What Is A Hunter Gatherers Essay

If someone came up to you and said that they’d pay you $100 to give up your current lifestyle and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, would you do it? What about for $1,000? Would you still do it for no money at all, but with the knowledge that it would give you a better life? I would. My family would think me to be crazy. In fact, most Americans and Europeans would think that I was crazy, too. As stated in the passage Agriculture, for Better and Worse by Jared Diamond, they would think that I was crazy because “most people in modern industrial societies enjoy better health than hunter- gatherers.” Not only that, but these Americans and Europeans also enjoy more leisure time. Despite the better health and more leisure time, life as a hunter-gather …show more content…
This is not true, though. Let’s think about it. If you were living the average adult’s life, you would be working eight hours a day. The drive home from work may or may not take longer than thirty minutes due to traffic. By the time you get home, it would most likely be around five or six o’ clock. This leaves you with only a few hours to eat, relax, and prepare for the next day. So, obviously, you don’t want to be hunting down a deer or catching fish to eat. The life of a hunter- gatherer; however, is much more simpler than the average agricultural adult. Because there are no concepts of wealth, power, or social constructs, there are no such thing as “specialty jobs.” You were either a hunter or a gatherer, spending a few hours a day looking for food. For people like the Bushmen in Africa, they spend about 12-19 hours a week hunting and gathering their food. There are 168 hours in a week. So for the rest of the, say, 150 hours left, the Bushmen can do as they please. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have the extra 150 hours to make art and spend time with my family than just a few hours at the end of the day or the weekend. In addition to how little time is actually spent on finding food, hunter-gathers get their exercise from their daily hunting. They have to stealthily chase an animal, kill it, maybe climb up a …show more content…
Wouldn’t that be an amazing world to live in? Well, before the entrenchment of social inequality, people actually did live equal to one another. It’s been stated and proven quite a few times in Before Class, a passage from the book A People’s History of the World by Chris Harmon, that the hunter-gatherer societies were very egalitarian. This appeals to me greatly. An egalitarian society would mean that there is no class, competition, inequality, or oppression. This is what a hunter-gatherer’s society was like. Because everyone was treated equally, all of the food brought in was shared within the group. Not only that, but if someone was not able to bring in food, they would not be looked down upon. In the passage it states that there was the “absence of male supremacy over women” and that “both women and men would take part in making key decisions.” Gender inequality, though not very apparent, is a struggle that women face today. Women are treated as the lesser counterparts of men. This is not something that I would enjoy facing. In addition to the gender equality in hunter-gatherer societies, the passage states that “there was no...private land ownership.” This meant that no one owned their own piece of land, so one could assume that there wasn’t really a concept of material wealth. In fact, an early Jesuit missionary noted that the Montagnais gave themselves “to the devil to acquire wealth.” And really, I don’t get why