Are Hunter-Gatherers The Happiest Humans To Inhabit Earth?
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I was born in East Europe "behind the iron curtain", but lived in the west for a long time. And then East Asia for even longer. There are huge differences in how people perceive "civilization" and how "trapped" they feel vs actually are.
The west with its rigorous rules, both explicit and implicit. Regulation of every facet of your life, to a degree you don't realize (it's so natural! building permissions! driving permissions! marriage permissions! breath the air permissions! otherwise the world collapses!) until you've lived somewhere else.
South East Asia with its reckless freedom, or downright anarchy (Thailand). The social pressure is applied more on the family level. There are few explicit regulations, and even where they do exist, you're half expected to ignore them.
All of this is changing of course. As Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". There is no doubt in which direction the civilization is moving. Individual human ingenuity is an outstanding achievement, but isn't evolution always oh-so-squinting toward larger, more integrated, more efficient structures? The game of entropy.
The naive integration attempts in the 20th century didn't work out so well, but the pressure is building again. Maybe this time.
Take people out, and all sorts of things happen. People get addicted to sugar, heroin, Facebook. You get unhealthy due to lack of exercise. You feel weird socially because you weren't wired to interact in the modern way (fast, tenuous, no strings). You grow up feeling awkward because you can't contribute from the age where you can talk, and you have to sit in front of a blackboard for years before you get let near anything. Your natural allies, your relatives, are not so near you as you'd like. You don't even have that many because you can't have a family until you're quite old.
I can see why there's this paradox that nothing seems to change how happy people are.
I feel a lot of the issues in our society boil down to this. Logically we should feel more secure in a modern economy because of the sheer material wealth, and yet so many of us suffer depression, anxiety, and a raft of other chronic health issues. I suspect this is at least partly because we are evolved to find security in close communal relationships with people around us, but these relationships have become more shallow in modern society.
At my parents' restaurant we'd often get the odd guy (normally a man) who was there just because he wanted to see other people. The sort of person you see who'd jump at any chance to talk to someone. They'd smile at everyone else, and try get some chat going, all while dining for one. Normally it would be my dad asking the guy about his life, he is good at that.
I remember when I was much older, and eating with my family at a restaurant, there'd be a regular we'd see who'd come in for a beer, smile at everyone, and then move on to the next place, and repeat. It was a small town. Dude seemed nice enough.
For me it's always interesting to observe myself when I'm with family. I have a huge number of cousins owing to a busy grandfather. There's a pleasant yet hard-to-explain familiarity with them, because I didn't grow up with any but 5 of them. The others (dozens, I can't count and they keep finding me on FB) grew up elsewhere, but somehow I feel warm and fuzzy when they're around.
Last time we all met up it was in Vegas.
Most people didn't choose their parents, their gender, their skin color, their poverty level, their childhood religious beliefs, what highschool they went to, their birth location, the job opportunities around their birth location, their spouse's choice's, their illness itenerary, etc..
So it's definitely interesting to read someine accurately describe a systematic problem then at the last second blame the victims and not the system.
It makes our life eaiser in those extreme times when a safety net is needed. We pay for this by spending our normal days working in office buildings and paying insurance premiums instead of fishing and picking fruit. It's a classic case of selling freedom for security.
Walking down the street among human development just doesn't do anything for me, so I quit going outside. It seems like expulsion from the biosphere.
I wonder if other people feel this way, whether consciously or not.
When you live in nature, you just do as you feel. No reference, no efficiency, it's freeing; and that's a feeling you rarely get in society.
The closest you can currently get to "doing as you feel", involves moving to Europe and becoming dependent on the socialist state. You can live for free in a flat forever, never have to work, get free health care for every booboo, just hang out all day surrounded by people who do the same thing. I would say this is currently the state of the art in living an unnatural life. And as a result, you might end up being miserable.
But I do sort of understand what you mean; our brains were built for living in natural environments. These impose fairly random and complex constraints, with stress coming in big but short-lived peaks and real family being constantly around.
Living in a concrete jungle and having constant low level stress, doing and eating the exact same things every day, taking pills for every little ill is a recipe for alienation and early death.
But I don't intend for this to become a political discussion. To me, this is just an effective example of how "doing what you feel like" can be very different from living in nature or in a natural state and being happy.
(It worked out okay, but I didn't realize I should have had a wheelchair on hand recently when I picked someone up from a relatively straightforward orthopedic surgery)
Contrast with the often hyper competitive social/city environment.
No, living under modern society is much better, happy or not.
Disease, for example, is mostly a product of settled societies, not hunter-gatherers. Crime was a different issue as well, when tribes knew all the members. And sure, tribes had conflicts, but they were often not as violent as the total wars of the last couple centuries.
