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Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming brought another curse to humanity – class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources such as an orchard or herd of cows. Instead, they live off the wild plants and animals that they obtain each day. Everybody except for infants, the sick, and the old joins in the search for food. Thus, there can be no kings, no full-time professionals, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.
Only in a farming population could contrasts between the diseaseridden masses and a healthy, non-producing, elite develop. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae around 1500 BC suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among mummies from Chilean cemeteries around 1000 AD, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hairclips, but also by a four-fold lower rate of bone lesions stemming from infectious diseases.
These signs of health differentials within local communities of farmers in the past appear on a global scale in the modern world. To most American and European readers, the argument that humanity could on the average be better off as hunter–gatherers than we are today sounds ridiculous, because most people in industrial societies today enjoy better health than most hunter-gatherers. However, Americans and Europeans are an elite in today’s world, dependent on oil and other materials imported from countries with large peasant populations and much lower health standards. If you could choose between being a middle-class American, a Bushman hunter, and a peasant farmer in Ethiopia, the first choice would undoubtedly be the healthiest one, but the third choice might be the least healthy.
While giving rise to class divisions for the first time, farming may also have exacerbated sexual inequality already in existence. With the advent of agriculture, women often became beasts of burden, were drained by more frequent pregnancies (see below), and thus suffered poorer health. For example, among the Chilean mummies from 1000 AD, women exceeded men in osteoarthritis and in bone lesions from infectious diseases. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under a load of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. In one case I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp, and a group of men, women, and children volunteered. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder the pole together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture laid the foundations of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have on the average at least as much free time as do farmers. I grant that some people in industrial and farming societies enjoy more leisure than hunter-gatherers, at the expense of many others who support them and have far less leisure. Farming undoubtedly made it possible to sustain full-time craftsmen and artists, without whom we would not have such large-scale art projects as the Sistine Chapel and Cologne Cathedral. However, the whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor in explaining artistic differences among human societies seems to me misguided. It is not lack of time that prevents us today from surpassing the beauty of the Parthenon. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and art preservation easier, great paintings and sculptures on a smaller scale than that of Cologne Cathedral were already being produced by Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago. Great art was still being produced in modern times by hunter-gatherers such as Eskimos and Pacific Northwest Indians. In addition, when we count up the specialists whom society became able to support after the advent of agriculture, we should recall not only Michelangelo and Shakespeare but also standing armies of professional killers.
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Thus, with the advent of agriculture an elite became healthier, but many people became worse off. Instead of the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, a cynic might ask how we got trapped by agriculture despite its being such a mixed blessing.
The answer boils down to the adage, ‘Might makes right.’ Farming could support far more people than hunting, whether or not it also brought on the average more food per mouth. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are typically one person or less per square mile, while densities of farmers average at least ten times higher.) Partly, this is because an acre of field planted entirely in edible crops produces far more tons of food, and allows one to feed far more mouths, than an acre of forest with scattered edible wild plants. Partly, too, it is because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it is old enough to keep up with the adults. Because sedentary farmers do not have that problem, they can and do have a child every two years. Perhaps the main reason we find it so hard to shake off the traditional view that farming was unequivocally good for us is that there is no doubt that it meant more tons of food per acre. We forget that it also meant more mouths to feed, and that health and quality of life depend on the amount of food per mouth.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the Ice Age, bands had to ‘choose’, whether consciously or unconsciously, between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps towards agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands adopted the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because ten malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It is not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except ones that farmers did not want. Modern hunter-gatherers persisted only in scattered areas useless for agriculture, such as the Arctic, deserts, and some rainforests.
At this point it is ironic to recall the common complaint that archaeology is an expensive luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons of present relevance. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.
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Hunter–gatherers practised the most successful and long-persistent lifestyle in the career of our species. In contrast, we are still struggling with the problems into which we descended with agriculture, and it is unclear whether we can solve them. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. The visitor might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four-hour clock on which one hour of clock-time represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 pm we adopted agriculture. In retrospect, the decision was inevitable, and there is now no question of turning back. But as our second midnight approaches, will the present plight of African peasants gradually spread to engulf all of us? Or, will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us except in mixed form?
