Wild Free and Happy Sample 22

[Note: This is the twenty-second 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 201 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.] 

Mother Grassland

Hominins originated on the tropical savannahs of Mother Africa, about four million years ago.  Since then, we have evolved, gotten too clever, colonized six continents, driven many megafauna species extinct, maximized food production, and exploded in numbers.  The human saga has been a unique experiment in living that is entirely out of the pattern of all other animals.  In a fantastic joyride of blissful ignorance, we have unintentionally succeeded in rubbishing the planet.  The bedrock foundation of this grand adventure is our deep and enduring relationship with grassland ecosystems.

Grasslands are sprawling green arrays of solar energy collectors that transform sunbeams into carbohydrates.  These nutrients migrate from species to species, up and down the food chain, and enable the existence of the family of life, including large herbivores, the preferred food for prehistoric people.  For the effort invested, they provided the biggest jackpots of meat.  Our intense desire for these animals, and our ongoing dependence on them, guided our evolution from hominins to humans. 

It’s important to understand that herds of large herbivores do not usually reside in forests or jungles.  Large body size is an advantage on grasslands, but can be a disadvantage in dense woodlands.  In terms of vegetation, forests contain much more plant biomass than grasslands, but most of it is elevated out of the reach of hungry herbivores. 

For herd critters, grasslands are the best place to dine on high quality greenery, hang out with friends and relatives, and enjoy a wonderful life of fresh air, travel, and adventure.  Each year, grasslands produce much more new biomass per acre than forests, and it’s conveniently located close to the ground.  Consequently, grasslands are home to far more large animals.  I would expect that most mammalian megafauna species originated in grasslands.

Grasslands, grazers, and large carnivores coevolved for many millions of years.  Much more recently, hominins pushed into the game, and began competing with the carnivores.  By and by, the clever tropical primates, with their terrifying weaponry, expanded into every continent, migrating from grassland to grassland, hunting, feasting, singing, and dancing.

As expanding wild cultures perfected their hunting skills, large game became harder to find, and attention shifted toward smaller animals, birds, shellfish, and so on.  We kept bumping into limits, and some cultures began to lurch toward the domestication of animals and/or plants.

Over time, persistent control freaks eventually succeeded in domesticating some wild herbivore species.  Instead of spending their time chasing increasingly scarce wild critters all over the countryside, they could selectively breed passive dimwitted animals, confine them to limited pastures, and conveniently exploit them in every imaginable way.  Jared Diamond noted that the five most important domesticates were horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.  All five were domesticated on the grasslands of Eurasia by 4000 B.C.  No mammals were domesticated south of the equator in Africa, humankind’s ancestral homeland.

In some cultures, foragers gathered the energy-dense seeds of wild grasses.  Over time they encouraged these grasses to grow in more locations by sowing their seeds.  Foragers had a natural tendency to gather the seeds that were more convenient to reap, and leave behind seeds that readily fell to the ground.  For example, when wild wheat is ripe, the heads shatter, releasing all of their seeds.  This natural dispersal promotes the survival of the species. 

Year after year, foragers brought home seeds from plants that were (1) less prone to shattering, (2) ripened at the same time, and (3) produced larger seeds.  Over centuries, the seeds they planted became significantly different from wild seeds.  Today, more than half of the calories consumed by humankind come from three grasses: rice, wheat, and corn (maize).  Other popular grasses include oats, barley, millet, sorghum, sugar cane, and bamboo. 

I’ll have more to say about plant and animal domestication in later chapters.  Here, I just want to point out that some hunter-gatherer cultures transitioned into farmers and herders.  Their diet continued to major in grassland plant foods and large herbivores, but it was shifting toward domesticated varieties.  What remained constant was the continued dependence of many cultures on grassland ecosystems.

