Just wondering if you can look a the most technologically undeveloped human hunter-gatherer groups that still exist, and use them as an accurate picture of what human life was like 50,000 to 100,000 years go?
Physiologically we’re all more or less “modern humans”, on the other side evolution moves pretty slowly, so biologically (I’m guessing) we’re pretty close to our 50-100 thousand year old ancestors.
Is looking backwards based on the most primitive human societies extant a scientifically valid way of reckoning what human society was like 50,000 to 100,000 years ago?
I believe the consensus is no. Leaving aside the issue of contact with more technologically advanced societies, there’s the issue of marginalization. Classical hunter-gatherer societies sought out the best lands to settle and their traditions were based on this abundance. Modern hunter-gatherers are the remnants of societies that were driven out of all of the good land and are living off of the most marginal land that nobody else wanted. So the traditions they live by are based on scarcity.
Per wiki there may be 100 or so tribal groups of such people totalling over 10,000 members
in South America. There are also thought to be several dozen in New Guinea, and there is one
on North Sentinel Island in the Andamans.
The last previously uncontacted North American people were discovered in 1924 in Mexico, and
the last of Australia in 1984.
But as pointed out even in that cite, coincident with humans spreading out the megafauna disappeared. That may have been due to being rapidly hunted out of existence, or from climate change, or other, but the effect was the same: for most of the Paleolithic period in which Homo sapiens spread, humans thrived by being to adapt to a diversity of food sources, be it large game, small game, and perhaps in particular various aquatic species and fowl, along with gathered fruits, nuts, tubers (mashed and cooked), as well. As do current hunter-gatherers, they apparently ate what was easiest to get for the nutrition contained, maxxing out at something like 30 to 35% of the diet being protein.
The fact that various extant hunter-gatherer groups diets share certain macronutrient features and that such are consistent with what has been found in various radioisotope studies of ancestral nutrition, means that extant nutritional habits can at least inform to some degree. (In the minds of many of the scholars at least.)
As I understand it, the generally accepted answer to the title question is “Probably not, but, when supplemented by archaeological evidence they probably do provide the best insight available into what human life and human belief systems were like back then.” Primitive societies do change over time, of course, and occasionally make technological innovations, but they are unlikely to be able to make much in the way of long-term progress without the technology of writing, which allows comparison of new ideas with old ones over multiple generations, and without the distorting effects of memory. Absent that, social change is likely to be more like a random walk rather than a progression, and a random walk will not quickly take you very far from your starting place.
This is what early Prehistorians thought, but for the past 100 years or so, scholars have realized things are not nearly that simple. An ‘accurate picture’ is out of the question right off the bat: prehistory is much messier than proponents of unilinear cultural evolution once imagined. Little Nemo had it right: we would be comparing the vestigial remains of a dying way of life to a time when the very best locations in the world were populated only by hunter-gatherers, and no alien influences such as metal blades and pots or animal-husbandry-derived lethal disease and gun-wielding conquerors existed.
Vast stretches of time with accompanying environmental, cultural and demographic change separate the Paleolithic humans from modern hunter-gatherers. The modern hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as exemplified by the !Kung of Southern Africa, is a Holocene adaptation to massive environmental change pretty much like early agriculture and animal husbandry were (guess which one won the race?)
Even though cultural change was generally slow in the Stone Age, a time span of 50 000, or even just 5000 years at any one geographical area covers many different phases of technological and societal change, with local ‘trajectories’ varying widely from another – there is little basis for cross-cultural analogies stretching from, say, the Sentinel Islanders to Stone Age Europeans.
Even within a simple hunter-gatherer context, substantial technological change is evident. The bow and arrow, and fishing equipment are examples of things most modern hunter-gatherers “have always had” but hunter-gatherers 100 000 years ago didn’t have (and Central Australian Aborigines never needed :)). Pottery is an example of technology that was widely used and then abandoned by many hunter-gatherer groups already in prehistory. Examples of societal change include hunter-gatherers switching from inland big game hunting to a maritime subsistence, small bands of mobile moose hunters condensing into hunter-gatherer sealing villages, only to return to a mobile inland lifeway once again as the environment, demography and cultural influences change. Many modern hunter-gatherer societies by comparison may even be children of once-agricultural or pastoral peoples with an atypical cultural trajectory.
Paleolithic and Mesolithic humans were in fact quite different from us, including the modern hunter-gatherers.
Skeletal measurements of Late Pleistocene / Early Holocene North Europeans have revealed extremely massively boned and muscled (based on bone detail) populations, as well as signs of severe, repetitive physical stress; even the skull wall thickness of our ancestors just 10k years ago was much higher than ours’. Think mid-heavyweight MMA fighters, not willowy Bushmen. Sexual dimorphism is a feature that was much more prominent in Paleolithic humans than in us modern people, including every hunter-gatherer still out there.
Judging by organic remains on settlement sites and stable isotope data, it is evident hunter-gatherer dietary breadth has increased substantially from the Late Paleolithic on through the Mesolithic and Neolithic Stone Ages. The picture of small bands of mobile foragers going after a variety of game animals while heavily relying on a couple of dozen to a couple hundred edible wild plants, insects etc. is a modern hunter-gatherer scene, the result of roughly 10 000 years of environmental and cultural change and innovation. Stable isotope analysis on human bones from Mesolithic Germany shows a near-pure carnivorous diet for these people (just like many Paleolithic societies), a very different picture, although there’s variation between societies here, as in everything else.
Even though Megafauna went extinct by the end of the latest glaciation, in Early Holocene times animals such as moose and red deer were still substantially larger than they are now, and these large forest animals were probably extremely common in the woodland-covered, human-scarce masses of land, making the hunting part of hunting and gathering much more feasible than in recent times in marginal or even optimal environments. As the Holocene went on and big game got smaller and scarcer, productive coastal areas turned into the wealthy population-packed trade areas that they have been for the past 7000 years or so. Unfortunately we haven’t had wealthy ‘pristine’ coastal hunter-gatherers to balance our views on prehistoric hunting and gathering for quite some time.
I also find fascinating that supposedly agriculture became dominant in the “best” areas of the environment supposedly no earlier than 15,000 years ago - yet fully developed civilizations and widespread agriculture developed very quickly in the 14,000 years (give or take) that a nomadic people descended from the near-arctic to a land of unfamiliar plants in North America.
Were the people of 50,000 to 100,000 years ago just slow learners? Or did people familiar with agriculture make the trek from agricultural China area down to the easier temperate zones of North America in a generation or three before they lost the oral history about sowing seeds and raising plants?
Recent discoveries, for example this temple-structure in Turkey (built by people prior to the Neolithic Revolution) indicate that some of our prehistoric ancestors may have resembled the Haida (pacific northwest natives with advanced social structure, yets still primarily hunter-gatherers) more than the !Kung San (nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, with very simple social organization).