During my recent [failed] fatbiking trek from the U.S. to the Yukon/NWT border area of B.C. (don’t ask… yet), I had a lot of time to think. I also had a lot of opportunity to engage the environment and interact with land and animals in a way not available to enclosed vehicle travelers. The combination of situational inputs repeatedly pulled my mind toward the nexus of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, fauna, food, farms, forests, and fences. As my mind wandered, a truism became more and more real — hunter-gatherers are not nomads.

At times I was seriously short of food, and shared that through the expedition twitter account. A frequent response was that I should simply hunt and gather along the way. While this advice was sometimes well-meaning, and sometimes in jest, it started to frustrate me over time. Despite having a measure of technology that would have allowed me to hunt and fish, I was traveling based on efficient routes, and not according to an abundance of edible wildlife. In the modern world, wildlife tends to be displaced by roads. Collecting data for a roadkill research project drove that point home — at times in a very visceral way.

It wasn’t just the roads. Farms and fences stretched for hundreds of miles. Some held cows or alpacas or horses in, but they also held the other animals out. Ecosystems had been chopped and burned and plowed into oblivion. What was once an area I could have hunted and gathered had been transformed into a garden for growing, as one sign cheerfully displayed, “snack foods”. The energy transmitted by the sun, converted by the earth, and solidified by the plants and animals was off limits to me and the furry creatures of the world.

I was traveling by road. Because of the ability to transport building materials before there were roads, many roads are built near railroads. Because of the ability to transport building materials before there were railroads, many railroads are build near rivers. River valleys are some of the most ecologically diverse regions on our home planet — that is, before they are obliterated by roads and railroads and dams and farms. Nearly every plant you buy in a grocery store has displaced a diverse ecosystem throughout its entire life. This tends to be true of the animals you eat as well.

My brain was in overdrive, and I kept coming back to the idea of an “intentional community” that wipes the slate clean of agricultural constructs such as feudalism, monotheism, patriarchy, sedentism, overspecialization, technophilia, and farming.

But Andrew, we don’t have feudalism anymore? That’s true in terms of the particular “legal and military customs”, but the goals of feudalism remain firmly entrenched:

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs… which, broadly defined, was a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour. – Wikipedia

Yes, it is true that the relationship derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour is now mediated by capital. However, the functional mechanism is largely intact.

Moving on.

What follows is an early sketch of what I have in mind. Normally, I’d develop and present support for something like this. However, I want to open it up to your input before diving too deep. Nothing here is set in stone, and should only be viewed as a point at which to start discussion.

Vision

To rethink the communities we voluntarily participate in starting with what we’ve only recently learned about our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is not a shunning of neolithic ideas per se, but a step back from the assumptions of agricultural civilization and rebuild on a clean slate.

To build a community deeply integrated with our current understanding of hunter-gatherer anthropology and evolved human psychology (with a small group of adventurous individuals).

To develop an evolving template for others who wish to do something similar.

Premises

• Civilization is a fairytale. The narrative of the civilized domesticated relies on the lie that humanity’s history began the same day as agriculture.
• Agriculture is overrated. Given the choice, hunter-gatherers have historically resisted assimilation by agricultural civilization.
• Agriculture breeds evil: Patriarchy, slavery, authoritarian gods, rape, and murder for hire.
• Agriculture hates life. The fertile crescent is a desert. Monocrops are a green veneer temporarily separating former ecosystems from future scorpion habitat.
• Ownership is for the lazy. Property (land) rights arose from agriculture as a response to sedentism and delayed return on investment, and are enforced through contractual evil (see previous).
• Security is an illusion. Agriculture’s exports are disease and famine.
• Comfort is a facade. Average dwelling size has increased from 100 sq. ft. to 2,300 sq. ft (U.S.) while happiness has decreased and depression has increased.
• Wealth is fake. Consumerism is an evolutionary mismatch that hijacks the human bias to collect resources for immediate consumption.
• Money is the root of all boredom. Now get back to work.

