Our past is more diverse than our present

We've developed a number of sophisticated strategies to dismiss the strangeness of our ancestors and neighbors.

On this page...

1. We call them apes.
2. We idealize them, calling them "noble savages". Or we focus on the "savage" part, and are fearful of pre-modern life.
3. We rob them of political creativity. We call them "stupid savages".
4. We claim that culture is determined by language, rather than human decisions.
5. We give agency to wheat, instead of humans.

500,000 years of experimentation

Around 500,000 BCE, Homo Sapiens achieved relative genetic stability.

We have looked very different. Thanks to geography, early human populations in Africa could be separated for 10,000s or even 100,000s of years. The fossil record shows a great range of human sizes and shapes. Graeber and Wengrow liken early humanity to a world of hobbits, giants, and elves.

With such physical variety, plus distinct environments, surely there was also a diversity of language, kinship, culture, and social organization.

Around 40,000 BCE, our relatives, including Homo Nalendi, Neanderthals, and Denisovans had gone extinct, and Homo Sapiens became recognizable.

Modern humans are remarkably non-diverse, physically. Our heads are basically the same size. We roll our eyes at idiots. We have languages with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. And we all have the capacity for freedom.

Our ancestors aren't apes

Dominant-submissive behavior may be hardwired into us from primate genes. But we can choose to act differently.

Gorillas don't mock each other for beating their chests. But humans do.

In many cultures, successful hunters are belittled. Humans frequently develop these types of social structures to prevent bullying and the accumulation of power.

This is the essence of politics. We can anticipate the effect of cultural decisions, and we can try to find a different path.

Be suspicious when a "big history" writer (like Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond, or Stephen Pinker) talk about people as being competitive chimpanzees or peaceful bonobos.

We aren't inherently competitive or cooperative

Since at least the Enlightenment, we've tended to repeat 2 origin myths:

1. Humans are naturally bad and competitive--from Thomas Hobbes.
2. Humans are naturally good and cooperative--from Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Hobbes retells the story of original sin. For Hobbes, civilization saves us from relapsing into a war of all against all, aka hell on earth.

Rousseau's story echos the fall from grace. Rousseau's state of nature is an Eden that we cannot return to without also giving up civilization.

Hobbes believes that we can only be united by our self-interest in self-preservation. In this view, families are the fundamental unit of social organization. Families stick together because of their shared genetic interest in protecting children. And naturally, these families are led by an alpha male. Only domination of everyone, by a super-alpha male, the King, (or maybe God's Invisible Hand) can channel individual self-interest into public good.

Rousseau wishes we could go back to small, egalitarian, nomadic bands. Rousseau-types believe the agricultural revolution was a bad move, but they're unwilling to throw out bureaucracy, patriarchy, and war because they're worried about losing art and science.

This argument hasn't changed much. Folks on the right, like Steven Pinker, still use “civilization” as an excuse for violence and injustice. While folks on the left make an unachievable utopia of equality, as an excuse for their inaction.

Our ancestors were more creative than us

Contrary to popular belief, the idea of the "noble savage" wasn’t invented by Rousseau. It was the creation of racist conservatives 100 years later, in order to criticize Rousseau for being soft-headed about Americans.

Rousseau’s actual mistake was the “stupid” savage. He assumed Americans lacked political imagination. He assumed that historical humans couldn’t have possibly anticipated what the first property claim would lead to.

In contrast, Pierre Clastres (a French anthropologist of the 1960s) argues that Indigenous Americans are more politically imaginative than contemporary Europeans. Americans deliberately chose to adopt (or not) bureaucracies, agriculture, and private property.

Language doesn't speak us

Cultural determinists claim that "language speaks us." This isn't true.

These anthropologists have tried to trace the spread of cultures by tracing movements and changes in language. They've tried to use language groups in order to map distinct "culture areas."

But language and culture are not always closely tied.

For example, in Northern California in the early 1900s there was a jumble of language families, but roughly similar cultural practices. Group identity was based on subtle cultural distinctions. And within a group a single language was usually spoken. But groups speaking different languages (Athabaskan, Na-Dene, Ute-Aztecan) had far more in common with their neighbors than far off speakers of the same language group.

More: Indigenous Americans of the Pacific Coast

It is only with the rise of modern nation states that populations have been ordered into neat ethnolinguistic groups (particularly post-WWII in Europe, see Tony Judt's "Postwar").

Wheat didn't domesticate us

Yuval Harai (and Micheal Pollan) have suggested that wheat (and corn) domesticated us. Tellingly, in this story Harai calls our ancestors "apes."

Perhaps treating wheat (or corn) as an agent of change is useful for de-centering human agency when we afford humans too much credit and control. But in this case, we already afford too little agency to the humans involved.

More: Technological determinism was invented to neutralize the Indigenous Critique of European Society.

People experimented with agriculture as one part of a range of strategies that allowed them to remain in nice places, with access to trading partners and/or hunting grounds. It was a choice. We can tell because they took their time, and changed their minds.