Hunter Gatherer Society - Philosophy Project

1Hunter Gatherer SocietyDirections: Read the following passage. Answer the following questions. Revisit the !Kung reading on p. 16 of the textbook. Answer the questions 6- 9 regarding thatreading.1. How do human beings in hunting-gathering societies provide for the necessities of life – food,clothing and shelter? What tools did they develop to aid them in these tasks?2. Why were hunting-gathering societies nomadic and of a limited size?3. How did men and women divide work in hunting-gathering societies? Why do you think theydivided work in this way?4. The French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is well-known for having developed thenotion of the “noble savage” – the idea that human beings living in hunting and gathering societieshad a superior quality of life to modern man. According to Rousseau, savage man lives a solitary,independent life in which “the only goods he knows in the universe are nourishment, a female andrepose; the only evils he fears are pain and hunger.” By contrast, modern man is dependent uponother men, and has a multiplicity of artificial needs he must now meet. Do you agree with Rousseauthat the quality of life in hunting and gathering societies is superior to modernity? Explain youranswer.5. The German political philosopher Karl Marx described hunting and gathering societies as a state of“primitive communism” in which “man confines his production to the limits of his immediateneeds.” According to Marx, once human beings began to produce more than they needed to live, asystem of economic exchange developed, economic classes of the wealthier and the poorerdeveloped and a government was established to protect the property of the wealthy. UnlikeRousseau, Marx thought that human beings could only realize our human potential and becometruly free when we overcame economic scarcity and produced a substantial surplus, so we did notneed to work to survive. But he wanted to establish a more advanced stage of communism in whichclasses and the state were abolished. Do you agree with Marx that it is better to live in a world ofeconomic plenty than of economic simplicity? Do you agree with Marx that it is better to live inegalitarian world, such as a hunting-gathering society, without social classes and a government?Explain your answer.6. What role does the gathering by women play in the !Kung economy?7. How does the traditional !Kung way of life promote leisurely activity?8. What problems do the !Kung face today?9. In what ways do you think that the quality of life of the !Kung people is superior to people living inmodern societies? In what do you think our quality of life is superior?

2HISTORY AND CULTURE AT THE BIRTH OF MANEvidence of early humans' splendid creative abilities first came to light in 1940 near Lascaux insouthern France. Examining a newly uprooted tree, youths discovered the entrance to a vastunderground cavern. Once inside, they found that its walls were covered with paintings of animals,including many that had been extinct for thousands of years. Other ancient cave paintings have beenfound in Spain, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere.Modern observers have been struck by the artistic quality of these paintings. To even the mostskeptical person, such finds are awesome demonstrations of richly developed imagination and skill.The ancient cave art is vivid evidence that the biologically modern people who made such art wereintellectually modern as well.These ancient people's specialized tools and complex social relations may be less striking visually, butthey also display uniquely human talents. The production of similar art and tools over wide areas andlong periods of time demonstrates that skills and ideas were not simply bursts of individual genius butwere deliberately passed along within societies. These learned patterns of action and expressionconstitute culture. Culture includes both material objects, such as dwellings, clothing, tools, and crafts,and nonmaterial values, beliefs, and languages.Although it is true that some animals also learn new ways, their activities are determined primarily byinherited instincts. Among humans the proportions are reversed: instincts are less important than thecultural traditions that each generation learns from its elders. All living creatures are part of naturalhistory, which traces biological development, but only human communities display profound culturaldevelopments over time. The development, transmission, and transformation of cultural practices andevents are the subject of history.Food Gathering and Stone ToolsWhen archeologists examine the remains of ancient human sites, the first thing that jumps out at themis the abundant evidence of human tool making -- the first recognizable cultural activity. Because thetools that survive are made of stone, the extensive period of history from the appearance of the firstfabricated stone tools around 2 million years ago until the appearance of metal tools around fourthousand years ago has been called the Stone Age.The name can be