10 ms·

Hunter-gatherers' work was play

68 points by dev_tty01 3y ago

jdthedisciple 3y ago
Makes sense to me. Their "work" was essentially just ... living life! Now, living life is what you do with about 5-15% of your time. The rest is work/red tape/...
- mandmandam 3y ago
  Yeah. So much work is one of three things: 1. Utter bullshit - completely useless to everyone; unjustifiable. 2. Actively evil - work that may be respected in society but is killing the world. Suits with BMWs selling weapons, insurance, oil, corporate tax loopholes etc. 3. Honest, but with most profits funneled upward, creating an ever more unequal society. Even artists, musicians, beadmakers etc are forced to do grisly hustly things to survive - the fun gets sucked out of it for most. Our society is deathly ill.
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    Hey now, selling guns is amazingly nonprofitable. I only sell guns for good feels.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    > 1. Utter bullshit - completely useless to everyone; unjustifiable. Isn't part of what you're romanticizing of these traditional societies the utterly useless shit they might do with some of their time? Our work pays because someone values it, that is tautological.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      > Our work pays because someone values it, that is tautological. You say that as if it helps your point? I'm talking about "bullshit jobs" as in those described in the book 'Bullshit Jobs' by Graeber. Think Wally from Dilbert; sinecures without the dignity. Here: > Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.
      - slothtrop 3y ago
        > You say that as if it helps your point? Yes.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Not sure if that point stands in the light of modern, or any, organisational theory so. Bureaucracy does exist for a reason, to organize things and activities. That organization allows us to live the pampered life we life (at least some do, especially in the developed world). Bullshit jobs are seen as such because division of activities was taken to a point were people fail to see the overall picture. Because, as sad as it is sometimes, in a capitalist society as long as someone pays for job being done, that job holds some value. Even if the people doing it fail to see that sometimes. If you care about some greater meaning ij your job, otherwise if it pays the bills, gets food on the table and, ideally, provides some financial stability, tue job actually provides a ton of value to thw person holding it, regardless if someone classifies it as a BS job or not. By the way, being to conplain about the metaphysical nature and philosophocal meaning of a day job is one of the highest privileges a person can have.
        mandmandam 3y ago
        Value to the yachting class is not the same thing as value to society. Value to the psychopathic dictator buying billions in weapons for his country is not the same thing as value to society. Value to Exxon is not the same thing as value to every living creature on the planet. What Graeber did was look at the net balance. I recommend you look more into it, because your interpretation of what he and I are saying is way off. > By the way, being to conplain about the metaphysical nature and philosophocal meaning of a day job is one of the highest privileges a person can have. Did your boss tell you that? Look at a graph of productivy versus wages over the last 50 years. We should be working 15 hours a week, like our prehistoric ancestors did. We're killing the planet. Thousands of species are being lost. Infinite growth is a lie that is literally going to kill us. It has to stop. This isn't metaphysical or philosophical, it's life and death.
        hef19898 3y ago
- slothtrop 3y ago
  They were constantly either hunting, foraging, fighting, or roaming. Is that your idea of "living life"?
  - GrumpySloth 3y ago
    Yes? Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming), searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc., doing hand-to-hand combat, hunting... Spend a day in front of a computer. Which one do you think will end in a feeling of happiness?
    - hef19898 3y ago
      The one where nobody of my family starves in winter because I failed to send that last e-mail of the day?
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      The one I'm living. > Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming) We can already do that at leisure, but most would not care to go a whole day (let alone every day) trudging around by necessity. > searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor. > doing hand-to-hand combat Between tribes (or even within your own), it can easily be more fatal than that. Not only are you worried about calories, you're also concerned about not being outright murdered.
      - GrumpySloth 3y ago