I'm surprised so many people who know nothing except modern society are so quick to make sweeping assumptions about a distant and unrecorded past.
Same logic applies to medicine and insurance.
https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/no-hunter-gat...
The link also mischaracterises the argument that anthropologists make: they do not believe that foragers had a fundamentally different ("noble savage in a Marxist feminist garden") character than moderns, but that their incentives and constraints differed. It is hard to find people to war with if you are living at extremely low population density, or to carry out ambush raids along long sightlines in the savannah. You are probably less likely to murder your neighbours' children if they are your nieces, or fail to share food with your brother's wife. Hunter-gatherer social technology exploiting human biases (e.g. toward kin) is often ignored in favour of wishful retrocasting of our own political viewpoints.
Globally, foragers may not have enjoyed the low levels of violence we do in modern society, but they may have been competitive with gardening/agricultural/tribal/state societies for millennia.
As for relatedness, that's relative (no pun intended). If everyone within 200 square kilometres is at a genetic distance of a second or third cousin, then a second cousin is the base for a non-relative. In any case, regardless of why precisely it is that violent death is so common pre-modern and especially pre-state societies, it's abundantly clear that it is.
Regarding low population densities, you'll notice that Australian Aborigine tribes are represented in that chart and exhibit murder rates that are far higher than those in modern societies. They do however have the lowest homicide rates among hunter gatherer tribes. The highest homicide rates are found in the Amazon rainforest, where population densities would be highest. So it appears that the two factors that contribute to high homicide rates are pre-state/agricultural society and high population density, and that in the case of the tribes living in the most sparsely populated regions, the inhibiting effect of extremely low population densities on homicide rates does not make up for aggravating effect of living in pre-state societies.
Of course relatedness is relative, but the argument is that encounter rates of whatever a group deemed "non-relative" were relatively low and that hostile contact was very costly/relatively unproductive. The "other" was known, cementing feelings of kinship, but distant.
The most violent societies according to your charts are post-band but pre-state with relatively high population density. That is not in contradiction with the "foragers nonviolent compared to other pre-state and comparable to earlier state societies" model.
The interesting question is whether there may have been two optima for human organisation - one at very low population density mobile foraging, the other at the point of the modern state. The modern state may be preferable to the first optimum, but the idea that it takes 10,000 of evolutionary search time to find the second hill is fascinating.
This is also not a settled question. Many scientists believe that the incentives and constraints on settled peoples led to very different genetic pressures, thus leading to a very different character in modern societies than those from from a mere 10k-20k years ago.
how is this a thing? Maybe you're thinking of large scale epidemics, but the most common cause of death in tribal settings are (modernly) treatable infections.
I ran around in the woods with a (figurative) loincloth for many years and there is something to it. :)
I'm not arguing that you are completely wrong, but you're also talking about a best case scenario in modern society. Spending time with people further towards the bottom of modern society will give a less positive outlook on modern happiness.
This excerpt is interesting:
"The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”
During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers."
Sometimes the Indians tried to forcibly return the colonials in a prisoner swap, and still the colonials refused to go. In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.
Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluen...
Is this really true? That it's better to live until 70 or 80 and be unhappy your whole life, than to have a happy life while running the risk of an early death from a preventable disease or infection? I know which I'd pick.
Also, you know which one you would pick. You've already picked it. As technology increases, there's nothing preventing you from slowly moving out into the wilderness besides an acknowledgement that modern comforts are worth it.
Yes, there is - people don't exist in a solitary state; they only can survive in groups. It requires dozens of humans to band together for any chance of survival and reproduction. Even then it can't just be done in a vacant lot; it requires an ecosystem such as only exists today in national parks and reserves, where hunting and gathering is not allowed.
So just because a single person can't just walk into the bushes and survive, doesn't mean that the 21st Century urban lifestyle is superior to a hunter-gatherer society in every way. It's not an either-or: both have advantages.
It may just be me, but reading comments in general isn't a positive thing in my life. I mean, I enjoy the discussions on HN and often I walk away informed, but the time it takes could've been spent better. I've been here 30 minutes today. That's about how long it takes me to read a scientific article on a subject I'm interested in, and when I do that I typically walk away both informed, inspired and with a few ideas of my own.
Which is the point I want to get to. Not everyone in the west is suffering. There are people who apply their focus to meaningful subjects and have interesting people to discuss them with. There are people who spend their Saturday walking in the forest. There are people who have enough wealth to live healthy lives with large degrees of individual freedom, and lastly there are people who combine all those things and lead truely impactful lives.
