Free Hunters And Gatherers A Better Way Of Life Essay Example

[Your Full Name]
[Instructor or Professor's Name; for example, Professor Rusty Shackleford]
[Date; for example, 29 February 2011]

I saw the movie ‘The God’s Must Be Crazy’ (Uyes, 1981) a comedy about how hunters and gatherers in Africa come into contact with progressionist for the first time. This movie emphasized the things in our society today that this tribe did not have nor need. From lifestyle perspective and sociological perspective being a hunter and gatherer may be much better than a progressionist. Joshua Diamond paper (Diamond, 1987) gives insight into both the hunter gather lifestyle and discusses how it differs from a farmer progressionist life. He tells that the health of the hunter and gatherer is healthier e.g. less bone lesions, longer lifespan, increase stature and little to disease needed. The diet of the hunter and gatherer has also been observed to have much more variety and protein than the starch laden diet of progressionist. Progressionists farming techniques tended to make them less mobile but this led people to stay around fertile land, build cities, change the balance between men and women, make economic classes when they stayed at one particular location.
Although many modern philosphers might seem hunters and gatherers to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ (Diamond, 1987) the opposite is probably true. Hunters and gatherers were quite healthy. Since they had a wide variety of food to choose. Hunters and gatherers had more than what the farmers had like pasta and potatoes which is missing a lot of vital vitamins. Diamond shows that the Bushmen’s daily food intake was far greater than the daily allowance of people that farmed. This meant that they had quite a lot of food sources with many wild plants and several different types protein sources that did not contain nasty parasites found when animals were domesticated and eaten. Hunters and gathers’ diet is still being investigated and it can be shown that the microbiome of the Hazda is significantly better than Italians (Schnorr, 2014) which could have help them fight off diseases. This is corroborated in Diamond’s paper (Diamond, 1987) which tells that farmers had an increase in malnutrition, and diseases like tuberculosis. Lastly, hunters and gatherers did not have so much famine as they could move for their food. Hunters and gatherers had a four course meal when farmers only had one.
With a better diet hunters and gatherers were generally healthier but how did they discover this? Paleopathologists found human remains that could compare the differences between the two different groups discussed. Firstly, Hunters and gatherers were not ‘short’ like modern philosophers mention. In fact they were taller than the early farming Turks by six inches for men and at least five inches for women. One striking comparison is to see when the hunters and gatherers changed to farming at Dickson mounds in Illinois. After adopting to a farmer life they had a fifty percent increase in anemia, a larger increase in bone lesions and a rise in back problems likely related to heavy labour. Lastly early farming communities died much earlier than their hunter gatherer counterparts. The initial benefit of saving time and aggregating population might have sounded good at first but ultimately killed them literally in the end.
When one stays in one location it created conflict with each other and an imbalance in the sexes. Hunters and gatherers’ had to be small and mobile in order to move over large distances for their next food source. They had an optimal number (‘1 over 10 square miles’) and they could only take what they could carry. This did not allow for food storage. When people aggregated (nearly 100 or more people per 10 square miles) to cities they increased in numbers, with increased food that they stored they created power struggles like kings and governments. This created a class system ‘with Royals [enjoying] a better diet than commoners’. With hunters and gatherers they got the same diet. Also they enjoyed something that we still have not been able to figure out today: sexual equality. Women in farming communities could be made ‘beast of burden’ to at the farm or raise several infants simultaneously. These types of two types of inequality are still prevalent today that would not exist if humans were hunters and gatherers.
Jared Diamond (Diamond, 1987) holds that, "We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture". With 10,000 years of being hunters and gatherers they developed a more varied diet. With this diet they were healthier and had less diseases. And because they did stay in one place they did not need a class system nor sexual inequality. As we have entered the 21st century we are plagued with malnutrition, diseases like obesity, cancer, diabetes and many wars. Maybe it would be a good time to return to being hunters and gatherers?

Works Cited

The God’s must be Crazy. Dir Jamie Uyes. Perf. N!xau, Marius Weyers, Sandra Prinsloo. Cat Films, Mimosa Films, 1981. Film.
Diamond, Jared. "The worst mistake in the history of the human race." Discover8.5 (1987): 64-66.
Schnorr, Stephanie L., et al. "Gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers." Nature communications 5 (2014).