The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

by Jared Diamond

  Of course, conversation serves that same function of risk avoidance for us as well. We, too, talk, but we have less need of talk, because we face fewer dangers and have more sources of information. I’m reminded of an American friend whom I’ll call Sara, and whom I admired for her own efforts to cope with a dangerous world around her. Sara was a single mother, working full-time, living on a modest salary, and struggling to pay for her young son’s needs and her own needs. As a smart and sociable person, she was interested in meeting the right man to become a partner for her, a father for her son, a protector, and an economic contributor.

  For a single mother, the world of American men is full of dangers that are difficult to assess accurately. Sara had encountered her share of men who proved to be dishonest or violent. That didn’t discourage her from continuing to date. However, like !Kung hunters who don’t give up when they find lions on a carcass, but who use all their experience to assess quickly the dangers posed by those particular lions, Sara had learned to size up men quickly and to be alert for small signs of danger. She regularly spent much time talking with women friends in similar situations, in order to share experiences of men and other opportunities and risks of life, and so they could help each other make sense of their observations.

  Wayne Gretzky would understand why Sara kept exploring men, despite many missed shots. (I’m pleased to be able to report that Sara finally did make a happy second marriage, with a good man who was a single father when she met him.) And my New Guinea friends would understand Sara’s constructive paranoia, and all the time that she devoted to rehearsing with her friends the details of her daily life.

  CHAPTER 8

  Lions and Other Dangers

  Dangers of traditional life Accidents Vigilance Human violence Diseases Responses to diseases Starvation Unpredictable food shortages Scatter your land Seasonality and food storage Diet broadening Aggregation and dispersal Responses to danger

  Dangers of traditional life

  The anthropologist Melvin Konner spent two years living with !Kung hunter-gatherers in a remote area of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, far from any roads or towns. The nearest town was a small one with few motor vehicles, such that a car appeared along the road through town on the average only every minute or so. Yet when Konner brought a !Kung friend named !Khoma to the town, the man was terrified at the prospect of having to cross the road, even when no car was visible in either direction. This was a man whose lifestyle in the Kalahari involved driving lions and hyenas off the carcasses of game animals.

  Sabine Kuegler, the German missionary couple’s daughter who grew up with her parents among the Fayu tribe in Indonesian New Guinea’s swamp forests, where there are also no roads or motor vehicles or towns, related a similar reaction. At the age of 17 she finally left New Guinea to attend boarding school in Switzerland. “There were unbelievably many cars here, and they roared along so unbelievably fast!…Every time that we had to cross the street without a traffic light, I began to sweat. I couldn’t estimate the cars’ speed, and I was panicked that I would be run over…. Cars raced by from both directions, and when there was a small gap in the traffic, my friends ran across the street. But I stayed there, as if turned to stone…. For five minutes I kept standing at the same place. My fear was just too great. I walked a huge detour until I finally found a street-crossing with a traffic light. From then on, all my friends knew that they had to plan crossing the street with me far in advance. To this day, I’m still afraid of rushing traffic in cities.” Yet Sabine Kuegler had become accustomed to watching out for wild pigs and crocodiles in New Guinea swamp forests.

  These two similar stories illustrate several points. People in every society face dangers, but the particular dangers differ among societies. Our perceptions of both unfamiliar risks and familiar ones are often unrealistic. Konner’s !Kung friend and Sabine Kuegler were both correct, in that cars actually are the number-one danger in Western life. But American college students and women voters, asked to rank life’s dangers, both rated nuclear power as more dangerous than cars, despite nuclear power (even including the death tolls from the two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War II) having actually killed only a tiny fraction of the number of people that cars have killed. American college students also rate pesticides as extremely risky (close behind guns and smoking, in their opinion), and surgery as relatively safe, whereas in reality surgery is more dangerous than pesticides.

  One could add that traditional lifestyles are overall more dangerous than the Western lifestyle, as expressed in a much shorter lifespan. That difference, though, is mostly recent. Before effective state government began around 400 years ago to reduce the impact of famines, and especially before public health measures and then antibiotics largely overcame infectious diseases less than 200 years ago, lifespans in European and American state societies were no higher than in traditional societies.

  What, really, are the main dangers in traditional life? We shall see that lions and crocodiles are only part of the answer. As for reactions to dangers, we modern people sometimes respond rationally by adopting measures effective at minimizing the dangers, but in other cases we respond “irrationally” and ineffectively, e.g. by denial, or else by prayer and other religious practices. How do traditional peoples respond to dangers? I shall discuss what seem to me to be the four main groups of dangers faced by traditional peoples: environmental hazards, human violence, infectious and parasitic diseases, and starvation. The first two of those groups are still major problems in modern Western societies, the third and especially the fourth less so (although they are still important in other parts of the modern world). Then I’ll briefly mention ways in which our assessments of risks are distorted, such that we overreact to pesticides and underreact to surgery.

  Accidents

  When we imagine the dangers facing traditional societies, our first association is likely to be with lions and other environmental hazards. In reality, for most traditional societies environmental dangers rank only third as a cause of death, behind disease and human violence. But environmental dangers exert a bigger effect on people’s behavior than do diseases, because for environmental dangers the relation between cause and effect is much quicker and more easily perceived and understood.