ELEVEN
WHY DO WE SMOKE, DRINK, AND USE DANGEROUS DRUGS?
Self-destructive chemical abuse by humans has precedents in animal displays that are costly or dangerous to
the displaying animal. Such behaviour may have originated from the dilemma that signals available to any individual lend themselves to cheating. But costly or dangerous signals carry a built-in guarantee of honesty and are thus useful – as long as their benefits outweigh their costs. Unfortunately, this old evolutionary framework has gone awry in us.
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CHERNOBYL – FORMALDEHYDE IN drywalls – asbestos – lead poisoning – smog – the Valdez oil spill – Love Canal – Agent Orange … Hardly a month goes by without our learning of yet another way in which we and our children have been exposed to toxic chemicals through the negligence of others. The public’s outrage, sense of helplessness, and demand for change are growing. Why, then, do we do to ourselves that which we cannot stand for others to do to us? How do we explain the paradox that many people intentionally consume, inject, or inhale toxic chemicals, such as alcohol, cocaine, and the chemicals in tobacco smoke? Why are various forms of this wilful self-damage native to many contemporary societies, from primitive tribes to high-tech urbanites, and extending back into the past as far as we have written records?
Like the subjects of the preceding three chapters, drug abuse is also a hallmark virtually unique to the human species, albeit an evil one rather than a noble one (like language and art) or a mixed blessing (agriculture). It is not the worst of our evil hallmarks; it does not threaten the survival of civilization, as do our genocidal tendencies and our environmental destructiveness. But it is still damaging and widespread enough to beg the question of its origins.
The problem is not so much in understanding why we continue to take toxic chemicals once we have started. In part, that is because our drugs of abuse are addictive. Instead, the greater mystery is what impels us to begin at all. Evidence for the damaging or lethal effects of alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco is by now overwhelming and familiar. Only the existence of some strong countervailing motives could explain why people consume these poisons voluntarily, even eagerly. It is as if unconscious programmes were driving us to do something we know to be dangerous. What could those programmes be?
Naturally, there is no single explanation: different motives carry different weight with different people or in different societies. For instance, some people drink to overcome their inhibitions, others to deaden their feelings or drown their sorrows, still others because they like the taste of alcoholic beverages. Naturally, too, differences among human populations and social classes in their options for achieving satisfying lives largely account for geographic and class differences in chemical abuse. It is not surprising that self-destructive alcoholism is a bigger problem in high-unemployment areas of Ireland than in Southeast England, or that cocaine and heroin addiction is commoner in Harlem than in affluent suburbs. Hence it is tempting to dismiss drug abuse as a human hallmark with obvious social and cultural causes, and in no need of a search for animal precedents.
However, none of the motives that I have just mentioned goes to the heart of the paradox of our actively seeking what we know to be harmful. In this chapter I shall propose one other contributing motive which does address that paradox. It relates our chemical self-assaults to a wide range of seemingly self-destructive traits in animals, and to a general theory of animal signalling. It unifies a wide range of phenomena in our culture, from smoking and alcoholism to drug abuse. It has potential cross-cultural validity, for it may explain not just phenomena of the Western world but also some otherwise mystifying customs elsewhere, such as kerosene drinking by Indonesian kung-fu experts. I will also reach into the past and apply the theory to the seemingly bizarre practice of ceremonial enemas in ancient Mayan civilization.
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Let me begin by relating how I arrived at this idea. One day, I was abruptly struck by the puzzle that companies manufacturing toxic chemicals for human use advertise their use explicitly. This business practice would seem a sure route to bankruptcy. Yet, while we do not tolerate advertisements for cocaine, advertisements for tobacco and alcohol are so widespread that we cease to regard their existence as puzzling. It hit me only after I had been living with New Guinea hunters in the jungle for many months, far from any advertising.
