Hunter-gatherer Quotes

The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag... Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle... (Daniel Levitin)
People have been looking for love potions since hunter-gatherer societies. View quote
Helen Fisher
Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The selection pressures of hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human evolution. View quote
E. O. Wilson
What do women do when they get together? We sit around and talk! Men, not so much. My theory is that this difference is genetic and dates back to the hunter-gatherer societies, when the men had to be quiet as they hunted, lest they scare away the bison and then everyone starved to death and it was all their fault. View quote
Jenny McCarthy
The singleton hypothesis is that Earth-originating intelligent life will (eventually) form a singleton. It is an open question whether the singleton hypothesis is true. My own opinion is that it is more likely true than not. Historically, we have seen an overarching trend towards the emergence of higher levels of social organization, from hunter-gatherer bands, to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states, and now multinational organizations, regional alliances, various international governance structures, and other aspects of globalization. Extrapolation of this trend points to the creation of a singleton. View quote
Nick Bostrom
I cannot name the 8 million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them, and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history. View quote
Yuval Noah Harari
Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life. We've taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure. View quote
Christopher McDougall
Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since. View quote
Naveen Jain
Survival-of the species of the culture of the faith-has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies-sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa? View quote
Ilana Mercer
If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. (Noam Chomsky)
A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need about 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can't have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It's not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales. View quote
Geoffrey West