Mysterious Prehistory
We modern WEIRDs, living comfortably, have an odd suspicion that our ancestors all lived in a sort of Garden of Eden. This, admittedly, also describes my tendency of thought, but I’m hardly alone. There’s lots of research that makes the hunter-gatherers among our ancestors out to have been happy, healthy, and psychosocially wealthy. And then along came the agricultural revolution that introduced economic class while increasing human numbers living together until political hierarchies arose. Before agriculture, there was egalitarianism and harmony with nature. After agriculture, there were disease and inequality and political power and oppression.
It’s a great story, that of the Garden of Eden. But was there such a thing? In a blog post “The Paleolithic Ancestor Model Pageant,” Substack author Tove K cites current-day anthropological studies calling the idyll into question. Some of the hunter-gatherer civilizations may have been driven to the lifestyle because they were pushed to the brink of existence when surrounding cultures adopted agriculture. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle at the edge of survival could be quite cruel, as demonstrated here in the case of the Paraguayan Aché tribe of hunter-gatherers first contacted in the 1970s:
The Aché did indeed not live an idyllic life in the forest. They had an especially gruesome custom of getting rid of children nobody wanted to take care of through burying them alive "as company" to a deceased adult, most often a male. The children killed this way were mostly girls under 5 years of age, but any child below 13 could meet such a fate. About 14% of all male children and 23% of all female children were killed before the age of ten.7
Also old people were insecure among the Aché. Old men were left behind never to be seen again. A man bragged to anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado that he had taken as his task to kill old women. He would strike an old woman's head with his ax from behind. All old women were afraid of him, he said.8
One reason behind the gruesomeness of Aché customs could be the relative poverty of their land. For some reason, the Paraguayan rain forest is poor in plant foods suited to humans, or too dangerous for women with children to operate effectively in.
The life communing with nature might be appealing to modern people imagining lifestyles from long ago. Yet, some hunter-gatherer cultures gladly abandoned the lifestyle as soon as they discovered the alternative. Given the option of more modern civilization, the Aché readily abandoned the cruelty of barely scraping by.
After they were contacted, many died from respiratory diseases. Two decades later, those who survived had all decided to take up farming. Some of them ventured into the forest for longer or shorter periods, but they mostly made a living from small-scale agriculture.
Others, however, more closely resemble the idealized model, such as the Tanzanian Hazda hunter-gatherers:
[A book on the tribe explains] that the Hadza have amicable relations with their neighbors. So amicable, in fact, that some neighbors decide to become Hadza! People from neighboring agriculturalists who don't like to till the land and plant their crops have been incorporated into the Hadza lifestyle and learned the language.
These, too, are part of our human past. This is the model we hear about more often, since it appeals to our yearning for what seems a simpler, easier way of living. The less attractive version of primitive simplicity doesn’t leap as readily to mind in our daydreams.
The cited article offers an interesting perspective on we can learn from our long-ago human past thanks to remnants of what we think that past probably looked like, including a glimpse at the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa (also known as the Bushmen) and Australian aboriginal peoples.
My great grandmother on my mom's side and my dad's father are the only two family members that died when I was young. We weren't allowed to go to funerals.
News Flash: Biden admin chooses 10 drugs over which it will negotiate with manufacturers. Price changes will go into effect in 2026. I ask you, how much more than an hour is needed to negotiate 10 prices? 2026? 2026???