Before the Fall: Evidence for a Golden Age
By Steve Taylor
If you asked them what life was like in prehistoric times,
most people would conjure up an image like the famous opening scenes of 2001:
Space Odyssey – groups of hairy savages grunting and jumping around, foaming at
the mouth with aggression as they bash each over the heads with sticks. We take
it for granted that life was much harder then, a battle to survive, with
everyone competing to find food, struggling against the elements, men fighting
over women, and everyone dying young from disease or malnutrition.
A whole branch of “science” has grown up around this view of
the human race’s early history. This is a relatively new discipline of
evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain all of the negative sides of
human nature as “adaptations” which early people developed because they had
some survival value. Evolutionary psychologists explain traits like selfishness
and aggression in these terms. Life was such a struggle that only the most
selfish and aggressive people survived and passed on their genes. The people
with gentle and peaceful genes would have died out, simply because they would
have lost out in the survival battle.
Evolutionary psychologists see racism and war as “natural”
too. It’s inevitable that different human groups should be hostile to one
another, because once upon a time we were all living on the edge of starvation
and fighting over limited resources. Any tendency to show sympathy for other
groups would have reduced our own group’s survival chances.
But fortunately we don’t have to believe any of this crude
nonsense. There is now a massive amount of archaeological and anthropological
evidence which suggests this view of the human race’s past is completely false.
Life for prehistoric human beings was far less bleak than we might imagine.
Take the view that life was a “struggle to survive.” The
evidence suggests that the lives of prehistoric human beings were a lot easier
than those of the agricultural peoples who came after them. Until around 8000
BCE, all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers. They survived by hunting wild
animals (the man’s job) and foraging for wild plants, nuts, fruit and
vegetables (the woman’s job). When anthropologists began to look at how
contemporary hunter-gatherers use their time, they were surprised to find that
they only spent 12 to 20 hours per week searching for food – between a third
and a half of the average modern working week! Because of this, the
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent
society.” As he noted in his famous paper of that name, for hunter-gatherers,
“The food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to
know what to do with themselves.”
Strange though it may sound – the diet of hunter-gatherers
was better than many modern peoples’. Apart from the small amount of meat they
ate (10-20% of their diet), their diet was practically identical to that of a
modern day vegan – no dairy products and a wide variety of fruits, vegetables,
roots and nuts, all eaten raw (which nutrition experts tell us is the
healthiest way to eat.) This partly explains why skeletons of ancient
hunter-gatherers are surprisingly large and robust, and show few signs of
degenerative diseases and tooth decay. As the anthropologist Richard Rudgley
writes, “We know from what they ate and the condition of their skeletons that
the hunting people were, on the whole, in pretty good shape.”
The hunter-gatherers of Greece and Turkey had an average
height of five feet ten inches for men and five feet six for women. But after
the advent of agriculture, these had declined to five feet three and five feet
one. An archaeological site in the lower Illinois Valley in central USA shows
that when people started cultivating maize and switched to a settled lifestyle,
there was an increase in infant mortality, stunted growth in adults, and a
massive increase in diseases related to malnutrition.
Hunter-gatherers were much less vulnerable to disease than
later peoples. In fact, until the advances of modern medicine and hygiene of
the 19th and 20th centuries, they may well have suffered less from disease than
any other human beings in history. Many of the diseases which we’re now
susceptible to only actually arrived when we domesticated animals and started
living close to them. Animals transmitted a whole host of diseases to us which
we’d never been exposed to before. Pigs and ducks passed the flu on, horses
gave us colds, cows gave us the pox and dogs gave us the measles. And later,
when dairy products became a part of our diet, we increased our exposure to
disease even more through drinking milk, which transmits at least 30 different
diseases. In view of this, it’s not surprising that with the coming of
agriculture, people’s life spans became shorter.
The transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to
a settled agricultural one began in the Middle East at around 8000 BCE,
spreading into Europe and Asia over the following millennia (and developing
independently in some places). Many of the world’s cultures have myths that
refer to an earlier time when life was much easier, and human beings were less
materialistic and lived in harmony with nature and each other. In ancient
Greece and Rome this was known as the Golden Age; in China it was the Age of
Perfect Virtue, in India it was the Krita Yuga (Perfect Age); while the
Judeo-Christian tradition has the story of the garden of Eden. These myths tell
us that, either as a result of a long degeneration or a sudden and dramatic
“Fall,” something “went wrong.” Life became much more difficult and full of
suffering, and human nature became more corrupt. In Taoist terms, whereas the
earliest human beings followed the Way of Heaven and were a part of the natural
harmony of the Universe, later human beings became separated from the Tao, and
became selfish and calculating.
