For one thing, it's incredibly chauvinistic to dismiss pre-colombian society as "some nomads," and their mobility patterns as having "wandered". Nomadic life-ways aren't the thoughtless ramblings of a child at play, or a sub-sentient beast in simple reactionary pursuit of greener pastures. They summer here, winter there, raise children in these parts, and visit those for sport, trade, or agriculture. Their relationship with the land is purposeful, and maintained by cultural artifacts we'd recognize as Almanacs.
One isn't "wandering" just because they haven't poured concrete.
For another thing, the pre-colombian americas weren't the Gardens of Eden, magically and effortlessly producing sustenance, and materials for us to enjoy. They were cultivated, sculpted, and gamed into those forms which facilitated our survival. There's evidence enough of that in the ways that restrictive intra- and under-growth have returned to the forests indigenous populations kept pruned for their traversal.
Lastly, biomes are big systems, and interconnected. I may have only a small garden, but it's fed from massive watersheds. If I am to survive, the mountains which constitute that watershed must be recognized as "mine" in some regard. So it goes with all the lands which feed into, and out of, those through which "some nomads once wandered."
I hope you can see, now, how myopically your "reality check" frames the situation.
In the previous discussion, I was mainly focused on the 'barren' and 'barely inhabitable' aspects. If your sentiment was about cultivation; yeah, you're probably right. Hunter/gatherer societies usually do very little cultivation.
(There's some indication that the Amazonas river fronts were heavily cultivated in pre-columbian times, as the presence of terra preta implies, though)
In that case however we'll run into the discussion about 'improving the land', since arguably cutting down woods to make room for agriculturalists is not improving the land for hunter/gatherers.
Hunter gatherers didn’t exactly live in a state of deprivation. We also a lot of examples of cultures that didn’t farm building giant earth works, like those found at Poverty Point in Louisiana[1]. We know that a number of pre-Colombian societies shunned agriculture and developed quite complex societies like the people along the gulf coast, or the Coast Salish to name to areas of interest. Pre-agricultural forbears of the Iroquois were probably mining copper. Agriculture doesn’t seem to be necessary for organization or communal work.
What Neanderthals did to Homo Erectus, and what early indigenous Homo Sapien tribes did to Neanderthals; later indigenous tribes did to earlier indigenous tribes; and so on and so forth.
At no point was the land homesteaded — by indigenous tribes or otherwise — ever fully unoccupied prior, by some definition of “unoccupied”. Intelligent lifeforms had to be driven from their rightful homes by “invaders”, categorically.
Nomads in antiquity — oweing to the lack of societal advancement — could settle air quotes “unoccupied” land. This is no longer possible in the modern, advanced world where every square inch of earth is claimed by a reasonably well-organized group of (highly violent) people, at minimum. Which means nomadism in today’s world isn’t what it once was. Nomadism in antiquity might even be viewed as outright nation building; after all, every nation has to start somewhere. But nomadism in modernity — and I say this as someone with a reasonable level of experience backpacking in various countries — is really just glorified homelessness, and I think that’s a point worth making.
The article makes a point that contemporary hunter gatherers are not living the life like their ancestors. "Modern" cultures displaced them into much less favorable environments.
I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature.
Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being dragged away from dinner by a panther.
Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or operate an elevator.
Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the future researchers.
> It is a misconception that all nomadic or foraging humans had to spend 100% of their time trying to stay alive.
Agreed.
> I'm fact, if you look at African tribes and their original lifestyle you will realize how little time they had to spend on getting food and how much time they were able to spend just being happy, playing, drinking hallucinogenic substances to get into an enlightening trance etc.
Generalizations about foraging populations are fraught with problems because there was a lot of diversity among them and its not possible to study them in a "pure" (untouched by agricultural peoples) setting.
There's a strong survivorship bias here - the uncontacted tribes tend to be in places that are isolated, and are unsuitable for agriculture or mining. I'm not sure we can infer much about the pre-agricultural lives of people in more normal environments from observing these groups.
Ah, sorry, I didn't mean you are racist. Just the idea of noble savage. I should have been more careful with the wording.
Re: hunter-gatherer lifestyle, my understanding that people leading that are merely unlucky (or lucky) ones who didn't domesticate enough plants and animals to settle down and go through a population explosion. They certainly have a lot of knowledge about local ecosystems because they depend on that knowledge for survival.
