Thank you all.
It seems the answer is we do not know as we have met too few Neolithic societies.
I think it is safe to say that throughout human history, however long that actually is, we’ve been oppressed, suppressed, repressed and pretty much any other “pressed” you can think of. Even today, in the so-called “modern world”, you can see it in many societies.
I do not think that is a safe assumption. It seems to me that a society must have some surplus production before they can reduce production by oppression.
I think others have pointed out how limited we are in getting an actual factual answer and I largely agree. It’s worth remembering that before large scale agriculture (and I use the term large scale deliberately–we know that lots of “hunter gatherers” as certain groups are casually labelled, actually have some level of familiarity with agriculture it just isn’t the foundation of their society), the largest human “groups”, or “tribes” or whatever you’d like to call them would have been small. There would also have been lots and lots of them. Just extrapolating from common sense assumptions, we can assume these groups would have very divergent behaviors in internal activity. While there’s dangers in comparing too much to modern hunter gatherers, we know there’s tons of variance in how modern hunter gatherer tribes behave. At the micro-scale of human society, even just one charismatic leader or person of prominence can have a big impact on how people around them behave. For that reason it’s probably almost foolish to really think we even could generalize about whether people from pre-agricultural pre-history were “X”, it likely varied tremendously.
It’s probably also worth considering the core question itself. It is such a modern question, that would have seemed so at odds with how early human social groups worked. Individual liberties and rights as a concept have only been present for a tiny tiny sliver of our existence as a species.
In our society (our being “the West”) we view individual rights not just as important, but as the foundational legal and ethical principle upon which our and even other societies should be judged. In tribal societies it is far more likely that they were based on the principal of obligations to the group and creating a society in which tribe members actively care about and want to fulfill those obligations.
Why do you assume that the oppression of any group of people automatically reduces production? For example, did the oppression of an entire race of people as slaves in the south reduce production there? No, in fact, it actually enhanced their agricultural production.
It has been my observation of history that very, very rarely can you steal and come out ahead. The major counterexample would be the Spanish in the New World who probably did make money on the deal. Elsewise, it seems to me that crime does not pay. At least not in the long run.
And you assume that hunter-gatherers didn’t have surplus production? Why?
Modern hunter-gatherers generally don’t have to work hard at all to fulfil their needs. They have plenty of free time, probably more than we do.
Speaking as an American, the major counter-example I see is slavery in the US. Economically speaking, the slaves were pretty damn productive, and their owners absolutely did “make money” (or cotton, or tobacco) on the deal. And that seems more relevant to pre-historic people because it doesn’t involve what was essentially “stealing territory” (which is a win for the thief, but probably not a net economic gain overall.)
I think economics tends to drive social structures, and so I would guess that the widespread incidence of slavery in agricultural societies indicates that slavery tends to be economically efficient, at least in agricultural societies.
I don’t know whether it is economically efficient in pre-agricultural societies, and I suspect that the answer to that question would predict how common slavery was among them.
But human cultures are quite diverse. Even today, when we all talk to each other, there is a large diversity of culture. Surely there was even more cultural diversity when most “societies” rarely interacted with other humans, and never interacted with most of the rest of humanity. So I would assume that women have been subjugated somewhere, by some men, since the dawn of humanity. And that other women have lived in more-or-less egalitarian societies somewhere, since the dawn of time.
The most famous “warrior women” come from much later in history, where a settled society with the surplus to train and equip a regiment of “warrior women” did so precisely because it was already established to be unusual, and because it played on the myths and legends that @DrDeth mentioned.
For example, the fabled “Amazons” of Dahomey were in fact non childbearing wives of the king who were allowed in the king’s palace (as men were not) who served as bodyguards and raiders; this was enabled by Dahomey’s status as a wealthy slave trading kingdom in Western Africa.
Slavery held Southern society back, as it holds all societies back. Please take a look at The Impending Crisis of the South (1857).
