To hell with a hunting knife

After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination By Kirkpatrick Sale Duke University Press, 2006 Review by Tricia Shapiro Primitivists say that humans and the planet they've come to dominate started going to hell with the adoption of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, the decisive wrong turn came much, much earlier than that. After Eden makes a persuasive case that humankind's relations with nature fundamentally changed around 70,000 years ago, when our previous way of life as scavengers and foragers was challenged by changes in climate. In response, Homo sapiens adopted a way of life primarily relying on hunting and killing animals, facilitated by a culture that placed humans outside of nature and encouraged the development of ever-more-effective technologies that enabled humans to dominate nature. Sale calls this "Sapiens culture," in contrast to the earlier culture of Homo erectus, a label Sale construes broadly enough to include the Neandertals of Europe and pre-sapiens humans in Asia and Africa. Sapiens culture enabled humans to multiply in numbers, to spread out and occupy most of the world and to weather subsequent crises–all by further developing technologies of domination over nature. Beginning around 10,000 years ago, humans developed "agriculture and the domestication of both plant and animal species," Sale writes, "the ultimate form of domination, but entirely of a pattern with the previous Sapiens experience." This summary is a gross oversimplification of Sale's elegant, brief (only 138 pages plus notes) and very readable re-telling of human prehistory. Sale nicely conveys the synergy of human relations with nature–domination isn't a simple one-time event but rather an evolving process, with humans at particular times and places making changes to their natural setting and those changes in turn causing humans to change and make further changes to nature, or to migrate with their nature-dominating technologies to new places and resume the process there. Although the book's central idea is quite original, it is well-grounded in current, mainstream archeological and anthropological scholarship, documented in fully 40 pages at the back of the book. Sale makes a compelling case for continuity between Sapiens hunting culture and Sapiens agriculture. This continuity does not, however, rule out ways in which agriculture truly does differ from what came before. Unlike hunting culture, which is at least hypothetically consistent with a steady human population, agriculture as adopted by early humans is inherently a sort of Ponzi scheme, a scam by which a small number of early investors are enriched by large numbers of later investors who hope for enrichment from an exponentially larger number of still later investors. A mobile, hunting way of life can support only a limited number of children; settled agriculture both encourages farmers to have many children, to help with the farming and take care of the parents in old age, and enables them to store a surplus of food to feed those extra mouths. Although, as Sale ably chronicles, Sapiens hunting culture time and again hunted animals to extinction, the pace and scale of human-caused extinction have increased exponentially with agriculture and industry's ever-growing consumption of natural resources to support the growth that the modern, Ponzi-like Sapiens economy demands. Sapiens culture–from hunting culture to agriculture to industry–has so accelerated its accumulation of species extinctions and local ecological collapses that the whole planet's web of life is now on the brink of collapse. Sale notes that we are now "consuming a vast variety of plant, animal and mineral resources, often to depletion, at a pace that is estimated not to be sustainable for more than fifty years." Sale notes that the humans who preceded Homo sapiens–Homo erectus–persisted as a species for nearly two million years, 10 times longer than Homo sapiens has so far survived, and did so without radically altering their natural environments. He believes "that essential identity with the natural world, that inherent harmony with living creatures, was what made Erectus society so enduring." Sale details several ways in which Erectus culture (what little we know about it) and an "Erectus consciousness" might guide us in the crisis humankind now faces. He also notes that we modern humans still carry most of Erectus's genetic baggage–and asserts that we carry much of Erectus culture, too, however marginalized or obscured by modern culture. "Modern civilization has lasted a mere blip in time," Sale reminds us, "and it has had very little real depth of influence on our basic hominid natures. Underneath the veneer is a Stone Age mind and a Stone Age heart." Of course, we can't go back to the Stone Age. But we can't go forward as we've been doing, either–the current ecological crisis calls for a cultural shift as profound as the shift from Erectus to Sapiens culture. Sale believes that these radical changes long-ago hold keys to the change just ahead of us: "We will need the wisdom of the Erectus and the skill of the Sapiens, our Stone Age hearts and minds, to survive." We'll also need a boundless willingness to change, and a lot of good luck.