Read Online Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marlene Zuk
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tasty and easy to grow. If one potato plant was susceptible, that meant they all were, and thus the entire crop could be decimated in one fell swoop. Reliance on just a few food plants makes us vulnerable to similar calamities, and it is an ongoing concern among scientists and farmers today. It is debatable, however, whether a return to a hunter-gatherer existence—even if feasible—is the best, or only, solution to this problem.
Working harder than a chimpanzee
One of the biggest bones of contention, so to speak, about hunter-gatherers versus agriculturalists is that the latter work too hard, in terms of both the time spent on subsistence and the intensity of the labor required, or at least they work harder than people who do not farm. Wells puts it this way: “As hunter-gatherers, we were a species that lived in much the same way as any other, relying on the whims of nature to provide us with our food and water.” 14 And the whims of nature are presumably easier to cajole than the rocky soil or recalcitrant cattle of the farm. Agriculture, then, is sometimes seen as bad because it is just plain too difficult.
It is true that at least some hunter-gatherers spend less of their day “working,” defined as engaging in activities necessary for subsistence, than do many farmers. Richard Lee’s classic 1960s studies of the Kalahari desert people found that they needed two and a half days per week to collect enough food; adding activities such as toolmaking and other “housework” brought the total to an enviable forty-two hours per week. 15 Jared Diamond notes that the Hadza of Tanzania managed to keep their weekly work time down to fourteen hours or less. 16 Other estimates vary, and many of the calculations have been criticized by some anthropologists, who claim that the societies cited are not typical hunter-gatherers. But it seems reasonable to conclude that farmers, particularly those engaged in intensive agriculture, do indeed work harder than most foraging peoples.
The problem is that those foraging peoples are themselves still working pretty hard, at least compared to many other species. Anthropologist Hillard Kaplan and colleagues suggest that a hallmark of more modern humans was the ability to get hard-to-acquire foods. 17 They classify foods as collected , such as fruit; extracted , such as termites that are in protected underground nests or tubers that have to be dug from the ground; and hunted , which are foods such as deer or other prey that are caught or trapped.
Other primates, including chimpanzees, also eat foods that require some of the same kind of processing, and the chimps even hunt from time to time. But only humans focus on the extracted and hunted types rather than collecting what nature’s whim provides. And we humans—even those in hunter-gatherer societies—need long years of training before we have the skills to net a fish or bring down an ungulate. Men of the Aché of South America, one of the best-studied contemporary foraging societies, do not peak in hunting ability, measured in the amount of meat collected per unit effort, until they are thirty-five years old. Collecting tubers is also no walk in the park; women of the Hiwi people of Venezuela become maximally efficient at foraging for roots between thirty-five and forty-five years of age. Acquiring these skills takes time, and lots of it. 18
We can draw two conclusions from these statistics. The obvious one is that hunting and gathering is more than lolling around waiting for grapes to fall into your mouth or meeting up with your mates for an occasional fun-filled hunting trip. It may not be the workweek of a Wall Street shark or a nineteenth-century sweatshop laborer, but it is not the idyllic life we might have imagined. Less obvious, though, is that the amount of time one spends making a living is a continuum among animals, humans included. Why do we have a paleofantasy about the ancestral hunter-gatherer, when our even
Working harder than a chimpanzee
One of the biggest bones of contention, so to speak, about hunter-gatherers versus agriculturalists is that the latter work too hard, in terms of both the time spent on subsistence and the intensity of the labor required, or at least they work harder than people who do not farm. Wells puts it this way: “As hunter-gatherers, we were a species that lived in much the same way as any other, relying on the whims of nature to provide us with our food and water.” 14 And the whims of nature are presumably easier to cajole than the rocky soil or recalcitrant cattle of the farm. Agriculture, then, is sometimes seen as bad because it is just plain too difficult.
It is true that at least some hunter-gatherers spend less of their day “working,” defined as engaging in activities necessary for subsistence, than do many farmers. Richard Lee’s classic 1960s studies of the Kalahari desert people found that they needed two and a half days per week to collect enough food; adding activities such as toolmaking and other “housework” brought the total to an enviable forty-two hours per week. 15 Jared Diamond notes that the Hadza of Tanzania managed to keep their weekly work time down to fourteen hours or less. 16 Other estimates vary, and many of the calculations have been criticized by some anthropologists, who claim that the societies cited are not typical hunter-gatherers. But it seems reasonable to conclude that farmers, particularly those engaged in intensive agriculture, do indeed work harder than most foraging peoples.
The problem is that those foraging peoples are themselves still working pretty hard, at least compared to many other species. Anthropologist Hillard Kaplan and colleagues suggest that a hallmark of more modern humans was the ability to get hard-to-acquire foods. 17 They classify foods as collected , such as fruit; extracted , such as termites that are in protected underground nests or tubers that have to be dug from the ground; and hunted , which are foods such as deer or other prey that are caught or trapped.
Other primates, including chimpanzees, also eat foods that require some of the same kind of processing, and the chimps even hunt from time to time. But only humans focus on the extracted and hunted types rather than collecting what nature’s whim provides. And we humans—even those in hunter-gatherer societies—need long years of training before we have the skills to net a fish or bring down an ungulate. Men of the Aché of South America, one of the best-studied contemporary foraging societies, do not peak in hunting ability, measured in the amount of meat collected per unit effort, until they are thirty-five years old. Collecting tubers is also no walk in the park; women of the Hiwi people of Venezuela become maximally efficient at foraging for roots between thirty-five and forty-five years of age. Acquiring these skills takes time, and lots of it. 18
We can draw two conclusions from these statistics. The obvious one is that hunting and gathering is more than lolling around waiting for grapes to fall into your mouth or meeting up with your mates for an occasional fun-filled hunting trip. It may not be the workweek of a Wall Street shark or a nineteenth-century sweatshop laborer, but it is not the idyllic life we might have imagined. Less obvious, though, is that the amount of time one spends making a living is a continuum among animals, humans included. Why do we have a paleofantasy about the ancestral hunter-gatherer, when our even
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