did not routinely engage in warfare”, but that “comparative anthropology shows that its frequency, organization, and its intensity in lives killed, increase substantially with permanent settlement and, then again, with civilization”. Further, he cites at least five sources and quantitative studies, providing evidence that “half the warfare of primitive peoples is relatively sporadic, unorganized, ritualistic, and bloodless”. (4)
So it would seem that, while hunter-gatherers do and probably always did engage in warfare, it is and was almost certainly less violent and bloody than civilized warfare. But Sahlins and others argue that the most natural response to conflict, in a world without centralized authority, is dispersion rather than war.
“Maximum dispersion is the settlement pattern of the state of nature,” Sahlins writes. “Where the right to proceed by force is held generally rather than monopolized politically, there discretion is the better part of valor and space the surest principle of security. Minimizing conflict over resources, goods, and women, dispersal is the best protector of persons and possessions.”
It makes sense. If conflict arises on a sparsely populated landscape, you can fight and risk losing your life and possessions, or you can simply choose to walk away. If food is readily available elsewhere, you can maintain your autonomy, go your own way, and lose nothing. Of course, this “choice” is contingent on the availability of food in nearby areas. If this hypothesis is true, we’d expect to see more dispersal throughout lush landscapes, ripe for foraging — and more conflict in areas where the food supply is scarcer.
Another way to solve conflict peaceably in the “state of nature” is through use of the gift. Gifts, in modern hunter-gatherer societies, are invaluable tools for de-escalating confrontation before it becomes war. According to Sahlins:
“Thus do primitive peoples transcend the Hobbesian chaos. For the indicative condition of primitive society is the absence of a public and sovereign power: persons and (especially) groups confront each other not merely as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute those interests. Force is decentralized, legitimately held in severalty, the social compact has yet to be drawn, the state nonexistent. So peacemaking is not a sporadic intersocietal event, it is a continuous process going on within society itself.”
Hunter-gatherers probably lived in small “bands”, loosely tied together by kinship. According to Lee and DeVore, at their Man the Hunter symposium, the most commonly cited “band size” among modern hunter-gatherers ranged from 25–50 people. These people generally lived at densities of 1–25 people per hundred square miles, and shifted location frequently within these territories:
“We make two basic assumptions about hunters and gatherers: (1) they live in small groups and (2) they move around a lot. Each local group is associated with a geographical range but these groups do not function as closed social systems. Probably from the very beginning there was communication between groups, including reciprocal visiting and marriage alliances, so that the basic hunting society consisted of a series of local ‘bands’ which were part of a larger breeding and linguistic community. The economic system is based on several core features including a home base or camp, a division of labor — with males hunting and females gathering- and, most important, a pattern of sharing out the collected food resources.”
These smaller groups of between 25–50 people probably operated, moved and exchanged within slightly larger bands, or what Michael Mann calls “a loose confederation […] of 175–475 people”; these “confederations” probably contained between 7–19 bands, and they formed the pools from which people would intermarry and exchange goods. (4) Mann thinks that perhaps these bands “were tied into continent-wide cultural matrices” — a larger cultural web beyond the typical interaction sphere of most people. But the basic social network for most hunter-gatherers probably did not far exceed 500 people.
Furthermore, hunter-gatherer communities were probably pretty egalitarian. Modern hunter-gatherers keep little personal property, and what they do have they often share with their bandmates. This lack of possessions serves two functions: on the one hand, it allows for a freedom of movement that facilitates individual autonomy; and on the other hand, it keeps differences in wealth from creating power differences and sowing discord.
According to Lee and DeVore:
“If individuals and groups have to move around in order to get food there is an important implication: the amount of personal property has to be kept to a very low level. Constraints on the possession of property also serve to keep wealth differences between individuals to a minimum and we postulate a generally egalitarian system for the hunters […] Further, the lack of impediments in the form of personal and collective property allows a considerable degree of freedom of movement. Individuals and groups can change residence without relinquishing vital interests in land or goods, and when arguments break out it is a simple matter to part company in order to avoid serious conflict. This is not to say that violence is unknown […] The resolution of conflict by fission, however, may help to explain how order can be maintained in a society without superordinate means of social control.”
In groups that do have “ranks” or social hierarchies — such as tribal societies with a “chief” or “bigman” — the leadership role is typically organized to facilitate wealth redistribution. Chiefs and bigmen are expected to hold feasts and dole out gifts to the community. Sahlins observes, “In primitive society social inequality is more the organization of economic equality. Often, in fact, high rank is only secured or sustained by o’ercrowing generosity: the material advantage is on the subordinate’s side.”
If a community “chief” or “bigman” gets too big for their britches, and tries to accumulate too much or abuse their power, their community members can and do leave, or depose them. For example, Sahlins quotes Malo’s study of Hawaiian kingships:
“…as one ethnological bard said, the Hawaiians sat cross-legged upon the ground and told sad stories of the death of kings: ‘Many kings have been put to death by the people because of their oppression of the makaainana [the commoners]. The following kings lost their lives on account of their cruel exactions on the commoners: Koihala was put to death in Kau, for which reason the district of Kau was called the Wier. Koka-i-ka-lani was an alii [chief] who was violently put to death in Kau…Enu-nui-kai-malino was an alii who was secretly put out of the way by the fishermen in Keahuolu in Kona…King Hakau was put to death by the hand of Umi at Waipio valley in Hamakua, Hawaii.²³ Lono-i-ka-makahiki was a king who was banished by the people of Kona…It was for this reason that some of the ancient kings had a wholesome fear of the people (Malo, 1951, p. 195).”
