Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana.
To be fair, Malthus, Hobbes, and Darwin were constrained by the lack of actual data. To his enormous credit, Darwin recognized this and tried hard to address it—spending his entire adult life collecting specimens, taking copious notes, and corresponding with anyone who could provide him with useful information. But it wasn’t enough. The necessary facts wouldn’t be revealed for many decades.
But now we have them. Scientists have learned to read ancient bones and teeth, to carbon-date the ash of Pleistocene fires, to trace the drift of the mitochondrial DNA of our ancestors. And the information they’ve uncovered resoundingly refutes the vision of prehistory Hobbes and Malthus conjured and Darwin swallowed whole.
We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.
IMMANUEL KANT
If George Orwell was correct that “those who control the past control the future,” what of those who control the distant past?
Prior to the population increases associated with agriculture, most of the world was a vast, empty place in terms of human population. But the desperate overcrowding imagined by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin is still deeply embedded in evolutionary theory and repeated like a mantra, facts be damned. For example, in his recent essay entitled “Why War?,” philosopher David Livingstone Smith projects the Malthusian panorama in all its mistaken despair: “Competition for limited resources is the engine of evolutionary change,” he writes. “Any population that reproduces without inhibition will eventually outstrip the resources upon which it depends and, as numbers swell, individuals will have no alternative but to compete more and more desperately for dwindling resources. Those who can secure them will flourish, and those who cannot will die.”9
True, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far, because Smith forgets that our ancestors were the original ramblin’ men (and women)—nomads who rarely stopped walking for more than a few days at a stretch. Walking away is what they did best. Why assume they would have stuck around to struggle “desperately” in an overpopulated area with depleted resources when they could simply walk up the beach, as they’d been doing for uncounted generations? And prehistoric human beings never reproduced “without inhibition,” like rabbits. Far from it. In fact, prehistoric world population growth is estimated to have been well below .001 percent per year throughout prehistory10—hardly the population bomb Malthus assumed.
Basic human reproductive biology in a foraging context made rapid population growth unlikely, if not impossible. Women rarely conceive while breastfeeding, and without milk from domesticated animals, hunter-gatherer women typically breastfeed each child for five or six years. Furthermore, the demands of a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle make carrying more than one small child at a time unreasonable for a mother—even assuming lots of help from others. Finally, low body-fat levels result in much later menarche for hunter-gatherer females than for their post-agricultural sisters. Most foragers don’t start ovulating until their late teens, resulting in a shorter reproductive life.11
Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin were themselves surrounded by the desperate effects of population saturation (rampant infectious disease, ceaseless war, Machiavellian struggles for power). The prehistoric world, however, was sparsely populated—where it was populated at all. Other than isolated pockets surrounded by desert, or islands like Papua New Guinea, the prehistoric world was almost all open frontier. Most scholars believe that our ancestors were just setting out from Africa about fifty thousand years ago, entering Europe five or ten thousand years later.12 The first human footprints probably weren’t left on North American soil until about twelve thousand years ago.13 During the many millennia before agriculture, the entire number of Homo sapiens on the planet probably never surpassed a million people and certainly never approached the current population of Chicago. Furthermore, recently obtained DNA analyses suggest several population bottlenecks caused by environmental catastrophes reduced our species to just a few hundred individuals as recently as 70,000 years ago.14
Ours is a very young species. Few of our ancestors faced the unrelenting scarcity-generated selective pressures envisioned by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin. The ancestral human journey did not, by and large, take place in a world already saturated with our kind, fighting over scraps. Rather, the route taken by the bulk of our ancestors led through a long series of ecosystems with nothing quite like us already there. Like the Burmese pythons recently set loose in the Everglades, cane toads spreading unchecked across Australia, or the timber wolves recently reintroduced to Yellowstone, our ancestors were generally entering an open ecological niche. When Hobbes wrote that “Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe,” he was unaware of just how cooperative and communicative wolves can be if there’s enough food for everyone. Individuals in species spreading into rich new ecosystems aren’t locked in a struggle to the death against one another. Until the niche is saturated, such intraspecies conflict over food is counterproductive and needless.15
We’ve already shown that even in a largely empty world, the social lives of foragers were anything but solitary. But Hobbes also claimed prehistoric life was poor, and Malthus believed poverty to be eternal and inescapable. Yet most foragers don’t believe themselves to be impoverished, and there’s every indication that life wasn’t generally much of a struggle for our fire-controlling, highly intelligent ancestors bound together in cooperative bands. To be sure, occasional catastrophes such as droughts, climatic shifts, and volcanic eruptions were devastating. But most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world, chock-full of food. For hundreds of thousands of generations, the omnivore’s dilemma facing our ancestors lay in choosing among many culinary options. Plants eat soil; deer eat plants; cougars eat deer. But people can and do eat almost anything—including cougars, deer, plants, and yes, even soil.16
Poverty ... is the invention of civilization.
MARSHALL SAHLINS
A recent New York Times article under the headline “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” begins, “By almost any definition—except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley—Hal Steger has it made.” The article notes that although Mr. Steger and his wife have a net worth of roughly $3.5 million, he still typically works twelve-hour days plus another ten hours on weekends. “A few million,” explains Steger, “doesn’t go as far as it used to.”