Our Distorted Image of Prehistoric Societies and the Impact of Agriculture
Were the lives of our ancestors really that “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”?
The advent of agriculture and formation of permanent settlements are often seen as the key milestones in the development of human civilization. We tend to think that this Neolithic Revolution, just over 10,000 years ago, forever changed humanity for the better.
In the (in)famous words of Thomas Hobbes and the imagination of many other thinkers who followed him, pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies lived lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Pain and suffering were imagined as the prevalent condition. Sex was thought to have been extremely brutish. Overall, these prehistoric societies were in many respects considered closer to our primate relatives than modern humans.
And all this was thought to have been resolved by agriculture and settled societies.
It is certainly true that agriculture changed humanity in almost every aspect. But not everyone is convinced that the changes were all that positive, particularly in the early stages of the transition, or that prehistoric life was as bad as Hobbes and those who followed his thought-leadership would have liked us to believe.
Some, such as historian and author Jared Diamond, even go as far as calling agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race, […] a catastrophe from which we have never recovered”.
“We’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.” — Jared Diamond
According to Diamond, as well as many recent studies, the spread and adoption of permanent settlements and agriculture actually lead to a dramatic decline in overall health, huge societal (and gender) inequalities, problems with our sexuality and relationships that persist to this day, and even decreased life expectancy from which we are only now recovering thanks to modern medicine.
“Stone Age populations lived healthier lives than did most of the people who came immediately after them.” — Marvin Harris
But more on this later. Let us first look at where many these misconceptions originate.
One main source for our warped perspective of prehistoric life is what Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, authors of the book Sex at Dawn, call “Flintstonization”.
We essentially project our modern assumptions on prehistory to come up with myths that seem plausible to us. We imagine the typical hunter-gatherer’s life somewhat like our own but without all the modern amenities we have become so accustomed to. Almost as if you were to take the average present day human and just dropped him naked in the wilderness.
In this way we project our post-agriculture society onto prehistory, “flintstonizing” it.
But we have to remind ourselves that evolution does not generally make things “better” (as many believe). It generally just makes them better adapted to an ever-changing environment. In this way, we are not permanently evolving towards some optimal pinnacle of evolution.
We modern humans are in no way evolutionarily better than our prehistoric ancestors. We are just more adapted to our current environment. Transplant a prehistoric man into modern society and chances are he won’t make it very long. But the reverse is equally true.
Starting from Thomas Malthus around 1800, it has been believed that the standard of (human) existence is starvation and poverty. Malthus postulated that we will always breed to the limit of our production capabilities (or beyond). And in his words, ultimately “the superior power of population is repressed by moral restraint, vice and misery”. In this way humanity is destined to suffer.
Or is it? It turns out that Malthus’s assumptions about population growth, especially pre-agriculture, were grossly wrong. In fact, recent studies show that few of our ancestors ever felt population-induced scarcity.
“Most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world, chock-full of food.” — Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
We might look at forager tribes and think of them as poor, but they might be far more content and “wealthy” than we are. Just because they lack things we consider necessities of civilized life doesn’t mean they would actually want them.
“Poverty […] is the invention of civilization.” — Marshall Sahlims
Both Malthus, who also assumed that prehistoric life was a fight of everyone against everyone, as well as Hobbes with his idea of “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” prehistoric life, lived in a Europe in upheaval.
They, like many others before and after them, fell victim to flintstonization. Hobbes for example spent much of his life in crowded and dirty London and Paris, and very likely projected everything that he experienced around him into his assumptions.
In fact there are much fewer signs of starvation in prehistoric foragers than in later societies in which people had settled down. Studies of prehistoric bones and teeth did show that there were cycles of fasting and feasting, but that genuine starvation was extremely rare.
Over the past several years, more and more research is pointing at the numerous health benefits of regular fasting, both on a daily level (such as intermittent fasting) as well as prolonged fasts of several days. Alternate periods of fasting and feasting have been evolutionarily ingrained in us. And if that is still true for present day humans, it must have certainly been the case for the farmers that came straight after the foragers.
Similarly, pre-agriculture there were far less instances of malnutrition and infectious diseases than in farmer societies. The average farmer’s diet was much less varied (and as a result also far more prone to singular catastrophic events such as crop failures). In addition, the large communities of not just humans but also livestock were a perfect breeding ground for diseases, further exacerbated by the lack of proper sanitation and hygiene.
“The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricaltural people (something we often hear) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors.” — Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Overall health, longevity and size actually took a sever hit from agriculture. We are only now growing tall again.
These facts most likely come as a surprise to most of us, since we are used to statistics such as the height expectancy in prehistoric times being less than one meter.
This number is in fact accurate. But the problem is that it is a completely misleading measure.
Adult males were on average at least as tall as us, but high infant mortality means that for every 3 adult remains we find about 7 infant remains, which is how height expectancy is calculated. And the exact same is true for life expectancy.
Many, including some scientist, use this false reasoning based on an age expectancy somewhere between 20 and 35 to claim that people rarely lived past their thirties. But that is nonsense.
The only thing that has been improved dramatically is infant mortality, not general age tendency. Ignoring infant mortality, average age expectancy in prehistory is generally estimated to have well exceeded the age of seventy or eighty.
And not just did many of our prehistoric ancestors live lives of equal duration as us, their health span, the age until which a person is actually healthy, was often longer than even today.
