The Last Two Times the World Warmed-2. Basic Humans
Lessons about our future climate history from climate change in prehistory.
14,700 years ago the temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere shot up ten times faster than the most terrifying projections of current human-caused global warming. Average temperatures spiked 16-18°Fahrenheit in only fifty years. Then about 11,600 years ago they did it again. What were these events like for humans and what does that mean for us?
The Past as Prelude
In Part 1 of this series we saw that world temperatures have not been stable over the earth’s billions of years of existence. During the two million years our genus Homo has been scurrying about living in bands, chucking spears, and sitting around campfires, ice ages have come and gone every 100,000 years or so.1 The most recent began to ebb just after 18,000 years ago with temperatures slowly rising until suddenly 14,700 years ago average temperatures in the northern hemisphere shot up 9-10°C in a single lifetime, reaching roughly our average temperatures today. But within another lifetime they began to fall again eventually passing the start level, and continuing downward until 12,900 years ago they bottomed out at 25°C lower than today. That’s hellish, ice-age cold. The suddenly 11,600 years ago they shot up again.
The Bølling–Allerød: A Time of Change
The period from the first spike to the bottoming out scientists call the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial—1800 years of leaps and plunges vastly more extreme and more impactful than anything humans have experienced in historical times.
A few degrees hotter or colder even in a single lifetime wouldn’t matter so much in and of itself. Back in the day a foraging band would just need to migrate a few miles north or south, just as today we can just run the AC a bit more.
What matters, and why global warming today is a problem, is that temperature change vegetation, wind patterns, ocean currents, and humidity. They don’t just move the climate; they change the type of climate. Warmer temperatures mean higher overall humidity so steppe becomes scrub, scrub becomes forest, and deserts become grasslands—but the effects are not spread evenly. As most areas get wetter, other areas dry up. Changes to the plants affect the behavior, territories, and migrations of the animals, so that species are coming into contact with one another that didn’t before, and that changes disease vectors (pathogens jumping to new hosts). Of course changes to the other animals and plants affect the apex predators like wolves, lions, and humans.
The climate of the Bølling–Allerød shifted every decade in ways that today take centuries. Again and again weather and vegetation shifted in every person’s lifetime. Consider someone in the mid-twentieth century, who as a kid read in a newspaper about the Wright Brothers’ first flight and lived to see a live television broadcast of astronauts landing on the moon, and pondered, perhaps—which is more shocking, the astronaut or the television? Someone in the Bølling–Allerød might have seen parents bring home the meat of the first elk ever seen by anyone in the band found among some scraggly trees, and lived to see whole herds of gazelle migrating through a lush forest, and pondered, perhaps—which is more shocking, the gazelle or the new forest?
And changes happened in the other direction. A young child growing up gazelle hunting in that lush forest can live to see the herds gone and whole forests withered and parched waiting for massive fires to burn them to ash. Likewise a young child growing up in the 2010s clicking on a new smartphone in automobile-based suburbs might live to see in the 2060s the power grid on daily brown-outs, the internet ‘cloud’ largely erased with much of the data it stored, and the cash-free economy collapsing.
Your Basic Humans
This week I want to stop to get a better picture of hunter-gathering or foraging, because if there is a basic us, that’s where we should look. They’re how every known human species lived, including until very recently homo sapiens.
Unfortunately, hunter-gatherers are largely missing from our civilized intellectual heritage simply because there weren’t any surviving foraging bands near where most of that heritage was rooted—ancient Greece, the lands of the writers of the bible, and ancient China.2 Writers and thinkers in those places trying to tell the story of humans were missing arguably the most important data. So like the joke about the drunk looking for a missing keys under a streetlamp because that’s where the light is better, the ancients were stuck looking for human nature and human origins among pastoralists, tribal horticulturalists, and early farmers because in China, the Fertile Crescent, and the Mediterranean the hunter-gatherers were long gone.
So Plato speculated that humans were originally pastoralists. Aristotle countered that humans were biologically town dwellers.3 Genesis 4 explores the conflict between pastoralism and agiculture in the story of Cain and Abel—with God favoring the pastoralists. But there are no foragers unless we imagine Eden as a sort of ancestral foraging metaphor. I have been tempted to argue this to get religious people interested in prehistory. I even thought of writing a book titled, Out of Eden. But it would be misleading. The metaphor of the Garden of Eden came from the hanging gardens of Babylon and other notions of luxurious, carefree gardens where all needs are met, not any actual wilderness where our ancestors eked out their living.4
Not So Nasty or Brutish
Not that our ancestors were really eking. Work-wise hunter-gatherers often had it a lot easier than we do, at least between the ice ages. Not Adam-and-Eve easy, true, but foragers tend to work shorter hours, eat better, get more exercise, and are in many respects healthier. This was the shocking realization publicized by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in the 1960s gleaned from ethnographers living among various modern foraging people. This realization has often been challenged by exaggerating Sahlins’ claims, but date bears it out. With simple, self-sufficient material cultures, low population densities, and expert adaptions to their environments, foraging bands tend to do a lot better than pastoralists or peasant farmers, and can even live in places like deserts and the arctic where farmers cannot live at all.