misleading. In the first place, not all tools were made of stone. Early humans wouldalso have made useful objects and tools out of bone, skin, wood, and other natural materials less likelythan stone to survive the ravages of time. In the second place, this period of nearly 2 million yearscontains many distinct periods and cultures. Early students recognized two distinct periods in the StoneAge: the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) down to 10,000 years ago and the Neolithic (New Stone Age)associated with agriculture. Modern scientists have found evidence for many more subdivisions.Most early human activity centered on gathering food. Like the australopithecines, early humansdepended heavily on vegetable foods such as leaves, seeds, and grasses, but one of the changesevident in the Ice Age is the growing consumption of highly nutritious animal flesh. Moreover, unlike

australopithecines, humans regularly made tools. These two changes – increased meat eating and toolmaking – appear to be closely linked.The first crude tools made their appearance with Homo habilis. Most stone tools made by Homo habilishave been found in the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa, whose sides expose sediments laid downover millions of years. One branch of this valley, the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, explored by Louis andMary Leakey, has yielded evidence that Homo habilis made tools by chipping flakes off the edges ofvolcanic stones. Modern experiments show that the razor-sharp edges of such flakes are highlyeffective for skinning and butchering wild animals. Later human species made much moresophisticated tools.Lacking the skill to hunt and kill large animals, small-brained Homo habilis probably obtained animalprotein by scavenging meat from kills made by animal predators or resulting from accidents. There isevidence that this species used large stone "choppers" for cracking open bones to get at the nutritiousmarrow. The fact that many such tools are found together far from the outcrops of volcanic rocksuggests that people carried them long distances for use at kill sites and camps.Members of Homo erectus were also scavengers, but their larger brains would have made themcleverer at it – capable, for example, of finding and stealing the kills that leopards and other largepredators dragged up into trees. They also made more effective tools for butchering large animals,although the stone flakes and choppers of earlier eras continued to be made. The stone tool mostassociated with Homo erectus was a hand ax formed by removing chips from both sides of a stone toproduce a sharp outer edge.Modern experiments show the hand ax to be an efficient multipurpose tool, suitable for skinning andbutchering animals, for scraping skins clean for use as clothing and mats, for sharpening wooden tools,and for digging up edible roots. Since a hand ax can also be hurled accurately for nearly 100 feet (30meters), it might also have been used as a projectile to fell animals. From sites in Spain there isevidence that Homo erectus even butchered elephants, which then ranged across southern Europe, bydriving them into swamps, where they became trapped and died.Members of Homo sapiens were far more skillful hunters. They tracked and killed large animals (suchas mastodons, mammoths, and bison) throughout the world. Their success reflected their superiorintelligence and their use of an array of finely made tools. Sharp stone flakes chipped from carefullyprepared rock cores were often used in combination with other materials. Attaching a stone point to awooden shaft made a spear. Embedding several sharp stone flakes in a bone handle produced a sawingtool.Indeed, members of Homo sapiens were so skillful and successful as hunters that they may havecaused or contributed to a series of ecological crises. Between 40,000 and 13,000 years ago the giantmastodons and mammoths gradually disappeared, first from Africa and Southeast Asia and then fromnorthern Europe. In North America the sudden disappearance around 11,000 years ago of highlysuccessful large-animal hunters known as the Clovis people was almost simultaneous with theextinction of three-fourths of the large mammals in the Americas, including giant bison, camels, groundsloths, stag-moose, giant cats, mastodons, and mammoths. In Australia there was a similar event. Sincethese extinctions occurred during the last series of severe cold spells at the end of the Ice Age, it is3

