42 Before Agriculture
of variation, certain common motifs can be identified. Hunter-gatherers are gener-
ally peoples who have lived until recently without the overarching discipline
imposed by the state. They have lived in relatively small groups, without central-
ized authority, standing armies or bureaucratic systems. Yet the evidence indicates
that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among
themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular
propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great
17th-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as ‘the war of all against
all’. By all accounts life was not ‘nasty, brutish and short’. With relatively simple
technology – wood, bone, stone, fibres – they were able to meet their material
needs without a great expenditure of energy, leading the American anthropologist
and social critic Marshall Sahlins to call them, in another famous phrase, ‘the
original affluent society’. Most striking, the hunter-gatherers have demonstrated
the remarkable ability to survive and thrive for long periods – in some cases thou-
sands of years – without destroying their environment.
The contemporary industrial world lives in highly structured societies at
immensely higher densities and enjoys luxuries of technology that foragers could
hardly imagine. Yet all these same societies are sharply divided into haves and have-
nots, and after only a few millennia of stewardship by agricultural and industrial
civilizations, the environments of large parts of the planet lie in ruins. Therefore
the hunter-gatherers may well be able to teach us something, not only about past
ways of life but also about long-term human futures. If technological humanity is
to survive it may have to learn the keys to longevity from fellow humans whose
way of life has been around a lot longer than industrial commercial ‘civilization’.
As Burnum Burnum, the late Australian Aboriginal writer and lecturer, put it,
‘Modern ecology can learn a great deal from a people who managed and main-
tained their world so well for 50,000 years.’
Hunter-gatherers in recent history have been surprisingly persistent. As recently
as AD 1500 hunters occupied fully one-third of the globe, including all of Australia
and most of North America, as well as large tracts of South America, Africa and
North-east Asia. The 20th century has seen particularly dramatic changes in their
life circumstances. The century began with dozens of hunting and gathering peo-
ples still pursuing ancient (though not isolated) lifeways in small communities, as
foragers with systems of local meaning centred on kin, plants, animals and the
spirit world. As the century proceeded, a wave of self-appointed civilizers washed
over the world’s foragers, bringing schools, clinics and administrative structures,
and, not incidentally, taking their land and resources.
The year 2000 will have seen the vast majority of former foragers settled and
encapsulated in the administrative structures of one state or another. And given
their tragic history of forced acculturation one would imagine that the millennium
will bring to a close a long chapter in human history. But will it? We believe not.
Hunter-gatherers live on, not only in the pages of anthropological and historical
texts, but also, in 40 countries, in the presence of hundreds of thousands of
descendants a generation or two removed from a foraging way of life, and these