I think those people are a lot more happy than hunter gatherers ever were, while also enjoying the fruits of modern technology enabling them to live beyond 35, not seeing half their children die, having easy access to a wealth of knowledge and in generally enjoying unsurpassed freedom.
In Western society there are always two lies operating at once. The first lie is that technology will save us and fix everything and is the ultimate path, the second lie is that throwing away all of our technology, being as close to nature as possible, blah blah will also save us and fix everything.
One thing happier people do in fact have is a sense of historical perspective and also future sacrifice. Knowing the sacrifice that 500 mothers and fathers made before you to move the human race hopefully a little forward, and knowing that you can help pass along their sacrifice, knowledge, and your own hard work to your children, grandchildren, and subsequent generations.
Do people that take a 2nd job to put food on the table for their kids see that as progress for the human race?
Everyone realizes the progress humanity has made. It is disrespectful to the people taking second jobs to insinuate that they'd be better off living ten thousand years ago. What does that say about how you view their life?
The current level of economic struggle in the US is both unacceptable and unnecessary.
I might take the hunt, and or form community with other peers who have had quite enough.
Together, it's not a bad equation.
I lived that kind of way for a time having delivered from the wilderness to food on the plate before age 16.
It's predominantly an anthropological case study.
Like the idea of spending more time playing sports, only have time for one jui jitsu class a week.
I don't think it's unfair to say that I would benefit from one less day of using my computer per week and exchange it for going outside and reading at the park or going on a hike or biking. Or that abstaining from social media but still having access to online content would benefit my brain.
To me, it's not like M&M Peanuts, where I can either have no M&M Peanuts because none exist in the house, or can consume entire bag in one sitting because some are in the cabinet. Instead, I think it's fair to say I should be more open about being discriminating on the technology we use instead of naively accepting every new hot thing as being good for us as long as we have the discipline to moderate.
I know of people who basically lost years of their lives to World of Warcraft, which is entirely why I never ever touched that game with a ten foot pole because I know my susceptibility to those games. It's also why I deleted Facebook/Twitter, because I know I easily get hooked onto news and that hundreds of designers/engineers are working on captivating my brain in the name of ad revenue.
In a sense, I feel like we just all need to be honest about our own limits and acknowledge that technology has a drawback that is not insignificant. Knuth may have seemed like a luddite, but given how many people are hooked onto news/social/media/e-mail/Slack, his hard stance on email was perhaps more wise than most of us realized.
The title refers to a completely different lifestyle, not an added day of leisure. It directly contrasts “hunter-gatherers” and “wealthy westerners.” This is not a trivial distinction.
It made me discover how much stuff has added sugar. Things that I would assume would be fine to eat all had added sugar. Most bread was a write off, practically every sauce, and more or less every packaged food contained sugar.
To be honest, the sugar cravings weren't hard to work through, I've never really eaten much sugar, but the sheer amount of food that I wasn't able to eat because of added sugar was staggering.
At least drinking was easy, I could still drink most wines, beers, and spirits.
I depends on what is "edible stuff" to you. Carrots, meat, cabage, fish, etc. have no added sugar in them. Why not simply cook your food, like most people in the world do?
From what I read here and there, Americans have completely lost foot with food, for them having a meal means to take some boxed thing out of the fridge and put it in the microwave owen for 10 mn. This is /not/ a normal meal, it's a lazy way to get one's belly filled. The normal meal for normal people is prepared at home from raw ingredients and some spices.
The problem is that I ended up having to make practically everything from scratch. I couldn't use pasta sauces, since they all have added sugar. Most bread has added sugar as well, so no bread for me.
What was his stance on email?
So while the average 9-to-5 job, smartphone-browsing lifestyle is probably preferable to the brutality of being a hunter-gatherer, if I were a garment factory worker making 100$/month under terrible conditions and long hours, then things might change -- I'd personally take my chances out in the wilderness.
Many move to the eastern parts of the country to work in those factories because they are a better alternative to what they have back home.
It's not all that different from kids in Podunk USA moving to bigger cities for better opportunities despite "the rat race" in cities.
If north America and Europe had not essentially outsourced their labor to China and India, we'd have two billion more people living in extreme poverty, burning wood stoves, etc.
When you buy cheap cloths at Walmart or even at the brands, just have a look at the tag. Your luxury is at the cost of cheap wage slave labour or a child labour in a third world country.
The new trend is 100% US based customer support. These are the very companies which cheaply outsourced customer support to start with.
I'm not sure how taking away what little industry they have by refusing to buy their products helps these countries.
While I find it said that children are working in many countries today, I'm also not glib enough to think that is those jobs are taken away, their parents will just send them to school instead and they'll go on to live a happy life.
