Cannibals and Kings (2 page)

Along the banks of the Amazon and the Mississippi, and on the islands of the Pacific, the villages were bigger, sometimes containing a thousand or more inhabitants. Some were organized into confederacies verging on statehood. Although the Europeans exaggerated their “savagery,” the majority of these village communities collected enemy heads as trophies, roasted their prisoners of war alive, and consumed human flesh in ritual feasts. The fact that the “civilized” Europeans
also tortured people—in witchcraft trials, for example—and that they were not against exterminating the populations of whole cities should be kept in mind (even if they were squeamish about eating one another).

Elsewhere, of course, the explorers encountered fully developed states and empires, headed by despots and ruling classes, and defended by standing armies. It was these great empires, with their cities, monuments, palaces, temples, and treasures, that had lured all the Marco Polos and Columbuses across the oceans and deserts in the first place. There was China—the greatest empire in the world, a vast, sophisticated realm whose leaders scorned the “red-faced barbarians,” supplicants from puny kingdoms beyond the pale of the civilized world. And there was India—a land where cows were venerated and the unequal burdens of life were apportioned according to what each soul had merited in its previous incarnation. And then there were the native American states and empires, worlds unto themselves, each with its distinctive arts and religions: the Incas, with their great stone fortresses, suspension bridges, ever-normal granaries, and state-controlled economy; the Aztecs, with their bloodthirsty gods fed from human hearts and their incessant search for fresh sacrifices. And there were the Europeans themselves, with their own exotic qualities: waging warfare in the name of a Prince of Peace, compulsively buying and selling to make profits, powerful beyond their numbers because of a cunning mastery of mechanical crafts and engineering.

What did this pattern signify? Why did some peoples abandon hunting and plant collecting as a way of life while others retained it? And among those who adopted farming, why did some rest content with village life while others moved steadily closer to statehood? And
among those who organized themselves into states, why did some achieve empires and others not? Why did some worship cows while others fed human hearts to cannibal gods? Is human history told not by one but by ten billion idiots—the play of chance and passion and nothing more? I think not. I think there is an intelligible process that governs the maintenance of common cultural forms, initiates changes, and determines their transformations along parallel or divergent paths.

The heart of this process is the tendency to intensify production. Intensification—the investment of more soil, water, minerals, or energy per unit of time or area—is in turn a recurrent response to threats against living standards. In earliest times such threats arose mainly from changes in climate and migrations of people and animals. In later times competition between states became the major stimulus. Regardless of its immediate cause, intensification is always counterproductive. In the absence of technological change, it leads inevitably to the depletion of the environment and the lowering of the efficiency of production since the increased effort sooner or later must be applied to more remote, less reliable, and less bountiful animals, plants, soils, minerals, and sources of energy. Declining efficiency in turn leads to low living standards—precisely the opposite of the desired result. But this process does not simply end with everybody getting less food, shelter, and other necessities in return for more work. As living standards decline, successful cultures invent new and more efficient means of production which sooner or later again lead to the depletion of the natural environment.

Why do people try to solve their economic problems by intensifying production? Theoretically, the easiest way to achieve a high-quality diet, a vigorous long life
free of toil and drudgery, is not to increase production but to reduce population. If for some reason beyond human control—an unfavorable shift of climate, say—the supply of natural resources per capita is cut in half, people need not try to compensate by working twice as hard. Instead, they could cut their population in half. Or, I should say, they could do this were it not for one large problem.

Since heterosexual activity is a genetically mandated relationship upon which the survival of our species depends, it is no easy task to thin out the human “crop.” In preindustrial times the effective regulation of population itself involved lowering the standard of living. For example, if population is to be reduced by avoiding heterosexual intercourse, a group’s standard of living can scarcely be said to have been maintained or enhanced. Similarly, if the fecundity of the group is to be lowered by midwives jumping on a woman’s stomach to kill the fetus and often the mothers as well, the survivors may eat better but their life expectancy will not be improved. Actually, the most widely used method of population control during much of human history was probably some form of female infanticide. Although the psychological costs of killing or starving one’s infant daughters can be dulled by culturally defining them as non-persons (just as modern pro-abortionists, of whom I am one, define fetuses as non-infants), the material costs of nine months of pregnancy are not easily written off. It is safe to assume that most people who practice infanticide would rather not see their infants die. But the alternatives—drastically lowering the nutritional, sexual, and health standards of the entire group—have usually been judged to be even more undesirable, at least in pre-state societies.

What I am getting at is that population regulation
was often a costly if not traumatic procedure and a source of individual stress, just as Thomas Malthus suggested it would have to be for all future time (until he was proven wrong by the invention of the rubber condom). It is this stress—or reproductive pressure, as is might more aptly be called—that accounts for the recurrent tendency of pre-state societies to intensify production as a means of protecting or enhancing general living standards. Were it not for the severe costs involved in controlling reproduction, our species might have remained forever organized into small, relatively peaceful, egalitarian bands of hunter-collectors. But the lack of effective and benign methods of population control rendered this mode of life unstable. Reproductive pressures predisposed our stone age ancestors to resort to intensification as a response to declining numbers of big-game animals caused by climatic changes at the end of the last ice age. Intensification of the hunting and collecting mode of production in turn set the stage for the adoption of agriculture, which led in turn to heightened competition among groups, an increase in warfare, and the evolution of the state—but I am getting ahead of the story.