Graham Harvey, a grass worshipping wordsmith, concluded that humans are essentially creatures of the grass, like hyenas and horses.  Deep inside, we still are.  Long ago we lost our ability to quickly scamper up trees, and leap from branch to branch.  We evolved into bipedal critters fine-turned for walking, running, and surviving in grasslands.

Nomadic Freedom

In the good old days, bands of nomadic hunter-gathers spent their lives wandering across vast grasslands.  It was a way of life that majored in freedom.  Our ancestors were as free as every other wild critter.  No rent, money, landlords, soldiers, slaves, taxes, kings, police, or smart phones.  Indeed, we evolved as nomads, and remained nomads for almost the entire four million year hominin saga.  For hunters to stop roaming, and put down roots, would have been very risky.  Their best option was to follow the herds, which never stopped wandering in search of grass.

Bruce Chatwin was fascinated by the freedom of nomadic life, and the deep human need to always keep moving.  He was born in England in 1940, and spent his entire life in an intensely overpopulated world, boiling with nonstop conflict and bad craziness.  Industrial civilization tends not to inspire a profound sense of joy, wonderment, and celebration among the billions of anxious stressed-out taxpayers born in captivity.

He mentioned a Hungarian epidemiologist who had studied the history of infectious diseases.  The man concluded that humans were not meant to settle down.  Whenever you confine dense populations of humans and other animals in a fixed location, poop happens — lots of poop — excrement all over the place.  Drinking water develops a crappy flavor and aroma.  Before long, pathogens rush through the crowds, weeding out the weak and unlucky — a gold rush for grave diggers.  Nomads live in small bands, and rarely crap in the same place twice.  Their water tastes like water, and their lifestyle is not a magnet for infectious diseases.  Freedom is good for your health.  We’ll take a closer look at disease in later pages.

Today, during the brief era of fossil fuel mania, developed societies can temporarily discourage epidemics by implementing complex, expensive, energy-guzzling systems for waste treatment and water purification.  In wealthy societies, antibiotics are currently controlling the spread of many pathogens, but the benefit of these wonder drugs can only be temporary, because pathogens will never stop mutating into drug-resistant forms.  We are approaching the post-antibiotic era.  Whistling while he works, the Grim Reaper is sharpening his scythe.  Breaking all the laws of nature has harsh consequences, and Big Mama Nature has a deep regard for justice.

Finally, nomadic cultures enjoyed great freedom as long as they remained hunter-gatherers.  These cultures were essentially egalitarian.  There was no hierarchy of power, everyone was equal.  Unequal status was toxic to group cohesion.  Folks who became big headed were a serious problem that had to be promptly resolved.  It was vital that folks in small bands cooperated, shared, and respected one another.

When nomadic cultures shifted from hunting wild animals to herding enslaved critters, they entered a path that led to ugly destinations.  Nothing more reliably turns humans into tyrants, conquerors, egomaniacs, and spectacular idiots than cultures that define personal status in terms of accumulated wealth — personal property.  The lad with 100 cattle looked down on the fellow with 10.  This mindset sparked an explosion of craziness — furious empires of Mongols and Huns spilling rivers of blood.  Status mania continues to this day, but on a dramatically larger scale.  We are not living at the zenith of freedom, or anywhere near it.

Grassland Basics

In the dry land regions of Earth, there are four primary biomes: grassland, forest, desert, and tundra.  Precipitation is a key factor.  Forests and jungles need to receive at least 30 inches (76 cm) per year.  Deserts receive less than 10 inches (25 cm).  Grasslands fit in the middle, 10 to 30 inches.  Grasslands have two seasons, productive and dormant.  In warm climates, they are dormant during the dry season, and recover when the rains return.  In temperate climates, they are dormant during the frosty months, and green when the soil thaws.

Grasslands have evolved to survive in arid climates.  Grasses can live where most other plant species cannot.  There are three basic categories of grasslands: savannah, steppe, and prairie.  [MAP]  Savannahs are grasslands speckled with some trees and brush.  Steppes are called shortgrass prairies, because most plants are less than one foot (30 cm) tall.  Prairies are wetter, and produce tall grass, which can grow up to 13 feet (4 m) high — a horse can disappear in it.

