Carl Sagan Legacy

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Humanity as Hunters and Foragers

I didn’t know what it was I was going to talk to you about tonight, and so I tried to pick a topic which was sufficiently broad and ambiguous that whatever I thought I would talk about would fit. However, what I’ve decided to talk about doesn’t fit. Well, maybe it does.

We humans have had civilization only for about 10,000 years. Our species is a few hundred thousand years old. Our genus, the genus Homo, is a few million years old. And therefore, for the vast bulk of our tenure on Earth, we were something other than sedentary. And the word has such an aura of self-congratulation, civilized. What were we?

We were hunters and foragers. We wandered in small, itinerant, extended families. And our knowledge of the hunt-and-gatherer lifestyle is due to a few courageous and far-seeing anthropologists who went and lived with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups before they were finally and utterly destroyed by civilization.

The anthropologist from whom I learned the most about hunter-gatherers is actually here with us, Richard Lee of the University of Toronto. He studied a people, the Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in the Republic of Botswana.

And I want to just give a little flavor about my understanding of our ancestors from Richard Lee’s study of the Kung San. I want you to know I practiced before the mirror for about half an hour.

Technology: A Deeply Human Trait

The first thing that I think is very important is that they are highly technological. The technology is wood and stone and domestication of fire technology. But it’s absolutely technology. And there are experts and other people who are not quite as good at the technology. But not only are they technological for fun, they are technological because their lives depend upon it.

Chipping and flaking stone tools back before they had a little trickle of metal into their economy is very difficult to do. Of course, they did it superbly well. And the archaeological and anthropological record is clear that we were technologists all the way back to the beginning.