Wild Free and Happy Sample 47

[Note: This is the forty-seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT

[Continued from #46]

Adulthood

The point where adolescence ends and adulthood begins is sort of blurry.  Colin Turnbull noted that in Mbuti society, adulthood begins with marriage.  It was a phase during which disputes and conflicts were more common, so adults were involved less in decision making, and more in the routines of daily life.  Turnbull thought that adulthood was a time for doing, and elderhood was a time for being. 

Wild cultures and modern cultures take a very different approach to adulthood.  In our culture, doing implies working — activities that bring money into your life, so you can afford the basic necessities of survival.  For many, “work” does not rhyme with “fun” or “joy.”  Most consumers have peculiar illusions about the difference between needs (essentials) and wants (desires).  Their conception of needs is far more expansive than other cultures — stuff like televisions, cell phones, computers, automobiles, and all other impulsive cravings.  For several billion less affluent non-consumers, needs focus on today’s sustenance.

When I contemplate the amount of all the stuff I’ve thrown out in my life, it staggers me — many, many tons.  Every week, garbage trucks rumble down the alley, and it’s stunning to imagine how much crap this neighborhood discards, or this city.  It must end up in a landfill as high as the Alps, constantly growing taller.  Every other animal in the family of life leaves the world in no worse condition than they found it.  This is exactly what sustainability means.

Turnbull noted that in simpler cultures, “work” means no more than what you happen to be doing in your life (assuming that it’s socially acceptable).  So, a child’s play is work, and so is the adolescent’s exploration of sexuality.  Work is reading a book, or gazing at the stars, or making love, or singing and dancing.  The Mbuti have no need for money, because the forest provides all their needs.  For them, singing a honey song is seen as essential for survival.  For the factory worker, installing windshields is essential for survival, because it is rewarded with trade tokens. 

In essence, unlike child’s play, Mbuti adulthood is about playing a “constructive role in the furtherance of the social order,” and it is “done with a conscious sense of social responsibility.”  This is about cooperation, and consideration for others.  Importantly, the focus is on WE, not ME.  In their culture, being independent and self-centered is irresponsible, obnoxious, and pathological.

In our culture, individualism and competition are promoted “with a curious fanaticism,” and this results in a fiercely exploitive crazy-making planet-thrashing nightmare world.  In our culture, ME trumps WE.  To us, absolute individual freedom is the Holy Grail — no responsibilities, no bosses, no rules, no cops, no consequences.  I can do whatever I want.  Stay out of my way.  Shut up!  To wild folks, this is absolute insanity.

In our culture, adulthood takes different forms.  Turnbull wrote, “We have all met many adults in our lives who, without seeming to try, have shown us what a rich thing adulthood can be.  We have also met many who have shown us what an empty thing it can be, sometimes by trying too hard to be other than what they are.  We have also met all too many who neither try nor succeed, those who are frankly and openly concerned only with their own immediate welfare…”

Old Age

In Mbuti society, elders are honored in their golden years.  This phase of life is about being.  Elders shift toward other important roles in society — guarding the camp, playing with children, mediating conflicts, and passing wisdom on to younger generations.  They enjoy tremendous respect.  While body and mind may have been stronger in years past, they are more experienced than ever, and their heart and soul continue getting stronger.  They still have important things to do.

Elders are relieved of adult responsibilities, withdrawing from involvement in a future that is not theirs.  These obligations are left to folks for whom the future belongs.  So, their social horizons narrow, while their authority expands, as they approach their return “to the source of Spirit.”  Elderhood encourages three paths: saints, witches, and wise ones.  It’s common for elders to engage in more than one role.  

Saints are rare elders who are radiant with spirit energy, aglow with a warm presence.  They don’t need to preach, “they just have to be.”  Their goodness can be especially beneficial to adolescents who travel on a more slippery path. 

“Witch” refers to the African sense of the word, not to the unfortunate victims of the Christian Inquisition (“demonic” women who must be tortured and burned alive).  Mbuti witches (male and female) have acquired excessive power, which is not under control, and can be used for good or ill, deliberately or not.  Elderly recluses can provide an important service.  They know all the shady things happening in the village, and they enjoy the freedom to piss off whoever they wish, and say exactly what they think.  While this makes the offenders uncomfortable, it encourages increased integrity in the community.

Wise elders are living treasure chests of important knowledge and experience.  They are the greatest babysitters, because children trust them.  They can communicate in a special way, since kids are close to the beginning of life, and elders are close to the end.  Elders are outside of the parent-child relationship, and its frictions, so things can be relaxed and open.

Of course, elders in modern cultures are a very different story.  Elderhood is often associated with uselessness, decline, poor health, poverty, senility, death.  Treating them as diminished beings results in a serious loss to the community.  We send elders away to institutions for old folks, “a pre-death limbo” where they are isolated from family and younger generations, and denied the joys of old age.  They become an annoying obligation for their children, who cherish their freedom and independence.  For many, retirement can be painful and traumatic, because folks no longer feel valued.  It can be a sad time of loneliness.

COHERENT SOCIETIES

So, we’ve taken a peek at how wild and modern cultures attempt to guide their people through the phases of the life cycle, and the different outcomes they produce.  Wild cultures were far more likely to enjoy functional, coherent societies, because everyone was on the same channel.  Humankind has generated a multitude of groups that invent unique cultural abstractions that are fundamentally (sometimes violently) intolerant of the beliefs of outsiders.  No other animal species does this.  In The Mountain People, Turnbull noted that the Mbuti enjoyed a society that was harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, lifestyles, and ethnicity.  A beauty!

Our modern society is a boisterous mob of different cultures, ethnicities, classes, crime gangs, hate groups, religious beliefs, and so on.  When jolted, it can explode into a swarm of furious hornets.  Indeed, Turnbull would not even call it a society.  “In larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force — the existence of which is a violence.”  It’s a strong, wobbly, dimwitted Frankenstein, a manmade monster that cannot be kept on a leash.

Turnbull wrote, “Hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity, and others.”  These traits not rare and noble virtues, they are fundamental to the survival of hunting cultures.  The Taliban people are also apparently united by a single powerful belief, but their culture is built on a different foundation.  They are civilized.

