Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk Read Free Book Online

increasingly doubt that any of the modern hunter-gatherer societies are truly “pristine,” living the way that even their own ancestors did just a few centuries ago. The San, for instance, trade with their farming neighbors, and in fact may themselves have farmed sometime in the recent past. The Inuit are now known to have had complex networks of trade that, as anthropologist Rosemary Joyce of UC Berkeley says, “reached into Russia long before ethnographers came to describe their supposed simplicity.” 20 In the 1970s, a tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Tasaday was supposedly discovered to be living as “remarkably peaceful remnants of Stone Age life,” according to a Science News report by Bruce Bower. 21 But further investigation cast doubt on the authenticity of the Tasaday’s isolation, and it now appears that at least part of the people’s lifestyle, including their use of stone tools, was faked to attract media attention.
    Many other contemporary foraging peoples are living in marginal environments far from their ancestral homes, pushed to the places where more technologically advanced people do not want to live. Or, like the Yanomami and other people living in the Amazon rain forest, they may be the remnants of much larger, and possibly quite different, populations that were decimated by Western diseases brought by the early European explorers. The Lacandon of Central America were once held up as a model of what “primitive” life would have been like if people had not begun to farm; we now know that they were pushed to the edges of the Spanish colony in the sixteenth century, adapting to their new environment by taking on behaviors like hunting and trading.
    It isn’t that one can’t learn anything from these people—far from it, as they can often provide novel testing grounds for hypotheses developed in Western societies with different economies and cultures. Studying a diversity of cultures is the best way to understand when our generalizations are truly universal and when they inadvertently reflect biases from our own backgrounds. But the contemporary foragers do not mirror our past, and if they show admirable attributes, such as the absence of diseases like diabetes, or a lack of anxiety over unemployment, we cannot conclude that our ancestors were similarly blessed and that we have gone astray as we have taken on a settled existence in the course of evolution. As Joyce puts it, “We can still use the modern hunter gatherers to explore how small scale human societies work, but we have to see them as examples of small scale, not of earlier stages of evolution.” 22
    The Neandertal makeover
    Anthropologist John Hawks, who maintains a popular blog about human origins, 23 has a set of entries called the “Neandertal anti-defamation files.” 24 According to the old conventional wisdom, Neandertals were those brutish hairy characters that lost out in evolution to the more cunning and—not coincidentally—more attractive Homo sapiens , who went on to make better tools, develop language, and generally evolve into, well, us. But ever since the 2008 finding of complex stone tools made by Neandertals, and more particularly since the 2010 discovery by Svante Pääbo and his colleagues that 1–4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today seems to have come from Neandertals, all parties have been hastily revising their stories.
    Neandertals are suddenly cool; 25 they had bigger brains, and possibly more sex, than previously thought, at least according to the popular press. The Guardian newspaper sympathetically provided the headline “Neanderthals: Not Stupid, Just Different.” 26 Wired.com huffed, “Neanderthals Not Dumb, but Made Dull Gadgets.” 27 Scotsman.com was blunter: “Stone Me—He’s Smart, He’s Tough and He’s Equal to any Homo sapiens.” 28 At the new Neanderthal Museum in Krapina, Croatia, the displays even intimate that the Neandertals brushed their teeth. (Perhaps more