Why did our ancestors hardly work, and now we work hard?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Robotization and automation are already taking up jobs today, and this process will only intensify in the future. What should people who are freed from labor do?

One of the main options is welfare (basic income). His opponents usually say that socialism and the absence of hired, long-term labor are unnatural for a person. However, for most of human history, humans have worked very little. Hunters and gatherers needed 2-4 hours of labor per day for a lifetime. Moreover, their diet was richer than that of peasants who worked 8-12 hours a day, they were less sick. The rest of the time the foragers spent on leisure, which was their goal and value, and labor was a means and necessity. Leisure is not a rest from (and for) work, it is a form of social life itself, the content of which is mutual visits, games, dances, festivities, various rituals and all kinds of communication.

“We made the biggest mistake in history: choosing between declining population and increasing food production, we chose the latter and ultimately doomed ourselves to hunger, war and tyranny. The lifestyles of hunter-gatherers have been the most successful in the history of mankind, and their lifespan was the longest, wrote the American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond in his book The Worst Mistake of Humanity (1987).

It is not labor, but social activity that is biologically determined for a person. For most of their history, humans have practiced appropriative farming, which allows them to get the most of their products with the least amount of labor. Thus, most of the time, members of pre-agricultural and non-agricultural communities could spend rest, communication and various group rituals. It is possible that a similar situation will develop in the emerging post-labor society, so that the near future will become like the distant past. How our ancestors treated work is described in the article by Andrey Shipilov, Doctor of Culturology (“Life without labor?

“Before the industrial revolution, the concepts of work and value, work and happiness excluded rather than presupposed each other. According to G. Standing, “the ancient Greeks understood that it was ridiculous and ridiculous to evaluate everything from the point of view of labor,” and even for the Middle Ages, in the semantics of “work”, “labor” and “slavery” were weakly separated from each other - this is a negatively valuable occupation of the lower estates and classes was considered as the diametrical opposite of praxis / leisure, that is, the self-directed activity of the higher.

M. McLuhan wrote that “a primitive hunter or fisherman was no more busy with work than today's poet, artist or thinker. Labor appears in sedentary agrarian communities along with the division of labor and specialization of functions and tasks. " D. Everett, who observed the life of the modern Amazonian Piraha tribe, also notes: "The Indians get food with such pleasure that it hardly fits into our concept of labor." KK Martynov formulates: “In the Paleolithic, man did not work - he looked for food, roamed and multiplied. The field to be cultivated has created labor, its division and surplus food."

During the first 90% of its history, man was engaged in appropriation, and 90% of people who have ever lived on Earth practiced the latter, so, in the words of I. Morris, "we can even call collecting a natural way of life." M. Salins described the society of hunters and gatherers as "a society of primordial abundance", meaning that the primitive and later ethnographically studied groups of foragers had ample resources to fully satisfy their limited material needs, obtaining maximum results with minimal labor costs."

For obvious reasons, the foragers of the northern and polar territories most of the diet consists of hunting products, and in the southern and tropical regions - gathering products; the balance of meat (and fish) and plant foods varies widely, but the diets themselves, in any case, correspond to energy costs, and, as a rule, completely cover them. According to isotope studies, the Neanderthals living in areas of a cold climate were so carnivorous that their diet was completely consistent with that of a wolf or hyena; some groups of modern Eskimos and Indians of the Subarctic also do not eat plant foods, while in others its share generally does not exceed 10%. The latter ate, respectively, fish (20-50% of the diet) and meat (20-70% of the diet), and quite abundantly: in the 1960s-80s. the Athapaskans of the Great Slave Lake region consumed an average of 180 kg of meat per person per year; among the Indians and Eskimos of Alaska, the consumption of fish and meat of wild animals ranged from 100 to 280 kg per year, and among the indigenous population of northern Canada - from 109 to 532 kg.

However, the consumption of meat was quite high in the south: for example, the Kalahari Bushmen consumed 85-96 kg of meat per year, and the Mbuti pygmies, whose diet consisted of 70% of gathering products, 800 g per day.

Ethnographic materials give some idea of what natural resources were at the disposal of hunters and gatherers. According to one testimony, a 132-strong Andaman group hunted 500 deer and over 200 small game during the year. In the middle of the 19th century, Siberian Khanty hunted up to 20 elk and deer per hunter a year, not counting small game. At the same time, the aboriginal population of the Northern Ob (Khanty and Nenets), whose population, including women and children, was 20-23 thousand people, mined 114-183 thousand pieces a year. different animals, up to 500 thousand pieces. birds (14, 6-24, 3 thousand poods), 183-240, 6 thousand poods of fish, collected up to 15 thousand poods of pine nuts.

In the North and Siberia in the XIX century. Russian hunters, with the help of overweight fishing nets, caught from 50 to 300 ducks and geese per night. In the Usa valley (a tributary of the Pechora), 7-8 thousand ptarmigan per family or 1-2 thousand pieces were harvested for the winter. per person; one hunter caught up to 10 thousand birds. In the lower reaches of the Ob, Lena, Kolyma, the aboriginal population hunted molted game (waterfowl lose their ability to fly during molting) at a rate of several thousand per hunter per season; in the early 1820s, a hunter hunted up to 1,000 geese, 5,000 ducks and 200 swans, and in 1883 one observer witnessed how two men killed 1,500 molting geese with sticks in half an hour.

