Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease. Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease. Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

So how did agriculture win out?

One answer boils down to the adage “Might makes right.” Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on[e] person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.

From a 1987 Discover magazine article:

The progressivist view [that history is a march of progress] is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps. How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.”

Why nutritional stress and infectious disease?

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

So why farming?

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. “I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity,” says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. “When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate.”

In a 1991 chapter, Cohen paints a more mixed picture of the health effects of the agricultural transition on North American and European populations. In some cases, health may have improved after the switch. And then in his book of the same year, Health and the Rise of Civilization, Cohen says hunter-gatherer health (and stature) probably started to decline with the disappearance of large game animals 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. Of course that bit of context doesn’t preclude that agriculture only made things worse, but it does complicate Diamond’s narrative above.

Hmm, score this round for Sex at Dawn.

Unions vowed that their striking workers would keep disrupting rail and road transportation. Teenagers marched through the streets and pledged to go on boycotting their schools. The government, trying to appear unfazed, urged Parliament to ignore the chaos and speed up the vote on a bitterly contested pension reform.

France remained stuck Thursday in what has become a major test of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative presidency – the turmoil caused by a nationwide strike and protest movement that has maintained its momentum well into a second month.

Sarkozy’s aides predicted the unrest would soon peter out, particularly as a 10-day school break begins this weekend. Given the government’s majority in both houses of Parliament, they added, final passage of the reform law is assured early next week, in any case. Nevertheless, the major labor unions scheduled two more nationwide strikes and demonstrations, for Oct. 28 and Nov. 6, voicing the hope that by pressing on with the campaign they could force Sarkozy to pull back the bill and start over.

The immediate dispute was over Sarkozy’s decision to raise the retirement age, from 60 to 62[*], in an effort to balance a social security budget that pushes deeper into the red every year. There was no other choice, Sarkozy and his ministers explained, if the retirement system is to retain adequate resources to serve the country’s aging population.

The change would still leave France with one of the world’s most generous pension programs and a retirement age well below those of its European neighbors. But union leaders, backed by the opposition Socialist Party and a growing army of student protesters, object that under Sarkozy’s reform, low-income workers would sacrifice more than their share. They suggest a capital gains tax would be a better place to look for the additional funds.

!Kung San dunning.

*Note that the Post is being somewhat misleading, as full pension benefits had kicked in at age 65, not 60.

Race, numerous studies tell us, is the most potent variable in predicting where hazardous waste facilities are located — more powerful than poverty, land values, or homeownership. Three out of every five African Americans and Hispanics and roughly 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans live in communities containing at least one uncontrolled toxic waste site. The percentage of African Americans or Latinos in a census tract significantly predicts whether that tract hosts a toxic waste facility. African Americans are more than three times more likely than whites to die from asthma, and the hospitalization rate for African Americans with asthma is three times that for whites. Moreover, a National Law Journal investigation from 1992 discovered that in minority areas, it took 20 percent longer to put hazardous waste sites on the national priority lists than it did in white areas, and penalties under hazardous waste laws were about 500 percent higher at sites having the greatest white population than penalties at sites with the greatest minority population. Such environmental disparities are widespread throughout the United States, but the South has had particularly lax environmental policies. As a result, the region (which houses m ore than half of the nation’s African American citizens) claims eight of the ten states ranked worst in terms of pollution, poor health, and environmental policies. In the EPA’s southeastern region, three out of the four largest hazardous waste landfills in the region sit in majority black areas.

See also Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty 1987-2007.

Read David Roberts. And then SCREEE! to your heart’s content.

Everyone who has worked among the Bushmen has commented upon the continual dunning [badgering] and constant pressures to share that go on. Here is Patricia Draper (1978:45):

The give and take of tangibles and intangibles goes on in the midst of a high level of bickering. Until one learns the cultural meaning of this continual verbal assault, the outsider wonders how the !Kung can stand to live with each other. . . . People continually dun the Europeans and especially the European anthropologists since unlike most Europeans, the anthropologists speak !Kung. In the early months of my own field work I despaired of ever getting away from continual harassment. As my knowledge of !Kung increased, I learned that the !Kung are equally merciless in dunning each other.