"if I were a garment factory worker making 100$/month under terrible conditions and long hours, then things might change -- I'd personally take my chances out in the wilderness."
Maybe that's true, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to suggest you would simply not be able to live in the same conditions 2 billion people live in and accept (they don't go out to the wilderness). Are you really so different that for you this will be such and impossible situation that you'd throw yourself to the wilderness?
These garment factory workers don't have the option to become hunter-gather. There probably is nothing to gather or hunt around where they live and the skills to do it are lost. We are comparing two models of society. Are humans in our capitalistic society happier on average than hunter-gatherers of the past?
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
Although I guess, in the end, not being conquered/enslaved/killed might make people happier.
I like to criticize "modern" societies, but some times I think that having predictable source of food was an obvious goal for any human being.
I don't have the citation, but IIRC, monkeys get higher dopamine spikes when success at a task is probable but not guaranteed. Having something that is unpredictable but likely to yield a reward is what motivates effort. Having a predictable supply of food is less stressful, but possibly, not as motivating. Maybe not as satisfying as successfully hunting an animal.
Sidenote: it's also been theorized that browsing social media is addictive because of the unpredictable aspect. You can keep scrolling, there is always new content, and there is some chance that you might find something interesting, but it's not guaranteed.
About social media my pov is that it's also a very non expensive provider of whatever hormone spike we crave. You move a finger, you get a bit of bias reinforcement, repeat. Try to read a physics book, and enjoy the unpredictability of the content.. yet less than 1% is addicted to libraries.
Maybe, maybe in the end monkeys ended up preferring teaming up (less randomness), to do random-filled activities like war. Reminds me of the article about war veteran not able to live in society after war, they craved the tension and the simplicity. War "is good".
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/30/anthroscience
You can now study ancient DNA as an alternative method of studying ancient history. It seems there was a lot of killing of males and capturing females leading to population replacement.
Agriculture is a different history. Means big cities with big walls, easy to defend. Agriculture and farming can feed much more people so you can have a bigger army and bigger buildings with enough room for harvests (so you don't need to move in winter). Hunters/gatherers can conquer and enslave for a while but can't feed all people, and dissolve in smaller groups when reaching a critical point.
The same principle applies to the army that can conquer, but would not survive at long term without the civils that create the foods and services.
Countries keep growing in numbers of people because other countries are also growing in numbers of people, and this correlates to their economic and military power.
Watching your children die due to diseases that are totally trivial in our non-hunter-gatherer society makes you happy. oooookaaaay... FFS
In fairness, people not packed into cities don’t have exactly the same issues with childhood diseases.
I don’t disagree with your sentiment, by the way. I just don’t think it’s directly comparable that way.
It’s also worth noting that many societies are not hunter gatherer and have high child mortality rates. The road from “tribal” to “modern” is full of dysentery.
Just check one of the Hans Rosling videos on TED[0]: almost everywhere life expectancy has increased, child mortality has dropped, education has risen.
Yes, I get it. Some find joy in the primitive, the promise of stripping way the complications of modern life, and feeling the raw world again. That's fine for a weekend or a week, but understand what you give up.
Me, well, I like indoor plumbing, heat, and refrigeration.
These are people who basically lived in hunter-gatherer style until very recently, and have recently started to adopt the "modern" lifestyle. According to him, they do not regret it.
Also, the "happy savage" meme has been around for literally centuries, and it's generally been propagated by rich, educated non-savages.
The core point here is too much of anything leads to stress. Living totally like a savage is indeed stressful. Also living a life totally immersed in urban dystopia is equally stressful. A happy medium works, but so few can get and remain there. Our economic systems encourage falling into extremes. They don't encourage stability and moderation.
So I buy that you can be happier like that. Until you or people around you start dying of (nowadays) preventable diseases. Or because you ran into some other group and they wanted your stuff - however little that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)
(It’s been mentioned on HN a few times which is how I think I became aware of it.)
Right now I don't think any truly civilized society would actually generate any garbage. When we solve that issue, we will look at the past (our present) in shame.
I acknowledge they are fun and make us happy, in current society we farm these out to other activities like sport and computer simulations but in pre societies they are not so fun for the losers. It seems like survivor bias.
If they are talking getting the best of both worlds then perhaps it's possible to move in that direction but the Earth won't support it in anything close to the way the tribes currently live so it seems like a bad way to be looking at it.
no
“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984)
no matter how far into primitivism we sink in the 21st and 22nd centuries, civilisation will always reboot with access to: bible (war), euclid's elements (mathematics), iliad (peace) and the right geographic start.
if all knowledge is lost, it will only take a few of hundred years this time not tens or thousands. even completely demolished, cities are hard to hide. the pyramids will still be there, restarting the loop.