It’s important to pay attention to the core differences between wild and modern cultures.  Hunting people lived in small groups, where everyone was family or friends, and all were on the same channel.  They had an extremely intimate relationship with the lands they lived in, and they fully understood the patterns of food availability.  They followed their stomachs, as they roamed across the land.  For hunter-gatherers, the wild menu was highly diverse.  They had many more dining options than the hungry dirty farmer with a cow and a wheat field.

Earlier, I mentioned how the San people in Botswana were able to survive in the Kalahari Desert through three years of extreme drought, because they possessed time-proven knowledge of how to live there.  The long drought killed 250,000 of the cattle owned by their Bantu neighbors, of whom 180,000 were kept on life support by U.N. famine relief projects. 

The domestication of plants and animals was a clever experiment.  When conditions were suitable, agriculture could feed a lot of people, and spawn civilizations.  But good luck was never a faithful companion.  Life was full of surprises.  It’s not a pleasant surprise to wake up every morning in a turbulent jam-packed world that is mercilessly pummeling the planet.  Alas, the clever experiment has turned out to be perfectly un-clever.

Turnbull emphasized that the bottom line here is that a farmer can lose a year’s work in one unfortunate day.  All of his eggs are stored in one basket.  A Mbuti hunter can only lose a day’s work when his luck takes a nap.  He has no need to hoard food, and constantly defend the stash.  If one food source becomes scarce, he eats something else.  They periodically move from place to place, as guided by their traditional wisdom, and shifting conditions.

Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him.  He knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.  He is the best of conservationists, knowing exactly how much he can take from where at any given time.”

The farmer, on the other hand, is betting everything on a narrow mix of food resources, which exist in a fixed location (his field and pasture), and are entirely vulnerable to a wide variety of potential threats.  A ripe field could suddenly be reduced to ashes.  A swarm of locusts might discover his delicious wheat crop.  Passing soldiers, friends or foes, could confiscate his livestock and stored grain.  A fungus could turn his bumper crop of spuds into a field of stinky black slime overnight.  His livestock could all drop dead when an epidemic of rinderpest or anthrax paid a visit to his region.  Drought, deluge, flood, heat wave, early autumn frost, late springtime frost — farming was a risky business, not a pleasant stroll down Easy Street.

Modern consumers are vulnerable to all of the above risks, plus they are dependent on an extremely complex system of industrial agriculture, food processing, distribution, retailing, and a functional economic system.  If the money in their wallets becomes worthless during an economic meltdown, what’s for dinner?  Will they get evicted?  Will the bank foreclose on their mortgage?  The food system depends on the fossil fuel industry to keep stuff moving on the farms, highways, railways, and airlines.  Refrigeration requires energy to keep food from spoiling.  Stoves and ovens need power to cook meals.  Industrial civilization must remain on life support to keep all the gears of the machine moving.  An enormous house of cards.  What could possibly go wrong?

CONNECTION TO PLACE

Coherent societies can only survive in coherent places — healthy wild ecosystems.  Wild animals are a constant presence in the surrounding countryside, outnumbering the humans.  Free critters inspire contemplation and deep respect.  They provide the folks with food, and eventually compost them.  Throughout every day, wild people devote careful attention to the ongoing drama of sounds, movements, smells, turds, tracks, spirits, and other matters of utmost importance.  Being wild and free is a rich and fully engaging experience.  It requires far more mindfulness than living in a glowing screen zoo.

In Encounters With Nature, Paul Shepard wrote about how our lives can be shaped by animals and places.  For hundreds of thousands of years, wild kids enjoyed childhoods in healthy lands where everything around them, the entire landscape, was fully alive with their plant and animal relatives.  Animals were especially fascinating.  Three year olds take great delight in learning the names of different animals, because they are so amazing.  Children’s lives were warmly embraced by their mothers, their family and neighbors, and by the land that fed them and fascinated them.

In 1997, I was living in the remains of a once prosperous copper mining district near Lake Superior.  I was able to spend a bit of time with the Anishinabe activist Walter Bresette, a man who had a profound spiritual connection to life.  One day, after lunch, I showed him a beautiful piece of copper that had been smoothed by passing glaciers.  To the Anishinabe, all of Creation is alive, sacred, and related — everything in Creation is a being with spiritual power.  I learned that copper rocks are especially sacred to the Anishinabe, and they affectionately and respectfully refer to these ancient and powerful red metal spirit beings as the copper people.

Walter took the heavy green stone in his hands, and gasped with amazement and delight.  The two of them went off, into the next room, and sat down together by the wood stove.  Walter bowed his head, and he and the copper spirits spent a long time in deep and sacred communication.  It was an awesome and moving experience to observe.  I will never forget it.  He spent a night in my house, to feel the strong presence of so many copper spirits.

Shepard said that a child’s early homeland imprinted on its psyche, and remained a special and sacred place for the rest of its life.  Kids soak in all that surrounds them.  At puberty, rites of initiation further strengthened the spiritual bonds to place, via tests of endurance, vision quests, and so on.  The person and the land were one.  All beings on the land belonged there.  None were pests or weeds that had to be eliminated.

In the good old days, before the plague of glowing screens, and the fear of perverts hiding behind every bush, children were allowed to run free, unsupervised, explore their home range, and get their hands dirty.  I was one of these, and I was lucky to live close to forests, lakes, and wetlands.  My imprint of this homeland remains vivid.  I still remember that place in great detail.  It played an important role in shaping my identity.  Most of it has now been obliterated by sprawl.  I have no interest in returning, it’s too painful to see.

Jay Griffiths and her brothers also spent much of their youth playing outdoors.  Like me, they rarely watched television.  She fears that her 1960s generation may be the last to experience the remaining vestiges of a normal childhood.

John Livingston lamented how being raised in a manmade reality deforms us.  Like livestock, we become passive and obedient servants.  We learn to endure the stress of living in dense populations of strangers, and spending most of our time in enclosed climate controlled cubicles with artificial lighting.  Our cubicles are located inside vast concentration camps called cities.  We are likely to develop a high tolerance for abuse, filth, squalor, noise, and intense pollution.