        > We can already do that at leisure, but most would not care to go a whole day (let alone every day) trudging around by necessity. We can do that at best 2/7 days a week. In reality, modern life forces us to dedicate even less time to that. I've done that many times. The feeling at the end of the day is always unlike any other. Wouldn't swap those experiences for anything else. > You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor. Have you ever picked mushrooms? Do you know how little time it takes to get enough mushrooms for weeks to come? And then how much meat there is in a deer? I agree that the risk of being murdered is higher. Although I think you overestimate the frequency of encounters. There weren't a lot of people back then on Earth. I also don't think this decreases happiness all that much. The slow senseless willowing away in an office everyday seems like a much less happy existence, even if it's a longer one.
- Aunche 3y ago
  Alternatively, their "living life" was just work. The modern concept of leisure was non-existent outside the very elite until well into the industrial revolution. For the billions of people who moved away from subsidence farming into factories were willing to make the trade off between working more in exchange for more security.
  - eikoongaepaikei 3y ago
    That directly contradicts a position the article takes and supports with citations. One contributing factor to the play-like quality of hunter-gatherer work is that the work was not excessive. According to several quantitative studies, hunter-gatherers typically devoted about 20 hours per week to hunting or gathering and another 10 to 20 hours to chores at the campsite, such as food processing and making or mending tools (e.g. Lee, 1972; Sahlins, 1972 ). All in all, the research suggests, hunter-gatherer adults spent an average of 30 to 40 hours per week on all subsistence-related activities combined, which is considerably less than the workweek of the typical modern American, if the American’s 40 or more hours of paid employment is added to the hours spent on domestic chores. One anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins (1972), famously characterized hunter-gatherer societies collectively as “the original affluent society.” An affluent society, by Sahlins’s definition, is one in which “people’s material wants are easily satisfied.” Hunter-gatherers were affluent not because they had so much, but because they wanted so little. They could provide for those wants with relatively little work, and, as a result, had lots of free time, which they spent, according to one observer of the Ju/’hoansi (Shostak, 1981), at such activities as “singing and composing songs, playing musical instruments, sewing intricate bead designs, telling stories, playing games, visiting, or just lying around and resting.”
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Especially the last paragraph sounda like pure entitlement, by the author, not the observed people. Something tells me, that Shostak was pretty happy with all the things modern society provided him with: an academic career, a roof over his head, ample food, the ability to travel, healzh care... And yet, he and Sahlins seem to be completely oblivious to what is necessary to provide all of that. Instead, they seem to look at some "noble primitives", see that thosep seem to live a simpler live, and glorify that. After said observation, they return to their offices, go grocery shoping, see a dentist and write papers and books about what they observed... It is almost ironic, isn't it?
hef19898 3y ago
If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was play, it for sure was closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun. Also, sharing of work was already a thing back than: hunters hunted, others went gathering, again others built tools... Damn it, and I swore I wouldn't read stuff from substack again...
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  This is just all totally incorrect What you described is a pop-culture idea of pre-history, nothing like what the actual research and literature shows. I suggest you start with Claude Lévi-Strauss' but that's only if you're interested in spending years learning, The Dawn of Everything is more recent and more accessible most likely.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Which part is wrong so? The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not? Or the one where they already shared tasks between them? Edit: There is archaelogical evidence from the stone age of shared work, namely in the form quarries in which the stone for the stone tools, axes, spear and arrow tips and the like, have been collected.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      "closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun"
      - swagempire 3y ago
        But it's true. Life WAS like that back then.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        As in dying of malnutrition? Of course it was. Or injuries, diseases... Pardon my word play on applying the word "play" to a society that constantly faced severe consequences of literal hunger...
piombisallow 3y ago
The noble savage is one of the most enduring myths of anthropology.
- lacrosse_tannin 3y ago
  Crying "noble savage" is more often deployed to deflect any criticism of modern life IME.
  - Kerb_ 3y ago
    Noble Modernity is one of the most enduring myths of modern society
