Human evolution; hunter-gatherers still exist today (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 05, 2024, 17:26 (261 days ago) @ David Turell

By choice of the individuals:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-hunter-gatherers-of-the-21st-century-who-live-on-the-move?ut...

Previous research on these societies from the 18th and 19th centuries had often portrayed them as primitive leftovers from a less developed past, who struggled to gather resources during their short, difficult lives. This early research supported an array of racist ideas about human evolution and emboldened forms of social Darwinism that were used to justify a view of hunter-gatherers as less than human, which helped lay the ‘moral’ ground for the displacement and colonisation of hunter-gatherer populations around the world.

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The movement of hunter-gatherers may explain the emergence of complex, cumulative culture and our ability to maintain high levels of genetic diversity, even when population sizes drop to very, very low numbers. Far from representing an obsolete mode of living, mobility may hold the key to the continuing survival of these populations, despite pressures to settle. These societies are not the remnants of an outdated, ancient way of life from the distant past. For many hunter-gatherers living in the 21st century, staying mobile is a deliberate choice because it enables large and complex societies – societies that look more like mobile constellations than villages or cities.

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In the 21st century, hunter-gatherers continue to choose a life of almost-perpetual motion not only so they can find resources. They remain mobile so they can participate in large and complex societies distributed across territories that rival the size of Earth’s largest cities.

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The specific locations of these camps were strategically selected, they said, to help with the hunting of small game. The rainy season had now passed, and we were arriving at the end of the fishing season, called kombi, which lasts for around two months, typically from January to February. With the change in season, most Mbendjele BaYaka families had temporarily relocated near the region’s main river, the Motaba.

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These agriculturalist populations spread across and eventually dominated the African continent...In central Africa today, there are still many hunter-gatherer groups, but this is not the case elsewhere in Africa. In the Congo Basin, only 20 or so cultural groups still practise hunting and gathering as their primary means of subsistence.

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Today, an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 people subsist mainly from hunting and gathering across the Congo Basin, despite strong government efforts, beginning in the 1950s across Central Africa, resulting in many being settled into villages or absorbed into the surrounding market economies. These hunter-gatherers often change residence, are mostly egalitarian, and practise sharing not as a choice but an obligation. Although they are in regular contact with surrounding farming populations, to the point that they even speak their languages, and exchange objects, food and other forest products with them for market goods, they have managed to maintain their way of life for hundreds of thousands of years.

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However, Central African hunter-gatherers have lived in very similar ways for more than 100,000 years. Despite dominant narratives about human evolution, these small bands have managed to continue their way of life into the 21st century. And even though they are sometimes surrounded by settled societies, they have chosen not to transition to agriculture, not to accumulate goods, not to live in larger groups, and not avoid the difficulties of staying mobile.

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societies that were at one stage fully reliant on agriculture later returned to hunting and gathering. Perhaps one of the most interesting examples is that of the Numic-speaking hunter-gatherer groups of the Great Basin (including California), such as the Shoshone. These groups, who were biological and linguistic descendants of the original maize-cultivators in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, completely abandoned their agricultural lifestyle around 1,000 years ago.

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Based on this evidence, the Mbendjele BaYaka and other groups in the Congo Basin did not simply move because food ran out. They moved because they were part a mobile society that was large, complex and distributed.

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The emergence and propulsion of complex culture was not the only reason why hunter-gatherers have stayed mobile. Another crucial reason is to look for spouses from different regions, with populations often having explicit rules prohibiting marriage between people from the same community.

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Settled agriculture is not a checkpoint on a one-way road to progress. Mobile societies have always been part of our success as a species, and they continue to structure our story, even today as 21st-century hunter-gatherers choose a mobile way of life.

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‘Suppose somebody dies,’ an elderly Mbendjele healer named Phata explained to his anthropologist friend Jerome Lewis in 1997. ‘Their body goes into the earth. Dead people do not come out again.’ In the ground, your body changes, Phata said. ‘But your spirit, it goes walking, it goes walking, it goes walking, it goes walking.’

Comment: it explains the wandering migration eastward from Africa to the western hemisphere