4difficult to measure which effects were the work of global and regional climate changes and whichresulted from the excesses of human predators.Finds of fossilized animal bones bearing the marks of butchering tools clearly attest to the scavengingand hunting activities of Stone Age peoples, but anthropologists do not believe that early humansdepended primarily on meat for their food. Modern foragers hunting and food-gathering peoples inthe Kalahari Desert of southern Africa and the Ituri Forest of central Africa derive the bulk of their dayto-daynourishment from wild vegetable foods; meat is the food of feasts. It is likely that the same wastrue for Stone Age peoples, even though the tools and equipment for gathering and processingvegetable foods have left few traces because they were made of materials unable to survive forthousands of years.Like modern foragers, ancient humans would have used skins and mats woven from leaves forcollecting fruits, berries, and wild seeds. They would have dug edible roots out of the ground withwooden sticks. Archaeologists believe that donut-shaped stones often found at Stone Age sites mayhave been weights placed on wooden digging sticks to increase their effectiveness.Both meat and vegetables become tastier and easier to digest when they are cooked. The first cookedfoods were probably found by accident after wildfires, but there is new evidence from East and SouthAfrica that humans may have been setting fires deliberately between 1 million and 1.5 million yearsago. The wooden spits and hot rocks that they would have used for roasting, frying, or baking are notdistinctive enough to stand out in an archeological site. Only with the appearance of clay cooking potssome 12,500 years ago in East Asia is there hard evidence of cooking.Gender Roles and Social LifeSome researchers have studied the organization of nonhuman primates for clues about very and earlyhuman society. Gorillas and chimpanzees live in groups consisting of several adult males and femalesand their offspring. Status varies with age and sex, and a dominant male usually heads the group.Sexual unions between males and females generally do not result in long-term pairing. Instead, thestrongest ties are those between a female and her children and among siblings. Adult males are oftenrecruited from neighboring bands. Very early human groups likely shared some of these primate traits,but by the time of modern Homo sapiens the two-parent family would have been characteristic. Howthis change from a mother-centered family to a two-parent family developed over the interveningmillennia can only be guessed at, but it is likely that physical and social evolution were linked. Largerbrain size was a contributing factor. Big-headed humans have to be born in a less mature state thanother mammals so they can pass through the narrow birth canal. Other large mammals are mature attwo or three years of age: humans are not able to care for themselves until the age of twelve tofifteen. The need of human infants and children for much longer nurturing makes care by mothers,fathers, and other family members a biological imperative.The human reproductive cycle also became unique at some point. In other species sexual contact isbiologically restricted to a special mating season of the year or to the fertile part of the female'smenstrual cycle. Moreover, among other primates the choice of mate is usually not a matter for longdeliberation. To a female baboon in heat (estrus) any male will do, and to a male baboon any receptivefemale is a suitable sexual partner. In contrast, adult humans can mate at any time and are much

choosier about their partners. Once they mate, frequent sexual contact promotes deep emotional tiesand long-term bonding.An enduring bond between human parents made it much easier for vulnerable offspring to receive thecare they needed during the long period of their childhood. Working together, mothers and fatherscould nurture dependent children of different ages at the same time, unlike other large mammals,whose females must raise their offspring nearly to maturity before beginning another reproductivecycle. Spacing births close together also ensured offspring a high rate of survival and would haveenabled humans to multiply more rapidly than other large mammals.Other researchers have studied the few surviving present-day foragers for models of what such earlysocieties could have been like. They infer that Ice Age women would have done most of the gatheringand cooking (which they could do while caring for small children). Older women past childbearing agewould have been the most knowledgeable and productive food gatherers. Men, with stronger armsand shoulders, would have been more suited than women to hunting, particularly for large animals.Some early cave art shows males in hunting activities.Other aspects of social life in the Ice Age are suggested by studies of modern peoples. All recenthunter-gatherers have lived in small groups or bands. The community has to have enough members todefend itself from predators and to divide responsibility for the collection and preparation of animaland vegetable foods. However, if it has too many members, it risks exhausting the food available in itsimmediate vicinity. Even a band of optimal size has to move at regular intervals to follow migratinganimals and to take advantage of seasonally ripening plants in different places. Archeological evidencefrom Ice Age campsites suggests that early humans, too, lived in highly mobile bands.Hearths and Cultural ExpressionsBecause frequent moves were necessary to keep close to mi grating herds and ripening plants, earlyhunting and gathering peoples usually did not lavish