  Table 8.1 lists the main reported causes of accidental death or injury for seven traditional peoples for whom summaries are available. All seven live in or near the tropics and practise at least some hunting and gathering, but two (New Guinea Highlanders and the Kaulong) obtain most of their calories by farming. Obviously, different traditional peoples must face different dangers related to their different environments. For instance, drowning and being carried out to sea on an ice floe are risks for the Inuit of the Arctic coast but not for the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, while being struck by a toppling tree and being bitten by a poisonous snake are risks for Aka Pygmies and the Ache but not for the Inuit. Falling into a collapsing underground cavern is a risk for the Kaulong but for none other of the seven tabulated groups, because only the Kaulong live in an environment with many thinly roofed sinkholes. Obviously too, Table 8.1 lumps together the differences between sexes and age classes within a society: accidents kill more men than women among the Ache, the !Kung, and many other peoples, not only because hunting animals by men poses more dangers than does plant gathering by women, but also because men tend to be more risk-seeking than are women. But Table 8.1 still suffices to suggest some conclusions.

  Table 8.1. Causes of accidental death and injury

  Ache (Paraguay) 1. Poisonous snakes. 2. Jaguars, lightning, getting lost. 3. Tree-fall, falling from tree, infected insect bites and thorn scratches, fire, drowning, exposure, cut by ax.

  !Kung (Southern Africa) 1. Poisoned arrows. 2. Fire, large animals, poisonous snakes, falling from tree, infected thorn scratch, exposure. 3. Getting lost, lightning.

  Aka Pygmies (Central Africa) Falling from tree, tree-fall, large animals, poisonous snakes, drowning.

  New
Guinea Highlands 1. Fire, tree-fall, infected insect bites and thorn scratches.

  2. Exposure, getting lost.

  Fayu (New Guinea lowlands) Scorpions and spiders, poisonous snakes, pigs and crocodiles, fire, drowning.

  Kaulong (New Britain) 1. Tree-fall. 2. Falling from tree, drowning, cut by ax or knife, collapse of underground cavern.

  Agta (Philippines) Tree-fall, falling from tree, drowning, hunting and fishing accidents.

  We note first that Table 8.1 makes no mention of the main causes of accidental death in modern Westernized societies: in descending sequence of death toll, we are killed by cars (Plate 44), alcohol, guns, surgery, and motorcycles, of which none except occasionally alcohol is a hazard for traditional peoples. One might wonder whether we have merely traded our old hazards of lions and tree-falls for our new hazards of cars and alcohol. But there are two other big differences between environmental hazards in modern societies and in traditional societies besides the particular hazards involved. One difference is that the cumulative risk of accidental death is probably lower for modern societies, because we exert far more control over our environment even though it does contain new hazards of our own manufacture such as cars. The other difference is that, thanks to modern medicine, the damage caused by our accidents is much more often repaired before it kills us or inflicts life-long incapacity. When I broke a tendon in my hand, a surgeon splinted my hand, which healed and regained full function within six months, but some New Guinea friends who experienced tendon and bone breaks ended up with no or improper healing and were crippled for life.

  Those two differences are part of the reason why traditional people so willingly abandon their jungle lifestyle, admired in the abstract by Westerners, who don’t have to live that lifestyle themselves. For instance, those differences help explain why so many Ache Indians give up the freedom of their lives as forest hunters and settle on reservations, degrading as that may seem to outsiders. Similarly, an American friend of mine traveled halfway around the world to meet a recently discovered band of New Guinea forest hunter-gatherers, only to discover that half of them had already chosen to move to an Indonesian village and put on T-shirts, because life there was safer and more comfortable. “Rice to eat, and no more mosquitoes!” was their short explanation.

  As you read through the seven sets of entries of Table 8.1, you’ll see some common themes of dangers that are serious for many or most traditional peoples, but that are rare or surprising for us moderns. Wild animals are indeed a major threat for traditional peoples (Plate 43). For example, jaguars cause 8% of deaths of adult Ache men. Lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, buffalo, and crocodiles do kill Africans, but the animal that kills more Africans than any other is the hippopotamus. !Kung and African Pygmies are killed, bitten, scratched, and gored not just by big carnivores but also by antelope and other injured prey that they hunt. While we are horrified at the idea of !Kung hunters driving prides of lions from carcasses, the !Kung recognize that the most dangerous lion is in fact a lone beast too old, sick, or wounded to catch swift prey and reduced to attacking humans.

  Poisonous snakes also rank high as a hazard for the tropical peoples of Table 8.1. They cause 14% of deaths of adult Ache men (i.e., more than jaguars), and even more loss of limbs. Almost every adult Yanomamo and Ache man has been bitten at least once. Ranked even more often as dangerous are trees, as a result both of trees or branches falling on people in the forest (remember my own experience that I described at the start of Chapter 7), and of people climbing a tree to hunt or to gather fruit or honey and falling out of the tree (Plate 42). Domestic fires for warmth are a bigger risk than bush fires, such that most New Guinea Highlanders and !Kung acquire burn scars from sleeping next to a fire as an adult or playing next to it as a baby.