Richard Louv told a touching story about a Girl Scout field trip.  Girls with AIDS from Los Angeles were taken to a camp in the mountains.  One night, a nine year old girl woke up, and had to go to the bathroom.  Stepping outside, she looked up and gasped.  Growing up in a sprawling megalopolis, she had never seen stars before.  “That night, I saw the power of nature on a child.  She was a changed person.  From that moment on, she saw everything.  She used her senses.  She was awake.” 

Natalie Diaz, a Mojave poet, noted that in her language, the same word is used to say both “body” and “land.”  The Mojave had no supermarkets, malls, cities, or online shopping.  So, throughout their lives, their air, water, and food came from the land, their home.  They were at one with the land, like a fetus in the womb. 

There is a profound difference between purchasing food-like substances at a shopping center, and gathering nourishment from the land.  When the land feeds you, an intimate and reverent relationship is born.  I fished a lot in my boyhood years.  Later in life, I took great pleasure in foraging in wild places, and on the recovering remains of abandoned farms and mining settlements.  Over the years, I’ve gathered apples, pears, cherries, plums, blueberries, thimbleberries, blackberries, strawberries, elderberries, grapes, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, acorns, mushrooms, asparagus, and so on.  Joy!

Tom Brown was eight years old when he met an elderly Indian in the woods.  Stalking Wolf was a tracker raised in a wild, free Apache community.  He possessed vast knowledge about the natural world, and how to survive in it.  He spent nine years teaching Tom and his buddy Rick.  Tom grew up to establish a school for trackers, and write 17 books. 

I was lucky to spend much of my childhood playing in the woods and swamps.  I felt very at home in nature.  Years later, a friend pointed me to Tom’s books, and it was a mind-blowing experience — an adult who had profound reverence and respect for the family of life.  Religion had given me years of painful headaches, because it was so incoherent.  Beliefs frequently seemed to have little or no influence on behavior.  I finally found something that made sense, holiness was all around me.  I could see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, respect it.

Jon Young happened to meet Tom Brown in 1971, when Tom was 18, and Jon was 10.  Tom spent eight years teaching his young friend.  When Jon later arrived at Rutgers University, he had extensive knowledge of wild ecosystems, which made him a total freak among his classmates, who seemed to be more than a little disconnected from life — suburban zoo animals.

Young soon discovered that he was the only person at Rutgers who understood bird language.  One day, on an outdoor field trip, he heard a bird call.  It was announcing the approach of a Cooper’s hawk, warning nearby critters that a predator was getting close.  Pay attention!  Jon mentioned this to the others.  The professors gazed at the sky, saw nothing.  They proceeded to exclaim that bird communication was impossible.  Then, the hawk came into view.  Wow!  Jon’s classmates were astonished that the professors, who were card-carrying bird experts, were clueless about bird language. 

Young clearly understood that connection to nature was precious, necessary, and vital.  Not forming that connection was a crippling injury, one suffered by most folks in modern society.  They have no hearts, because they are “dis-placed,” said Okanagan elder Jeanette Armstrong.  In Chief Seattle’s famous speech, he allegedly said, “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.  You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.”

Jack Forbes, of Powhatan and Delaware heritage, diagnosed disconnection as an epidemic of insanity, which he called wétiko psychosis, the cannibal disease.  It’s a spiritual illness that causes people to become predators, and to relentlessly consume the lives of others.  Wétiko was the essence of European culture, a nightmare world of bloodthirsty vampires and werewolves.  Their “religion” was something isolated from everyday life, practiced indoors, away from the perfection of Creation. 

Anyway, in 1979, Jon Young asked a core question.  Which people are the most fully connected to the family of life?  Why are some cultures deeply connected, and others not?  There are three components here: connection to self, connection to others, and connection to nature.  In Western societies, disconnection from self, others, and nature (separation sickness) is at pandemic levels.  Over time, Young learned that the San people (“Bushmen”) of the Kalahari were among the most connected cultures still in existence, so he spent time with them.

Being with the San, you always feel safe.  They are super intelligent, super happy, super vital, and great problem solvers.  You never feel competition.  People are in love with every aspect of the ecosystem around them, celebrating it with childlike wonder through all stages of their life.  Every person in that community is committed to the flowering of every other person.  They are incredibly aware of their surroundings at all times, because a brief lapse of attention can kill you in lion country.

When San children grow up with nature in this way, they’re well-adjusted, healthier, happier, smarter, spiritually grounded, and more creative.  By the time they are 12 to 15 years old, they have master tracker skills.  They are illiterate, but they fully understand the language of the Kalahari.  They are better scientists than civilized scientists.

The San are remarkably skilled at living like human beings.  They are wary of entering buildings, because folks who do this too often become damaged, no longer human.  They go crazy.  Today, using the techno-juju of DNA mapping, it’s looking like the San are the common ancestors of all humankind.  For two million years, our hominin ancestors lived like the San.  We have their genes and instincts, but our culture lost its connection centuries ago.

Louis Liebenberg wrote two fantastic books about the tracking skills of San hunters on the Kalahari.  He and Young became friends.  San women were as good as men, or better, at interpreting spoor.  Everyone in a band, even children, could observe human tracks, and accurately identify the individual person who made them.  One time, Liebenberg asked some trackers if they could actually recognize the spoor of an individual antelope.  “They found it very amusing that I should ask them such a stupid question.  To them it is difficult to understand that some people can not do it.”    

Lame Deer was a Lakota medicine man.  His parents were the last generation to be born wild and free.  His generation suffered from the relentless efforts of white people to destroy the Lakota people, and he fiercely resented this.  Whites had lost their connection to the family of life, and were desperately in need of a big healing.  Like their cattle, sheep, and lapdogs, their wild power had been bred out of them.  Lame Deer shared a powerful story, in the hope of helping white folks outgrow their bad trip, so their world-killing rampage would come to an end.

He told us that we needed to experience nature in a good way, and become part of it.  Let’s sit down and listen to the air.  Let’s talk to the butterflies, owls, rivers, and lakes.  They are our relatives.  Let’s become like stones, plants, and trees.  Let us be animals, and think and feel like animals.  Even rocks are holy.  Every man needs a stone to guide him.  His story was painful and beautiful, but it failed to inspire a miraculous healing among the palefaces.

Aldous Huxley wrote, “A man must do more than indulge in introspection.  If I would know myself I must know my environment.”  Prince Charles said it a bit differently:  “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  Carson McCullers said, “To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.”  Paul Shepard put it like this, “Knowing who you are is impossible without knowing where you are.”