Both Wiessner (1982:79) and Marshall (1968:94) have commented on the fact that the persistent pressures to share have led the !Kung to limit their work effort, since in working harder they would likely expose themselves to demands to share the fruits of their additional labors. To refuse to share opens oneself to accusations of stinginess or worse. Here are Wiessner’s (1982:79) observations:

In reciprocal relations, one means that a person uses to prevent being exploited in a relationship … is to prevent him or herself from becoming a “have”…. As mentioned earlier, men who have killed a number of larger animals sit back for a pause to enjoy reciprocation. Women gather enough for their families for a few days, but rarely more. . . . And so, in deciding whether or not to work on a certain day, a !Kung may assess debts and debtors, decide how much wild food harvest will go to family, close relatives and others to whom he or she really wants to reciprocate, versus how much will be claimed by freeloaders.

The !Kung, we are told, spend a great deal of time talking about who has what and who gave what to whom or failed to give it to whom (Wiessner 1982:68). A lot of the exchange and sharing that goes on seems to be as much motivated by jealousy and envy as it is by any value of generosity or a “liberal custom of sharing.” In his survey of foraging societies, Kelly (1995:164-65) notes that “Sharing… strains relations between people. Consequently, many foragers try to find ways to avoid its demands …. Students new to anthropology..,. are often disappointed to learn that these acts of sharing come no more naturally to hunter- gatherers than to members of industrial societies.”

Score this round for Steven Pinker.

If you’re lost, read this. And this.

Gardening is important, but so is trade. Neanderthal stone tools, interestingly, are all found within a few miles of where the rocks originated. And the tools didn’t change very much over time. But Homo sapiens that lived at the same time had tools made from rocks that were clearly traded over long distances. And Homo sapiens’ tools changed and developed rapidly. We traded our ideas along with stuff. Any Neanderthal tribe that met a sapiens tribe was a single tribe against an entire species. I’m a Homo sapiens, and I follow Homo sapien traditions. I aim for appropriate self-reliance, not for independence. Independence is for Neanderthals.

I’ve threatened a couple of times to blog about income inequality as a way of addressing climate change. Robert Frank’s most recent column in the New York Times gives me an excuse to begin laying out the argument, which I’ve cribbed from a handy little book called The Spirit Level: How Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.

Frank gives us the context:

During the three decades after World War II, for example, incomes in the United States rose rapidly and at about the same rate — almost 3 percent a year — for people at all income levels. America had an economically vibrant middle class. Roads and bridges were well maintained, and impressive new infrastructure was being built. People were optimistic.

By contrast, during the last three decades the economy has grown much more slowly, and our infrastructure has fallen into grave disrepair. Most troubling, all significant income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.

He also spells out the first problem that income equality would help solve:

1. Consumerism

Recent research on psychological well-being has taught us that beyond a certain point, across-the-board spending increases often do little more than raise the bar for what is considered enough. A C.E.O. may think he needs a 30,000-square-foot mansion, for example, just because each of his peers has one. Although they might all be just as happy in more modest dwellings, few would be willing to downsize on their own.

People do not exist in a social vacuum. Community norms define clear expectations about what people should spend on interview suits and birthday parties. Rising inequality has thus spawned a multitude of “expenditure cascades,” whose first step is increased spending by top earners.

The rich have been spending more simply because they have so much extra money. Their spending shifts the frame of reference that shapes the demands of those just below them, who travel in overlapping social circles. So this second group, too, spends more, which shifts the frame of reference for the group just below it, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. These cascades have made it substantially more expensive for middle-class families to achieve basic financial goals.

Frank claims this working paper of his shows that U.S. counties where inequality grew the fastest showed the greatest symptoms of financial distress.

Our next five problems that income equality would help solve come from The Spirit Level, which presents a series of correlations showing that health and social problems are more prevalent among industrialized countries or U.S. states exhibiting high income inequality relative to those showing low income inequality. (The measure for inequality used by the authors is the ratio of the income of the richest 20 percent to that of the poorest 20 percent.)

