Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

decreased
since the age of foraging.
5
Survival in that era required superb mental
abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could
increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’
were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next
generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.
Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and
objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened
to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking
there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits,
beehives and bird nests. They moved with a minimum of e ort and noise, and
knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and e cient manner. Varied and
constant use of their bodies made them as t as marathon runners. They had
physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of
practising yoga or t’ai chi.
The hunter-gatherer way of life di ered signi cantly from region to region and
from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more
comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds,
labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
While people in today’s a uent societies work an average of forty to forty- ve
hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty

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hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats –
such as the Kalahari Desert work on average for just thirty- ve to forty- ve hours
a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to
six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be
that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent
even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed
a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to
vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.
The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than
agriculture or industry do. Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around
seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop, and
there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten long
and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in order to
wash dishes and do the laundry. Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager
might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. They’d roam
the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up edible roots,
catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early afternoon,
they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of time to
gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out. Of course the tigers
sometimes caught them, or a snake bit them, but on the other hand they didn’t
have to deal with automobile accidents and industrial pollution.
In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is
hardly surprising – this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of
years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised
skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to su er from starvation
or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant
descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but
this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who made it
through the perilous rst years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty,
and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, forty- ve-year-
old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5–8 per cent of the
population is over sixty.
6
The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and
malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and
unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an
agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes or rice
– that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans
need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for
lunch, and rice for dinner. If she were lucky, she could expect to eat the same on
the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of di erent

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foodstu s. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries
and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak
with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrows menu might have been completely
di erent. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary
nutrients.
Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less
liable to su er when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are
ravaged by famine when drought, re or earthquake devastates the annual rice or
potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and
su ered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with
such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstu s, they could
gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area.
Ancient foragers also su ered less from infectious diseases. Most of the
infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as
smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were
transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers,
who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most
people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic
permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in
small bands that could not sustain epidemics.
The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity
of infectious diseases have led many experts to de ne pre-agricultural forager
societies as ‘the original a uent societies’. It would be a mistake, however, to
idealise the lives of these ancients. Though they lived better lives than most people
in agricultural and industrial societies, their world could still be harsh and
unforgiving. Periods of want and hardship were not uncommon, child mortality
was high, and an accident which would be minor today could easily become a
death sentence. Most people probably enjoyed the close intimacy of the roaming
band, but those unfortunates who incurred the hostility or mockery of their fellow
band members probably su ered terribly. Modern foragers occasionally abandon
and even kill old or disabled people who cannot keep up with the band.
Unwanted babies and children may be slain, and there are even cases of
religiously inspired human sacrifice.
The Aché people, hunter-gatherers who lived in the jungles of Paraguay until
the 1960s, o er a glimpse into the darker side of foraging. When a valued band
member died, the Aché customarily killed a little girl and buried the two together.
Anthropologists who interviewed the Aché recorded a case in which a band
abandoned a middle-aged man who fell sick and was unable to keep up with the
others. He was left under a tree. Vultures perched above him, expecting a hearty

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meal. But the man recuperated, and, walking briskly, he managed to rejoin the
band. His body was covered with the birds’ faeces, so he was henceforth
nicknamed ‘Vulture Droppings’.
When an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of the band, one of the
younger men would sneak behind her and kill her with an axe-blow to the head.
An Aché man told the inquisitive anthropologists stories of his prime years in the
jungle. ‘I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts … The women
were afraid of me … Now, here with the whites, I have become weak.’ Babies born
without hair, who were considered underdeveloped, were killed immediately. One
woman recalled that her rst baby girl was killed because the men in the band did
not want another girl. On another occasion a man killed a small boy because he
was ‘in a bad mood and the child was crying’. Another child was buried alive
because ‘it was funny-looking and the other children laughed at it’.
7
We should be careful, though, not to judge the Aché too quickly. Anthropologists
who lived with them for years report that violence between adults was very rare.
Both women and men were free to change partners at will. They smiled and
laughed constantly, had no leadership hierarchy, and generally shunned
domineering people. They were extremely generous with their few possessions,
and were not obsessed with success or wealth. The things they valued most in life
were good social interactions and high-quality friendships.
8
They viewed the
killing of children, sick people and the elderly as many people today view
abortion and euthanasia. It should also be noted that the Aché were hunted and
killed without mercy by Paraguayan farmers. The need to evade their enemies
probably caused the Aché to adopt an exceptionally harsh attitude towards
anyone who might become a liability to the band.
The truth is that Aché society, like every human society, was very complex. We
should beware of demonising or idealising it on the basis of a super cial
acquaintance. The Aché were neither angels nor ends – they were humans. So,
too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers.
Talking Ghosts
What can we say about the spiritual and mental life of the ancient hunter-
gatherers? The basics of the forager economy can be reconstructed with some
con dence based on quanti able and objective factors. For example, we can
calculate how many calories per day a person needed in order to survive, how
many calories were obtained from a kilogram of walnuts, and how many walnuts
could be gathered from a square kilometre of forest. With this data, we can make

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an educated guess about the relative importance of walnuts in their diet.
But did they consider walnuts a delicacy or a humdrum staple? Did they believe
that walnut trees were inhabited by spirits? Did they nd walnut leaves pretty? If
a forager boy wanted to take a forager girl to a romantic spot, did the shade of a
walnut tree su ce? The world of thought, belief and feeling is by de nition far
more difficult to decipher.
Most scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common among ancient
foragers. Animism (from ‘
anima
’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ in Latin) is the belief that almost
every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has
awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans. Thus,
animists may believe that the big rock at the top of the hill has desires and needs.
The rock might be angry about something that people did and rejoice over some
other action. The rock might admonish people or ask for favours. Humans, for
their part, can address the rock, to mollify or threaten it. Not only the rock, but
also the oak tree at the bottom of the hill is an animated being, and so is the
stream owing below the hill, the spring in the forest clearing, the bushes growing
around it, the path to the clearing, and the field mice, wolves and crows that drink
there. In the animist world, objects and living things are not the only animated
beings. There are also immaterial entities – the spirits of the dead, and friendly
and malevolent beings, the kind that we today call demons, fairies and angels.
Animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and other beings. They
can all communicate directly through speech, song, dance and ceremony. A hunter
may address a herd of deer and ask that one of them sacri ce itself. If the hunt
succeeds, the hunter may ask the dead animal to forgive him. When someone falls
sick, a shaman can contact the spirit that caused the sickness and try to pacify it
or scare it away. If need be, the shaman may ask for help from other spirits. What
characterises all these acts of communication is that the entities being addressed
are local beings. They are not universal gods, but rather a particular deer, a