Foragers lived healthily and actively until old age.
We are only now slowly undoing some of the diseases that were able to develop and spread through high-density population and domesticated animals.
Similarly stress, and in particular cortisol, strong immunosuppressants that make getting ill much more likely, have never been higher than at the present moment. These factors have been recognized as the source of a tremendous burden on our health.
In contrast, the forager lifestyle offered plenty of sleep and leisure, and had very little chronic stress (while at the same time providing good doses of healthy acute stresses).
Burnout and related diseases are another invention of civilization.
Just as many believe that poverty and suffering were intrinsic to our prehistoric ancestors, another widely held belief is that constant war and conflict were the norm.
Settled societies live under the assumption of shortage, always saving. Foragers live under the assumption of affluence.
Our ancestors often found food so easily that a day of light work could in many cases sustain them for three full days. Not only did this give them ample leisure time, it also meant that selfishness was far less important than generosity and a strong community.
With essentially no property and practically unlimited space, why would egalitarian forager societies fight wars?
Those who support the idea of widespread conflict in prehistoric times often base their argument on statistics of war deaths. But in many cases these statistics are actually based on present-day tribes that had been in contact with settled societies. Skeletal finds of prehistoric humans exceedingly rarely show signs of interpersonal conflict or violence.
Similarly, many refer to primate studies of rape and violence but completely ignore the bonobo, our closest primate relative, where in decades of observation not a single case of rape has been observed.
Even chimp studies that show them as extremely violent are flawed. The chimps only turned violent when researchers decided to feed them daily at their research camp to encourage them to come there. Suddenly the chimps experienced a huge (but limited) treasure to be had for only a short amount of time every day, which confused them and lead to dramatically increased rates of conflict. But this detail of human intervention is largely ignored in studies.
If anything, it could be taken as a supporting argument for agriculture increasing the tendency to war. Agriculture, personal property and livestock were like the boxes of bananas in the jungle. Suddenly there was something worth fighting for, a reliable yet limited resource.
The question of whether we or our ancestors are “naturally” warmongering or peace-loving depends on the circumstances. But it is very likely that in pre-agricultural society we tended to be mostly peace-loving. There was simply much more to lose through conflict than to gain.
Those economists who base their theories purely on the idea of self-interest completely ignore the importance and value of community, and the generosity that builds it.
This is easily overlooked when considering the large communities that emerged after humanity started to settle. At larger scales, such as the cities Hobbes experienced, there is no concept of “local personal shame”. This has lead to severe issues, several of which we are still struggling with, including climate change and overfishing.
On the other hand, small tight-knit communities such as the ones of our foraging ancestors self-regulate and naturally develop mechanisms against “cheating”.
Concepts like Dunbar’s Number, the idea that a human can not keep track of who is doing what or maintain stable social relationships with more than about 100 to 150 people indicate how even small settlements, which easily allow for communities above this limit, dramatically change the social dynamics.
Whereas previously everyone in a group intimately knew everyone else and reciprocity came natural to our ancestors, we have moved to societies in which the vast majority of people are either complete strangers to us, or at best remote acquaintances. Reciprocity can no longer be assumed as the default, and as a result social relations and behaviors changed completely.
Consequently agriculture brought with it a somewhat paradoxical change (and disconnect) in the interplay of personal and group interests.
On the one hand, post-agricultural society experienced big advances at the group level, which eventually lead to many of the great achievements we attribute to civilization.
However, on a personal level most people were actually off worse due to agriculture: frequent famine, vitamin deficiency and other forms of malnutrition, the above noted stunted growth and reduction in life span, increased violence, and other similarly dire consequences impacted lives on a personal level.
Yet at the same time we see a shift in the individual towards selfishness and property-oriented thinking.
Forager societies were extremely egalitarian. Everything was shared: food, property, sexual partners. This was the best way to distribute risk among the members of these small groups and form the tight knit bonds required in their societies.
Hunter-gatherers had a depth and intimacy of social interaction few of us today could imagine, or tolerate. The complex social interactions that developed during this time are in many ways one of the key features that set us apart from most other animals. Many argue that our comparatively large brain is predominantly a result of these social interactions, especially the need for language.
While the intense closeness in such societies would feel almost unbearable to us now, we have not completely lost our ancestral tendencies. The extreme opposite is even worse. Humans are desperate for social contact, and isolation is one of the worst punishments imaginable (as many accounts of solitary confinement vividly depict).
The egalitarian nature found in forager societies, particularly with respect to sexual partners, is often interpreted as primitive and unchaste. But again we have flintstonization at play.
We take our current Western family norms, which themselves are in no way universal neither over human history nor across different regions, and think of them as eternal human nature, projecting them back onto our prehistoric ancestors.
This particular aspect of the flintstonization of sexuality, the key theme of Sex at Dawn, is so fascinating and widespread that I am planning to discuss it separately in a future article.
I should note that several of the ideas presented above are controversial, without clear academic consensus. Despite the way I presented them, I am not necessarily offering them as truth. Most of them were directly adapted from Sex at Dawn (which itself is somewhat controversial and has divided expert opinion).
My main goal, besides setting a foundation for a subsequent article on the evolution of human sexuality, was to provoke you to think for yourself and do your own reading on this fascinating topic.
For now, I hope that I have at least made you question some of your conceptions about prehistoric life and the evolution of humanity and civilization.
