Chapter 5: The myth of the primitive

There is a perverse irony in the fact that, after a virtual consensus has been reached about the abuses that European colonialists inflicted on aboriginal peoples, the possibility of attaining a realistic and sympathetic view of ‘the primitive’ is being gutted by assorted ecomystics, anticivilizationists, and more generically, self-avowed primitivists who have made ‘the primitive’ into a postmodern parody of the noble savage.

Today Euro-American primitivists have grossly distorted our understanding of the lives and cultures of aboriginal peoples by attributing to them suprahuman, paradisiacal dimensions. By turning ostensibly primitive lifeways into models for ‘simple living’ and ‘closeness to nature’ , they have not only made tribal cultures into romantic caricatures of social harmony and virtue but reared them up as a standard that privileged, urban white people should emulate.

Not only is this romanticization extremely naive, it imposes an ideological burden on aboriginal peoples that downplays their real problems, needs, and hopes for a better future. Worse still, the ‘noble savage’ myth obliges aboriginals to be superior beings, indeed almost angelically virtuous and exemplary in behavior and thought, if they are to enjoy the prestige of Euro-American recognition and the rights to which they are entitled.

This conflict between the realities that aboriginal ‘primitives’ face and the taxing expectations that Euro-American primitivists impose upon them is eminently tangible. In the mid-1970s Northwest Indian communities were beginning to use technologically sophisticated methods to breed and harvest salmon. After years of neglect and poverty, the pride they took in their achievements was as moving as it was admirable. During a conference I attended in Bellingham, Washington, to my utter astonishment, some white ecomystics and primitivists reproached them for using modern technological, presumably ‘non-ecological’ methods. Having been degraded and exploited for centuries as ‘savages’ , these Indians were now being told that they were being too civilized. By adopting advanced aquaculture techniques, they failed to qualify for their high estate in the ecomystica1 firmament. Having been defamed for being primitives in an earlier time, they were now being defamed for not being primitive enough.

Such ecomystical and primitivistic arrogance is epidemic today. Primitivism, to be sure, has many faces, ranging from a wholesale rejection of civilization (commonly designated as industrial and technocratic) to compromises with civilized practices guided by a ‘primitive sensibility’ or spirituality . Thus the late Edward Abbey — whose writings were inspirational for Earth First! and are recited reverentially by self-styled ‘radical’ environmentalists — expressed his preference for ‘the coming restoration of a higher civilization’ than the present military-industrial one. This preference would certainly be laudable by any progressive standard. But Abbey’s ‘higher civilization’ , as it turns out, is one in which ‘scattered human populations modest in numbers [would] live by fishing, hunting, food-gathering, small-scale farming and ranching’ — a curious mix of occupations that would seem to stand at odds with each other (‘small-scale ranching’ mingled with ‘food-gathering’?). The new ‘primitives’ would ‘assemble once a year in the ruins of abandoned cities for great festivals of moral, spiritual and intellectual renewal — a people for whom wilderness is not a playground but their natural and native home.’[177] The rums of abandoned cities would become at one and the same time the despised playgrotmd for a ‘moral, spiritual and intellectual renewal’ and, oddly enough, the theater for the ‘higher civilization’s’ festivals — which should put city life in any shape or form in its place!

For all its incongruities and its total failure to appreciate the universalizing historical role of the city, Abbey’s vision is by no means the most extreme example of chic primitivism. Earth First!ers commonly sport bumper stickers with the slogan ‘Back to the Pleistocene!’ As John Davis, onetime editor of Earth First!, wrote, ‘Many of us in the Earth First! movement would like to see human beings live much more like the way diey did fifteen thousand years ago as opposed to what we see now’, which, Christopher Manes soberly explains, means, ‘the kind of hunter-gatherer, shifting agricultural economies of tribal peoples.’[178] Precisely why modern humanity should draw a straight line from Sunbelt cities direcdy back to the late Paleolithic is a problem I shall leave to the reader to resolve.

Judging from the examples usually given by ecomystics and primitivists, ‘primal’ sensibilities correspond to beliefs and practices imputed to American Indians. This identification of Indian peoples with archaic practices and Paleolithic views has led to bitter conflicts between the expectations of Euro-American primitivists and the very peoples they extoll. Ecomystics, primitivists, and deep ecologists have challenged the rights of native Americans to divert water from rivers for irrigation purposes and harvest timber on their tribal lands. Their lands stolen by European settlers and their cultures subverted, victimized by genocidal attacks and denied free access to game and fertile soil, native peoples are now ejected — if ecomystics have their way — to reject the ‘technocratic-industrial’ support systems that the privileged white world takes for granted.

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I make no claim that a competitive ‘free enterprise’ economy, rendered even harsher by a highly sophisticated technology, is a desideratum — either for aboriginal peoples or for Euro-Americans. Quite to the contrary, I argue for a way of life that is not focused on capital accumulation and profit. Nor do I favor a ‘technocratic-industrial’ society that centers its concerns on the privileged few. Quite to the contrary: human life is meaningless if it is not enriched by art, ideals, and a spirituality that is ecological and humane.

But a way of life burdened by material insecurity and toil cannot nourish the kind of individual and social freedom that makes human life meaningful and creative — indeed, that is likely to foster a rich ecological sensibility. Materially deprived and socially underprivileged people whose bellies are empty are not likely to be much concerned with the integrity of wildlife and forests. What they need is food and a decent life before they can think of the welfare of other life-forms.