Every five years, the average American moves to a different address in the same city, or another county, state, or nation.  We typically spend 95 percent of our lives indoors.  Someone once realized that prisoners in maximum security prisons typically spend more time outdoors than suburban kids do.  We have become space aliens, residents of no place, something like zoo animals.

CONNECTED PEOPLE

Many of us have been taught ideas that echo Thomas Hobbes, who declared that the lives of hunter-gatherers were “nasty, brutish, and short.”  Many folks who have had direct experience would disagree.  The wild cultures that were less than mellow tended to be engaged in herding or horticulture, situations in which it was more common to bump into neighbors in an unpleasant manner.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  In Book of the Eskimos, he wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth, living in the most beautiful country there is.”

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies, and described them in The Forest People.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living.  He said that they laugh until they can no longer stand, then they sit down and laugh.

In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, seeming to communicate telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

In The People of the Polar North, Knud Rasmussen noted how the Eskimos pitied (and giggled at) the Danes, because they suffered from hurricane minds — they never stopped thinking.  Knud once observed an Eskimo who appeared to be deep in thought, and asked him what he was thinking about.  The man laughed.  “Oh!  It is only you white men who go in so much for thinking; up here we only think of our flesh-pits and of whether we have enough or not for the long Dark of the winter.  If we have meat enough, then there is no need to think.”  Their language included no tools for discussing abstractions.  Eskimos rarely made plans for tomorrow.  “An irresponsible happiness at merely being alive finds expression in their actions and conversation.”

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

In his book, In Search of the Primitive, Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

In 1832, the artist George Catlin visited Indian tribes in the Upper Missouri River region.  He wrote, “They live in a country well stocked with buffaloes and wild horses, which furnish them an excellent and easy living; their atmosphere is pure, which produces good health and long life, and they are the most independent and happiest race of Indians I have met with: they are all entirely in a state of primitive rudeness and wildness, and consequently are picturesque and handsome, almost beyond description.  …In my travels I have more than realized my former predictions that those Indians, who could be found almost entirely in a state of nature, with the least knowledge of civilized society, would be found the most cleanly in their persons, elegant in their dress and manners, and enjoying life to the greatest perfection.”

Daniel L. Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  He described his efforts in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.  He eventually realized that it was pointless “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  He became a devout atheist.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

[Continued in sample #48]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 06

[Note: This is the sixth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild Free & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Bipedal Locomotion

Baboons survive today because their ancestors evolved a successful approach for living on the savannah.  They did this by organizing into powerful bad ass gangs.  Like all other non-human animals, baboons still survive by living in the manner for which evolution has fine-tuned them, free from addictions to crutches like fire or complex weapons.  They stayed in their tropical homeland, and could possibly remain there for another million years, if the human turbulence in their ecosystem mercifully mellowed out.

Unlike baboons, our ancestors took a radically different approach to surviving on tropical savannahs.  They quit knuckle walking, evolved an upright posture, and became bipedal — standing, striding, and sprinting on two legs, not four.  This transition reduced or eliminated their ability to quickly scamper up trees, where they were less vulnerable to predators.  So, a new category of primates was born: hominins — bipedal ground-dwelling primates. 

The earliest bipedal primate is the subject of controversy.  It may have lived as early as 6 million years ago.  By about 4 million years ago, our ancestors’ feet had become less useful for grasping (climbing trees), and more attuned for walking smoothly.

In Tanzania, 3.6 million years ago, two bipedal ancestors left their footprints in wet volcanic ash.  In 1978, at the Laetoli site, scientists discovered 70 of their fossilized footprints, in a sequence that was 88 feet long (27m).  These ancestors were probably Australopithecus afarensis.

Why the shift to bipedal travel?  Over time, as climate change expanded grassland, the distance between groves of trees increased.  Knuckle walking is OK for short trips, but striding is more comfortable and energy efficient for longer journeys.  Standing upright provided a better view of the surroundings.  It also made them more visible to hungry predators.  It freed up their hands for carrying things like food, water, infants, embers, and tools.

For brief high-speed getaways, hominins were far slower than galloping chimps.  Alfred Crosby noted that bipedal striding is like walking on stilts, and it increases the odds for falling down.  Four-legged critters (quadrupeds) like canines, cats, or horses move in a manner that is far more graceful, stable, and speedy.

On the savannah, evolution typically selected for prey animals that were better high speed escape artists.  Consequently, it also selected for the predators that were more effective at killing them.  If prey gradually got larger, predators gradually got larger.  If prey got faster, so did the predators.  If prey got too good at surviving, they would overgraze the savannah and starve.  If predators got too good at hunting, they would eliminate their prey and starve.  The ecosystem was an endless bloody evolutionary soap opera.

With regard to our ancestors, evolution advanced an unusual mutation.  Instead of size or speed, it selected for heat tolerance and long distance running.  Compared to four-legged critters, standing upright exposed less of their bodies to hot sunbeams, and their bushy hairdos provided extra heat protection.  Their nearly furless bodies, equipped with three million juicy sweat glands, allowed them to shed body heat better than other savannah mammals. 

Tree-dwelling primates enjoyed a diet majoring in fruit, which grew all around them, all year long.  On the savannah, there was less fruit, so foraging required travelling farther, and finding other things to eat.  Some believe that our ancestors became bipedal to improve their success at scavenging — beating competitors to fresh carcasses.  Bernd Heinrich wrote that at Yellowstone Park, dead animals are reduced to a pile of bones in just seven hours.  In Africa, hyenas devour the bones too.

The person you see in the mirror has a body that is optimized for running, not walking.  Your toes and heel tendons provide a bounce when your foot hits the ground, improving energy efficiency.  Your legs and spine are fine-tuned for jogging, keeping your head and eyes steady.  Skilled runners gracefully glide along, lightly skimming across the land.

The shift to bipedal locomotion resulted in some radical changes in our ancestors’ skeletons.  Notably, the pelvis got narrower, which reduced the size of the birth canal — the passageway through which fetuses pass during birth.  This challenge was dealt with in two ways.  (1) Birth occurred earlier, when brains were smaller and less mature.  This extended the duration of childhood, the spacing between births, and the need for extended parental oversight.  (2) Since bipeds no longer slept in the trees, they could grow heavier and bigger.  Increased size was an asset for hunting and defense.  Longer legs enabled longer strides, which boosted running speed.  Larger bodies retained water better, delaying dehydration.