Note however that not many can. “Low population density” should probably read very low. Even a foraging band on a temperate coast teeming with fish can’t have more than 20 people per square mile, and foraging bands in less generous environments can barely sustain a fraction of that.
Foragers mostly live in bands of 30-50 people of all ages, with several different families far from other bands. They are nomadic—unless they live on one of those temperate coasts teeming with fish, or other very generous ecological zones—and live in camps of small huts that are periodically abandoned.
Among modern hunter-gatherers men tend to do more of the hunting, usually in small groups or alone, and women tend to do more of the gathering in small groups with their younger children. More than half the diet in most environments is plants shared within an individual family, while meat is more prestigious and is shared throughout the band. If large game is killed (and for much of prehistory our genus were big-game hunters), meat is butchered on site, and members of the band will go to the site to get cuts and carry it back. This meat is distributed in a complex pattern of relatives, friends, those owed meat from previous hunts, and so on, and it’s a major aspect of foraging life.
Foraging bands sadly have a high infant mortality, as did most pre-modern people, but with their low population densities most foraging bands don’t have the high levels of communicable disease that agricultural and horticultural people suffer. As we’ll see plant domestication did not come about as a solution to poverty, starvation, or suffering.
Government
If you find the success of our ancestors at feeding themselves hard to believe, you’ll find their lack of government even more implausible. But facts are facts.5 Foraging bands just don’t have government as we understand it, and rarely even have the sort of consensus-based proto-offices like village headmen, councils of elders, war chiefs, big men, councils of women, or such that we find among pastoral or horticultural tribes. This is true both for those observed by ethnographers and those reconstructed by archaeologists. Almost all foraging people are quite free and most are fairly equal too. This doesn’t mean they were living in Rousseau’s State of Nature, but they were even less living in Hobbes’ State of Nature. If you need an Enlightenment State of Nature to match real hunter-gatherers probably Locke’s version is closest.6
Foragers also don’t have social classes, but this less surprising since they lack the material culture to accumulate over generations, which is how most social classes historically have formed.
But before you rush to join up, know that hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is not of the hippie sort. For one thing women and men almost always treat one another differently and think of one another differently. Gender roles may be looser and more fluid than modern conservative gender expectations, but that varies a lot from group to group, and in all groups ever found there is an association of men with hunting and women with gathering.7 Foragers also have expectations and privileges based on age.
But what’s most unhippie is the high murder rates. Humans use of spears which means—unlike our wild mammal cousins—any human can pretty-much kill any other human from a safe distance. And it’s not the case that the strongest or the most athletic wins the spear chucking. Even in a direct competition there’s a rough equality in those who can throw a spear the farthest balancing against those who can aim the best balancing against those who can make the best spear because a straighter, deadlier spear makes up for a lot of deficiencies in whoever throws it.8 Humans are artisans as much as athletes.9 Plus anyone can run a spear through someone else when their back is turned. So the egalitarian culture of our foraging ancestors is probably not just the passive result of peaceful humans free from the oppression of government, but also the active result of any male being killed who is bullying, aggressive, or just makes others jealous.10
Sex and Family
Many civilized humans have dreamed that our ancestors were promiscuous or polyamorous, or somehow free to really get their freak on. Nietzsche imagined primitive people governed by wild Dionysus to be followed by civilized people governed by austere Apollo,11 but the truth is far more mundane. Foragers tend to be serially monogamous, attractions leading to marriages that last long enough for children to outgrow their toddlerhood. During that time infidelity is seriously condemned. And in small groups secrecy won’t last long so repeated infidelity would earn someone a bashed in head or a spear in the back. There are no “players.” A John F. Kennedy hitting on other people’s wives or an Elon Musk fathering multiple children would get a spear in the back. A Donald Trump feeling up other people’s daughters would get a spear in the back. There usually aren’t rules against polygamy, but the polygamist must have the diplomatic skills to keep other men from being jealous or they’ll get a spear in the back.12 Unlike pastoralists, horticultural tribes, or early agricultural states, there isn’t really enough privacy or separation of different groups and the groups aren’t large enough for a gang of bullies to rule the roost. At least that hasn’t been attested.
Raising Children
Most existing foraging groups breastfeed their children far longer than agricultural people, sometimes until the child is four. This might be because existing foragers tend to live in areas like deep forests without good options for weaning. Before I dropped out of grad school to become the success I am today, I was researching these effects of the environment on weaning. My idea was that mothers in grasslands would have better food options for earlier weaning, and since lactation reduces fertility, bands in areas with earlier weaning would have faster population growth. I didn’t get far in this, so if you make it the basis of your academic career you owe me a coffee. But know that hunter-gatherer families have far fewer children than peasant farmers or YouTube homeschoolers.
As kids grow up they don’t need much direct education. Through their early years they hang with their mothers mostly, but fathers are also involved in raising children in every foraging group observed (unlike many mammals), and life is quite communal with all families in the band sharing the same clearing between the huts, and often the same fire, so kids are to some extent raised collectively. (Though parents feed their own children and are responsible for them.)