  Death from exposure to cold and/or wet weather is a danger outside the tropics, and at high altitudes in New Guinea and elsewhere in the tropics. Even for the Ache living in Paraguay near the Tropic of Capricorn, winter temperatures can drop below freezing, and an Ache caught out in the forest at night without a fire is at risk of dying. On one of New Guinea’s highest mountains, while I was hiking well prepared and warmly dressed in freezing rain and gale-force winds at an altitude of 11,000 feet, I met a group of seven New Guinea schoolchildren who had foolishly set out that morning in clear weather, wearing shorts and T-shirts, to cross the mountain. By the time that I encountered them several hours later, they were shivering uncontrollably, stumbling, and barely able to speak. Local men with me, who shepherded them to a shelter, pointed out to me a nearby rock pile behind which a group of 23 men had sought shelter in bad weather in a previous year and had ended up dying there of exposure. Drowning and being struck by lightning are other environmental hazards for traditional as well as modern peoples.

  The !Kung, New Guineans, Ache, and many other foraging peoples are legendary for their ability to follow tracks, read clues in the environment, and detect a barely indicated trail. Nevertheless, even they, and especially their children, occasionally make mistakes, get lost, and may be unable to find their way back to camp before nightfall, with fatal consequences. Friends of mine were involved in two such tragedies in New Guinea, one in which a boy walking with a group of adults wandered off and was never found despite exhaustive searches that same day and on the following days, the other in which an experienced strong man became lost on a mountain in the late afternoon, could not reach his village, and died of exposure in the forest at night.

  Still other causes of accidents are our own weapons and tools. The arrows used by !Kung hunters are smeared with a potent poison, with the result that an accidental scratch by an arrow is the most serious cause of hunting accidents for the !Kung. Traditional people around the world accidentally cut themselves with their own knives and axes, as do modern cooks and woodsmen.

  Less heroic and much commoner than lions or lightning as causes of accidental death or injury are humble insect bites and thorn scratches. In the humid tropics any bite or scratch—even one from a mere gnat, leech, louse, mosquito, or tick—is likely to become infected, and to develop if untreated into an incapacitating abscess. For example, once when I revisited a New Guinea friend named Delba with whom I had spent several weeks hiking through the forest two years previously, I was shocked to find him house-bound and unable to walk at all, as the result of a simple scratch that had become infected, and that then responded quickly to antibiotics that I carried but that New Guinea villagers don’t have. Ants, bees, centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and wasps not only bite or scratch but also inject poisons that are sometimes fatal. Along with falling trees, stinging wasps and biting ants are the dangers that my New Guinea friends fear most in the forest. Some insects lay an egg under one’s skin, from which hatches a larva that produces a huge and permanently disfiguring abscess.

  While these causes of accidents in traditional societies are varied, they yield some generalizations. Serious consequences of accidents include not just death itself but also, even if one survives, the possibility of temporarily or permanently decreased physical effectiveness, resulting in impaired capacity to provide for one’s children and other relatives, decreased resistance to diseases, crippling, and limb amputation. It’s these “minor” consequences, not the risk of death, that make my New Guinea friends and me so afraid of ants, wasps, and infected thorn scratches. A poisonous snake bite that the victim survives may still cause gangrene and leave the victim paralyzed, maimed, or having lost the bitten arm or leg.

  Just like the omnipresent risk of starvation to be discussed later in this chapter, environmental hazards influence people’s behavior far more than one might guess from the number of deaths or injuries caused. In fact, the number of deaths may be low precisely because so much behavior is invested in combating the hazards. For instance, lions and other big carnivores account for only 5 out of 1,000 !Kung deaths, and this might mislead one to the erroneous conclusion that lions are not a big factor in !Kung life. In reality, that low death to
ll reflects the profound influence of lions on !Kung life. New Guineans, living in an environment without dangerous carnivores, hunt at night; the !Kung don’t, both because it then becomes difficult to detect dangerous animals and their tracks, and because dangerous carnivores themselves are more active at night. !Kung women always go foraging in groups, constantly make noise and talk loudly to ensure that animals do not encounter them by surprise, look for tracks, and avoid running (because it incites a predator to attack). If a predator is seen in the vicinity, the !Kung may restrict their travel out of camp for a day or two.

  Most accidents—those caused by animals, snakes, falling trees, falling out of a tree, bush fires, exposure, getting lost, drowning, insect bites, and thorn scratches—are associated with going out to forage for or to produce food. Most accidents could thus be avoided by staying home or in camp, but then one would acquire no food. Hence environmental dangers illustrate the modified Wayne Gretzky principle: If one takes no shots, then one will miss no shots but one is also guaranteed to score no goals. Traditional foragers and farmers, even more than Wayne Gretzky, must balance hazards against the overriding need for a steady stream of scores. Similarly, we modern city-dwellers could avoid the major hazard of urban life, car accidents, by staying home and not exposing ourselves to thousands of other drivers roaring unpredictably at 60 to 100 miles per hour along the freeways. But the jobs and shopping of most of us depend on driving. Wayne Gretzky would say: If no drives, then no pay check and no food.