The accepted explanation for the transition from band life to farming villages used to go like this: Hunter-collectors had to spend all their time getting enough to eat. They could not produce a “surplus above subsistence,” and so they lived on the edge of extinction in chronic sickness and hunger. Therefore, it was natural for them to want to settle down and live in permanent villages, but the idea of planting seeds never occurred to them. One day an unknown genius decided to drop some seeds in a hole, and soon planting was being done on a regular basis. People no longer had to move about constantly in search of game, and the new leisure gave them time to think. This led to further and more rapid advances in technology and thus more food—a “surplus above subsistence”—which eventually made it possible for some people to turn away from farming and become artisans, priests, and rulers.

The first flaw in this theory is the assumption that life was exceptionally difficult for our stone age ancestors. Archaeological evidence from the upper paleolithic period—about 30,000
B.C
. to 10,000
B.C
.—makes it perfectly clear that hunters who lived during those times enjoyed relatively high standards of comfort and security. They were no bumbling amateurs. They had achieved total control over the process of fracturing, chipping, and shaping crystalline rocks, which formed
the basis of their technology, and they have aptly been called the “master stoneworkers of all times.” Their remarkably thin, finely chipped “laurel leaf” knives, eleven inches long but only four-tenths of an inch thick, cannot be duplicated by modern industrial techniques. With delicate stone awls and incising tools called burins, they created intricately barbed bone and antler harpoon points, well-shaped antler throwing boards for spears, and fine bone needles presumably used to fashion animal-skin clothing. The items made of wood, fibers, and skins have perished, but these too must have been distinguished by high craftsmanship.

Contrary to popular ideas, “cave men” knew how to make artificial shelters, and their use of caves and rock overhangs depended on regional possibilities and seasonal needs. In southern Russia archaeologists have found traces of a hunters’ animal-skin dwelling set in a shallow pit forty feet long and twelve feet wide. In Czechoslovakia winter dwellings with round floor plans twenty feet in diameter were already in use more than 20,000 years ago. With rich furs for rugs and beds, as well as plenty of dried animal dung or fat-laden bones for the hearth, such dwellings can provide a quality of shelter superior in many respects to contemporary inner-city apartments.

As for living on the edge of starvation, such a picture is hard to reconcile with the enormous quantities of animal bones accumulated at various paleolithic kill sites. Vast herds of mammoth, horses, deer, reindeer, and bison roamed across Europe and Asia. The bones of over a thousand mammoth, excavated from one site in Czechoslovakia, and the remains of 10,000 wild horses that were stampeded at various intervals over a high cliff near Solutré, France, testify to the ability of
paleolithic peoples to exploit these herds systematically and efficiently. Moreover, the skeletal remains of the hunters themselves bear witness to the fact that they were unusually well-nourished.

The notion that paleolithic populations worked round the clock in order to feed themselves now also appears ludicrous. As collectors of food plants they were certainly no less effective than chimpanzees. Field studies have shown that in their natural habitat the great apes spend as much time grooming, playing, and napping as they do foraging and eating. And as hunters our upper paleolithic ancestors must have been at least as proficient as lions—animals which alternate bursts of intense activity with long periods of rest and relaxation. Studies of how present-day hunters and collectors allocate their time have shed more light on this issue. Richard Lee of the University of Toronto kept a record of how much time the modern Bushman hunter-collectors spend in the quest for food. Despite their habitat—the edge of the Kalahari, a desert region whose lushness is hardly comparable to that of France during the upper paleolithic period—less than three hours per day per adult is all that is needed for the Bushmen to obtain a diet rich in proteins and other essential nutrients.

The Machiguenga, simple horticulturalists of the Peruvian Amazon studied by Allen and Orna Johnson, spend a little more than three hours per day per adult in food production and get less animal protein for this effort than do the Bushmen. In the rice-growing regions of eastern Java, modern peasants have been found to spend about forty-four hours per week in productive farm work—something no self-respecting Bushman would ever dream of doing—and Javanese peasants seldom eat animal proteins. American farmers, for
whom fifty-and-sixty-hour work weeks are commonplace, eat well by Bushman standards but certainly cannot be said to have as much leisure.

I do not wish to minimize the difficulties inherent in comparisons of this sort. Obviously the work associated with a particular food-production system is not limited to time spent in obtaining the raw product. It also takes time to process the plants and animals into forms suitable for consumption, and it takes still more time to manufacture and maintain such instruments of production as spears, nets, digging sticks, baskets, and plows. According to the Johnsons’ estimates, the Machiguenga devote about three additional hours per day to food preparation and the manufacture of essential items such as clothing, tools, and shelter. In his observations of the Bushmen, Lee found that in one day a woman could gather enough food to feed her family for three days and that she spent the rest of her time resting, entertaining visitors, doing embroidery, or visiting other camps. “For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time.”

The evidence I have cited above leads to one conclusion: The development of farming resulted in an increased work load per capita. There is a good reason for this. Agriculture is a system of food production that can absorb much more labor per unit of land than can hunting and collecting. Hunter-collectors are essentially dependent on the natural rate of animal and plant reproduction; they can do very little to raise output per unit of land (although they can easily decrease it). With agriculture, on the other hand, people control the rate of plant reproduction. This means that production can be intensified without immediate adverse consequences,
especially if techniques are available for combating soil exhaustion.

The key to how many hours people like the Bushmen put into hunting and collecting is the abundance and accessibility of the animal and plant resources available to them. As long as population density—and thus exploitation of these resources—is kept relatively low, hunter-collectors can enjoy both leisure and high-quality diets. Only if one assumes that people during the stone age were unwilling or unable to limit the density of their populations does the theory of our ancestors’ lives as “short, nasty, and brutish” make sense. But that assumption is unwarranted. Hunter-collectors are strongly motivated to limit population, and they have effective means to do so.