Graham Harvey noted that grasses first evolved about 70 million years ago.  There are now an estimated 12,000 grass species, and they grow in many temperate and tropical regions.  Grasslands are communities of different plants — primarily grasses, mixed with a wide variety of sedges and leafy forbs (wild flowers and herbs). 

These mixed communities maximize the capture of solar energy, make better use of soil resources, and create rich humus.  Humus boosts fertility, and helps retain moisture.  Some plants convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that is essential for all plants and animals.  Others are good at retrieving essential mineral nutrients.

Following an intense disturbance, grasslands can recover in 5 to 10 years — far faster than a wrecked forest.  Evolution has done a remarkable job of fine-tuning grasslands for rugged durability.  They can go dormant during dry times, and revive when rains return.  They can survive extended droughts and six month winters.  They can recover more easily after wildfires because only a third of grassland biomass is above ground, and vulnerable to flames. 

Beneath the surface, the invisible portion of grasslands is astonishing.  Many plants send roots deep into the ground, to acquire moisture and nutrients.  Some grow as deep as 32 feet (10 m).  In some regions, densely interwoven roots created a thick sod that pioneer farmers cut into bricks that were used to build homes and schools.  Because of unreliable precipitation, trees and shrubs often die before they can grow roots deep enough to tap dependable water.

The seeds of many grassland species can remain dormant for an extended period, until appropriate conditions return, and inspire them to germinate.  Some seeds can survive a ride through an herbivore’s gut and remain fertile, enabling the colonization of new locations.

In 1872, Kansas senator John James Ingalls celebrated the power of grass.  He wrote: “Grass is the forgiveness of nature — her constant benediction.  …Streets abandoned by traffic become grass-grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated.  Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.  …The primary form of food is grass.  Grass feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so the tide of life with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.”

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.

The Other Side of Eden

Hugh Brody is an English anthropologist.  His parents were Jewish, and a number of their relatives died in the holocaust.  Brody spent three decades in Canada hanging out with natives raised in hunter-gatherer societies.  He worked for the government, and made documentary films.

Brody was raised in a nutjob civilization.  He found the hunter-gatherers to be fascinating, because they had many virtues that were missing in modern society.  The natives were kind and generous people.  They radiated a profound love for the land of their birth, the home of their ancient ancestors.  They deliberately had small families.  Nobody gave orders to others.  Everyone made their own decisions.  Children were never disciplined.

He described his experiences in The Other Side of Eden, an excellent book.  It examined the vast gulf between farming societies and hunter-gatherers — the broken and the free.  In many ways, it was a predator-prey game.  Wild people were useless obstacles to the insatiable hunger of the powerful empire builders and soil miners.

Conquered hunters had to be broken — turned into educated, Christian, English-speaking wageworkers.  They had to be made dependent on a farm-based civilization, and this required turning their lives and minds inside out.  It was different in India, where the British colonized people who were already farmers.  These folks were allowed to keep their language, religion, and culture.  The empire simply skimmed off a portion of the cash flow and became a morbidly obese parasite.

Brody’s family was Orthodox and Zionist.  Later in life, his mind-altering experience with hunter-gatherers compelled him to reexamine his cultural programming.  Genesis was essentially the creation story of western civilization.  Eden was paradise, and Adam and Eve were provided with everything they needed.  There was just one simple rule to follow, and they promptly disobeyed it.  God threw them out.

They had two sons.  Cain was a farmer, and Abel was a herder.  God was not a vegetarian, and he loved Abel’s offerings of meat.  Cain got jealous, and killed his brother.  God condemned him to a life of endless toil.  Eventually, God came to loath the troublesome humans, and decided to drown them all.  Only a few were decent — Noah and his family were spared.  God instructed the survivors to spread across the world, multiply, and subdue wildness.