The strengths of the correlations differ, and some are based on more overwhelming evidence than others, but the trends all point in the same direction, which the authors take as evidence of causation: income inequality is causing the health and social problems. I’m sure somebody savvier than me could poke holes in the authors’ methodology, but the sheer number of linkages makes me think there’s something to their argument. Now, without further ado, problems 2-6:

2. Trust

This one is based on survey data from the European and World Values Survey and the U.S. General Social Survey. Respondents were asked whether they agreed with the statement, “most people can be trusted.” Here’s a plot of the data for industrialized countries, from the authors’ web site:

Among 41 states for which comparable data existed, the spread was similar: North Dakota, Montana and Minnesota had trust levels like the Scandinavian countries, whereas North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi were more like Singapore and Portugal.

The authors’ make this plausibility argument (p.51):

We tend to choose our friends from among our near equals and have little to do with those much richer or much poorer. And when we have little to do with other kinds of people, it’s harder for us to trust them. Our position in the social hierarchy affects who we see as part of the in-group and who as out-group — us and them — so affecting our ability to identify with and empathize with other people.

And they cite this study, which supposedly demonstrates that inequality affects trust and not the other way around. I am completely unqualified to judge.

3. Mental Health

For this category there was no significant correlation for U.S. states (except a weak one for women) — an anomaly among the health and social problems the book examines. The country data comes from the World Health Organization:

The mental health problems most strongly correlated with inequality were anxiety disorders, impulse-control disorders and “severe illness” (which I assume means psychosis), whereas mood disorders showed less of a correlation. Anxiety disorders also accounted for more of the total mental health problems in more unequal countries.

Calling the following a mechanism might be a stretch, but who knows? (p. 69):

Psychologist and journalist Oliver James uses an analogy with infectious disease to explain the link. The ‘affluenza’ virus, according to James, is a ‘set of values which increase our vulnerability to emotional distress’, which he believes is more common in affluent societies. It entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. These kinds of values place us at greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder[.] … As inequality grows and the super-rich at the top spend more and more on luxury goods, the desire for such things cascades down the income scale and the rest of us struggle to compete and keep up. Advertisers play on this, making us dissatisfied with what we have, and encouraging invidious social comparisons.

Shh, don’t tell Jonah Lehrer.

4. Drug Use

Country data from the United Nations — the authors say something similar holds for states:

The following may have little to do with why humans do drugs, but it’s compelling as a factoid on the psychological effects of low social status (p. 71):

In a clever experiment, researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina took twenty macaque monkeys and housed them for a while in individual cages. They next housed the animals in groups of four and observed the social hierarchies which developed in each group, noting which animals were dominant and which subordinate. They scanned the monkey’s brains before and after they were put into groups. Next, they taught the monkeys that they could administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever — they could take as much or as little as they liked. … Monkeys that had become dominant had more dopamine activity in their brains than they had exhibited before becoming dominant, while monkeys that became subordinate when housed in groups showed no changes in their brain chemistry. The dominant monkeys took much less cocaine than the subordinate monkeys. In effect, the subordinate monkeys were medicating themselves against the impact of their low-social status.

5. Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality

Same pattern in rich countries and in U.S. states: greater income inequality correlates with lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality. Here’s the infant mortality plot:

Again, the following is a little sketchy but maybe it contributes (p. 85):

The psyche affects the neural system and in turn the immune system — when we’re stressed or depressed or feeling hostile, we are far more likely to develop a host of bodily ills, including heart disease,  infections and more rapid ageing. … When we experience some kind of acute stress and experience something traumatic, our bodies go into the fight-or-flight response. Energy stores are released, our blood vessels constrict, clotting factors are released into the bloodstream, anticipating injury, and the heart and lungs work harder. … If the emergency is over in a few minutes, this amazing response is healthy and protective, but when we go on worrying for weeks or months and stress becomes chronic, then our bodies are in a constant state of anticipation of some challenge or threat, and all those fight-or-flight responses become damaging.

6. Obesity

You get the idea by now, but again, obesity rates show the same pattern for countries and states:

And again, this doesn’t strike me as a great explanation for obesity in the U.S., but it’s an interesting connection to draw (p. 95):

People with a long history of stress seem to respond to food in different ways from people who are not stressed. Their bodies respond by depositing fat particularly round the middle, in the abdomen, rather than lower down on hips and thighs. … [C]hronic stress affects the action of the hormone cortisol, and researchers have found differences in cortisol and psychological vulnerability to stress tests among men and women with high levels of abdominal fat. People who accumulate fat around the middle are at particularly high risk of obesity-associated illnesses

In a subsequent post I’ll present five more problems that income equality would help solve, and I’ll make some concluding remarks about what any of this has to do with climate change. Stay tuned, fistlings stick to subjects on which I can say something halfway informed.

