have been like. These were “do it yourself” societies. Justice, for example,
was a family affair.
It is a mistake to think our ancestors were unsophisticated. To survive using
Stone Age technologies, they needed detailed “scienti¿ c” knowledge of
their environments, accumulated through millennia of “collective learning”
and stored in stories and myths. Southwestern Tasmania was one of the
most remote environments on Earth in the Paleolithic era. Yet modern
archaeological studies of Kutikina Cave, which was occupied from 35,000
years ago to perhaps 13,000 years ago, have revealed hundreds of stone
tools, ancient hearths, delicate spear points of wallaby bone, and knives made
from natural glass (Mithen, After the Ice, pp. 306–07). The ¿ rst Tasmanians
exploited their environment with great ef¿ ciency.
We have little access to the spiritual world of our Paleolithic ancestors. Yet
Paleolithic art, such as cave paintings, hints at a rich artistic and spiritual
life. Paleolithic religions were probably based on the “animistic” assumption
that the world contains many different types of living beings. In 2006, in
a cave in Botswana, archaeologists found evidence dating back more than
70,000 years that delicate stone tools were presented as gifts to a python god
whose shape had been carved from a large boulder.
How well did people live? This question matters, because if Paleolithic lives
were desperately hard, we may conclude that human history is a story of
progress. But if their lives weren’t too bad, we may have to question our
assumptions about progress.
To many, it may seem obvious that Paleolithic lifeways were harsh, brutal,
and unpleasant. Yet in 1972, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote
a famous article, “The Original AfÀ uent Society,” in which he questioned
these assumptions. Sahlins argued that in some ways Paleolithic life was not
too bad. Being nomadic, people had little desire to accumulate goods. This,
he describes as the “Zen” path to abundance: a feeling that everything you
need is all around you. Diets were often healthy and varied. Modern studies
of foraging societies suggest that people often survived on just 3–6 hours of
work a day. Because there was little accumulated wealth, Paleolithic societies
were more egalitarian than those of today (though this does not mean