From your link:
“Helper claimed that slavery hurt the Southern economy by preventing economic development and industrialization”
Yeah, I think there’s evidence that slavery is NOT the most economically efficient model in an industrialized economy. But it worked pretty well (economically speaking) in pre-industrial agricultural societies.
Anyway, societies don’t have to be 100% efficient to survive.
A society that has little economic surplus cannot reduce production without taking great risks.
But as pointed out above, many hunter-gather societies had some surplus. And more would have prior to the advent of agriculture, because agricultural societies (with their higher population densities) drove non-agricultural societies off all the richest land.
If things like the Bengal famines show us anything, it’s that there doesn’t need to be an actual surplus if you’re willing and able to withhold what there is from some class of people…
True. But, before a society can reduce it’s efficiency, it needs to have a surplus. That is, a society that’s on the edge of survival cannot reduce its production, because any reduction will cause its dissolution.
The tricky thing is that while most years will have a surplus, some years will not. How often the bad years occur (and how bad they are) will depend on the local environment, varying from almost never to several times a generation. Even societies with large food-storage capabilities encounter enormous strains during the bad years. As inefficiencies build up in a society over the years with surpluses, eventually there’ll be a year bad enough to overwhelm the stored surplus.
I think pre-agricultural societies in marginal environments would not be able to carry many inefficiencies and so would be egalitarian. The pre-agricultural societies in optimal environments would be able to be repressive and still survive. As societies transitioned to sedentary agriculture to allow more surpluses in formerly marginal environments, repression could become more common.
Well sort of. Their were some “semi-neolithic” tribes around in the past centuries, some even until the 20th. Case being like the Australian aborigines who were VERY primitive.
Again, why do you think this applies to hunter-gatherer societies? (Since you’re talking about 40,000 years.)
Cite?
‘Dirt-poor’ doesn’t even make sense in a non-money society. If people have ample resources to live comfortably without struggling or working too hard, they are not poor.
This seems to be economic ideology applied with no historical or anthropological knowledge.
“But as soon as anthropologists started working with hunter-gatherers they began questioning this narrative, finding that foragers actually enjoy quite a lot of leisure time. Our data provides some of the clearest support for this idea yet.”
The study found that on average, Agta adults spent around 24 hours each week engaged in out-of-camp work, around 20 hours each week doing domestic chores and around 30 hours of daylight leisure time. But the researchers found that time allocation differed significantly between adults.
So in this specific case, the average working time was 44 hours a week, and about 4+ hours a day of daylight leisure time, and obviously more in the evenings.
From the abstract of the paper:
This difference is largely driven by changes in the time allocation of women, who spend substantially more time engaged in out-of-camp work in more agricultural camps.
So women in particular have less leisure time in farming communities, more in hunter-gatherer communities.
And, yes, the authors warn about drawing general conclusions about earlier societies.
Well I can say from reading about the experiences of Lewis and Clark, they were in some villages where the NA women were told to have sex with the “outsiders”. Also women (like Sakajawea) were stolen and sold as slaves and wives. L&K told about one experience in 1804 with the Teton Sioux who had just won a battle with the Omaha and had taken 45 women as captives. In Australia the men in one tribe would tell their women to go have sex with the men from another tribe in order to avoid a war.
Would that be considered “repression”? I think in some NA tribes women were not chiefs and didnt vote but they did sometimes hold high positions in the tribe.
If anything I’d think that they would have had even more leisure time because the agricultural societies wouldn’t have relegated them to the worst lands from an agricultural perspective (which granted might not have been bad from a h+g perspective.)
That could be true, and I’m certain that crimes like rape and murder have existed for eons before they were formally codified as crimes. But earlier in our evolution, it would have been a disadvantage to abuse a woman in ways that harmed the survival of the family or tribe. Creating a patriarchy as we know it today would have been suicidal in evolutionary terms. Survival of tribes depended on contributions from everyone, male and female. Keeping a female in the cave or near the fire would have severely restricted her ability to contribute in ways that would have been disadvantageous.