For more than three decades evolutionary psychologists have advanced a simple theory of human sexuality: because men invest less reproductive effort in sperm than women do in eggs, men’s and women’s brains have been shaped differently by evolution. As a result, men are eager for sex whereas women are relatively choosy. But a steady stream of recent evidence suggests this paradigm could be in need of a makeover.

A highly cited 1993 paper on evolved sex differences (linked to below) served as the story’s jumping off point and foil. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, a co-author of that paper, kindly responded to a query of mine while I was writing the story, laying out his objections to the evidence I cited in the article. I knew I wasn’t going to have room to do justice to his views, so I asked him if I could post his comments to this blog. He did me one better: he wrote a direct response to my article, which I’m reprinting below in its entirety. Naturally, this will make more sense after you’ve read my article.

Evolved Sex Differences: Not Gone, Not Forgotten, and Not Explained by Alternative Hypotheses

It is both astonishing and disturbing that evolutionary psychology as a field, and the specific hypotheses that have been advanced under its broad umbrella, continue to be so badly mischaracterized by other “scientists” as well as by science journalists writing for popular media (see, for example, Dr. Kurzban’s recent account of one vivid example directly related to the current article). That these errors and scholarly lapses continue to occur, despite numerous attempts to correct common misunderstandings about them, suggests poor scholarship, non-scientific motivations of the ideological or religious kind, or both.

Given the large number of lapses contained in the current article and in thecomments of the authors it quotes, I’ll restrict my comments to a few of the more egregious errors and point interested readers to the relevant scientific sources so they canjudge for themselves.

The first problem is that sexual strategies theory, initially advanced in 1993, is erroneously depicted. Contrary to the cartoonish depiction of “eager males-choosy females,” our theory proposed that BOTH men AND women have evolved short-term AND long-term sexual strategies. Subsequent publications from my own lab and the labs of other scientists (e.g., Gangestad, S.W., & Thornhill, R. (2008). Human oestrus. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275, 991-1000) have tested specific evolutionary hypotheses about the benefits to women of short-term mating strategies. Although the final word is not in, currently viable hypotheses for women’s short-term sexual strategies include increased access to resources, securing good genes, and trading up to a better mating partner. Readers in the science of female sexuality should check out my recent book, co-authored with Dr. Cindy Meston, entitled Why Women Have Sex.

Just as some women pursue a short-term sexual strategy some of the time, many men pursue a long-term mating strategy marked by love, commitment, and heavy parental investment in children. Humans have a complex “menu” of mating strategies, selectively deployed depending on predictable contexts such as population density, matevalue, and sex ratio. Given that these elements have been central to sexual strategiestheory since its inception 17 years ago, responsible scientists and science journalists should put a stop to the cartoonish depiction of sexual strategies theory.

Now let’s address the issue of whether men and women differ in their psychology of short-term mating. Among the 9 key hypotheses and 22 empirical predictions contained in the original version of sexual strategies theory is indeed the hypothesis that men will attach a higher motivational priority to short-term mating, depending on contextual factors such as personal mate value, sex ratio in the mating pool, risk, and cost. The logic follows from Trivers’s theory of parental investment and sexual selection, which has been abundantly supported in the non-human and human scientific literatures. Indeed, the scientific evidence supporting this prediction for humans is overwhelming. Contra the data cited in the current article, readers should consult the massive cross-cultural studies that have been conducted both by evolutionary psychologists such as David Schmitt and by scientists who have no commitments to evolutionary psychology, such as Dr. Richard Lippa. The Lippa study, for example, tested more than 200,000 individuals across 53 different nations and found robust sex differences precisely as predicted by sexual strategies theory, as well as findings flatly contradicting the Eagly-Wood “alternative” theory [that women and men are simply responding to their society’s division of labor]. I urge readers who really doubt the existence of sex differences on variables such as desire for sexual variety to consult these massive cross-cultural studies. Indeed, these psychological sex differences are among the largest psychological sex differences ever discovered, as meta-analyses by Dr. Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin have documented.

