What today’s hunter-gatherers can teach us about modern life

In many ways, humans are kind of evolutionary freaks

We're much more capable of learning skills than, let's say, our Australopithecus ancestors a few million years ago were

When I was 19, I bizarrely ended up getting an internship at a merchant bank

And in that bank, we had a manager and he would pepper his talks with us with this kind of Darwinian language

Banking is a survival of the fittest. You know, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there

Life is a continuous process of competition. The truth is, evolutionary history just isn't a constant competition

Actually, most animals spend as much time as they can relaxing, taking it easy or playing and enjoying themselves

This idea that everything is continuously battling for energy is nonsense. I spent most of the last 25 years documenting hunter-gatherers as they took their worldview

and tried to engage with our worldview in very uneven terms and to try and make sense of their perceptions of work and our perceptions of work

And what it did was it revealed an entirely different way of thinking

an entirely different way of being. My name is James Sussman. I'm an anthropologist and the title of my latest book is called

Work, a deep history from the Stone Age to the Age of Warpots

When one thinks about wanting to gather a society, they have imagined a world in which

We endure this horrendous struggle for survival in an eat or be eaten world

Nature was red in tooth and claw and life was hard and we learned to accumulate and grab resources

It was a great competition for life. But it seems fairly clear that we enjoyed quite a lot of leisure time as hunter 20 years ago I went off to the Kalahari to start working with a group of people called the Jn

The Jn'Muasi were the first hunter-gatherer society that were really studied to see how hard they actually worked

And it was revealed that they worked 15 hours in a week, and had a very different work ethos to what we do here in the West

The idea of what constitutes work in the way we organize our lives

can be very different and very contextual basis. Hunting, gathering, fishing, hiking

In the Jinhua world, those are all considered work. In the Western world, where I come from at the moment

most of those things are considered leisure activities now. The Inuit in the Arctic, the Aboriginals in Australia

and they're, of course, people like the Jinhua sea, engage with the land with consummate skill and consummate, in some ways, ease

The Kalahari Desert, where the Jnwasi live, is an incredibly tough environment

It's the kind of place where most of us, if we're dumped there without any prior knowledge of how to do things

we would be dead within several days. The Jnwasi, on the other hand, are able somehow out of this seemingly desolate place

to pluck out 130 or so different plant species. They're able to hunt 15 or 20 animal species

They are so skilled and so attuned to that environment that they are able to do so on the basis of really a marginal amount of effort

Even in the toughest times of year, you're looking at not spending more than four or five hours a day on the food quest

And you're looking at the best times of year, people are able to simply pluck things. It's almost a bit like a magical kind of 7-Eleven

Now, of course, it sounds a little bit idyllic, and hunter-gatherers went through intensely difficult times

periods of climatic change. But for the most part, living off the land

seemed a very straightforward way of making a living and we are supremely adapted to making a living as hunters and gatherers Hunter societies they typically highly egalitarian

Richard Lee, an anthropologist who worked with the Genoisi, he used the word fiercely egalitarian

and I haven't found a better way to describe it. There are no hierarchies whatsoever

Age does not convey any authority to anybody. Gender does not convey any authority to anybody

It's incredibly open and tolerant. People don't force things on children. But they also realize that there's an instinct

In particular, they say, not among women, but among men. Young men who go out hunting and they bring in their first big animal

They'll strut in and show off. They'll say that potentially risks upsetting the egalitarian balance that makes the society function

Rather than praise a successful hunter, they mock them. Somebody shows up if they've killed a giraffe, which is something huge and it's enough to feed everybody for ages and the meat's drying from the branches

They'll say, ah, this giraffe, this bit of a scrawny giraffe, and it stinks a little bit

And there's this great ritual of humility and insult that goes on

And the hunter will be expected to behave with great humility. And the way it was described by one man, he said, we use it to gentle young men's hearts

to enable leadership to be based purely on context and competence, voluntarily given and voluntarily accepted

Resources were shared openly and evenly and done through a system of demand sharing

In the system of demand sharing, it is in the right of pretty much anybody

to go and ask anybody else for a share of what they have

And it is considered extremely rude to turn that person down under any circumstances

It stops any kind of authority. This enabled food and resources to flow very evenly and very quickly through society

The truth is now very few zoologists in fact no zoologist or ecologist will think of an ecosystem as governed by competition Instead it will be governed by webs of intricate engagements some of which are cooperative some of which are less This idea

that nature is a constant competition for life is nonsense. Hunter-gatherers like the Junoasi

describe their environment as a kind of continuous flow of give and take between species and

interactions. There's absolutely no denying that the extraordinary attitudes that evolved during

hunter-gatherer have now brought us incredible benefits. We are both incredibly adaptable and

culturally intransigent. When change is forced upon us we're really good at adapting to it

we're amazingly good at doing it, but only when we have no choice. And I think what we might see

is a restructuring and reorganization of our societies. Identities now which are far more

hybridized, we certainly have a work identity through our zoom channel, but for many people I

I think there'll be an opportunity to re-engage themselves in the physical space that they

are in and I think it's going to profoundly reorganize the way we think about community

identity, belonging and self. Economists say we're all universally this kind of selfish beast

Anthropologists on the other hand take the very starting point of their experience is

based on generally going out and living somewhere where all your most fundamental and basic

ideas about how the world works are often turned on their heads. It's a fundamental transition

It upsets your sense of the world. And anthropologists, I think, are based on having this double perspective

of being in one world and from another, and then being able to look back in the world

that they're from. And frankly, I think it would be good if we still lived in a world

where people could experience another way of living and being to the point that it makes

the strange familiar and the familiar strange