For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.
— Janine Benyus
Vibrant Hunter Gatherers quotations
The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.
What do women do when they get together? We sit around and talk! Men, not so much. My theory is that this difference is genetic and dates back to the hunter-gatherer societies, when the men had to be quiet as they hunted, lest they scare away the bison and then everyone starved to death and it was all their fault.
Beyond Bookchin”, David Watson, of Fifth Estate, argues that aboriginal society represents a viable Utopia. He quotes favourably the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins; “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything, perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.
We must have been hunters and gatherers but some of us were just waiters and hopers.
We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we're shopper-borrowers.
Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life. We've taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.
The flute is traditionally the property of the male side of matrilineal hunter-gatherer societies and was used as a means of communication and personal expression.
The sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution
We were hunter-gatherers of information, and we moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information.
Human beings thrive on action. Stagnation does not wear well with us. We are said to have our origins as hunter-gatherers. We run and we chase. We are problem-solvers. We must be continuously tested and we continuously test ourselves. And it will not end until our lives end because of life itself.
People have been looking for love potions since hunter-gatherer societies.
We were hunter-gatherers of information, and we moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information.
We are a material goods and brands, hunter-gather society of hominids standing upright to shop.
There's something very terrifying about that and very primal about it.
It's my belief that what horror does for people is that it provides that primal fear that, when we were wild hunter-gatherers, we had as part of our natural lives because maybe something was trying to hunt and gather you as well. We don't have that anymore in life and that's one of the things that horror films and action films provide for us.
In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.
If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.
Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.
We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it's not a problem, but if they find a leader - a Captain Caveman, if you will - we'll be facing an even more serious problem.
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either.
A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?