But, a few successful domestications, some introduced species, few hundred years of nice weather and they will multiply and turn into the same kind of locusts the rest of humanity is. I think Maya or Aztec went through that. Hell, this was happening back when cyanobacteria was repeatedly wiping out life on earth before something figured out how to use oxygen. It is a general property of life -- consume and reproduce.
We might eventually grow out of it (I see a lot of promise in regenerative agriculture for example), but chances are not certain.
This is such a weirdly persistent bizzaro notion of hunter-gather lifestyles.
I grew up in the Kimberley region surrounded by and outnumbered by traditional hunter gathers ( some sea | some river | and we'd move south and interact with some of desert folk ) who had their food for the day in hand in under six hours, easily.
It makes more sense to think of Hunter-gathers as quasi nomadic across an estate that reaches to the horizon and beyond filled with animals they watch and both eat and protect, along with edible plants they harvest and encourage (by churning up soil and throwing seeds and husks back into).
The days are filled with story telling and walking a circuit looking for fresh tracks, hacking a few thick plants, digging out roots, sifting low tide mud for molluscs, pinging a few lizards in the head with rocks from a basketball court distance away, etc.
Hunter-Gatherers do practice agriculture, it just doesn't look like western european agriculture, more like ripping out 'bad' plants and spreading the seeds of good plants.
I'm astounded (perhaps I should not be) that so many assume that the lives of the people in these cultures must be short brutish and unpleasant. For a culture, or set of cultures to survive and likely thrive for 1000s of years in the jungle it must be a rich life. Take a look at the decoration these people paint on their skin for instance. They have free time to decorate and adorn themselves. They have farms. They have technology and knowledge beyond what your small minds can imagine. Yes, technology, they can light fires, create traps for the food they need, farm and make tools from all manner of naturally occurring materials that surround them in abundance. I'd wager they live an abundant happy life. Sure, they have their difficulties. But I live in modern society and I have lots of difficulties too. These people live in a tightly knit family and society. I envy them in some ways. I certainly wouldn't be sitting here thinking how much better I have it from them. They have a different way of life. To assume their way or our way is better can only stem from ignorance, and oh of course, no shortage of arrogance.
If someone took you and immersed you in the jungle you'd be lucky to last a day or two.
Think of what would happen to one of these people if you put them in a city.
> ...while many people use their words to sing the praises of [hunting-gathering] their actions suggest they don't really want that, since they could still have it if they wanted it enough.
I think you're overestimating how much you can have that if you wanted it. I realize many people would reject that life (or at a minimum want modern medicine alongside it), but basically no one actually has the choice.
Hunting-gathering became steadily less 'appealing' as it became impossible to do effectively. In America, start from the near-extinction of bison. Add the privatization of most land, mass agriculture destroying the great plains habitat completely, fenced cattle farming destroying western spaces. (That also destroyed the semi-hunter-gatherer vaquero lifestyle, which people were mourning mere decades ago.)
You can do this anywhere - urbanization of the American East, desertification of the Southwest, the list goes on. And if you want a less-nomadic version, since the open spaces for nomadism are gone, you run into more modern laws actively preventing it. I know people who grew up (not at all as hunter-gatherers) in houses out in the woods that are now completely illegal because electricity and running water have been mandated.
I'm on a soapbox here, yeah. But I know people who do want this lifestyle, people who've tried for this lifestyle, and the simple answer is that it's not actually available. For most people, that choice is gone. It can't coexist with modern civilization, and that might be a price worth paying but we ought to admit we paid it.
I'm not making any assumptions. I'm just pointing out that people had the opportunity to remain hunter-gathers and they didn't. They were human thus the evidence of human nature doesn't support your argument.
I don't see a whole lot of people wanted to go from their current lives to hunter-gathers.
You're also talking to someone who has a large library of homesteading books and is interested in permaculture and sustainable living. I love technology and would never want to sacrifice my standard of living.
That is a rather rose colored view of traditional societies (of what exactly - treating all traditional cultures as homogeneous as opposed to roughly technologically analogous is itself deeply disrespectful exoticism), are they agrarian? Pastoral? Hunter gatherer?
The claims are ignorant of actual the colonial processes, history, and economic earlier resource extractive/cash crop and early how industrialization actually works including a conflation of market economy with enclosure of the commons or control of the food supply to remove subsistence options.
It's certainly not impossible that we've blinded ourselves to other problems by being so quick to blame all of their woes on colonialism however. The real world is rarely so simple. I find it a bit condescending when we try to pin all of the blame on western influence in the past, when these people are quite capable of fucking up their own lives without your help thank you very much. The idea that the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle was idyllic and perfectly in harmony with nature is also a myth.