Bipedal locomotion was an unusual evolutionary experiment.  Few if any humans still live in the manner for which evolution fine-tuned us, a practice known as persistence hunting.

Persistence Hunting

On the savannah, predators made speedy attacks, and their prey attempted quick getaways, but both soon had to find shade and chill out, because bursts of high exertion promptly led to overheating.  Consequently, predator attacks were resolved quickly.  If a charging lion failed to promptly take down its target, the attack ended, and the prey might live to see another day. 

Our ancestors gained the ability to engage in steady long distance running, hour after hour, in the oven-like midday heat of tropical savannahs.  Once a chase began, the prey animals immediately scattered.  The hunter quickly selected an animal that was less strong and speedy, and began trotting after it.  Even when the prey was miles ahead, the hunter would doggedly follow its trail, reducing its ability to rest and cool off.

Persistence hunting requires no weapons.  Hunters must possess a deep understanding of animal behavior, great skill in the art of tracking, an intuitive mind, a healthy body, and sufficient water and nutrients for a long run.  Kalahari people had exceptional tracking skills.  Women were as good as men, or better, at interpreting spoor.  At the end of a successful pursuit, the prey might collapse from exhaustion or heat stroke, or simply stop running.  If the hunter found it still alive, he could suffocate it or bonk it on the head. 

Liebenberg was maybe the first civilized person to participate in persistence hunting (he nearly died from heat stroke).  He observed a six and a half hour chase that covered 21.7 miles (35 km), on a day when the temperature ranged between 89°F and 107°F (32°C and 42°C). 

He noted that tracking encouraged wild people to develop heightened abilities for intuitive thinking, because the tracks of their prey were rarely clear and complete.  Knowledge of animal behavior helped to fill in the blanks and suggest the most likely escape route.  The mental process was fast, automatic, effortless, and often unconscious.  Intuition also enhanced social relationships.  Wild people were far more sensitive to each other than folks in the modern world, whom Liebenberg saw as being severely handicapped by shallow or dysfunctional relationships.

Maybe our ancestors learned persistence hunting from hyenas, who hunt in packs, using their super-sensitive noses to follow animals until they are exhausted.  Or, maybe they first learned by chasing small, slow moving critters.  Somehow, maybe several million years ago, our hominin ancestors learned the clever trick of using overheating and exhaustion as deadly weapons — and the keys to survival.

Every gardener who has experienced backaches or sore knees, is painfully aware that evolution did not fine tune hominins for spending long hours on their knees or bent over, engaged in tedious repetitive movements — digging, cultivating, planting, weeding, picking, threshing, grinding, and so on.  What you see in the mirror is a body optimized for long distance pursuits across hot African savannahs — a meat-loving hunter and forager.

Bears have never forgotten their identity, consequently they confidently continue to live like bears, which is why they remain perfectly sane, and have no need for psych meds.  The same can be said for all the wild animals alive today.  The glaring exception is a super large mob of modernized persistence hunters who have become extremely disoriented by memory loss.

Young children, even in the deepest darkest McMansion suburbs, are fascinated by bears, lions, horses, bunnies, piggies, and others.  They play with teddy bears, pretend to be horses, and love looking at animals in picture books.  The kids are animals, and their hominin ancestors have been fascinated by animals for six million years.  Sadly, most will spend their lives in a reality where most of the animals they’ll closely experience will be thoroughly domesticated critters purchased for companionship or status display.

Jung said that we still retain unconscious memories of our arboreal past, when falling out of trees caused big fear.  Many of us have suddenly awakened with a gasp when a dream included a sudden plunge.  Nightmares commonly involve being chased or attacked by dangerous predators.  In crowded movie theaters, when the woman is about to be stabbed by a psycho killer, the hall explodes with loud squeals and screams, like our primate ancestors in a distant rainforest.

Over the last six million years, every species of bipedal primate has gone extinct, except one — and almost all of us have abandoned persistence hunting as a routine component of basic survival.  Don’t worry.  Close your eyes and imagine what humans might become if we spent the next 200,000 years sitting on couches, staring at glowing screens, washing down greasy pizza with fizzy sugar water.

Running Goes Global

By and by, as hominins spread far beyond the savannahs of tropical Africa, so did persistence hunting.  It spread around the world, because it works, and because evolution fine-tuned us for doing it.  For almost the entire hominin saga, we lived on our feet.  Running was a key factor in our ancestors’ survival, until we got wheels, four legged slaves, and other weird and troublesome things.

Tim Flannery reported that the Aborigines of Western Australia would pursue an individual kangaroo until it was overheated and exhausted.  The chase could take several days.  Johann Kohl wrote that the Ojibway would often run down elk, especially in the winter, when deep snow soon wore out the animal.  Hunters on snowshoes could pursue the animal for hours.  Kohl also mentioned a Sioux hunter who chased a bear to exhaustion.

Bernd Heinrich wrote about the Penobscot tribe chasing down moose, and the Navajo and Paiutes wearing out pronghorn antelopes.  In Southern Africa, hunters chased steenbok, gemsbok, wildebeest, zebras, and others.  Wendell Bennett wrote about the Tarahumara people of Mexico pursuing deer and turkeys until they collapsed.  

Peter Nabokov noted that some Tarahumara lads could run 170 miles (273 km) without stopping.  Mexicans would hire them to capture wild horses, sometimes chasing them for two or three days, until the horses could run no more — while the men remained fresh.  Nabokov quoted a Hopi man: “Long ago when the Hopi had no sheep, no horses, no burros, they had to depend for game-capturing on their legs.”

Nabokov provided numerous accounts of Indian messengers traveling great distances.  One ran 50 miles in six hours.  A Mojave lad ran 200 miles (322 km) in 24 hours.  Seven days a week, a Tarahumara man ran a 70 mile (112 km) route, carrying a heavy mailbag.  After running 15 miles (24 km), Zuni runners still had a slow heart rate and no signs of fatigue.  Men in their seventies continued to have tremendous endurance, as well as low blood pressure.

