MINDLESS MUSINGS

Our ever-inventive ancestors have significantly increased their chances of survival at this stage and that usually has a predictable outcome: population growth. The difference this time is that the extra sources of sustenance result in the tribe being able to accommodate more ankle biters. They also have the advantage of keeping these pint-sized assets and utilizing them as they grow, thus allowing the tribe to increase their members. Where once too large a group became a burden due to scarcity and instability, it is now a little more tenable.

I’m not talking about Shangri-La here. Of course, times were still very tough, but these were tough people. They had to be tenacious and resourceful just to stay alive! These weren’t people who were going to need to learn how to budget their resources to accommodate the extra offspring. They weren’t thinking “okay if we tighten our belts a bit, we might be able to cater for a few more”. They were already taking only what they needed to survive; maybe stashing a little to make it through a bad winter or some other kind of famine. Our ancestors didn’t need to count calories or worry about obesity.

So, my unscholarly conjecture is that the extra nourishment automatically got utilized by members who may have earlier been sent on their way and new babies whose mothers could supply more milk. I have no references to back this up, but it’s my way of creating a bridge between hunter gatherers and farmers.

I’m sure there is much more to the story, and I am certain that there were many stages in between these two stages of our development. There would have been an extremely long period where the two co-existed and interacted. Not as distinct as Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans, but still different and, without realising, progressing in distinctly separate ways somewhat like their own distant ancestors.

While not becoming completely extinct, the hunter gatherer numbers would be slowly, and relentlessly decimated whilst the farmers would continue to advance their powers of production and population growth to the almost unsustainable sum we have at present.

There are still a few remnants of our displaced predecessors. A few exotic populations who somehow managed to keep from getting completely engulfed by the tidal wave of human progress. Nomadic tribes in the Asia and Africa, the few remaining isolated populations in the Amazon or remote islands around the globe who unrelentingly embrace their way of life.

I really want to avoid having this whole exercise becoming a massive bummer, but I think we all know the writing is on the wall. These last remaining links to a time where humans were part of nature are only safe so long as there are no profits to be found by ‘relocating’ them. As soon as the dollar signs appear these extremely vulnerable ‘obstacles’ will be removed.

Viewing it from this perspective the tragedy is that much more palpable. I am only really becoming aware of this familial homicide as I write this. Moving on to the next phase suddenly feels like a movie where the opening scene lets you know things will end badly and then the story proper begins where we are introduced to our doomed characters and all their hopes and aspirations.

But on we must go, painful as it may be. We must watch as our forebears overtake and ultimately usurp our other forbears. And where did this divergence begin? According to my theory, it was a thing called surplus.