I must rescind this statement. As a result of these discussions, I began reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, in the chapter "To Farm or not to Farm," makes clear the disconnect between agriculture and sedentary living:
"Another misconception is that there is necesarrily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently develop such a contrast, hunter-gathers in some productive areas, including North America's Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, costal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gathers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.
Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea's Lake Plains made clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has not produced. Apache Indians of the southwestern United States settled down to farm in the summer at high elevations and toward the north, then withdrew to the south and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods, during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp along regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pasturage. Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living."
Also, don't forget that agriculture only arose recently, in the grand scale of things - somewhere around 20,000 years ago, and these folks had agriculture - in fact, their suffering is largely based around the fact that they're attempting agriculture in isolation, which doesn't really work with a "tribe" of their scale. You have to have trade, as, as we saw with them, if you lose your seed stock (carrots, almost rye), you're up the proverbial creek. It took second generation wilderness upbringing for what sounds like a instinctive hunting technique - i.e. chase the animal for days until it falls over exhausted, and kill it - this is how some Sub-Saharan cultures have hunted (and may in fact still) for millenia - Khoi, for instance, and is likely actually how humans have hunted since we descended onto the plains. We have no claws or fangs, just a physiology perfectly adapted for running long, long distances. I digress.
Another factor is that crops have changed vastly since the start of agriculture, which is also a major factor in the relative growth rate of human population (along with disease, which arose hand in hand with agriculture, of course) - see Teosinte vs. Corn, and Emmer Wheat vs. Durum. Same plants, shaped by man's hand since time immemorial by selective breeding.
So, yeah. These guys actually had it really well off compared to historic humans, as they had agriculture, but it doesn't function well in isolation, particularly in such a harsh environment as the taiga - don't forget the place used to be inundated with hunter-gatherers before everyone migrated for the cushy disease and war-ridden life agriculture offers.
Survival was a bitch until we figured out farming and trade - and it's improved over the last 150 years or so due to modern medicine (lower infant and adult mortality), improved crops (green revolution), improved productivity (industrial revolution), and all the rest.
I somehow think this is an idea popular mainly among people who never had to live that way for real (and no, going for a weekend in woods for fun is not comparable). Yes, they don't have our types of stress, but it's just not true that this is stress free living. Their every single moment is fighting to survive, to collect enough water, to hunt enough meat, not to get hurt, not to get sick or injured. And they're used to that life, so superficially they might look like doing much better than us, but life is still hard for them. Walking for hours to collect water and then bringing it back every single day is not something that people who had to do it remember fondly. Looking for food can be fun when there is enough of it, but sometimes there isn't, and they know very well that if they fail their family will be literally be left hungry, their children might even die. I honestly doubt it's much less stressful than worrying about mortgage. And all of that is in the normal situations, until a drought or disease strikes, or until their best hunter gets killed or injured, or neighboring tribe attacks and steals their women. In such extreme times civilization is the safety net that saves your life, and that's why we come up with it, in the first place. To make our life easier. And it is. And if it's too stressful for you, is it really because of the civilization, or because of your own choices and ambitions?
The (vast?) majority of pre-industrial tribes I remember studying in anthropology live in very fertile areas like the Amazon, Pacific islands, and the mountainous jungles of central Africa or Papua New Guinea. These areas can support small scale agriculture but for various reasons are impractical to exploit economically.
Anthropologists have gone to great lengths to study tribes that have had little to no interaction with the outside world so our understanding of their quality of life isn't as biased as you'd think.
One isn't "wandering" just because they haven't poured concrete.
For another thing, the pre-colombian americas weren't the Gardens of Eden, magically and effortlessly producing sustenance, and materials for us to enjoy. They were cultivated, sculpted, and gamed into those forms which facilitated our survival. There's evidence enough of that in the ways that restrictive intra- and under-growth have returned to the forests indigenous populations kept pruned for their traversal.
Lastly, biomes are big systems, and interconnected. I may have only a small garden, but it's fed from massive watersheds. If I am to survive, the mountains which constitute that watershed must be recognized as "mine" in some regard. So it goes with all the lands which feed into, and out of, those through which "some nomads once wandered."
I hope you can see, now, how myopically your "reality check" frames the situation.
Edit: I took out a specious allusion to the BLM.
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