Hunter-gatherers: the original libertarians.

• Author: Mayor, Thomas

In this article, I ask a perennial yet still unresolved question: What version of political economy--collectivist or individualistic--is more consistent with man's basic nature? Does man naturally respect an individual's right to the products of his own efforts, or does he believe that others have a higher claim on those products? Is he genetically programmed to be an independent decision maker, or does he feel more comfortable in a passive role, following a strong leader? To be sure, philosophers and political theorists have given different answers to these questions, but almost always without significant supporting evidence. I argue here that such evidence does exist and may in fact be obtained by applying basic principles of evolutionary biology to the voluminous ethnographic literature available in the field of anthropology.

Archaeological and biological evidence suggests that humans, defined by Richard Leakey as upright apes, first appeared about seven million years ago (1994, xiii). Since then, with the exception of perhaps the past ten thousand years, it is likely that man lived in small, kinship-based hunter-gatherer bands. In such an environment, over such a long period of time, man would have evolved patterns of behavior and socioeconomic institutions that promoted survival in hunter-gatherer or foraging societies. We must conclude, therefore, that modern man is, in a fundamental, biological sense, a hunter-gatherer. To understand modern man in his entirety, we must understand him in his primitive condition, long before the advent of civilization a scant five to ten thousand years ago. (1)

Basic Characteristics of Hunter-Gatherer Societies

The archaeological record, consisting almost entirely of skeletons and tools, provides insufficient insight into human patterns of behavior. However, a rich and detailed ethnographic literature describes hunter-gatherer people and near hunter-gatherer people who have survived into the modern era. (2) This literature definitely establishes the distinct features of hunter-gatherer behavior that appear in nearly every primitive society--the "stylized facts" of hunter-gatherer societies that provide important insights into man as an economic and political animal. The most important of these stylized facts are as follows:

1. The basic unit of society is the band, which typically consists of a small number of nuclear families related by kinship. Bands rarely exceed fifty persons (Fried 1967, 113). The widespread nature of this basic unit is impressive. All known foraging groups seem to take this form. Moreover, the band form of social organization also predominates among our closest primate species. We can be fairly confident, therefore, that this form of social organization prevailed throughout human history (and probably prehuman history as well) until the advent of settled agriculture.

2. Bands are widely scattered over relatively large territories, yielding population densities from perhaps one person for every five square miles to one person for every fifty or more square miles (Steward 1955, 125). The total human population was apparently extremely small until fairly recent times. Some estimates place the entire population of Europe at no more than one hundred thousand people as recently as twenty thousand years ago.

3. Bands have no effective government or formal laws. They frequently do have one or two men who command more respect than their peers and might be referred to as "headmen." But whatever their designation, they typically have little more authority than other men in the band. According to Fried, any band leader is "unable to compel any of the others to carry out his wish" (1967, 83). Of course, bands have norms of behavior that apply, sometimes rather strictly, to all band members.

4. Food is typically hunted or gathered, not produced, as in pastoral or agricultural societies. Yet some primitive groups who have survived into the modern era (such as the Yanomamo of remote South America) may engage in a limited amount of gardening while still maintaining basic hunter-gatherer characteristics (Chagnon 1992, 79).

5. Most goods are perishable. Primitive people have limited means of preserving food. Even nonfood items may have to be abandoned when the band moves to a different location. This characteristic of foraging society has obvious implications for the accumulation of property.

6. Goods are exchanged according to a system of reciprocal gift giving. This system is of course the only practical one for a society that has no money or even a workable substitute for money. It is a much-discussed characteristic of foraging societies and one that must be thoroughly understood in order to answer the questions raised in this article.

7. There is generally a division of labor between the sexes but not within the sexes. Thus, each adult male performs more or less the same work as every other adult male, and each adult female performs more or less the same work as every other adult female, but the work of men and the work of women are quite different. Women tend to care for children and to gather food and material, whereas men tend to hunt.

8. Although hunter-gatherers have individual rights to personal property, no property rights typically exist in the natural resources the band uses. With very few people and abundant natural resources, creating property rights ill those resources yields no advantage. This common-property condition probably prevailed with few exceptions until the development of agriculture some ten thousand years ago.

9. Life in the band is characterized by extreme lack of privacy. Individuals therefore have extensive information about the activities of other individuals in the band.

10. Intraband conflict is relatively minor despite the lack of laws, police, and judges, but interband conflict may be significant. Marvin Harris concludes that a majority of hunter-gatherer societies engaged in interband warfare, not ordinarily caused by disputes over territories or resources, but by disputes over personal grievances (1977, 47-49). Disputes over women and the widespread practice of capturing women were prominent causes of warfare (Chagnon 1992, 218-19).

Popular Conceptions of Primitive Societies

For the purposes of this article, it is helpful to consider how primitive man has been characterized in the popular imagination. Well-known anthropologist Lionel Tiger argues that in a quest by modern man (including some professional anthropologists) to discover "our loving, peaceful, lyrically fair human core" (2008), primitive man has frequently been romanticized. Other modern men (for example, Sahlins 1972) have used the mystique of primitive societies in criticizing modern societies, perhaps only to contrast the complications and stress of modern life with the supposed simple serenity of primitive life. (3) Others have extolled the supposed egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies as a model for a future communist society (Lee 1988).

Over the years, many intellectuals in the Marxist tradition believed that early man lived in a state of "primitive communism." The impetus for this belief was apparently Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society, first published in 1877. According to Morgan, "communism in living" was the standard practice among primitive peoples ([1877] 1958, 454). Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were highly influenced by Morgan's views, and Engels gave them prominence in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Thus, according to Engels, "Production at all former stages of society was essentially collective, and likewise consumption took place by the direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller communistic communities" ([1884] 1962, 2:322). This view has had an enormous impact on the thinking of socialists up to the present day. (4) "Communism" within the nuclear family was doubtless the norm in primitive societies as it is in present-day societies. It could hardly be otherwise. The rearing of children to maturity--indeed, the very survival of humans--requires that the family be so organized. Many observers of these societies, however, mistakenly interpreted family communism as extending to all persons outside the family, a view decidedly not supported by ethnographic evidence.

The communist view of primitive societies was also aided by a misinterpretation of the basic nature of primitive economies. These economies are self-sufficient communities with no significant division of labor. All adult members work as hunters and gatherers. The adults' productivity in these activities cannot vary greatly. Of course, some hunters are more or less talented than others, but such variation is likely to be relatively small. Therefore, in such a society the standard of living will be quite equal even if little or no redistribution of income occurs. The reason for much higher disparities of income in modern societies is not that primitive societies engage in more redistribution or are in some sense more communistic. The modern economy, with its large base of population and its extensive division of labor, allows persons of great talent to be paid commensurately to that talent. J. K. Rowling, a popular writer of children's stories, went from a modest job as a teacher to earning about five thousand times as much as the typical British woman when she tapped into her special talent. She was able to sell books and movies to hundreds of millions of people around the world. In a hunter-gatherer society, that special talent would remain latent, and her productivity as a gatherer would likely be quite similar to the productivity of every other woman in that society.

Curiously, Marx and Engels did not argue that evolution has shaped man's basic nature toward collectivism--a view that might seem logical if primitive man did indeed practice "communism in living." This apparent oversight might reflect the strong Marxist belief...