Comments on Common Missteps

Principles

1. Egalitarian

• Near zero difference in political power

2. Nomadic

• Think more opportunistic migration than perpetual motion or living in a van down by the river.
• De-emphasize notion of permanent residence with perpetual ownership
• Achieved via multiple locations in varied ecological contexts
• Apply timeshare concept as analogy to HG semi-nomadism.
• Sedentism is the path to land ownership with is the path to the state.

3. Play

• Play serves survival benefit in terms of simulating, and providing practice for, potentially dangerous situations
• Play serves reproductive benefit in terms of sexual selection
• The stifling of play in children and adults is a neolithic construct in service of the increased workload required to meet caloric needs under farming.

4. Self-sufficient

• Hunt
• Gather
• Quasi-gathering via minimal horticulture

5. Property rights distinguished from land rights

• No individual has a right to control natural resources
• No individual has the right to control objects fashioned from natural resources by another

6. Non-State

• Our country is the world
• The state is a function of agriculture
• The state incites, perpetuates, and hijacks human group bias to its own benefit.

7. Self-reliant

• Emphasize generalists over specialists
• Do not impose generalization in all domains
• Intentional division of labor foments sub-optimal well-being through fear of resource scarcity

8. Individualist

• Humans are individuals, and individuality should be allowed/encouraged to flourish
• Strict communalism tends to limit individual expression
• Sexual selection (in the technical, Darwinian sense) should not be impinged upon

Additional Inspirations

Foundational References

• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, Peter Gray
• The Hadza, Frank Marlowe
• The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott
• Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, Richard Manning
• Progress and Poverty, Henry George
• Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Christopher Boehm
• Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Paul Shepard
• The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Lierre Keith

UPDATE Spring 2015

We have laid the theoretical foundation for this concept, and purchased our first property! The ideas have change a bit since this was originally written, and in a good way.

First, a disclaimer: I have no moral qualms with with sex. My current interpretation is that, in humans, sex is a factor we use in deciding with whom to reproduce. If that’s true, the cult of monogamy serves, in some degree, to benefit individuals whose reproductive success is improved under that system. I also have no qualms about the theoretical underpinning of pick-up artists (PUAs) so far as it’s about jettisoning cultural baggage and presenting one’s self in the best light. Translation: I don’t hate the game.

Here’s where I do object: The hackneyed use of evolutionary psychology and pop-paleoanthropology to craft narratives of our evolutionary past, then use them to justify behaviors or strategies. Among PUAs, this is commonly manifested in a narrative that goes something like: “Humans evolved emotional responses that influence attraction in the paleolithic. During this period of human evolution, we lived in tribes. Because of the protective advantages, resource advantages, and social advantages of tribal leaders, women evolved an attraction to tribal leaders, a.k.a. alpha-males. Therefore, men should act like alpha males to attract women.”

Side Note: Lately, John Durant of hunter-gatherer.com has been writing about sorta similar things in the context of masculinity. While John’s recent posts have reminded me of my intent to write about this subject, I haven’t seen him construct this narrative. So… unless I missed something, the timing of this post is mostly a coincidence.

As to not be accused of constructing a straw-man, here are some quotes from “Mystery”, of the TV show The Pick-Up Artist. I can already hear the PUAs interjecting… “Yeah, but brah… he doesn’t represent all PUAs.” I fully agree with that point, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.

Evolutionary psychology and hunter-gatherer anthropology are ridiculously important and useful to a zillion things, and they continue to be held back by the pop-PUA bullshit that gets circulated endlessly. In other words, it makes my life difficult because I have to waste my time dealing with flak from people who object to the bullshit narrative — while I agree with their objections to the narrative. Darwin’s baby gets thrown out with the bathwater because a few people want to sell an image and a bunch of poorly researched ebooks.

