Hacker News Reader

Comment by dunmalg | Hacker News Reader

>One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

This sentence illustrates one of my main gripes with JD's "sunshine and happiness" view of hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is fantastic for that small fraction of folks who live where there are plenty of mongongo nuts (so to speak). He sort of handwaves the majority, who are eking a bare subsistence out of the land, or worse, alternately subsisting and starving.

View on HN

Well, the whole point is that the populations for successful hunter gatherer tribes would be stable. Barring drastic ecological changes and (more commonly) attacks/displacement from technologically superior outsiders, aboriginal tribes have continued living as they have for centuries (even millennia).

Of course that type of society wouldn't be able to support a population of 7B people, although based on the 2.4B in poverty you'd be hard pressed to argue that technological society is really doing much better (ignoring the whole carrying capacity question entirely).

As someone enjoying typing on the Internet right now, I'm by no means arguing any return to the past, but it'd be silly not to acknowledge how much longer we work than our ancestors.

Don't discount the state of constant warfare most aboriginal societies live in. If you have a neighbor, he wants your mongongo nuts.

Hmm, while this the assumption (in some pretty flawed) early anthropology, I think the modern consensus is that hunter gatherer societies were relatively peaceful, both amongst themselves[1] and between each other[2].

Of course, successful/stable hunter-gatherer societies are pretty geographically isolated, since encounters by tribes w/ more "advanced" (post-agrarian, colonial, modern) societies usually has meant obliteration.

[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how... [2] http://www.sott.net/article/264152-Warfare-was-uncommon-amon...

Recently I read Pinker's "Better Angels" [1]. Using archeological records, he argues that dying from a violent death was extremely likely in hunter gatherer societies.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

Not an anthropologist, so take my casual observations with a grain of salt, but I can think of quite a few examples of latter day stone-age societies that are notably bloodthirsty. The few remaining indigenous tribes in the amazon, for one. 'Headhunters' in Indonesia, for another.

My other gripe with it is that as a member of a non-hunter-gatherer society I value the fact that my diet is more interesting and varied than just mongongo nuts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com