much time on housing. Natural shelters tinderoverhanging rocks or in caves in southern Africa and southern France are known to have been favoritecamping places to which bands returned at regular intervals. Where the climate was severe or wherenatural shelters did not exist, people erected huts of branches, stones, bones, skins, and leaves asseasonal camps. More elaborate dwellings were common in areas where protection against harshweather was necessary.An interesting camp dating to 15,000 years ago has been excavated in the Ukraine southeast of Kiev.Its communal dwellings were framed with the bones of elephant-like mammoths and then coveredwith hides. Each oblong structure, measuring 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 meters) by 40 to 50 feet (12 to 15meters), was capable of holding fifty people and would have taken several days to construct. The camphad five such dwellings, making it a large settlement for a foraging community. Large, solid structureswere common in fishing villages that grew up along riverbanks and lakeshores, where the abundanceof fish permitted people to occupy the same site year-round.Making clothing was another necessary technology in the Stone Age. Animal skins were an early formof clothing, and the oldest evidence of fibers woven into cloth dates from about 26,000 years ago. An"lceman" from 5,300 years ago, whose frozen remains were found in the European Alps in 1991, waswearing many different garments made of animal skins sewn together with cord fashioned fromvegetable fibers and rawhide. Although accidents, erratic weather, and disease took a heavy toll on a5

foraging band, there is no reason to believe that day-to-day existence was particularly hard orUnpleasant. Some studies suggest that, under the conditions operating on the African savannas and inother game-rich areas, securing necessary food, clothing, and shelter would have occupied only fromthree to five hours a day. This would have left a great deal of time for artistic endeavors as well as fortool making and social life.The foundations of what later ages called science, art, and religion were also built during the StoneAge. Basic to human survival was extensive and precise knowledge about the natural environment.Gatherers needed to know which local plants were best for food and the seasons when they wereavailable. Successful hunting required intimate knowledge of the habits of game animals. Peoplelearned how to use plant and animal parts for clothing, twine, and building materials, as well as whichnatural substances were effective for medicine, consciousness altering, dyeing, and other purposes.Knowledge of the natural world included identifying minerals suitable for paints, stones for making thebest tools, and so forth. Given humans' physical capacity for speech, it is likely that the transmission ofsuch prescientific knowledge involved verbal communication, even though direct evidence forlanguage appears only in later periods.Early music and dance have left no traces, but there is abundant evidence of painting and drawing. Theoldest known cave paintings in Europe date to 32,000 years ago, and there are many others from latertimes in other parts of the world. Because many cave paintings feature wild animals such as oxen,reindeer, and horses that were hunted for food, some believe that the art was meant to record huntingscenes or that it formed part of magical and religious rites to ensure successful hunting. However, anewly discovered cave at Vallon Pont-d'Arc in southern France features rhinoceroses, panthers, bears,owls, and a hyena, which probably were not the objects of hunting. Still other drawings include peopledressed in animal skins and smeared with paint. In many caves there are stencils of human hands. Arethese the signatures of the artists or the world's oldest graffiti? Some scholars suspect that othermarks in cave paintings and on bones from this period may represent efforts at counting or writing.Newer theories suggest that cave and rock art represent concerns with fertility, efforts to educate theyoung, or elaborate mechanisms for time reckoning. Another approach to understanding such artdraws on the traditions of peoples like the San – hunters, gatherers, and artists in southern Africa sincetime immemorial. Some cave art suggests that Stone Age people had well-developed religions, butwithout written religious texts it is difficult to know exactly what they believed. Sites of deliberatehuman burials from about 100,000 years ago give some hints. The fact that an adult was often buriedwith stone implements, food, clothing, and red-ochre powder suggests that early people revered theirleaders enough to honor them after death and may imply a belief in an afterlife. Today we recognizethat the Stone Age, whose existence was scarcely dreamed of two centuries ago, was a formativeperiod. Important in its own right, it also laid the basis for major changes ahead as human communitiespassed from being food gatherers to food producers. Future discoveries are likely to add substantiallyto our understanding of these events.6