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    In this case, it really does look like that's how the author is trying to incorrectly frame hunter gatherer societies. No doubt they had fun, but work was life and death. They had no way to stockpile food, so just getting enough calories for a small group required frequent work where the stakes were whether you starved or not. A lot of the remains we've found of early man portray a complex, meaningful world nonetheless full of hardship (famine, malnutrition) and violence (e.g. bones broken by accident, or crushed/chipped by weapons). Modern hunter gatherer societies are not substantively different: they have populations limited by what their proximate environment can support, not because they want it that way but because that's all that can be practically sustained.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      There's a lot wrong here. To start, modern foragers are very different than their pleistocene counterparts. They have much more advanced technology and live in significantly more marginal environments. They're also limited to what their environments support mostly by choice and modern society. They almost always have significant contact with sedentary agriculturalists, acting as guides and selling resources in trade. Secondly, the whole point of being a nomadic forager is that you move. If whatever region you're in runs out of food, you leave to somewhere with more. The pastoral version of this is called transhumance. It's been made more difficult in the modern era, so we see much greater reliance on local productivity today. There was constant foraging occurring, but modern foragers definitely don't believe themselves to be on the edge of starvation and they spend enough time socializing around camp with each other that they could easily spend foraging more food if they saw a need to.
grecy 3y ago
This resonates very strongly with me. When I lived in the Yukon working as a Software Engineer I got into moose and bison hunting, I help friends build off-grid log cabin houses, I harvested wild berries, caught a freezer full of salmon every year and tried to live the "homestead" life as much as possible. I packed these adventures into weekends and time off. These activities are physically demanding, cold and arduous. They were also some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life, and they are extremely strong memories that I often talk about and long for. There is something about working for my own survival that is way, way more deeply satisfying than simply going to work to earn money to pay for my survival. I wrote about my first ever moose hunting experience here: http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting Salmon fishing always involved grizzlies: http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haines-alaska http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haine...
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  Dude. You buy all your gear from modern society with electricity, oil for your car and shit and post it about online. This doesn't mean HG work was play or that they had it better than you. It just means that you love that type of thing. Same as many people love different sports or physical activities and nature experiences. Specially in contrast with dense populated towns/cities. There's a difference between larping survival and having a real net and having absolutely no choice. Adrenaline can be fun but life or death constantly is absolutely different.
  - grecy 3y ago
    > This doesn't mean HG work was play or that they had it better than you Of course it doesn't, and at no point did I remotely say anything like HG people had it better than me. I was simply offering my life experiences that I find working for my own survival in our modern world to be much more enjoyable than going to work to earn money to pay for that survival.
- hef19898 3y ago
  As much as I enjoyed The Road Chose Me, let's not kid ourselves: Hunter-Gatherers, the true ones, don't have the luxury to pull into a town with internet to do some contractor work, see a doctor or buy some food if the last hunt didn't go too well. Edit: Nor do they have sponsors and the financial means to build multiple overland jeeps and go travelling around the world for fun.
pkdpic 3y ago
I don't think theres one simple conclusion to this ongoing general question of pre-history vs modernity but I remember coming across the infanticide and geriatricide rates in pre-agricultural societies (not that they were / are all the same) at some point and having it complicate my thinking pretty drastically. I believe it was in here, its a quick interesting read in any case. http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scan...
- Aunche 3y ago
  > The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race I'm sure the people invented agriculture didn't think of it as a mistake. It's not like they decided that they liked eating cultivated grass seeds more than wild nuts and mammoth steaks. They did so because that's what they had available.
  - melolife 3y ago
    The general argument is that if you are a proto-government/warlord/gangster, you want to encourage/coerce your subjects into agriculture as the output is easily taxed and stored. This turns out to be wildly successful for creating large hierarchical societies, which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      So, lobsters have undersea farms?
    - Aunche 3y ago
      The people who resorted to eating cultivated grass seeds had more imminent problems to worry about before ambitions about being warlords. That occurred a few thousand years later. > which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive Until gunpowder, tribal societies were at least a strong as their hierarchical contemporaries. The Huns destroyed the Roman Empire and Mongols conquered China.