The other objection I can hear rattling around in the most vapid of PUAs’ heads is, “Um, dude… So what, it fucking works.” That’s true in many cases, but it’s still a logically flawed argument. I’ll let those using it try to figure out why on their own.

But I digress… the quotes:

“Our emotional circuitry is designed to best suit our [survival and reproduction] based on an ancient environment and tribal social order that once existed tens of thousands of years ago.” – The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed (2005)

“Our emotions, and the behaviors they cause, are best adapted to a primitive tribal environment that no longer exists.” Revelation (2008)

“A friend that says, ‘He’s dated playboy models.’ Peacocking that screams tribal leader. Demonstrations of leading men in the group…. These are plotlines, and my game is full of them… learning that you are the tribal leader, having a jealousy plot line infuriate her…” The Pickup Artist: The New and Improved Art of Seduction (2010)

Anthropology argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

The main references cited in the PUA books mentioned in these posts are Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Evolution of Desire by David Buss (2003). I recommend both books, but the citations tend to misrepresent them. In the case of Dawkins’ book, it was written more than three decades ago, and anthropology has progressed radically in that time. Further, Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not an anthropologist. Using his work as an anthropological reference is bound to be somewhat problematic.

There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their social group — not exactly a benefit to reproduction. It appears that human ancestors likely lived in dominance hierarchies sometime in our distant past, but probably prior to the evolution of the hominin (human) line (Boehm 1999; Debreuil 2010). These works indicate that whatever “alpha” dominance tendencies evolved in our remote ancestors has most likely been evolving in the opposite direction for a couple million years. Among related primate ancestors, we see varying levels of dominance hierarchies, but the most recent common ancestor likely dates to 6 million years ago — a very far cry from merely “tens of thousands of years ago.” It must also be noted that as an evolutionary process, these behavioral traits exist on a continuum, and can’t be precisely mapped on a timeline. However, the “tribal” evolution narrative appears to be simply wrong.

Evolutionary argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

Without going into tedious detail, it’s unlikely that the alpha-male behavioral type (however imprecise that classification may be) is particularly adaptive. Traits that confer significant reproductive advantage tend to spread through a population rapidly. That basically means that traits that consistently vary widely among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being alpha was the ne plus ultra of mate wooing strategies, there would be a whooooooollle lot fewer “betas.”

Evidence of what works better

If evolved human dominance behaviors have been decreasing over time, we would expect to see something else evolve to replace it. Because of the evolution of hominin brain size and cognition across the paleolithic, we might expect that whatever trait evolved via sexual selection related to these developments. Indeed, humor and intelligence appear to be more attractive to women than testosterone-related masculinity when it matters most — during female ovulation (Kaufman, et al. 2007). Greengross & Miller (2011) also found that humor relates to intelligence, and predicts mating success. Further, their data showed that Christopher Hitchens was right, and that males use humor to be selected by women.

Verdict

Masculine or “alpha” behavior is attractive to some women sometimes. It appears to be a retained trait from multiple millions of years ago, that was once advantageous, but has lost its significance with respect to the population as a whole. I’ve personally experimented with gender stereotypes enough to know that the opposite of masculinity can be attractive to women as well. When successful, either approach will lead to massive selection bias.

So, the PUAs are partially right on the attractiveness of masculinity. However, their narrative is a myth, and buying into such myths can limit reproductive success — or whatever term the PUA flavor of the month is using for “fucking” these days.

Then again, if you have intelligence, and the humor related to it, you probably already know that playing one strategy for every game is itself a sub-optimal strategy.

References

Boehm, Christopher (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

Dubreuil, Benoit (2010). Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature.

Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2011). Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Intelligence, 39, 188-192. [PDF]

Kaufman, S. B., Kozbelt, A., Bromley, M. L., & Miller, G. F. (2007). The role of creativity and humor in mate selection. In G. Geher & G. Miller (Eds.), Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system (pp. 227-262). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [PDF]