Malo also says that the Hawaiian chiefs’ storehouses were the “‘means of keeping the people contented, so they would not desert the king […] as a rat will not desert the pantry…where he thinks food is, so the people will not desert the king while they think there is food in his storehouse’”. That is, the people expect generosity from their chief; and if he lacks this, or abuses his authority, they will desert or kill him.
DID THE STATE IMPROVE LIFE FOR THE HUNTER-GATHERER?
Maybe the ancient hunter-gatherer didn’t lead as miserable a life as we’ve been led to believe. But did the state and civilization improve things? Scholars like James C. Scott — author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States — cast doubt on this notion.
Scott believes that early humans had plenty of reasons to avoid the state, once it had come into being.
For one thing, civilization concentrated populations on a scale that was previously unheard of. And with that concentration, disease was more likely to spread. Some of the earliest texts document disease epidemics, and demonstrate that ancient peoples understood principles of contagion. Bedsheets, dishes, and clothes of sick people were avoided, for example. Scott believes that ancient cities, many of which were suddenly abandoned, were breeding grounds for new diseases — diseases that could not have adapted to their human hosts without the population concentration provided by civilization. He argues that these mysterious and sudden episodes of “abandonment” could have been triggered by plagues.
“The diseases of crowding are also called density-dependent diseases or, in contemporary public health parlance, acute community infections. For many viral diseases that have come to depend on a human host, it is possible, by knowing the mode of transmission, the duration of infectivity, and the duration of acquired immunity after infection, to infer the minimal population required to keep the infection from dying out for lack of new hosts […] By the same token, of course, this means that none of these diseases could have existed before the populations of the Neolithic.” (5)
Furthermore, the concentration of livestock and other “commensal” animals around the civilized domestic environment allowed species to cross-transmit disease as well. Citing “an outdated list, now surely even longer”, Scott notes that we share 26 diseases with poultry, 32 with rats and mice, 35 with horses, 42 with pigs, 46 with sheep and goats, 50 with cattle, and 65 with dogs. Measles, smallpox and influenza all are thought to have originated after the domestication of various animals thousands of years ago. And the sedentary lifestyle that civilization required also concentrated another disease vector: human and animal waste. Rather than leaving their waste behind as nomadic hunter-gatherers did, civilized humans left it festering in the city, providing breeding grounds for mosquitoes, fleas, and other pests that spread illness.
Over time, the people living within the city would have developed immunities to many of the pathogens that lurked among them; but this is the type of process that occurs over generations — not necessarily within the lifetime of one person. Meanwhile, those who continued to live on the outskirts — such as hunter-gatherers — would remain vulnerable, having had little to no generational contact with these diseases. It’s easy to see how an early hunter-gatherer near the edge of an ancient city-state might see it as a dangerous cesspool, and avoid it at all costs.
Secondly, the diets of civilized peoples tended to be inferior to those of the nomad. People in cities relied predominantly on grains to nourish them — and many of us still do! On the other hand, hunter-gatherers had highly varied diets of vegetables, fruit, berries and meat. They were typically taller than their city-dwelling peers, and had good bone structure, whereas urban agriculturalists showed evidence of poorly formed bones and iron deficiency.
These are already some good reasons, from a nomad’s perspective, to steer clear of civilization. But the state was also a sort of population cage and control center. Many early cities were walled — as Owen Lattimore remarked about the Great Wall of China — probably as much to keep citizens in as to keep barbarians out. Within the boundaries of the state, tax collectors and armies could appropriate your harvest, or your labor might be conscripted by the elites and rulers who owned your farmland. Nomads were nearly impossible to track, tax, and control, while city-dwelling farmers occupied predictable areas, harvested at the same time every year, and counted readily visible proceeds that could be taken from them.
Some nomads did join the urban centers, either by raiding and plundering, through developing trade relationships, or as captured slaves sold into bondage, for example. But it was by no means a one-way street from barbarism to culture. Pierre Clastres calls this “secondary primitivism” — the phenomenon of city-dwellers giving up their urban lifestyle and relearning how to be nomads. Apparently, it was extremely common. Christopher Beckwith describes a “constant drain of peoples escaping from China to the realms of the eastern steppe, where they did not hesitate to proclaim the superiority of the nomad lifestyle”; Scott writes:
“The process of secondary primitivism, or what might be called ‘going over to the barbarians,’ is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for. It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration. In such circumstances, far from being seen as regrettable backsliding and privation, it may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot.”
In the upcoming articles we will be delving deeper into some of these concepts, and the evidence that exists to support them. What were some of the forms that could define a barbarian’s relationship to the state? What was it like to live in some of the world’s earliest states, and how powerful were they in reality? Who were the people who made up the structures of government, who were the people who lived under them, and who were the slippery ones who lived in and profited from the shadows?
We will look at more evidence, but one thing is clear: for some people at least, civilization probably did not spell out progress.
Notes
- We’ll examine their ideas directly in the future, but for now we are simply concerned with how their ideas are portrayed by modern educators.
- Some of his sources include Frederick McCarthy and Margaret McArthur (1960), Richard Lee (1968, 1969), John Edward Eyre (1845), James Woodburn (1966, 1968), Martin Gusinde (1961), Herbert Basedow (1925), Sir George Grey (1841), Lorna Marshall (1961), and Harold Conklin (1957). But the list goes on.
- Sahlins’ book will be the primary source for this section of the article.
Sources
- Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan. Project Gutenberg, courtesy of Edward White and David Widger, based on the Penguin Classics version of the first edition. Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm
- Sahlins, Marshall (1972). Stone Age Economics. Aldine de Gruyter: New York.
- Lee, R.B., & DeVore, I. (Eds.). (1968). Man the Hunter. Oxford, England: Aldine.
- Mann, Michael (2005). The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge University Press: New York. (Original publication 1986).
- Scott, James C. (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.