In Alaska, in successful years, the Athabascans hunted up to 30 beavers weighing from 13 to 24 kg and up to 200 muskrats weighing from 1, 4 to 2, 3 kg per hunter (if the muskrat meat has a caloric value of 101 kcal, then the beaver meat - 408 kcal, surpassing in this regard, good beef with its 323 kcal). The fishing of sea animals and fish is also characterized by very impressive figures. In northern Greenland in the 1920s, one hunter hunted an average of 200 seals a year. The Californian Indians hunted up to 500 salmon per six people during one night (during spawning); the tribes of North-West America stored 1,000 salmon per family and 2,000 liters of fat per person for the winter.

The "primitive" hunter-gatherer groups ate both more and better than the domesticated farmers. Agriculture stimulated demographic growth and increased population density (from 9500 BC to 1500 AD the world population increased 90 times - from about 5 million to 450 million people. Under the Malthusian laws, population growth outstripped the increase in food production, so the peasant got less than the forage.

The diet of a traditional farmer by two-thirds, or even three-quarters, consists of one or more crop products (wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, etc.), rich in carbohydrates, which provides a high calorie content, but the nutritional value decreases due to the expressed deficiency of proteins (especially animals), vitamins, trace elements and other substances necessary for the body. Also, specific agricultural diseases develop (primarily caries, also scurvy, rickets). Livestock raising with a relatively large size of permanent settlements and overcrowding of residence is a source of infectious zoonoses (brucellosis, salmonellosis, psittacosis) and zooanthroponoses - epidemic diseases that were originally acquired by people from livestock and later evolved, such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, tropical malaria, influenza and etc.

Hunters and gatherers who lived in small, mobile and often seasonally dispersed groups did not know these diseases, were taller and generally had better health compared to communities that had switched to a producing economy, due to an extremely varied diet, which included up to hundreds or more types of plant foods. and animal origin.

The transition to a manufacturing economy was not historically inevitable, occurring independently only a few times in several regions of the Earth under the influence of a complex combination of environmental and socio-cultural factors. Neither a practically sedentary lifestyle, nor the domestication of animals (dog, deer, camel), nor even the emergence and development of quasi-agricultural tools and technologies were not a guarantee of such a transition. For example, the Australian aborigines lived in an area where endemics suitable for breeding grew (the same root and tuber crops were introduced into the culture in neighboring New Guinea), had axes and grain grinders, knew how to care for plants and harvest, owned a wide range of processing plants for cooking, including threshing and grinding, and even practiced some form of irrigation. However, they never switched to agriculture, due to the lack of need for it - their needs were completely satisfied by hunting and gathering.

"Why should we grow plants when there are so many Mongongo nuts in the world?" Said the Kjong Bushmen, while the Hadza gave up farming on the grounds that "it would take too much hard work." And one can not only understand them, but also agree with them: the Hadza spent on average no more than two hours a day on getting food, khong - from 12 to 21 hours a week, while a farmer's labor costs are equal to nine hours a day, and a working week in modern developing countries it reaches 60 and even 80 hours. Approximately the same amount of time was spent on hunting and gathering and other groups of "earners" studied by anthropologists: the Bushmen of the Gui - no more than three to four hours a day, the same amount - the Paliyans (South India), Australian Aborigines and Indians of the American Southwest - from two - three to four to five hours a day

K. Levy-Strauss also noted: “As studies conducted in Australia, South America, Melanesia and Africa have shown, it is enough for able-bodied members of these societies to work two to four hours a day to support a family, including children and the elderly, more or no longer involved in the production of food. Compare with how much time our contemporaries spend at a factory or office!"

What did these people do in their “free time from work”? And they did nothing - if only labor was considered a "deed". As one of the latter described in a study of Australian Aborigines in Arnhem Land, "He spent most of his time talking, eating and sleeping." In the other observed groups, the situation did not differ from that described: “Men, if they stayed in the parking lot, slept after breakfast for one to one and a half hours, sometimes even longer. Also, after returning from hunting or fishing, they usually went to sleep either immediately upon arrival, or while the game was cooking. Women, gathering in the forest, seemed to have a rest more often than men. Staying in the parking lot all day, they also slept during their free hours, sometimes for a long time."

“Often I saw men doing nothing all day, but just sitting around a smoldering fire, chatting, laughing, emitting gases and dragging baked sweet potatoes from the fire,” writes D. Everett.

Along with this, the demand for intensive labor, which lies at the origins of industrial civilization, perceived as a religious-moral-economic imperative, is rejected even by the groups involved in interaction with it, which retain the foraging mentality and values: it is more important for them to work less than earn more, and even “implementation new tools or crops that increase the productivity of native labor can only lead to a reduction in the period of compulsory work - the benefits will serve to increase the time of rest rather than to increase the product produced. When the Highlanders of New Guinea gained access to iron axes instead of stone ones, their food production increased by only 4%, but the production time was cut fourfold, resulting in a significant increase in ceremonial and political activity.

Thus, for a society of earners, in contrast to a society of producers, leisure is an end and a value, and labor is a means and a necessity; Leisure is not a rest from (and for) work, it is a form of social life itself, the content of which is mutual visits, games, dances, festivities, various rituals and all kinds of communication. Social interaction in the space of horizontal and vertical hierarchy is natural for a person, since he is a social being. If labor distinguishes him from animals, then sociality brings them closer to them - at least with our closest siblings and ansestors, that is, species brothers and ancestors in the hominid family."