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

by dhw, Wednesday, March 06, 2024, 09:10 (260 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: 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.

Thank you for this wonderful article, which I find both enlightening and moving. Here we have a form of human society that probably comes as close as possible to ideal. Gone is the emphasis on personal power and wealth which leads to so much strife in our own society. In this sense, it seems quite naturally to have achieved many of the ideals aspired to by Buddhist philosophy. Even if the hunter-gatherers now exchange goods with neighbouring farmers, they are not dependent on a market economy controlled by impersonal corporations. And they have oneness instead of conflict with nature, no crime, no envy, no war...I googled the whole article, and was struck by the scene conjured up at the very beginning:

“Less than a year ago, we had walked these same muddy trails, travelling each day to a temporary Mbendjele BaYaka settlement in the Congo rainforest. Back then, the settlement buzzed with children’s laughter. Women organised expeditions to gather firewood or helped collect payo (a bush mango) with the men who hadn’t left camp to try their luck catching an antelope.”

Idyllic. Has it been romanticized? I don’t think so, since it has survived for so long despite "strong government efforts" to destroy it. Why should it be destroyed? One look at the misery and chaos of the world we so-called “civilised” people have created should be enough to tell us that we have no right to look down on the hunter-gatherers, let alone to put an end to their culture.

But of course we can’t go back now. Our civilisation has progressively shrunk the world and narrowed its focus to harnessing nature instead of cooperating with it. We institutionally poison our food, pollute our air, murder, starve and exploit one another, all for the sake of profit or power. And this is now our normality. That is not to say that we have killed all joy. There is still love, empathy, art, philanthropy, humour etc. to give us the chance of happiness. But I suspect that the hunter-gatherers can teach us far more than we can teach them.