So, the descendants of Noah were cursed to be wanderers, with no permanent home.  Soil depletion, overbreeding, and belligerent neighbors forced them to keep moving.  We think of hunters as being nomads, and farmers as sedentary, but the opposite is closer to the truth.  Hunters tend to remain in the same territory for ages.  Farmers commonly pack up and move when greener pastures become available.

Yes, hunters did eventually migrate to every corner of the planet, but the diaspora took more than 100,000 years.  The new farming game grew explosively, and spread everywhere in a few thousand years.  It was a huge and tragic change in the human journey, because it was thoroughly unsustainable, ravaged everything in its path, and created mobs of rootless broken people.

Over 200 years ago, Sir William Jones noticed that Sanskrit had similarities to other languages, like Latin, Greek, and German.  Other linguists pursued this notion, and discovered many related languages.  These are now known as the Indo-European family of languages, and they are spoken by half of humankind.  They likely originated in the Fertile Crescent, and spread in all directions, as agriculture expanded.

Brody noted that Genesis made no mention of hunter-gatherers, it was a story told by the victors.  This Hebrew creation myth was especially peculiar in that it described two-legs as being superior to all the other animals.  In the stories of wild people, two-legs were often portrayed as the newbies — clumsy, comical, childlike critters who had much to learn from the older, wiser species.

The natives of northern Canada believed that they lived in the most beautiful place in the world.  It gave them everything they needed.  They treated their home with great reverence and respect.  They were extremely lucky that their chilly Eden wasn’t prime real estate for agriculture.  With the exception of horrific epidemics, they were relatively unmolested until the twentieth century.

But then, hell rumbled into Eden.  Obnoxious missionaries told them they were wicked devil worshippers.  The government built permanent settlements for them, with churches, schools, and stores.  Their ancestral land became the property of the state.  Loggers, ranchers, and miners moved in.  A large region of Eden became a training ground for supersonic low altitude NATO bombers.  By and by, the natives became fond of the pain killing magic of oblivion drinking.  The good old days were over.

The residential schools were sadistically cruel.  Children were taken from their families and sent far away.  The kids were beaten for speaking their language.  Many were malnourished or sexually abused.  Many died.  The primary goal of school was ethnocide — eliminating wild culture.  They weren’t really creating improved people; they were breaking them, like ranchers break wild horses.  The children were taught that they were primitive, and that everything they knew was wrong and stupid.  After a year of English-only, they forgot their native tongue.  It took years to relearn it, and many never did.

Control is the foundation of the farming mindset.  Settlers ravage ancient forests with sharp axes and plows.  They exterminate the wildlife and build sturdy fences.  When Brody brought an Inuit elder to England, they took a drive in the country.  Anaviapik was stunned, “It’s all built!”  The original ecosystem was gone.  It was unbelievable.

On one project, Brody hung out with alcoholic natives in an urban skid row.  He noted that white drinkers took great pride in holding their liquor while drinking heavily.  It was uncool to stumble around or slur words.  Respectable boozers remained in control.  Natives, on the other hand, let go.  “There is a welcome loss of self, a flight into another state of being, another kind of person” — a spirit journey.

Control is impossible in the hunting world.  Fish, birds, and game go where they wish, and do as they please.  Weather happens and patterns change suddenly without warning.  Hunter-gatherers must continually pay close attention to the land and its creatures.  A living ecosystem is not a predictable machine.  Intuition and improvisation are essential for survival.  Folks must be open to many states of mind.  Dreams provided important information.  “If there is a trail to be discovered, the dreamer must find it.”

“It is artists, speculative scientists, and those whose journeys in life depend on not quite knowing the destination who are close to hunter-gatherers, who rely upon a hunter-gatherer mind.”

Brody, Hugh, The Other Side of Eden, North Point Press, New York, 2001.