Although some researchers try to market their data as contradicting hypotheses about evolved sex differences, viewed in the broader context of the massive data sets such as those of Janet Hyde, Richard Lippa, and David Schmitt, dispassionate readers will come to the conclusion that massive weight of the scientific evidence supports thefundamental tenets of sexual strategies theory.

David M. Buss, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology

Head, IDEP Area

For those who want to know how Eagly and Wood’s alternative paradigm might account for the cross-cultural data collected by Schmitt and Lippa, here’s your starting point. Happy reading!

Update [10/18/10]: There’s a great exchange in the comments section of my story between Buss’s co-author David Schmitt (comments 20 and 21) and a commenter who goes by “figleaf” (comment 25).

Here are the choice bits, first from Schmitt:

This article contains mischaracterizations of current evolutionary psychological thinking on sex differences in sexuality.

First, Sexual Strategies Theory (Buss & Schmitt, 1993) did not claim that all men are easy short-term maters and all women are choosy long-term maters. To the contrary, the key contribution of Sexual Strategies Theory to psychological science was to highlight the differences within men when pursuing short-term mates versus long-term mates and within women when pursuing short-term mates versus long-term mates. Subsequent to this development within evolutionary psychology, several additional theories (e.g., Strategic Pluralism Theory, Life History Theory, Attachment Theory) have been elaborated and extended to accommodate this important advance in adaptationist thinking. Current evolutionary thinking continues to focus on the mating psychology differences within men and within women, as well as highlighting fundamental differences between the genders. It seems only ill-informed researchers who have failed to read the massive literature in the area and the ideologically-driven critics of evolutionary psychology continue to depict the easy men versus choosy women straw man. This does nothing but hurt psychological science.

And from figleaf’s response:

@Davidschmidt #20: I’m gratified to hear that actual lower-case evolutionary psychologists have more nuanced theory than… 99% of all popular accounts thereof let on.

But if that’s true then Miller’s work should hardly be threatening at all: her work seems only to threaten established perceptions routinely promoted by ideology-driven *adherents* of the one-dimensional promiscuous-men/particular-women model articulated ad nauseum in the popular press.

Indeed, if as you say non-pop professional EP is confined by adherence to a single straw-mannish model of sexual selection then by putting pressure on that model Miller ought to be giving real EPs an opportunity to present the more subtle, more sophisticated, and more accurate Sexual Strategies Theory you’re endorsing.

Because, seriously Dude, out here in the real world we’re not hearing a lot about those, m’kay? Now’s your chance. Why waste it attacking that line of research when you could instead co-opt it as confirming your more sophisticated readings against the distortions introduced by ill-informed but highly-enthusiastic ideologues who keep misappropriating the work real EPs?

Because it’s not like progressives have a monopoly on “political correctness.” And in the case of EP it’s the ideological adherents who seem to be doing more damage to the actual work than are its equally ideological antagonists.

Now that’s discourse.

Kalahari Desert CC: Elmar Thiel

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re trying to establish what kind of life prehistoric hunter-gatherers may have lived. Because we don’t have any prehistoric hunter-gatherers on hand, we’re first going to see what we can learn from the modern version. Specifically, let’s take a look at the !Kung San Bushmen (Bushfolk?) of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa.

The !Kung are hunter gatherers, adapting to their semi-arid environment by gathering roots, berries, fruits, and nuts that they gather from the desert, and from the meat provided by the hunters. … !Kung men are responsible for providing the meat, although women might occasionally kill small mammals. Game is not plentiful and the hunters sometimes must travel great distances. Meat is usually sparse and is shared fairly among the group when a hunter is successful. Every part of the animal is used; hides are tanned for blankets and bones are cracked for the marrow. Typical game sought in the hunt includes wildebeest, gemsbok, and giraffe; they also kill various reptiles and birds, and collect honey when it is available. The men provide household tools and maintain a supply of poison tipped arrows and spears for hunting.

!Kung women provide the majority of the food, spending two to three days a week foraging varying distances from the camp, and are also responsible for child care, gathering wood for fires, carrying water, and cooking. Typical foods they might return with are mongongo nuts, baobab fruits, water roots, bitter melon, or !Gwa berries. Children are left at home to be watched over by those remaining in camp, but nursing children are carried on these foraging trips, adding to the load the !Kung women must carry.

