A review of the hunter and farmer theory, five years after it was first published.
Hunters and Farmers Five Years Later
by Thom Hartmann
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
--J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in Life, October 10, 1949.
The concept of hunters and farmers as “good science”
In the five years since the first publication of this book and my presentation of the Hunter/Farmer concept as a possible explanation for why we have ADD in our gene pool, there have been many changes in the thinking of people who study the subject. There have also been many changes in the overall view of psychiatric and physiological disorders in general, particularly those with a genetic basis.
The publication of
Why We Get Sick: The new science of Darwinian medicine by Randolph Nesse MD and George Williams Ph.D. (Times Books) signaled a turning point in the minds of many. The book, thoroughly researched and brilliantly well-written, makes the strong and scientifically-defendable case that we are creatures living out of our element, humans with bodies and brains designed to live in a primitive natural environment and still carrying around the physical and psychological tools necessary to that environment. These include things from morning sickness to cystic fibrosis to depression. Our modern lifestyle, evolved just over the past few thousand years, represents not a norm for human life, but an incredibly brief flicker of momentary history in the 200,000 year life-span of (people like us) on the planet.
[...]
The 1996 publication by psychiatrists and physicians Anthony Stevens and John Price of the book
Evolutionary Psychiatry: a new beginning (Routledge) summarized much of this research, and has provided a deep mine of material for future researchers. For example, they tell the story of the Ik, a group of hunter-gatherer peoples in Uganda whose rates of life-threatening psychological and physical illnesses exploded when they were forcibly moved from their natural hunting grounds and forced to engage in agriculture. Other examples abound in this well-researched work.
[...]
In popular literature, Riane Eisler (
The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasures) has explored early cultures and shows the fundamental differences between what she calls “cooperator” and “dominator” cultures. (We in western civilization are members of the latter.)
Side note: Laura includes excerpts from the book in part V of
"The Grail Quest and The Destiny of Man"
Similarly, Daniel Quinn Ishmael and
The Story of B) writes about “Leavers” and “Takers” to describe a similar cultural division. About five thousand years ago, these cultural schisms set the stage for a mass extermination of hunter/gatherer peoples which continues to this day in remote parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
A brilliant study published in the February, 1994 issue of
Discover magazine detailed the exact answer to the question of when and how this happened, and has since been corroborated by other researchers. Using an analysis of language patterns and DNA, researchers found that 3,000 years ago Africa was almost entirely populated by thousands of different (genetically and in language) tribes of hunter/gatherer peoples. Population density was low and, apparently, strife was minimal.
Then a group of Bantu-speaking agriculturists in the northwestern part of Africa were apparently infected with what University of California professor of Native American Studies Jack Forbes calls the cultural mental illness of Wétiko (a native American term for the amoral and predatory behavior of the European invaders). Wétiko is the term that Forbes applied decades ago to describe what Eisler and Quinn today call “dominator” and “taker” cultural mass psychology.
In his penetrating and thought-provoking book
Columbus and Other Cannibals, Professor Forbes points out how Wétiko, which he calls a “highly-contagious form of mental illness,” originated in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago. From there, it spread across the fertile crescent and into Syria, eventually infecting northern Africa, Europe (via the Roman conquerors who carried Wétiko), Asia, and, with the arrival of Columbus, the Americas.
The Bantu-speaking farmers of northwest Africa, culturally contaminated by Wétiko beliefs in the “correctness” of genocide, systematically spread across the entire African continent over a 2,000-year period, destroying every group in their path. The result is that now fewer than one percent of the entire African continent’s population are hunter/gatherers, and the languages and cultures of thousands of tribes — developed over 200,000 years of human history — have been lost forever. Entire ethnic groups were wiped out and have now vanished from the Earth.
The reasons the Wétiko farmers were so successful in their conquest of Africa (and later, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas) is fourfold:
1. Farming is more efficient than hunting at producing food.
Because it’s about ten times more efficient at extracting calories from the soil, The population density of farming communities tend to be about ten times higher than those of hunting communities. And so their armies were ten times larger.
2. Farmers become immune to the diseases of their own animals.
Measles, chicken pox, mumps, influenza, and numerous other diseases originated in — and are still often carried by — domesticated animals. When the Farmers of Europe first came to the shores of the Americas, they killed off millions of native Americans simply by accidental infection with these diseases, to which the local hunters had not developed immunities. (This practice was later escalated with the deliberate infection of entire tribes by smallpox-infected blankets by the Wétiko-infected invaders.)
3. Farming is stable.
Farmers tend to stay in one place, and that gives rise to specialization of function. The butcher, baker, candlestick maker, and weapons maker came into being, and armies were formed. Factories were a logical extension of farming technologies, and so farming peoples became even more efficient at producing weapons and technologies of destruction.
4. The Wétiko culture taught that slaughter could be justified on religious grounds.
From its beginnings in Mesopotamia, Wétiko taught that the slaughter of other humans was not only acceptable, but could even be “a good thing” because it was ordered or sanctioned by their gods. The most bizarre instance of this can be seen during the Crusades, when Europeans slaughtered “heathens” in order to “save their souls.” A close second is “the winning of the American West,” in which Americans (whose Declaration of Independence says the Creator gave people the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) decreed that the same Creator gave America a Manifest Destiny to overtake the whole continent, and used this religious argument to justify killing the “heathen” residents.
While indigenous hunting peoples often had conflict with neighbors over borders and territories, these conflicts served to strengthen the cultural and independent identities of both tribes involved. Wétiko warfare, where every last person in the “competing” tribe is put to death, is something that no anthropologist has ever found in the history or behavior of any past or modern non-Wétiko hunting/gathering peoples. The Wétiko agriculturists, however, viewing non-Wétiko humans to be as exploitable as the land, have a history littered with genocide, slavery, and exploitation.
And so, over the past 5000 years, on every continent and among every people, hunter/gatherers have been wiped out, displaced, slaughtered, exterminated, and oppressed by Wétiko farmers/industrialists. Today, fewer than 2% of the world’s human population are genetically pure hunter/gatherer peoples, and only a remnant of them is found in our gene pool, and that only as the result of enslavement and assimilation.
The Wétiko domination (Those who would disempower for their own gain) continues in our modern world.
