Cannibals and Kings Read Free

relationship upon which the survival of our species depends, it is no easy task to thin out the human “crop.” In preindustrial times the effective regulation of population itself involved lowering the standard of living. For example, if population is to be reduced by avoiding heterosexual intercourse, a group’s standard of living can scarcely be said to have been maintained or enhanced. Similarly, if the fecundity of the group is to be lowered by midwives jumping on a woman’s stomach to kill the fetus and often the mothers as well, the survivors may eat better but their life expectancy will not be improved. Actually, the most widely used method of population control during much of human history was probably some form of female infanticide. Although the psychological costs of killing or starving one’s infant daughters can be dulled by culturally defining them as non-persons (just as modern pro-abortionists, of whom I am one, define fetuses as non-infants), the material costs of nine months of pregnancy are not easily written off. It is safe to assume that most people who practice infanticide would rather not see their infants die. But the alternatives—drastically lowering the nutritional, sexual, and health standards of the entire group—have usually been judged to be even more undesirable, at least in pre-state societies.
    What I am getting at is that population regulationwas often a costly if not traumatic procedure and a source of individual stress, just as Thomas Malthus suggested it would have to be for all future time (until he was proven wrong by the invention of the rubber condom). It is this stress—or reproductive pressure, as is might more aptly be called—that accounts for the recurrent tendency of pre-state societies to intensify production as a means of protecting or enhancing general living standards. Were it not for the severe costs involved in controlling reproduction, our species might have remained forever organized into small, relatively peaceful, egalitarian bands of hunter-collectors. But the lack of effective and benign methods of population control rendered this mode of life unstable. Reproductive pressures predisposed our stone age ancestors to resort to intensification as a response to declining numbers of big-game animals caused by climatic changes at the end of the last ice age. Intensification of the hunting and collecting mode of production in turn set the stage for the adoption of agriculture, which led in turn to heightened competition among groups, an increase in warfare, and the evolution of the state—but I am getting ahead of the story.

2
Murders in Eden
    The accepted explanation for the transition from band life to farming villages used to go like this: Hunter-collectors had to spend all their time getting enough to eat. They could not produce a “surplus above subsistence,” and so they lived on the edge of extinction in chronic sickness and hunger. Therefore, it was natural for them to want to settle down and live in permanent villages, but the idea of planting seeds never occurred to them. One day an unknown genius decided to drop some seeds in a hole, and soon planting was being done on a regular basis. People no longer had to move about constantly in search of game, and the new leisure gave them time to think. This led to further and more rapid advances in technology and thus more food—a “surplus above subsistence”—which eventually made it possible for some people to turn away from farming and become artisans, priests, and rulers.
    The first flaw in this theory is the assumption that life was exceptionally difficult for our stone age ancestors. Archaeological evidence from the upper paleolithic period—about 30,000 B.C . to 10,000 B.C .—makes it perfectly clear that hunters who lived during those times enjoyed relatively high standards of comfort and security. They were no bumbling amateurs. They had achieved total control over the process of fracturing,