Note the part about !Kung women “spending two to three days a week foraging.” I’m guessing the author bases that fact on work by anthropologist Richard Lee, who lived among a group of !Kung San in in the 1960s in an area of the Kalahari (above) called Dobe. Over the course of four weeks, from early July to August 1964, Lee recorded the comings and goings of the Dobe foragers and found that they spent a mere fifteen hours per week, or 2.5 working days, outside of camp acquiring food.

Sex at Dawn (p. 176) quotes the following passage from Lee’s paper:

A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year.

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins took Lee’s data and ran with it in his influential essay, “The Original Affluent Society“:

A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.

I became aware of Lee and Sahlins by reading the book Sex at Dawn, and now I’m telling you about it, thus passing on this bit of lore. But a quick dip into the literature around Sahlins’ essay suggests that Lee’s finding is misleading on its face.

As David Kaplan points out in his paper “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society’,” Lee’s numbers

were somewhat puzzling to some anthropologists who have conducted similar investigations in similar societies. Hawkes and O’Connell (1981) observed that the Bushmen figures were one-half to one-fifth of the time required by the Alyawarra, a central Australian foraging group. They expressed some surprise because the !Kung and Alyawarra are very similar in habitat as well as technology. The difference, it turned out, was explainable by Hawkes and O’Connell’s definition of work: in their calculations of work, they included time spent in processing food as well as hunting and gathering it.

When Lee factored in processing time in later work, he found that the !Kung San’s total work time was 40.1 hours per week for women and 44.5 hours per week for men, which takes away much of the force of Sahlins’ argument.

In addition, Lee’s four week period was not representative of the whole seasonal cycle. According to his own report, during the dry season, the women sometimes had to hike 10 to 15 miles for food.

Crucially, Lee’s data also leave open the possibility the !Kung San were going to bed hungry. He claimed the Dobe Bushfolk “live[d] well … on wild plants and meat, in spite of the fact that they are confined to the least productive portion of the range in which Bushmen peoples were formerly found,” but he also acknowledged it was “impossible to exclude the possibility that subclinical signs of malnutrition existed.”

According to Kaplan, subsequent researchers have cast doubt on Lee’s notion of well-fed Bushfolk:

[P]erhaps the most critical and telling remarks concerning the well-fed !Kung come from the demographer Nancy Howell (1986:171-72), who spent two years with them:

While the !Kung way of life is far from one of uniform drudgery-there is a great deal of leisure in the !Kung camp, even in the worst time of the year- it is also true that the !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all times of the year. It is likely that hunger is a contributing cause to many deaths which are immediately caused by infectious and parasitic diseases, even though it is rare for anyone simply to starve to death.

Kaplan quotes other researchers who say that what the !Kung lack is an “‘appetizing, compact, high-energy’ foodstuff such as animal fat in reliable quantities.”

Moreover, Kaplan says, like “virtually all hunter-gatherers,” the !Kung San are subject to “periodic failure of all major [food] resources.” For example, mongongo nut trees may fail during the Kalahari’s frequent droughts.

One such failure reported by Wilmsen (1982:108) occurred in 1979; by September of that year, drought conditions had become so serious that the government had to step in with food relief programs. In 1980 the nut crop was a good one, but Wilmsen indicates that it was barely touched because most people preferred maize meal.

And further:

Wiessner … informs us that in 1974, high winds destroyed most of the mongongo nut crop in the Xai/Xai area where she did field research. Because of the heavy rains, the game scattered, and gathering and snaring became difficult. Insects and cattle disease made domestic foods scarce. By August, she says, work effort came to a standstill as the !Kung said there was nothing worth hunting or gathering. People spent their “leisure” time lounging, chatting, and repairing or adding to their tool assemblage.

Bottom line: The habits of the !Kung San cannot be taken as evidence that modern hunter-gatherers enjoy such a natural bounty that their wants are easily satisfied by a couple days’ light work. However, the significance for our prehistoric hunter-gatherers is less clear. The !Kung San have managed to eke out a living in what I gather is one of the worst modern environments for their way of life. As Lee stated:

It is likely that an even more substantial subsistence base would have been characteristic of these hunters and gatherers in the past, when they had the pick of African habitats to choose from.