Hunter Gatherer FAQs

Our ancient ancestors probably did fart, but there is a dire paucity of anthropological evidence

No such thing as a stupid question! That’s what my high school history teacher used to say, until we collectively asked so many stupid questions that he was forced to change his policy. 

I get a lot of questions about hunter-gatherers in my DMs. Most of them are very good. Others have led me to believe that we might need to have a little chat here about something called the “naturalistic fallacy,” evolutionary mismatch, and the reason I talk about hunter-gatherers in the first place. 

But first, let me try my best to answer some of the best ones. Please note that these are mostly parodies of much more intelligent questions. If you are reading this and realizing that you asked something similar, then just know that I have no judgment for you. I myself have been known to go on day-long Google Scholar deep dives trying to find out whether anyone has written a paper on hunter-gatherer bedtime routines for toddlers (they have not) and whether there is an evolutionary explanation for toenail fungus (unclear). And so, without further ado…

Did our stone-age ancestors fart a lot? My husband’s farts are so toxic that I think there is something wrong with him. I am wondering if we should try the Paleo diet?

This is genuinely a very difficult question to answer because farts do not show up in the fossil record.

However, as I have mentioned many times, researchers sometimes study contemporary hunter-gatherer societies as one way of understanding our shared evolutionary past. Unfortunately, there is a dire paucity of research on hunter-gatherer flatulence. Perhaps it is because the scientific equipment used to measure flatulence is not adapted to field conditions. I looked into it and there are three primary measures of fart quality: stench, sound, and temperature. Scientists have invented some pretty intricate devices for measuring these attributes including a sensor that can be swallowed and a machine with a microphone, thermometer and hydrogen sulfide monitor. (For some additional reading on the topic, I highly recommend this article). Although all have been used on Western subjects, none of these seem like techniques that would be readily applicable in a remote field setting. 

Someone needs to invent a time machine and then take the fart machine with them and report back. Stay tuned.

Did hunter-gatherers have playgrounds? I hate playgrounds. I thought that maybe if hunter-gatherers didn’t have them, then maybe I don’t have to go. 

Trish, it’s okay with me if you don’t want to go to the playground. Let’s leave it at that. 

At what age do modern hunter-gatherers introduce peanuts?

I believe they introduce them if and when they have peanuts available. They generally do not tend to follow AAP guidelines. 

In one of your videos you mentioned that hunter-gatherers spend 50% of their waking hours in leisure. This is also how I like to live my life, but my wife gets mad at me. Can you tell her it’s normal? 

Well, Jim, you are more than welcome to send her my reel on that topic, but I take no responsibility for any ensuing antagonistic conversations. 

(This one, I can’t help but mention, is pretty much a copy-paste)

Would you like to join our elite Crypto trading group?

No. (This is genuinely one of the most frequently asked questions though).

…

Jokes aside, I think it’s worth taking a minute to clarify why I am so interested in hunter-gatherer societies in the first place. My research is anchored in a concept called evolutionary mismatch, a term scientists use to describe a situation in which a previously adaptive trait suddenly becomes maladaptive following a rapid change in physical environment. My theory is that modern motherhood is basically one giant case of evolutionary mismatch. We evolved to birth and raise children in a certain context, then in the evolutionary blink of an eye we changed everything and our brains and bodies have not had time to catch up. I am mostly interested in how this affects our mental health, although it has real consequences for the rest of the body as well.

Since humans lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% of our existence as a species, we can use contemporary hunter-gatherer societies as a kind of proxy for how we all lived before agriculture and industrialization. This practice is not without controversy. Some academics believe we should not do it at all. We should rely only on the fossil record when interpreting the past. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to determine things like social structure by looking at bones. I tend to agree with Frank Marlowe, an anthropologist who spent his life studying the Hadza of Tanzania. As he puts it, “Societies that continue to hunt and gather…resemble the societies our ancestors lived in more than industrial societies do - that is an inescapable fact. It makes them interesting; it makes them valuable for evolutionary research; it does not make them any less respectable.”

One of the major criticisms of using hunter-gatherers as proxies for our Paleolithic past is that we often ignore the immense variety of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, and thus the extraordinary flexibility and adaptability of the human species. It’s tempting to look to the !Kung and say, wow their diet was 40% carnivorous! We must have evolved to eat 40% meat and 60% plants. But then you look at the Inuits and see that their diet is 95% carnivorous. Or the Hadza, whose diet is 80% vegetarian. Humans living in different environments adapt to different conditions. Human behavior, it turns out, is largely shaped by circumstance and by whatever survival strategy is the optimal one given the prevailing conditions. It’s dangerous to leap to conclusions about “human nature” by looking at how people behave in just one context.

What interests me are the things that appear to be fairly universal across most hunter-gatherer societies and that are directly relevant to mothers: collective care of babies and children, independent play in multi-age playgroups, longer interbirth intervals, prolonged breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc. One can make a strong argument that humans have been doing these things for hundreds of thousands of years, and because we have been doing them for hundreds of thousands of years, our brains and bodies are well-adapted to them. For instance, we evolved to live in highly social groups of kin and non-kin. The evidence overwhelmingly supports that social interaction is good for humans and that our modern way of living has created a loneliness epidemic linked with real chronic health conditions. There are many other examples. 

But that still doesn’t mean that in all cases we have to, or should do, things today the way we did them for most of evolutionary history. There is something called the “naturalistic fallacy” where we assume something is good because it is natural. People who take an interest in hunter-gatherer societies are prone to this fallacy. I am prone to this fallacy. But I try my best to look at the evidence for how such-and-such a practice impacts people in the modern context too. I also like using data from hunter-gatherer research to overturn instances where naturalistic fallacy is based on a misunderstanding of what is actually natural: like when people say moms should stay home with the kids all day because it’s what we evolved to do Wrong.

There is another reason why I am interested in hunter-gatherer societies: one that I think my community is interested in as well. I believe they provide an interesting foil to our modern way of living. This actually has nothing to do with evolution, but I think it is why people ask me very specific questions sometimes; questions that might seem a bit silly but are truly asked in earnest. What people really want to know is: do I have to do things the way everyone else does them today? Do I have to do what the experts tell me to do? Or is there another way? 

Hunter-gatherers show us there is another way: a way that was so successful, it endured for hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe it’s not the optimal way. Maybe it’s not what works for everyone today. Maybe it has nothing to do with our immutable “nature” as humans. But it’s a different way, and one that tends to make a lot of common sense.