Myths about Hunter-Gatherers

The myths about hunter-gatherers are exposed in this excellent article:

William Buckner, “Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer,” Quillette, December 16, 2017
http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

Buckner points out that many of these myths were first promulgated in a conference called “Man the Hunter” (held at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Chicago, from 6–9 April, 1966) in a paper by Richard B. Lee (Lee 1968) on the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert (also called the Bushmen or the San people).

Lee’s (1968) work was taken up by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in his book Stone Age Economics (1974) (2nd edn. Sahlins 2004), in which he called Stone Age hunter-gatherers the “original affluent society.”

This idealised view of hunter-gatherer societies was based on the work of Lee (1968), and has recently been elaborated by James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017), and James Suzman’s Affluence without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen (2017).

The Cultural Leftist and Liberal media have pushed these books and their skewed view of hunter-gatherer societies.

Buckner, reviewing the scholarly literature, points out the lies and myths of these new romanticised views of hunter-gatherers

(1) subsequent work has shown that hunger and malnutrition are prevalent in modern hunter-gatherer societies, and the notion that ancient hunter-gatherer communities, which would have been similar to modern ones, were “affluent societies” absurd (Howell 1986; Harpending and Wandsnider 1982; Konner and Shostak 1986; Silberbauer 1981).

(2) modern hunter-gatherers have horrifically high infant mortality rates and low life expectancy at birth, which ranges from 21 to 36 years. (Lee 1993; Howell 1979; Headland 1988; Gurven and Kaplan 2007; Migliano et al. 2007), and we should expect that this was true of Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

(3) the mobile nature of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle means that hunter-gatherers are vulnerable to the pathogens of different regions, and have difficulty evolving resistance to such pathogens. This should be true of ancient hunter-gatherers too.

(4) the extent of equality in hunter-gatherer communities is exaggerated (Gurven 2004; Smith et al. 2011; Smith 2004), though it is less than in most agricultural societies. There is no compelling reason to think ancient hunter-gatherer communities were different.

(5) as Darwinian theory would predict, successful male hunters tend to be accorded high status and have much greater reproductive success in hunter-gatherer communities through polygamy, far more than in modern advanced societies (Brown et al. 2009; Binford 2001).

(6) hunter-gatherer communities are not some models of gender equality (Tonkinson 1978; Hill et al. 2007; Hurtado and Hill 1996; Divale et al. 1976; Hewlett 1991; Rasmussen 1931), but men seem to consistently have higher status, and women inferior status.

(7) Kelly (2013) finds that homicide rates of hunter-gatherer societies are far higher than most modern nation states.

So, all in all, hunter-gatherer quality of life is markedly inferior to that of modern industrialised societies, and the modern Left continue to promulgate myths about these societies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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