H. Sapiens Notes

While most of us have learned that hunter-gatherers are "primitives" who lived lives inferior to our own, we've evidence that they may understand better than we how to live and die well. While hunting and gathering may be a lifestyle capable of supporting only a small fraction (1%?) of current human population, viewing it as a means by which we existed for 99+% of human tenure can be a way to put everything since dawn of agriculture in different perspective.

With cities, property rights, and labor specialization that followed widespread adoption of agriculture we've made other social and personal changes that persist to this day, and that in many cases growing numbers of us view as pernicious. As we become more aware of these we're questioning how we might evolve, mitigate, or altogether eliminate them to adapt more successfully.

Agricultural peoples command more energy and with it greater ability to manipulate people and things around us. Continuing into an industrial age we've accumulated artifact to create a positive feedback loop of increasing energy conversion and environmental manipulation based on more extensive and rapid resource exploitation and rising EROEI. As we deplete resources and proliferate hazards we see that persisting on this path is impossible. We can use understanding of other times and places to see beyond a current hegemonic world-view and better understand what we want--our values--and to predict consequences of various actions and shape experiments for adaptation.