back to hunter-gatherers

We are shedding our agricultural traditions and, in some respects, returning to our nomadic roots.

Few of us still live in the house where we grew up. Rather, many of us have several places we call home—our parent's house, the office, our own residence, and perhaps a vacation spot. We migrate between them. We no longer grow our own food. We now hunt and gather in the grocery store and then carry home our catch—as Homo erectus did over a million years ago. (I am not surprised that we like fast foods either, or eat between meals here and there as we move through the day; our ancestors certainly ate as they marched along.) We commute to work again. And we have a loose network of friends and relatives, many of whom live far away.

These are habits from our past. We are shedding the sexual attitudes of farm life too. In preindustrial Europe, a wedding often marked a merger of property and an alliance between families. So marriages had to be stable and permanent. This necessity is gone. A woman's job was to bear her husband's seed and raise his young; hence our agrarian forerunners required virginity at marriage. This custom is gone. Many of our farming ancestors carefully arranged their marriages. This practice is largely gone. They banned divorce. This is gone. They had a double standard for adultery. This has changed. And they celebrated two marital mottoes: "Honor thy husband" and "Till death us do part." These, too, are disappearing.

For the past several thousand years, most farm women had only three basic options: to be uneducated, subservient housewives; to be cloistered nuns; to be courtesans, prostitutes, or concubines. Men, on the other hand, held the sole responsibility for the family income and welfare of the young.

Now vast numbers of women work outside the home. We have double-income families. We are more nomadic. And we have a growing equality between the sexes. In these respects, we are returning to traditions of love and marriage that are compatible with our ancient human spirit.

Other things:

Women have begun to space their children farther apart as well. In societies where woman gather or garden for a living, they tend to bear their young about every four years. This gives the mother uninterrupted time with her infant before she bears a second child. Today this trait, birth spacing, is returning.

Women will continue to work. Female chimpanzees work. Female gorillas, orangutans, and baboons work. For millenia, hunting-gathering women worked. On the farm women worked. The housewife is more an invention of privileged people in ranked societies than a natural role of the human animal. The double-income family is part of our human hertiage.

Margaret Mead once said: “The first relationship is for sex; the second is for children; the third is for companionship.”