Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap

I’ve been reading Mark Moffett’s new book:

Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

It is at heart a work of natural philosophy, an old term not in much use anymore. Moffett is interested in what constitutes society: our do we differentiate between insiders and outsiders? To do so he surveys the animal world and the follows the distinction in the evolution of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to the current day.

In this post I offer a few excepts and some occasional comments on them.

Conclusion

As is often the case, I didn’t start at the beginning. I started with the conclusion, from which I offer these excerpts:

357:

Markers are essential components in all societies of more than a few hundred individuals, whether mighty human or mere insect. At a certain point of growth, however, markers alone are insufficient to hold a society of humans together.

359:

As we look to the future, it may be illuminating to reframe the discussion around an idea cherished by people everywhere, and which I have brought up only I passing thus far: their freedom.

362:

Our misfortune has been, and will be always, that societies don’t eliminate discontent; they simply redirect it toward outsiders–which paradoxically can include the ethnic groups within them.

And then it was off to Chapters 8, “Band Societies”, 9, “The Nomadic Life”, and 10, “Settling Down”. I offer some excerpts and a few comments of my own.

Band Societies

103:

There are shelves of articles and books by anthropologists who write about hunter-gatherers based solely on what happened in bands, while ignoring how hunter-gatherer bands identified with a broader society.

Because the members of human band societies, as well as chimpanzee societies, rarely come together, finding out where a society stops and the next starts can be tough, but sharp separation in the memberships of societies are in place just the same. Numerous accounts tell how hunter-gathers of recent centuries felt secure in the presence of their “own kind.”

And I’ve read a few of those books and articles, so this was news to me. I’d thought that they just wandered about all year, spending weeks or perhaps months in one place and then moving on, the same little band. But no it isn’t unusual for a number of bands to gather together and participate in a single activity. Thus a bit latter he’ll mention that “every Autumn in North America, bands of certain tribes gathered to frighten herds of bison over cliffs” (125), something I’d read about when I was young.

This behavior motivates a distinction that is central to the book, that between a group and a society. In this case the group is the band of people who live and travel together year-round. The society, on the other hand, is the large collectivity, consisting of all those groups of individuals who recognize one another as being of the same people. The may not and generally will not know everyone in the society very well, but they recognize rights and obligations with respect to one another that they do not recognize with respect to those outside the society.

106:

Among the Bushmen, bands of the same society occupied contiguous spaces, whereas a no-man’s land lay between different societies. Similar unoccupied gaps separate the societies of other species, too–communities of chimpanzees, packs of wolves, and colonies of fire ants.

109:

For hunter-gatherers the signage of daily existence was understated. Each nuance about the natural world and the people in it filled their senses. Distinctions between their neighbors that to us would be slight would have stood out as plainly as grass blades bent by a passing antelope.

111:

After all, given the low density of most hunter-gatherers in antiquity, people would have encountered an infinitesimal fraction of the outsiders most of us are familiar with today.

And this, I might add, underlines one of the central themes of the book. We now live in societies where we are constantly meeting and interacting with people we do not know. We think nothing of it. And yet, in a broad context, it is very odd. How do we manage to do it?

The Nomadic Life

Moffett likens a hunter-gather band to a small factory. Everyone works, 112: "Few tasks in a band factory demanded multiple players."

113:

The rhythm of expeditions orchestrated by sex added a layer of complexity beyond that of the movements of almost all other animals.

That is, to a first approximation, with allowances from some differences between male and female worlds, every adult in such a society knows everything there is to know. With the exception of a ritual/medical specialist, a medicine man or shaman, there are no occupational specialists. Everyone must make everything they need for daily life and perform every necessary task.

114:

An upside of this factory life was that people weren’t occupied with raising crops or struggling to take in excess food. They ended up with leisure time–a commodity that earned these nomads the moniker “the original affluent society.” [...]

That, and the bare-bones nature of ownership, meant everything about their nomadic way of life pretty much had to fit inside each member’s head, even if peers, and especially the elderly, were useful at reinforcing what was correct. [...]

Otherwise the sole specialized line of work in a band was a medicine man. Even then, Aboriginal healers, whose training in that role could take years, were still expected to carry out life’s mundane tasks themselves.

I find that last very interesting and extraordinarily important. It isn’t hunters or weavers or cooks and so forth who are specialists, but medicine men, who are, in that role, story tellers and ritualists as well. Of course medicine is fundamental – we in the United States devote enormous resources to it ourselves (not always very wisely or effectively either) – but in simple hunter-gather societies the telling of mythic stories and the enactment of ritual was a part, indeed much of, the healing process. The medicine man was, in effect, in charge of the mythic worldview by which the society understands itself in the world.

I’m thus reminded of Shelley’s assertion: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Has it always been thus? Of course the medicine man doesn’t think of themselves as originator of the stories. They’re only passing on the stories as they’ve been handed down to them, ultimately from supernatural creatures.

115:

Still, evincing one’s talents was a delicate matter. Because of the intimacy of life around camps, band societies rarely tolerated a showoff. [...]

So without specialists or jobs, band societies offered opportunities for dexterous toolmakers, dazzling storytellers, skilled mediators of social conflicts, and thoughtful decision makers.

116:

Among other indications that life in the society completely expressed their worldview, the bands didn’t distinguish sacred beliefs (usually relating directly to nature) from other aspects of life. Likewise, rituals, entertainment, and education–all matters except family matters were part and parcel of their relationship to the society as a whole.

121:

In contrast to the rapport afforded by a band, the societies that hunter-gatherers belonged to were about identities–inclusion and exclusion. Even though each band carried out its quotidian chores alone, the society offered a security blanket, supporting reliable market and marriage relations beyond the local fireplace.