Day after day, my New Guinea friends had been asking me about Western customs, and I had come to realize through their astonished responses how senseless many of our customs are. Then the months of fieldwork ended with one of those sudden transitions that modern transportation has made possible. On 25 June I was still in the jungle, watching a brilliantly coloured male bird of paradise flap awkwardly across a clearing, dragging its 3-foot-long tail behind it. On 26 June I was sitting in a Boeing 747 jet, reading the magazines and catching up on the wonders of Western civilization.
I leafed through the first magazine. It fell open to a page with a photograph of a tough-looking man on horseback chasing cows, and the name of a brand of cigarette in large letters below. The American in me knew what the photograph was about, but part of me was still in the jungle, looking at that photo naively. Perhaps my reaction will not seem so strange to you if you try to imagine yourself completely unfamiliar with Western society, seeing the advertisement for the first time, and trying to fathom the connection between chasing cows and smoking (or not smoking) cigarettes.
The naive part of me, fresh out of the jungle, thought: such a brilliant anti-smoking ad! It is well known that smoking impairs athletic ability and causes cancer and early death. Cowboys are widely regarded as athletic and admirable. This advertisement must be a devastating new appeal by the anti-smoking forces, telling us that if we smoke that particular brand of cigarette, we will not be fit to be cowboys. What an effective message to our youth!
But then it became obvious that the advertisement had been put there by the cigarette company itself, which somehow hoped that readers would draw exactly the opposite message from the advertisement. How on earth did the company let its public relations department talk it into such a disastrous miscalculation? Surely, that advertisement would dissuade any person concerned about his/her strength and self-image from starting to smoke.
Still half immersed in the jungle, I turned to another page. There I saw a photo of a whisky bottle on a table, a man sipping presumably the bottle’s contents from a glass, and an obviously fertile young woman gazing at him admiringly as if she were on the verge of sexual surrender. How can that be, I asked myself? Everyone knows that alcohol interferes with sexual function, tends to make men impotent, makes one likely to stumble, impairs judgement, and predisposes to cirrhosis of the liver and other debilitating conditions. In the immortal words of the porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘It [drink] provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.’ A man with such handicaps should conceal them at all costs from a woman he aims to seduce. Why is the man in the photograph intentionally displaying those handicaps? Do whisky manufacturers think that pictures of this impaired individual will help sell their product? One could expect that Mothers Against Drunk Driving would be the ones producing such advertisements, and that the whisky companies would be suing to prevent publication.
Page after page of advertisements flaunted the use of cigarettes or strong alcohol, and hinted at their benefits. There were even pictures of young people smoking in the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex, as if to imply that smoking too brought sexual opportunities. Yet any non-smoker who has ever been kissed by (or tried to kiss) a smoker knows how severely the smoker’s bad breath compromises his or her sex appeal. The advertisement paradoxically implied not just sexual benefits but also platonic friendships, business opportunities, vigour, health, and happiness, when the direct conclusion to be drawn from the advertisements was actually the reverse.
As the days passed and I reimmersed myself in Western civilization, I gradually stopped noticing its apparently self-defeating advertisements. I retreated into analysing my field data and wondering instead about an entirely different paradox, involving bird evolution. That paradox was what led me finally to understand one rationale behind cig
arette and whisky advertisements.
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The new paradox concerned the reason that male bird of paradise I had been watching on 25 June had evolved the impediment of a tail 3 feet long. Males of other bird of paradise species evolved other bizarre impediments, such as long plumes growing out of their eyebrows, the habit of hanging upside-down, and brilliant colours and loud calls likely to attract hawks. All those features must impair male survival, yet they also serve as the advertisements by which male birds of paradise woo female birds of paradise. Like many other biologists, I found myself wondering why male birds of paradise use such handicaps as advertisements, and why females find the handicaps attractive.
At that point I came across a remarkable paper by an Israeli biologist, Amotz Zahavi, who had conceived a novel general theory about the role of costly or self-destructive signals in animal behaviour. For example, Zahavi attempted to explain how deleterious male traits might attract a female precisely because they constitute handicaps. On reflection, I decided that Zahavi’s hypothesis might apply to the birds of paradise I studied. Suddenly I realized, with growing excitement, that his theory perhaps could also be extended to explain the paradox of our use of toxic chemicals, and our touting it in advertisements.