numtel 3y ago
If hunting/gathering is play and since that's basically what all animals do, then the blog's title, "play makes us human" is totally incorrect. Of course other animals play, we've all seen it. It seems the opposite: toil makes us human. Our inability to accept what can be foraged has pushed us into working.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  > Our inability to accept what can be foraged has pushed us into working. It's more that foraging limits population size, and when people have to compete for resources they end up killing or starving each other. Humans have a drive to grow and reproduce, and they have been more successful by working together, then by industrializing (e.g. agriculture). Because they got so good at it, one person could do the work to feed nine others, meaning the other nine didn't need to work in food production anymore and could do other things. (oversimplified, you know what I mean) Everything's been abstracted away to things-exchanged-for-money though, nobody needs to forage or build their own homes anymore, just fork over cash and it's there. Getting said cash, there's myriad ways to do so and we keep inventing new ones, like... recording oneself queueing up at Disney World, or dressing up in a maid outfit and doing NPC emotes for money.
  - piuantiderp 3y ago
    Calm down Ted Kaczynski
- redblacktree 3y ago
  To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Genesis 3:17-3:19 I always took this to mean precisely what you said. "From the sweat of your brow," you eat because you chose to define for yourself "good and evil" with respect to nature's provisions.
zubairq 3y ago
Interesting read!
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
One thing that many modern takes on hunter gatherers gloss over is the way women were treated. There was profound sexual inequality. Often hunter gatherer societies practiced polygyny. Women were mainly valued for their ability to bear children. Women were often seen as a possession - first to their fathers who would sell them (bride price) to their husbands. Often there was no consent. In addition, the modern states that these hunter gatherer societies are a part of don’t allow them to practice unrestricted warfare quite like they used to. So bands can’t go around killing all the males and taking the conquered tribe’s women and supplies. Because of this, looking at hunter gatherer societies that exist now is not necessarily reflective of how it actually was.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
isaacremuant 3y ago
> Boston College research professor Peter Gray specializes in the nature and value of play. Of course Peter finds play in everything because that's his frame of looking at things. The entire thing is a bit of a joke in how simplistic and fallacious it is. Work is not play because it's unpleasant but the HG work is play because it's fun (not much, it's social, is challenging/not routine/boring and it's optional). It has to deliberately dismiss the need of survival as "well, but they were many so some could avoid working for a month and all would be good " so the reward (food for survival) was not the goal and the goal was play. If there's an abundance of resources that allow you to survive and you don't have a high demand, then you'll have less stress than in other scenario. How is that not Economy 101? There's this fetichism for "the simple life" from people that, I'd conjecture, clearly don't like theirs that much and project it unto others, where they get surprised at "those basic people" having skills, proficiency and actual culture and the capacity to be happy. How can they be happy without competing for a Tesla to make the neighbour jealous, seems to be the silly type of thinking. One of "ignorance is bliss". Extremely poor article in every sense. He should read more or actually engage in anthropology. Surveys don't cut it, I'm afraid. The cherry on top is: "machines should work for us, I don't want to have to produce the drivel for my work, please someone release me from my 'toil' so I can just drink wine with my friends."
MarcScott 3y ago
We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2018)
- hef19898 3y ago
  And we are all better because of it. And by the way it wasn't wheat that domesticated us, it was the cats!
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    I for one welcome our feline overlords... because they purr and look so cute when they're asleep which is like most of the time!
noslacknoops 3y ago
All is fun and games until you face and evetually get wiped out by more advanced farmer-based societies, with specialized labor (army), more developed tools (weapons and cavalry) and much more sophisticated social structure (elites deciding where to expand). Jared Diamond wrote a lot on this subject.
- defrost 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Critici...
  - noslacknoops 3y ago
    Need more context for conversation. Could you elaborate a bit?
RecycledEle 3y ago
The author ignores most of the differences between primitive life and modern life. Gathering nuts is not as much fun when you have a infected foot and an infected tooth.

68 points by dev_tty01 3y ago

Makes sense to me. Their "work" was essentially just ... living life! Now, living life is what you do with about 5-15% of your time. The rest is work/red tape/...

mandmandam 3y ago
Yeah. So much work is one of three things: 1. Utter bullshit - completely useless to everyone; unjustifiable. 2. Actively evil - work that may be respected in society but is killing the world. Suits with BMWs selling weapons, insurance, oil, corporate tax loopholes etc. 3. Honest, but with most profits funneled upward, creating an ever more unequal society. Even artists, musicians, beadmakers etc are forced to do grisly hustly things to survive - the fun gets sucked out of it for most. Our society is deathly ill.
- rpmisms 3y ago
  Hey now, selling guns is amazingly nonprofitable. I only sell guns for good feels.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > 1. Utter bullshit - completely useless to everyone; unjustifiable. Isn't part of what you're romanticizing of these traditional societies the utterly useless shit they might do with some of their time? Our work pays because someone values it, that is tautological.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    > Our work pays because someone values it, that is tautological. You say that as if it helps your point? I'm talking about "bullshit jobs" as in those described in the book 'Bullshit Jobs' by Graeber. Think Wally from Dilbert; sinecures without the dignity. Here: > Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      > You say that as if it helps your point? Yes.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Not sure if that point stands in the light of modern, or any, organisational theory so. Bureaucracy does exist for a reason, to organize things and activities. That organization allows us to live the pampered life we life (at least some do, especially in the developed world). Bullshit jobs are seen as such because division of activities was taken to a point were people fail to see the overall picture. Because, as sad as it is sometimes, in a capitalist society as long as someone pays for job being done, that job holds some value. Even if the people doing it fail to see that sometimes. If you care about some greater meaning ij your job, otherwise if it pays the bills, gets food on the table and, ideally, provides some financial stability, tue job actually provides a ton of value to thw person holding it, regardless if someone classifies it as a BS job or not. By the way, being to conplain about the metaphysical nature and philosophocal meaning of a day job is one of the highest privileges a person can have.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        Value to the yachting class is not the same thing as value to society. Value to the psychopathic dictator buying billions in weapons for his country is not the same thing as value to society. Value to Exxon is not the same thing as value to every living creature on the planet. What Graeber did was look at the net balance. I recommend you look more into it, because your interpretation of what he and I are saying is way off. > By the way, being to conplain about the metaphysical nature and philosophocal meaning of a day job is one of the highest privileges a person can have. Did your boss tell you that? Look at a graph of productivy versus wages over the last 50 years. We should be working 15 hours a week, like our prehistoric ancestors did. We're killing the planet. Thousands of species are being lost. Infinite growth is a lie that is literally going to kill us. It has to stop. This isn't metaphysical or philosophical, it's life and death.
        hef19898 3y ago
slothtrop 3y ago
They were constantly either hunting, foraging, fighting, or roaming. Is that your idea of "living life"?
- GrumpySloth 3y ago
  Yes? Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming), searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc., doing hand-to-hand combat, hunting... Spend a day in front of a computer. Which one do you think will end in a feeling of happiness?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    The one where nobody of my family starves in winter because I failed to send that last e-mail of the day?
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    The one I'm living. > Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming) We can already do that at leisure, but most would not care to go a whole day (let alone every day) trudging around by necessity. > searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor. > doing hand-to-hand combat Between tribes (or even within your own), it can easily be more fatal than that. Not only are you worried about calories, you're also concerned about not being outright murdered.
    - GrumpySloth 3y ago
      > We can already do that at leisure, but most would not care to go a whole day (let alone every day) trudging around by necessity. We can do that at best 2/7 days a week. In reality, modern life forces us to dedicate even less time to that. I've done that many times. The feeling at the end of the day is always unlike any other. Wouldn't swap those experiences for anything else. > You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor. Have you ever picked mushrooms? Do you know how little time it takes to get enough mushrooms for weeks to come? And then how much meat there is in a deer? I agree that the risk of being murdered is higher. Although I think you overestimate the frequency of encounters. There weren't a lot of people back then on Earth. I also don't think this decreases happiness all that much. The slow senseless willowing away in an office everyday seems like a much less happy existence, even if it's a longer one.
Aunche 3y ago
Alternatively, their "living life" was just work. The modern concept of leisure was non-existent outside the very elite until well into the industrial revolution. For the billions of people who moved away from subsidence farming into factories were willing to make the trade off between working more in exchange for more security.
- eikoongaepaikei 3y ago
  That directly contradicts a position the article takes and supports with citations. One contributing factor to the play-like quality of hunter-gatherer work is that the work was not excessive. According to several quantitative studies, hunter-gatherers typically devoted about 20 hours per week to hunting or gathering and another 10 to 20 hours to chores at the campsite, such as food processing and making or mending tools (e.g. Lee, 1972; Sahlins, 1972 ). All in all, the research suggests, hunter-gatherer adults spent an average of 30 to 40 hours per week on all subsistence-related activities combined, which is considerably less than the workweek of the typical modern American, if the American’s 40 or more hours of paid employment is added to the hours spent on domestic chores. One anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins (1972), famously characterized hunter-gatherer societies collectively as “the original affluent society.” An affluent society, by Sahlins’s definition, is one in which “people’s material wants are easily satisfied.” Hunter-gatherers were affluent not because they had so much, but because they wanted so little. They could provide for those wants with relatively little work, and, as a result, had lots of free time, which they spent, according to one observer of the Ju/’hoansi (Shostak, 1981), at such activities as “singing and composing songs, playing musical instruments, sewing intricate bead designs, telling stories, playing games, visiting, or just lying around and resting.”
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Especially the last paragraph sounda like pure entitlement, by the author, not the observed people. Something tells me, that Shostak was pretty happy with all the things modern society provided him with: an academic career, a roof over his head, ample food, the ability to travel, healzh care... And yet, he and Sahlins seem to be completely oblivious to what is necessary to provide all of that. Instead, they seem to look at some "noble primitives", see that thosep seem to live a simpler live, and glorify that. After said observation, they return to their offices, go grocery shoping, see a dentist and write papers and books about what they observed... It is almost ironic, isn't it?

hef19898 3y ago

If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was play, it for sure was closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun. Also, sharing of work was already a thing back than: hunters hunted, others went gathering, again others built tools... Damn it, and I swore I wouldn't read stuff from substack again...

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is just all totally incorrect What you described is a pop-culture idea of pre-history, nothing like what the actual research and literature shows. I suggest you start with Claude Lévi-Strauss' but that's only if you're interested in spending years learning, The Dawn of Everything is more recent and more accessible most likely.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Which part is wrong so? The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not? Or the one where they already shared tasks between them? Edit: There is archaelogical evidence from the stone age of shared work, namely in the form quarries in which the stone for the stone tools, axes, spear and arrow tips and the like, have been collected.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    "closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun"
    - swagempire 3y ago
      But it's true. Life WAS like that back then.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      As in dying of malnutrition? Of course it was. Or injuries, diseases... Pardon my word play on applying the word "play" to a society that constantly faced severe consequences of literal hunger...

piombisallow 3y ago

The noble savage is one of the most enduring myths of anthropology.

lacrosse_tannin 3y ago
Crying "noble savage" is more often deployed to deflect any criticism of modern life IME.
- Kerb_ 3y ago
  Noble Modernity is one of the most enduring myths of modern society
- karaterobot 3y ago
  In this case, it really does look like that's how the author is trying to incorrectly frame hunter gatherer societies. No doubt they had fun, but work was life and death. They had no way to stockpile food, so just getting enough calories for a small group required frequent work where the stakes were whether you starved or not. A lot of the remains we've found of early man portray a complex, meaningful world nonetheless full of hardship (famine, malnutrition) and violence (e.g. bones broken by accident, or crushed/chipped by weapons). Modern hunter gatherer societies are not substantively different: they have populations limited by what their proximate environment can support, not because they want it that way but because that's all that can be practically sustained.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    There's a lot wrong here. To start, modern foragers are very different than their pleistocene counterparts. They have much more advanced technology and live in significantly more marginal environments. They're also limited to what their environments support mostly by choice and modern society. They almost always have significant contact with sedentary agriculturalists, acting as guides and selling resources in trade. Secondly, the whole point of being a nomadic forager is that you move. If whatever region you're in runs out of food, you leave to somewhere with more. The pastoral version of this is called transhumance. It's been made more difficult in the modern era, so we see much greater reliance on local productivity today. There was constant foraging occurring, but modern foragers definitely don't believe themselves to be on the edge of starvation and they spend enough time socializing around camp with each other that they could easily spend foraging more food if they saw a need to.

grecy 3y ago

This resonates very strongly with me. When I lived in the Yukon working as a Software Engineer I got into moose and bison hunting, I help friends build off-grid log cabin houses, I harvested wild berries, caught a freezer full of salmon every year and tried to live the "homestead" life as much as possible. I packed these adventures into weekends and time off. These activities are physically demanding, cold and arduous. They were also some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life, and they are extremely strong memories that I often talk about and long for. There is something about working for my own survival that is way, way more deeply satisfying than simply going to work to earn money to pay for my survival. I wrote about my first ever moose hunting experience here: http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting Salmon fishing always involved grizzlies: http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haines-alaska http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haine...

isaacremuant 3y ago
Dude. You buy all your gear from modern society with electricity, oil for your car and shit and post it about online. This doesn't mean HG work was play or that they had it better than you. It just means that you love that type of thing. Same as many people love different sports or physical activities and nature experiences. Specially in contrast with dense populated towns/cities. There's a difference between larping survival and having a real net and having absolutely no choice. Adrenaline can be fun but life or death constantly is absolutely different.
- grecy 3y ago
  > This doesn't mean HG work was play or that they had it better than you Of course it doesn't, and at no point did I remotely say anything like HG people had it better than me. I was simply offering my life experiences that I find working for my own survival in our modern world to be much more enjoyable than going to work to earn money to pay for that survival.
hef19898 3y ago
As much as I enjoyed The Road Chose Me, let's not kid ourselves: Hunter-Gatherers, the true ones, don't have the luxury to pull into a town with internet to do some contractor work, see a doctor or buy some food if the last hunt didn't go too well. Edit: Nor do they have sponsors and the financial means to build multiple overland jeeps and go travelling around the world for fun.

pkdpic 3y ago

I don't think theres one simple conclusion to this ongoing general question of pre-history vs modernity but I remember coming across the infanticide and geriatricide rates in pre-agricultural societies (not that they were / are all the same) at some point and having it complicate my thinking pretty drastically. I believe it was in here, its a quick interesting read in any case. http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scan...

Aunche 3y ago
> The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race I'm sure the people invented agriculture didn't think of it as a mistake. It's not like they decided that they liked eating cultivated grass seeds more than wild nuts and mammoth steaks. They did so because that's what they had available.
- melolife 3y ago
  The general argument is that if you are a proto-government/warlord/gangster, you want to encourage/coerce your subjects into agriculture as the output is easily taxed and stored. This turns out to be wildly successful for creating large hierarchical societies, which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    So, lobsters have undersea farms?
  - Aunche 3y ago
    The people who resorted to eating cultivated grass seeds had more imminent problems to worry about before ambitions about being warlords. That occurred a few thousand years later. > which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive Until gunpowder, tribal societies were at least a strong as their hierarchical contemporaries. The Huns destroyed the Roman Empire and Mongols conquered China.

numtel 3y ago

If hunting/gathering is play and since that's basically what all animals do, then the blog's title, "play makes us human" is totally incorrect. Of course other animals play, we've all seen it. It seems the opposite: toil makes us human. Our inability to accept what can be foraged has pushed us into working.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
> Our inability to accept what can be foraged has pushed us into working. It's more that foraging limits population size, and when people have to compete for resources they end up killing or starving each other. Humans have a drive to grow and reproduce, and they have been more successful by working together, then by industrializing (e.g. agriculture). Because they got so good at it, one person could do the work to feed nine others, meaning the other nine didn't need to work in food production anymore and could do other things. (oversimplified, you know what I mean) Everything's been abstracted away to things-exchanged-for-money though, nobody needs to forage or build their own homes anymore, just fork over cash and it's there. Getting said cash, there's myriad ways to do so and we keep inventing new ones, like... recording oneself queueing up at Disney World, or dressing up in a maid outfit and doing NPC emotes for money.
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  Calm down Ted Kaczynski
redblacktree 3y ago
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Genesis 3:17-3:19 I always took this to mean precisely what you said. "From the sweat of your brow," you eat because you chose to define for yourself "good and evil" with respect to nature's provisions.

zubairq 3y ago

Interesting read!

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

One thing that many modern takes on hunter gatherers gloss over is the way women were treated. There was profound sexual inequality. Often hunter gatherer societies practiced polygyny. Women were mainly valued for their ability to bear children. Women were often seen as a possession - first to their fathers who would sell them (bride price) to their husbands. Often there was no consent. In addition, the modern states that these hunter gatherer societies are a part of don’t allow them to practice unrestricted warfare quite like they used to. So bands can’t go around killing all the males and taking the conquered tribe’s women and supplies. Because of this, looking at hunter gatherer societies that exist now is not necessarily reflective of how it actually was.

deleted 3y ago

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isaacremuant 3y ago

> Boston College research professor Peter Gray specializes in the nature and value of play. Of course Peter finds play in everything because that's his frame of looking at things. The entire thing is a bit of a joke in how simplistic and fallacious it is. Work is not play because it's unpleasant but the HG work is play because it's fun (not much, it's social, is challenging/not routine/boring and it's optional). It has to deliberately dismiss the need of survival as "well, but they were many so some could avoid working for a month and all would be good " so the reward (food for survival) was not the goal and the goal was play. If there's an abundance of resources that allow you to survive and you don't have a high demand, then you'll have less stress than in other scenario. How is that not Economy 101? There's this fetichism for "the simple life" from people that, I'd conjecture, clearly don't like theirs that much and project it unto others, where they get surprised at "those basic people" having skills, proficiency and actual culture and the capacity to be happy. How can they be happy without competing for a Tesla to make the neighbour jealous, seems to be the silly type of thinking. One of "ignorance is bliss". Extremely poor article in every sense. He should read more or actually engage in anthropology. Surveys don't cut it, I'm afraid. The cherry on top is: "machines should work for us, I don't want to have to produce the drivel for my work, please someone release me from my 'toil' so I can just drink wine with my friends."

MarcScott 3y ago

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2018)

hef19898 3y ago
And we are all better because of it. And by the way it wasn't wheat that domesticated us, it was the cats!
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I for one welcome our feline overlords... because they purr and look so cute when they're asleep which is like most of the time!

noslacknoops 3y ago

All is fun and games until you face and evetually get wiped out by more advanced farmer-based societies, with specialized labor (army), more developed tools (weapons and cavalry) and much more sophisticated social structure (elites deciding where to expand). Jared Diamond wrote a lot on this subject.

defrost 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Critici...
- noslacknoops 3y ago
  Need more context for conversation. Could you elaborate a bit?

RecycledEle 3y ago

The author ignores most of the differences between primitive life and modern life. Gathering nuts is not as much fun when you have a infected foot and an infected tooth.