Settling Down

And now comes a bomb, pp. 122-23:

Between Mount Eccles and the sea in Victoria, Australia, on a lava plain laid down by a volcano eruption about 30,000 years ago, are the archaeological remains of hundreds of dwellings. The structures cluster in groups of a dozen or so, some so large they are partitioned into apartments. People by the thousands settled across that expanse in these small villages, members of settled tribes that jostled, fought, and forged lasting alliances.

The region around the villages was transformed into a vast, managed landscape, with streams and rivers variously dammed and diverted to create a labyrinthine yet integrated drainage system. The waterways, which extend for kilometers, are ancient, many dating back 8,000 years, with the system reaching its full glory 600 to 800 years ago. The canals were used to harvest wild game–a species of eel–with traps reaching a hundred meters long and constructed in some places of stone walls up to a meter high. The people also carved out artificial wetlands in which the young eels could thrive until they were large enough to eat, and caught the fish in such abundance that the excess could be preserved and stored for the off-season.

Like all the Aborigines elsewhere in Australia, the people at Mount Eccles lacked domesticated food. This entire elaborate infrastructure was the brainchild of hunter-gatherers. And yet the homes look to have been permanent, and some may have been occupied year-round–the descendants of the original residents claim this was so. Indeed, the lesson of the Mount Eccles Aborigines is that, even before societies took up farming, people had the option to reside in what I call a settled hunter-gather society.

Think of that, just think of it.

A bit later, 125: "Indeed, the foremost reason people have never scaled up the egalitarian lifestyle of band societies is that, like most mammals, we squabble a lot."

126:

To drop the itinerant way of life required bounty on an ongoing basis.

127:

More elaborate where the settled hunter-gatherers of North America [...] All these tribes mass-collected and stashed aquatic foods to keep themselves fed through thick and thin.

127:

Some sites in the Pacific Northwest were occupied for centuries by a couple hundred to nearly 2,000 individuals.

Moving on, p. 135:

People in settlements came to refocus their goals from maximizing their free time to earning power and esteem. In the Pacific Northwest, admired artisans, sought out for their masks, home decorations, and totem poles, were among the few who plied their trade full time and were compensated well enough to earn a rank just below the aristocrats.

136:

The constant efforts expended by people in bands to keep on a level playing field suggests that egalitarianism wasn’t the original condition of humankind but rather an option recently perfected.

136:

I expect that hunter-gatherers hiked less and settled more before agriculturalists laid claim to the world’s choicest, and most fertile, real estate.

137:

Many settled hunter-gatherers were, from the perspective of population growth and the cultural extravagance that can accompany it, a civilizational dead end. Domesticating the aquatic life that nourished most of these societies was impractical, with no way to control its reproduction to feed expanding societies, or to allow those societies to spread far from their sources of wild food. By contrast many domesticated crops and livestock can be taken from their ancestral habitat by locating or creating environments to suit them.

Thus such a life style was simply not possible in most places; it was dependent on aquatic life, like that available on the Northwest coast of North America.

And here’s something I think is very important, 137-8:

As it would turn out, giving up hunting and gathering was no advance in quality of life. After the advent of farming, people grew smaller, weaker, and more sickly as they struggled to nurture and harvest crops–conditions that wouldn’t be reversed until the invention of the plow and harnessed oxen.

This is something not appreciated widely enough. For all except the ruling elite, the agricultural life style was a step back in terms of material life, something David Hays discussed in his book, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1995) – I’ve excerpted the relevant passage at this link, which includes thumbnail estimates of per capita energy expenditure, work hours, and material welfare. Moffett continues on, 138:

Taking to cultivation at all but the smallest scale of simple gardening had another drawback that no early farmer could have predicted: it could ensnare a society in a plant trap. A trap, because the option of going back to hunting and gathering full time faded away once an expanding society committed to agriculture. [...] Yet once a society grew to a huge population, or was packed in tight with other agricultural societies, the numbers of people would be too great to be supported by native foods and starvation would be guaranteed.

Plant trap: I'm wondering if the USA got into a similar situation after WWII. We'd geared up war production to fight the war and then kept it going through Korea and the rest of the fifties leaving us with the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about. Now, with military production dispersed through all 50 states our economy is become (all but permanently) stuck in war mode.

More later.

Addendum, Oct 14, 2019: From Zach Zorich, Online Map Leads Archaeologist to Maya Discovery, NYTimes, Oct. 8, 2019:

Finally, in 2005, he and his wife, Daniela Triadan, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, began excavating the ancient city of Ceibal in the Petén rainforest in Guatemala, where they discovered some of the earliest known Maya buildings. The city’s ceremonial center dates to 950 B.C., but Ceibal didn’t have permanent housing until 200 years later.

Dr. Triadan and Dr. Inomata believe that the earliest Maya were probably still living a migratory lifestyle, coming to Ceibal only for religious purposes. How they transitioned to settling down in large cities and what role the Olmec civilization, which preceded the Maya, played in the founding of the Maya civilization are the big questions that Dr. Inomata and Dr. Triadan are seeking to answer. Olmec-style artifacts were found among the earliest buildings at Ceibal, indicating that the Maya civilization was influenced by the Olmec from the beginning. “The relationship between the Maya and Olmec gets at the origins of Mesoamerican civilization overall,” Dr. Inomata said.

* * * * *

For some posts about Moffett on ants see:

• Supercolonies, or, What’s a society?
• Moffett & the Ants: Mode, Embedding & Emergent Complexity
• Ants 3: Photography as thinking and Conceptual calibration