With low birthrates, high infant mortality, and the small population of the group foraging bands don’t include large groups of children, so there aren’t more than 1-2 kids of any given age. Unlike a modern school there cannot be much in the way of same-age cliques and peer pressure. Kids are integrated vertically with adults above and younger kids below, not vertically as in America with other kids their own age. Older kids play together in groups when they are old enough not to be dependent on their mothers but not yet old enough to follow their parents as would-be adults. But even this pre-adolescent group is not separate from adult contact as we were in my suburban neighborhood growing up. Adults are always coming and going.
When kids do grow up, love often happens when bands get together with other bands at certain times of year. These are festive events with lots of family visits, friends reconnecting, gossip, dances, and sometimes conflict. Bands can break up with members joining other bands. It’s all very informal. Young adults especially might try out another band or follow a new wife or husband. Homo sapiens tend to be exogamous, meaning we tend to marry out of our own immediate group if options are available and socially sanctioned (and sometimes when they’re not socially sanctioned). These marriages knit together bands across great distances to act as sources of sharing knowledge and materials, and future spouses. A group whose members never marry into another group is suspect and will be the source of hostility and resentment.
Many conservatives today look to the family to save its members from the predations of society, while many on the left look to society to save individuals from the predations of their families, but among hunter-gatherers the foraging band and the families that constitute it are always interwoven. Neither works without the other, or could be conceived without the other. Foragers live in nuclear families but interacting daily and intimately with another 4-8 nuclear families, many of whom they’re related to by blood or marriage.
That’s where we’ll have to leave it this week. I’ve vowed to make these pieces shorter to be more readable, and Substack informs me I’ve reach a fifteen minute limit. Next time we’ll finish our general description of hunter-gatherers with a discussion of fire, trade, war, religion, and art. Then we’ll go back to the Natufians and discuss the first domestication, which was not plants or cows, but how the one social animal that rivaled our ancestors for hunting and migration—the wolves—became our partners, the dogs.
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Ice ages come from 100,000 changes in the earth’s tilt, so in theory when there was an ice age in the northern hemisphere there is a warming period in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. But there’s much more ocean in the the southern hemisphere and the land doesn’t extend as far toward the poles so the southern hemisphere “ice ages” don’t impact much. There were glaciers in Tasmania, New Zealand, and the tail of South America, but humans hadn’t yet reached New Zealand and South America.
There were hunter-gatherers in parts of what is now India (still are), and I would love to know what if any impact they had on Indian writing.
Zoon politikon or ζῷον πoλιτικόν. This is often mistranslated as “political animal” which would imply Aristotle was saying humans were drawn to politics as we know it, but politikon here is merely the adjectival form of polis (πόλις) “city.” Aristotle is claiming we are city animals, or town animals, as I might say, The squirrel is a woodland animal. Our word political derives from politics which comes from politika (πολιτικά) an abstract noun derived from the plural of that adjective politikon, and means “stuff having to do with the city,” but the various connotations that we have for politics came later.
Adam and Eve are not presented as acting as foragers would, and they don’t hunt, which is critical to all hunter-gathering societies (Vegans would not live long without the benefits of civilization.) and humans certainly weren’t driven out of Eden by the knowledge of good and evil.
For those addicted to evolutionary psychology the fact is that homo sapiens do not have alpha males or silverback males like some primates.
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent Dawn of Everything seems obsessed with the exceptions. They seem very invested in ridding the reader of the notion of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. Charitably, maybe the Davids had a really bad experience with peers loving Rousseau. Less charitably, maybe the Davids are hierarchal people who want to normalize inequality. Graeber died soon after publication.
There’s pretty good theories whose authors I can’t remember that how well women are treated is basically a function of how much plant gathering contributes to the family.
This all assumes spears are being thrown and there are theories that before our own species, homo sapiens, neanderthals, say, didn’t throw spears but only used them as thrusting weapons. That’s possible, but the point still holds that weapons mean that agility and tool-making skills balance out to pure strength in a way that doesn’t hold true for gorillas.
Imagine if quarterbacks had to make their own footballs. Maybe Patrick Mahomes’ footballs would not be as aerodynamic as Geno Smith’s; the quarterback rankings would be very different.
Hunter-gatherers don’t seem to operate like prison gangs with a cohort of males lording it over everyone else, though this is more or less how one could view chimpanzee social order. The difference is that prisons heavily reduce freedom to leave and accessibility of weapons, so those who can control space control the people in it. In a foraging band, the abused can leave, make weapons, and come back. It is a violent world, but not violent like prisons or the “alpha male” violence of some social animals.
The Greeks imagined that Dionysus came third, Apollo and the Olympian gods were second, and other theological figures came before that. This seems metaphorically more true.
Even when we get to pastoral villages the “headmen” tend to be diplomatic, wealthy-but-not-too-weathy, easygoing-but-not-silly, and resolute but not foolhardy. They are never the most aggressive men.