For most of our species’ history, some two to three hundred thousand years, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, and the anthropological record shows people who were, on the whole, healthy, well fed on a wide variety of foods, fiercely equal, gentle with their children and sustainable in how they lived on the land. It was also hard and often dangerous, with illness, injury, hunger at times and many deaths in childhood. Therapeutic Shamanism holds both at once; these were real people with real flaws, and they were doing far better than we are now at living well with each other and with the other-than-human world.
How do we know what hunter-gatherer life was like? #
Mostly from the study of hunter-gatherer peoples who survived into modern times. The archaeological evidence for times more than fourteen thousand years ago “is scanty”, not least because hunter-gatherers leave few lasting traces, but there are “hundreds of years of records and studies of hunter-gatherer cultures”.1 Those cultures show “an incredible richness of diversity”, and they also share certain common features.
Two cautions go with that evidence. Many of the peoples studied were already in contact with farming or herding neighbours, or had been pushed onto poor land, so they were not living just as their ancestors had; and farming and herding peoples are often lumped in with hunter-gatherers, though their ways of life are very different. When anthropologists say “hunter-gatherers” without qualification they mean the small, mobile, egalitarian bands.2 See What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing?
How hard did hunter-gatherers have to work? #
Hard, but in a different way from us. The famous early estimate of only a few hours a day rested on less than a month of data from two populations, and left out the time spent processing food, making and mending tools and keeping house; counting those, the anthropologist Richard Lee’s own recalculation came to nearly forty hours a week, and the average across well-studied hunter-gatherer societies is about forty to forty-five, much like a modern working week.3 Therapeutic Shamanism reads the comparison differently: those hours covered everything a band needed, with time left for socialising, playing with the children, sleeping, making love, laughing, dancing, singing and practising shamanism, whilst a modern working day comes on top of the commute, the shopping, the cooking, the washing, the bills and “countless other things”.4 Seen that way, hunter-gatherers met their needs in less of their lives than we do. See Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
Were they healthy? #
On the whole, yes, and generally healthier than us. They lived active lives, and their diet was rich and varied, in some accounts as many as two hundred different foods, where early farmers lived on one or two staple foods, a few vegetables and some meat.5 Their mental health was good. In hunter-gatherer cultures Power-loss and soul-loss tended to be passing things, healed as a matter of urgency, and “Depression is almost unheard of (some tribes do not even have a word for it).”5
That does not mean life was easy. It “would have been physically dangerous. There would have been parasites to deal with, and no antibiotics”, dangerous animals, times of scarcity, and “Lots of children would have not made it to adulthood, and lots of women would have died in childbirth.”6 See What does domestication do to us?
Did they have chiefs and leaders? #
Not permanent ones. Decisions were usually taken by the band as a whole, with elders holding the space for discussion,7 and “There were no permanent leaders or followers in hunter-gatherer communities. Instead, people temporarily took the initiative, or were temporarily assigned authority, by consensus and according to the task at hand.”8 The picture of tribes ruled by a chief usually comes from farming peoples, and lumping the two together is “a common mistake”.8
Equality was not just practised but fiercely protected. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm, in his book Hierarchy in the Forest, calls it a “reverse dominance hierarchy”. When anyone tried to dominate, the rest of the group came together against them, first with teasing, then ridicule and shaming, then refusing to cooperate, and in the end, if nothing else worked, casting them out.9 Men and women usually had different roles, though how strictly varied enormously, and there was usually still equality and mutual respect between them; children were treated with great respect, and the elderly, ill and disabled were looked after.7 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
How did they raise their children? #
Gently, and as a whole band. Corporal punishment existed in some hunter-gatherer cultures but was rare, and most hunter-gatherer adults did not hit children.10 Neglect was “rare to the point of being virtually non-existent”. Children were kept close and their emotional needs met quickly, and anthropologists all over the world described hunter-gatherer children as “unusually happy and well adjusted”.11 Among the !Kung, or Ju/’hoansi, of the Kalahari, then living mainly by hunting and gathering, the anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas found that children rarely cried, because they had very little to cry about.12
The parents were not trying to control their children. They trusted their children’s instincts, and respected the autonomy of others so much that they rarely offered unasked-for advice. Children raised that way grew into adults with power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this, who felt little need to dominate others and were unwilling to hand their own power over.12
Were hunter-gatherers violent? #
Not warlike, and not pacifists either. Fighting existed as skirmishes between bands, but full-scale war, wiping out another people and taking their land, “is virtually unheard of”, and in many hunter-gatherer cultures fighting was limited by ritual and convention.13 The anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg, in a study of nomadic foragers, concluded that their social organisation “is not conducive to making war”, though fighting and killing did happen, more in some groups than others.14
They were, after all, hunters, and anyone who persisted in trying to dominate the band could in the end be killed to protect it.15 Whether early humans were mainly peaceful or mainly violent is still disputed; the arguments on both sides are set out in Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism?
How did they live with the land and the other Peoples? #
As kin. To hunter-gatherers the wolves and bears, jaguars and foxes were brothers and sisters, “Everything had its place and its right to exist”, and the land belonged to all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer; in fact, the Peoples belonged to the land.16 They were Leaver culturesLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer, in the writer Daniel Quinn’s phrase, taking what they needed and left the rest, often deliberately leaving a share for the other creatures.17
“In all the literally thousands of different hunter-gatherer cultures that have been studied, we have no recorded evidence of any hunter-gatherer culture having destroyed the environment they live in”. Some may well have hunted particular species to extinction, as a new species moving into a region often does, but the wholesale destruction of ecosystems comes only with agriculture.18 See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
Were all hunter-gatherers like this? #
No. They varied a lot, and there is one notable exception to the picture. Where wild food was so plentiful that people could stay in one place, some hunter-gatherers settled, and these “complex hunter-gatherers”, such as the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, developed hierarchy, inequality, slavery, warfare and chiefs without farming at all. In Therapeutic Shamanism’s view they “were extremely rare”, the exception that proves the rule.19 Some archaeologists and anthropologists, Manvir Singh amongst them, think such settled, unequal foraging societies were more widespread than that.
Farming peoples are a different case altogether. The Yanomami of the Amazon, for example, whose portrait in the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s book Yanomamö: The Fierce People was widely taken as showing hunter-gatherers to be violent, got the majority of their food from agriculture and had been repeatedly attacked by colonists, so they are no guide to hunter-gatherer life.19 See What did Jared Diamond mean by calling farming “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”?
Why does any of this matter now? #
Because it shows that the way we live now is not simply human nature. Hunter-gatherers were not living in some idyll, but relative to the farmers who came after them they had “a much healthier relationship with the Earth and with the non-human Peoples”, and that makes them “the best template that we have” for living as humans in a healthy, connected, animist way.20 The point is not to go back to living in the woods. It is to take the principles they lived by and work out how to apply them to the lives we have now. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