For wild people in open country, running was essential for communication, warfare, hunting, ceremonies, and rituals.  Apache boys of 8 to 12 years old regularly ran to improve their endurance and pain tolerance.  They ran carrying big loads, and they ran up mountains.  Apache warriors were much stronger and braver than the U.S. Army lads sent to exterminate them.

Nabokov wrote that 4-year old Navajo boys had to get up before sunrise every day and run four miles before having breakfast.  Speed and strength were essential when attacking enemies, or being attacked.  No one will help you in this world, you must run to get strong.  Your legs are your friends.

I spent many years sitting indoors at school desks, learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, loading my brains with the ideas necessary to be an obedient, punctual, productive cog in the industrial society that’s pounding the planet to pieces.  Wild Native Americans, during the years of their youth, were being taught to be strong, brave, and extremely healthy.  They learned the skills needed to survive in their ecosystem, in a low impact manner.  During their entire lives, they sent nothing to landfills.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 05

[Note: This is the fifth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild Free & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Savannah Pioneers

When our ancestors moved from the forest to the savannah, they began a journey into an entirely different way of life.  Critters that evolution had fine-tuned for arboreal living were poorly prepared for surviving on open grassland.  They were not big, strong, or speedy.  They didn’t have horns, fangs, or claws.  They couldn’t digest grass.  They had to adapt to different sources of food, and different threats to their survival.  It took centuries of trial and error to develop new ways of living, and hundreds of thousands of years to evolve new and improved bodies fine-tuned for their unique experiment.

In the early days, our ancestors were not apex (top level) predators, they may have been more like walking meatballs, easy prey for big cats, packs of hyenas, huge crocodiles, and other hungry carnivores.  Chris Stringer mentioned genetic research indicating that today’s Earth-pounding mob of Homo sapiens trace back to an ancestral population of about 10,000 breeding individuals.  Earlier, a million years ago, in the Homo erectus era, there were just 20,000 breeding individuals.  For a very long time, our ancestors existed not too far from the brink of extinction.  It wasn’t easy being a highly vulnerable ground-dwelling primate.

Scavenging and Primitive Hunting

Our ancestors on the African savannah were hunter-gatherers, and their diet majored in plant foods, with a regular supplement of highly nutritious animal foods.  In the early chapters of the great hominin adventure, they were not expert hunters with effective weapons.  Meat was acquired via scavenging and primitive hunting.  With bare hands, they could grab critters like grubs, grasshoppers, termites, maggots, snails, shellfish, lizards, and frogs.  They could kill animals sleeping under bushes, dig up others from their burrows, chase down slow moving aardvarks and porcupines, and snatch immature youngsters.  Large birds could be knocked down by throwing clubs.

It’s easy to forget that rocks can be lethal weapons.  Wendell Bennett wrote that the Tarahumara people of Mexico threw stones with remarkable accuracy, killing rabbits, birds, and animals up to the size of coyotes.  Some of their groups did more hunting with stones than with bows and arrows.

Alfred Crosby wrote that any human more than eight years old, male or female, can throw projectiles farther and more accurately than any other species.  This ability gave us the power to effect change from a distance.  Well-thrown projectiles could drive away hungry predators or kill a plump bunny for dinner.  Researcher Frans de Waal noted that stone throwing chimps also have “impressive long-range aim.”  (Ouch!)

Crosby noted that a few hundred years ago, Europeans visiting Samoa got a painful lesson in the superb stone-throwing skills of the natives.  Of the 61 men sent ashore, 12 were killed by well-thrown rocks.  Humans also invented the rock-throwing sling, which was even more deadly, especially when loaded with lumps of lead.  Many of the conquistadors visiting Mexico had life-changing experiences while getting stoned by the angry sling-twirling Indians.

Scavenging is getting meat from carcasses that you didn’t kill — leftovers from large carnivores, or animals that died from other causes.  In later times, as the ancestors became more skilled at hunting, scavenging was not abandoned.  Meat is treasure, no matter how it is acquired.  Scavenging was often less work and less dangerous than pursuing and killing an animal.

During the day, our ancestors paid careful attention to the skies.  When vultures flew in a specific direction, they might be en route to a fresh carcass.  Circling vultures were strong evidence of a banquet directly below.  Once you got a hot tip, it was best to move quickly, in an effort to beat other scavengers to the banquet.

Hyenas work in gangs, and can quickly strip the scraps off carcasses, leaving few leftovers, if any.  Their arrival time was sometimes delayed by their need to stop, pant, and cool off from time to time.  Our ancestors were far better at shedding heat, an important advantage.  If hyenas or jackals arrived first, it was sometimes possible to mob them and drive them off.  On lucky days, it was possible to steal lunch from a lone cheetah.

Lions were another story.  To drive them away from a kill, surprise was important.  You and your buddies should suddenly charge, waving your arms, shouting, throwing rocks, swinging clubs, or maybe start a grass fire upwind.  Smart scavengers never tried this when lions were just beginning their lunch feast, and were still very hungry.  It was best to wait until they were full and ready for a nap.  Lions rarely consume brains or marrow, and sometimes leave some meat scraps for the intrepid.

It was also important for scavengers to pay attention to trees.  When leopards didn’t completely consume a kill at one sitting, they stored the leftovers up in the branches.  Leopards are night creatures.  If you found their unguarded stash in the daytime, there was less chance of getting shredded and devoured by an angry cat.

Right now, your eyes are following a track of squiggly scratches, and your mind is comprehending meaning from them.  My thoughts and actions created those tracks, and they contain specific meaning for those who have learned how to interpret them.  The farther you are able to follow my tracks, the more you will learn about me.

Similarly, animals leave behind tracks and other signs as they move across the land.  Folks who are skilled at reading this information can accumulate pieces of a story.  They can perceive a fantastic amount of information by studying spoor — footprints, urine, feces, saliva, blood, fur bits, feeding signs, smells, sounds, and so on.  Spoor provides clues about the animal’s species, gender, size, behavior, direction of travel, time of passage, and so on. 

Fresh tracks left by a game animal indicated that it had passed through the area, and the direction it was moving — essential information for hungry hunters.  Also, spoor left by large carnivores indicated predators on the move.  Following their tracks might eventually lead to a recent kill, and a carcass to scavenge.