Many of these myths make clear references to the
hunter-gatherer way of life – for example, the Greek historian Hesiod states
that during the Golden Age “the fruitful earth bore [human beings] abundant
fruit without stint,” while the early Indian text the Vaya Purana states that
early human beings “frequented the mountains and seas, and did not dwell in
houses” (i.e. they lived a non-sedentary way of life). The garden of Eden story
suggests this too. Originally Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of
knowledge, until they were forced to leave the garden and forced to “work hard
and sweat to make the soil produce anything.” It appears that, at least in
part, these myths are a kind of “folk memory” of the pre-agricultural way of
life. The agricultural peoples who worked harder and longer, had shorter life
spans and suffered from a lot more health problems must have looked at the old
hunter-gatherer way of life as a kind of paradise.
Warfare and Social Oppression
There are other significant reasons why these peoples would
have seen earlier times as a Golden Age. There is a great deal of evidence
suggesting that prehistoric human beings were much less war-like than later
peoples. Archaeological studies throughout the world have found hardly any
evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history.
There are, in fact, just two indisputable cases of group violence during all of
these tens of thousands of years.
A cluster of sites around the Nile Valley show some signs of
violence from around 12,000 BCE. The site of Jebel Sahaba, for instance, has a
grave containing the bodies of over 50 people who apparently died a violent
death. And in south-east Australia, there are some signs of inter-tribal
fighting – as well as of other kinds of social violence such as the cranial
deformation of children – at several different sites dating from 11,000 and
7000 BCE. Lawrence Keeley’s book War Before Civilisation suggests several other
examples of prehistoric violence and warfare, but all of these are dubious, and
have been dismissed by other scholars. For example, Keeley sees cut marks on
human bones as evidence of cannibalism, when these are more likely to be the
result of prehistoric funeral rituals of cleaning bones of their flesh. He also
interprets highly abstract and stylised drawings in caves in Australia as
depicting battles, when they are open to wide variety of other interpretations.
In this way, as the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson remarks, Keeley’s
“rhetoric exceeds his evidence in implying war is old as humanity.”
The lack of evidence for warfare is striking. There are no
signs of violent death, no signs of damage or disruption by warfare, and
although many other artefacts have been found, including massive numbers of
tools and pots, there is a complete absence of weapons. As Ferguson points out,
“it is difficult to understand how war could have been common earlier in each
area and remain so invisible.” Archaeologists have discovered over 300 cave
prehistoric “art galleries,” not one of which contains depictions of warfare,
weapons or warriors. In the words of the anthropologist Richard Gabriel, “For
the first ninety-five thousand years after the Homo sapiens Stone age began
[until 4000 BCE], there is no evidence that man engaged in war on any level,
let alone on a level requiring organised group violence. There is little evidence
of any killing at all.”
There seems to have been equality between the sexes in
prehistoric times too. The fact that women provided so much of the tribe’s food
strongly suggests they had equal status, since it’s difficult to see how they
could have low status while performing such an important economic role. The
healthy, open attitude ancient hunter-gatherers had to the human body and to
sex – shown by the massive numbers of sexually explicit images and objects
archaeologists have discovered – suggests this too, since the oppression of
women appears to be closely linked to a sense of alienation from the human
body, and a negative attitude to instincts and bodily processes.
Contemporary indigenous peoples are sexually egalitarian
too. Before European conquest and colonisation, many of them traced descent and
ownership of property through the mother’s rather than the father’s side of the
family. And as the anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, in “immediate return”
hunter-gatherer societies (that is, societies which live by immediately using
any food or other resources they collect, rather than storing them for later
use), men have no authority over women. Women usually choose their own marriage
partners, decide what work they want to do and work whenever they choose to,
and if a marriage breaks down they have custody rights over their children.
In prehistoric societies there were no status differences
between individuals either. There were no different classes or castes, with
people who had more power and possessions than others. For archaeologists, the
most obvious signs of social inequality are differences in graves, in terms of
size, position and the goods which are placed inside them. Later agricultural
societies have larger, more central graves for more “important” people, which
also have a lot more possessions inside them. Men generally have more
“important” graves than women. But the graves of the ancient hunter-gatherers
are strikingly uniform, with little or no size differences and little or no
grave wealth.
Almost all contemporary hunter-gatherers show a striking
absence of any of the characteristics that we associate with social inequality.
The anthropologist James Woodburn speaks of the “profound egalitarianism” of
immediate-return for foraging peoples and emphasises that no other way of human
life “permits so great an emphasis on equality.” Foraging peoples are also
strikingly democratic. Most societies do operate with a leader of some kind, but
their power is usually very limited, and they can easily be deposed if the rest
of the group aren’t happy with their leadership. People don’t seek to be
leaders – in fact if anybody does show signs of a desire for power and wealth
they are usually barred from consideration as leaders. And even when a person
becomes a leader, they don’t have the right to make decisions on their own.
Decisions are made in co-operation with other respected members of the group.
More here:newdawnmagazine.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment.