The Case Against Civilization: Did our
hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better? By John Lanchester
“We don’t give the
technology of fire enough credit, Scott suggests, because we don’t give our
ancestors much credit for their ingenuity over the long period—ninety-five per
cent of human history—during which most of our species were hunter-gatherers. …
To demonstrate the significance of fire, he points to what we’ve found in
certain caves in southern Africa. The earliest, oldest strata of the caves
contain whole skeletons of carnivores and many chewed-up bone fragments of the
things they were eating, including us. Then comes the layer from when we
discovered fire, and ownership of the caves switches: the human skeletons are
whole, and the carnivores are bone fragments. Fire is the difference between
eating lunch and being lunch.
Anatomically modern
humans have been around for roughly two hundred thousand years. For most of
that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, about twelve thousand years ago,
came what is generally agreed to be the definitive before-and-after moment in
our ascent to planetary dominance: the Neolithic Revolution. This was our
adoption of, to use Scott’s word, a “package” of agricultural innovations,
notably the domestication of animals such as the cow and the pig, and the
transition from hunting and gathering to planting and cultivating crops. The
most important of these crops have been the cereals—wheat, barley, rice, and
maize—that remain the staples of humanity’s diet. Cereals allowed population
growth and the birth of cities, and, hence, the development of states and the
rise of complex societies.BOOK RECOMMENDATION