The San

Louis Liebenberg is a South African lad who has spent years on the Kalahari Desert with the San people (other names include Khoisan, Bushmen, !Kung).  He was not a nerdy anthropologist, he directly participated in hunts, and eventually became a skilled tracker.  He wrote two outstanding books about tracking, scavenging, and persistence hunting.

One time, Liebenberg asked some San trackers if they could actually recognize the spoor of an individual antelope.  They burst out laughing at his incredibly stupid question.  They couldn’t imagine anyone not being able to do this.  When they see a human footprint, they immediately know which individual in their band made it.  Children can identify the tracks of their parents.  Footprints are as unique and recognizable as faces.  To see the footprints of an unknown stranger was highly unusual, and would inspire caution. 

More anthropology books have been written about the San than any other wild people.  Geneticists have found that they have the oldest DNA of any living culture — it is the genetic foundation of nearly all modern humans.  Their genes are the closest to the ancient female from whom all living humans descend, known as Mitochondrial Eve.  Thus, your family tree likely leads back to ancestors similar to the San.  (Pygmies are the second oldest living culture.)

The San have been hunter-gatherers since the dawn of humankind, and they enjoyed a way of life that managed to survive into the 1970s.  Eight hundred years ago, the San homeland included all of southern Africa.  Since then, Bantu and European herders and farmers have displaced them from lands suitable for grazing and agriculture, forcing the San into the Kalahari where, on average, two of every five years are drought years, and severe droughts occur one in every four years.

There are large regions of the Kalahari that are quite flat, an endless landscape having no notable landmarks for a white boy like me, who would quickly become hopelessly lost, and turn into vulture chow.  The San, on the other hand, always know exactly where they are, across large regions, because they orient themselves by the layout of plant communities, noting their size, shape, position, and unique features.  They know the face of their land as well as they know the faces of their family.

Richard Lee wrote about the San.  Their primary food was mongongo nuts, which dropped once a year, but could be gathered all year long.  Meat was their second most desired food.  The Kalahari provided them with about 100 edible plant species, which they were careful not to overuse.  The San expected periodic times of scarcity, so they reserved some plant species for drought food.  Portions of their territory were set aside for lean times.

John Reader wrote about an extreme drought in Botswana that lasted three years, resulting in the deaths of 250,000 cattle and 180,000 people.  The San didn’t starve.  Each week they spent 12 to 19 hours foraging for their sustenance.  They lived in one of the harshest environments on Earth.  At the same time, hungry farming people had shifted to foraging during the drought, so the San lands were supporting a larger population than that of normal times.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lot of time with the San.  She wrote her first book on them in 1958, and her third in 2006.  Like any intelligent culture, their safety net included mindful family planning, to avoid the problems caused by overpopulation, and its trusty companions: environmental degradation, hunger, and conflict.

Because of low body fat and vigorous physical activities, San women began menstruating later.  Some did not have regular monthly periods.  Children were usually nursed for about four years, which further reduced their mom’s fertility.  Most of the women had one to four offspring.  Nomads moved frequently, and belongings and infants often had to be hauled long distances.  A woman could only carry one infant, so just one twin was kept.

When a child could not be kept, the woman gave birth alone, away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew breath.  In their culture, a newborn did not immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK.  Crippled or badly deformed infants were not kept, because they would be a drain on the wellbeing of the band.  To avoid unwanted pregnancies in harsh times, it was common for folks to abstain from intercourse. 

Jon Young is the star of several YouTube videos on nature connection.  He was an early student of Tom Brown, the famous author of many books on tracking and nature awareness.  Young visited a number of wild cultures to find those that remain most closely connected to nature.  He discovered that the San people were incredibly well connected.  They refuse to enter houses, because people who live indoors go insane.

Young says that with the San, you always feel safe.  They are super intelligent, super happy, super vital, and great problem solvers.  You never feel competition.  The people are in love with every aspect of the ecosystem around them, celebrating with childlike wonder through all stages of their life.  Every person in that community is committed to the flowering of every other person.  They are incredibly aware of their surroundings at all times, because a brief lapse of attention can kill you in lion country.

Great Leaps



It’s fascinating to explore the deeper roots of our family tree.  They reveal a lot about the path that led us to today.  Homo sapiens emerged in Africa, somewhere between 300,000 and 130,000 years ago, depending on which expert you read.  DNA mapping asserts that the oldest surviving human group is the San people of South Africa and Namibia (also known as Khoisan, Bushmen, or !Kung).  Their genes are the closest to the ancient female from whom all living humans descend (Mitochondrial Eve).

The San have been hunter-gatherers since the dawn of humankind, enjoying a way of life that managed to survive into the 1970s.  Eight hundred years ago, the San homeland included all of southern Africa.  Since then, Bantu and European herders and farmers have displaced them from their better lands.  They now reside in the Kalahari Desert, where they are being devastated by the dark juju of modernity — missionaries, bureaucrats, booze pushers, and the money economy.

The Pygmies, who live in the rainforest of central Africa, are the second oldest surviving group.  They also managed to live as hunter-gatherers into recent decades.  The Pygmies and San coevolved in their ecosystems, and their way of life was genuinely sustainable, like all other (normal) animals.  They did not live like ecological firestorms.  Prior to the arrival of outsiders, they had no domesticated plants or livestock.

In the tropics of Mother Africa, meat spoiled quickly, and yummy carcasses quickly attracted mobs of ravenous scavengers.  When folks wanted a steak, they killed something.  Preserving and storing meat was impractical and unnecessary, a stupid idea that never occurred to anyone.  This limitation was a blessing, because it made large-scale hunting impossible, keeping low limits on population.  It was impossible for nomadic hunters in the tropics to acquire and preserve surplus meat that could feed non-hunting specialists like priests, technicians, warriors, or kings.

Somewhere between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, pioneers began migrating out of Africa, into southwest Asia.  They discovered new species of big game, many of which had no instinctive fear of small, smelly, goofy-looking tropical primates with sharp sticks.  In tropical regions like India, Southeast Asia, and Australia, traditional lifestyles essentially continued, because meat storage was impractical.

Pioneers who migrated into colder regions were confronted with daunting new challenges.  They were something like moon explorers.  Outside the tropics, food was less available all year long.  Surplus had to be carefully stored to ensure winter survival.  They needed weatherproof shelters, warm hearths, and stylish wardrobes of fur clothing.

The San and Pygmies lived in sustainable, time-proven, low-tech ways.  However, in chilly non-tropical regions, where living was more complicated, ongoing innovation boosted the odds for survival.  The clever ones invented sleds, canoes, kayaks, lances, harpoons, nets, snares, and on and on.  For the moon explorers, innovation became insanely addictive, because cool gizmos reduced the odds of premature death.  As centuries passed, innovation became something like an endless arms race, a nightmare-inducing runaway train, according to Alfred Crosby.

Clive Finlayson discussed the humans living in snowy Europe from 20 to 30 thousand years ago.  The clever Gravettian culture preserved surplus meat by freezing it in pits dug in the permafrost.  Finlayson perceived the storage pit to be a wicked invention, because it radically changed the world.  “They had found ways of producing surplus, something almost impossible in tropical climates, and with it emerged an unstoppable drive to increase rapidly in numbers.”  Food storage infected the moon explorers with a new and diabolical idea, “more is better.”

Around 10,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, the genie of domestication emerged from the magic lamp, and steered humankind into the express lane to catastrophe.  Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating essay on the emergence of domestication.  Obviously, it was impossible for the cunning conjurors to foresee the unintended consequences of the monster they were creating.  If a vision had revealed the dark future to them, Diamond thought that they would have immediately ceased their experiments, and made food production taboo.  The shift to agriculture “was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

No matter how hard the control freaks tried, most plant and animal species proved to be unsuitable for domestication.  Of the 200,000 species of wild plants, only 100 have been enslaved.  Of the 148 species of terrestrial herbivores and omnivores weighing more than 100 pounds (45 kg), only 14 have been enslaved.  Of those 14 species, 13 were enslaved in Eurasia, including the big five: cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses.

None of the 14 species enslaved originally resided south of the equator in Africa.  Horses, donkeys, and zebras are close relatives, and can interbreed.  Horses and donkeys were enslaved in Eurasia, but all four species of African zebras defiantly resisted 200 years of efforts to destroy them — the older a zebra gets, the more vicious it becomes.  Freedom is precious.  No surrender!

In the homelands of the San and Pygmies, few wild plants were suitable for domestication.  Of the crop plants domesticated in Africa, all originated north of the equator.  In their ancient homelands, the San and Pygmies had no domesticated plants or livestock, and zero need for long-term food storage.  Progress was not an option for them, so they lived simply and sustainably, like their hominid ancestors had for the last two million years.

Unfortunately, the moon explorers wandered into harsh ecosystems where it was impossible to live like tropical hunter-gatherers.  The way-too-clever oddballs eventually became exotic invasive loose cannons.  Large game became scarce, then small game.  The dark and slippery path to agriculture was nicely described by Mark Nathan Cohen.

Diana Muir noted how the process unfolded in prehistoric New England.  In the good old days, game was abundant.  Stuff like acorns and shellfish were reserved for famine food.  As game became scarce, shellfish became a mainstay.  An adult male would need 100 oysters or quahogs each day.  Thousands were dug and smoked for winter consumption, a tedious job.  In the lower layers of huge shell dumps are oyster shells 10 to 20 inches across (25 to 50 cm) — oysters 40 years old.  In higher levels, the shells get smaller and smaller.

Eventually, the seeds of corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  If a region was home to 100 tribes of hunter-gatherers, and just one tribe adopted corn, helter-skelter followed.  The farmers produced more calories, and could feed more bambinos.  With abundant stored foods, they had a much better chance of surviving harsh winters when hunting was poor.

Eventually, farmers outnumbered hunters.  Muir wrote, “Once any group in a region decides to adopt agriculture, no neighboring group can afford not to.”  Farming spread, population grew, conflicts increased, and villages were surrounded by defensive wooden palisades.  Soils were depleted, new fields displaced forests, and stronger tribes trumped weaker ones.  Progress!

In Mother Africa, the San continued their traditional way of life (i.e., naked, illiterate, heathen savages).  The folks who stumbled into Europe took a different path.  The turbo thrusters of progress roared.  In the Czech Republic 25,000 years ago, folks lived in mammoth bone huts.  A bit later, folks in France were painting gorgeous graffiti in caves.  A bit later, folks were whacking down forests, living in filthy cities, and slaughtering each other in great numbers.

Pleistocene Europeans had heroically transformed from “anatomically modern humans” (like the San), to “behaviorally modern humans” (like the Trumps).  Hooray!  This miracle began maybe 50,000 years ago, an event celebrated by the cult of human supremacy.  They call it the Great Leap Forward — cave paintings, complex language, ceramics, ornaments, rational thinking, and on and on.  It had a lot to do with migrating out of Africa and adapting to exotic ecosystems via technological innovation.

The bottom line disturbs me.  Until recently, the San followed an ancient path, which didn’t wreck their ecosystem.  The folks who adapted to non-tropical ecosystems eventually strayed away from a two million year tradition of sustainability.  Consequently, after a relatively brief rocket ride of bad craziness, the climate is trashed, the ocean is trashed, and seven-point-something billion primates are painfully discovering the embarrassing side effects of great leaps.

It’s fun playing “what if?”  Imagine what the world would be like if our ancestors had remained in sub-Saharan Africa, and continued living like wild tropical primates — and nothing was domesticated.  Would Europe and America still be home to mammoths, rhinos, and saber-toothed cats?  Is there something we might learn from our bloody adventure?

Image: A San Tribesman (Source)

Cohen, Mark Nathan, The Food Crisis in Prehistory — Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977. 

Crosby, Alfred W., Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010.

Diamond, Jared, “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication,” Nature, 418, 700-707 (8 August 2002) | doi:10.1038/nature01019  Free download.

Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1997.

Diamond, Jared, “The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race,” Discover, May 1987.  Free download.

Finlayson, Clive, The Humans Who Went Extinct — Why Neanderthals Died Out And We Survived, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.

Muir, Diana, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2000.

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Harmless People, Vintage Books, New York, 1989.

Turnbull, Colin M., The Forest People, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1961.

Wade, Nicolas, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, Penguin Books, New York, 2006.