Nor can an ecological sensibility be found by trying to return to an idealized primitive’ world. In the band and tribal societies of prehistory, humanity was almost completely at the mercy of uncontrollable natural forces and patently false and mystified visions of reality.

Like ecomystics, primitivists are shifting public attention away from the tasks of seriously remaking society along rational lines, toward dubious — and often contrived — arcadian cultural attitudes that are imputed to the long-lost past. For a humanistic vision of a future that has yet to be won, both for native and Euro-American peoples alike, they are trying to substitute mythic notions of a pristine and primitive past that probably never existed.

Understanding aboriginal life requires that we find a balance between the ‘primitive’ and the civilizational that corresponds to what we really know, based on evidence provided by paleoanthropology and anthropology. This problem cannot be sloughed off with dreamy accounts of what we would like to believe our Paleolithic ancestors did or thought. The evidence we have about ice age people and existing aboriginals must be examined seriously on their own terms, untainted by wishful thinking.

Whatever natural features we impute to the primitive world, and whatever synthetic features we impute to the civilized world, the old Victorian image of the demonic aboriginal savage and the contemporary ecomystical image of the angelic aboriginal saint are myths we can no longer entertain. Modern civilization is too dynamic to be dissolved into a largely mythic past. In the next generation or two humanity is likely to move ahead technologically, scientifically, and industrially even more rapidly than it did during the past three centuries.

But what direction will these changes take? Toward a rational future that creates a sensitive balance widiin society and between society and the natural world? Or toward a domineering and exploitative social order that makes earlier systems of domination seem benign?

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If primitivists use the word primitive to refer to ‘closeness to nature’ , the phrase primitive culture is simply an oxymoron, for culture — or society — is hardly a ‘natural’ phenomenon, a phenomenon of first nature.

Although animals may be more or less sociable, their sociability is not evidence of the existence of a society. Society is unique to human beings. There is a crucial difference between society, with its distincdy structured and mutable institutions, and community with its simple, often undifferentiated relations between organisms. Societies, however well or poorly entrenched their institutions, can be changed by human action; animal communities are either the product of genetic factors, such as beehives, or they are relatively formless and unstable. Non-human animals can be very sociable indeed, as are wolves, African dogs, and baboons; but sociability does not make for a society, any more than the ad hoc use of stones by sea otters to open oyster shells or the use of twigs by c him panzees to get at termites constitutes a technology (or what anthropologists call a tool-kit) with its carefully shaped permanent or semipermanent implements. In the absence of social institutions that can be modified or radically changed — a phenomenon that is distinctly human — non-human animals may form and dissolve groups, but apart from genetically induced aggregations, like those of ‘social insects’ , they have minimal structure and permanence.

Hence no culture is ‘natural’ in a strictly biological sense. To be sure, a tribal culture may be ‘close to nature’ in that its environment is relatively pristine, but its members usually know of no other habitats than the ones in which they find themselves, formed by natural evolution. The forests, grasslands, and mountains that surround them may have been countless years, indeed eons, in the making, together with the wildlife and plants on which they rely for food, clothing, and shelter, but it is a world seemingly unbroken by changes, apart from the few that they, as humans, have produced.

Such tribal cultures may base their social institutions on biological facts, such as age groups, gender relations, and kinship ties, which may seem natural because of their biological premises — age, gender, and kinship — but they are part of second nature, not first nature. No such institutional ensembles exist among non-human animals. Non-human animals have no gerontocracies, patriarchies, or systems of rights and duties based on a common ancestry — apart horn mother-offspring relations, and even these relations tend to be unstable and tentative where they persist for any great length of time.

By contrast, the human societies of second nature are a qualitative departure from animal communities, an alienation from stricdy biological phenomena, however much they initially rest on certain biological facts* A ‘primitive’ culture that is ‘close to nature’ is not in any way congruent with the natural world, or first nature. Once hominids and early humans fashioned, retained, and elaborated a tool-kit, established a division of labor (however rudimentary), shared food, acted altruistically, and organized their relationships into definable structures, they no longer merely adapted to their environment; they began to significantly change it with a distinct purposiveness. The second nature they created fundamentally separated them from their first nature as mere animals. Hence, however primitive a human culture may have been, it was not identical with purely biological lifeways — indeed, not even with the fairly sociable relations that exist among chimpanzees and baboons.

Humans were now engaged in doing firings and using means that, nascent as they may be in other animals, sharply distinguished them from other life-forms. They began to transform their environment willfully, often with a clear idea of the means they required to create a more congenial habitat and way of life.

A ‘primitive culture’, then, is actually very ‘unnatural’. It marks a decisive break with the largely passive and adaptive nature of animal behavior. To speak of a ‘primitive culture’ is to thoroughly mystify the ‘primitive’, not to speak of the concept of society. “With the emergence of society, a qualitatively new realm of evolution, of subjectivity, and potentially, at least, of freedom developed out of a realm that was essentially biological, rooted in great part by genetically guided behavior.

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Odd as it may seem, the fact that band and tribal cultures broke with first nature is most clearly seen in the appearance of what ecomystics and primitivists enthusiastically celebrate today — notably, ‘primitive spirituality’.

Whether it is ‘primitive’ or not, spirituality is entirely ideological. That is, it is a process of thinking, of symbolizing, and of reflecting about experience. However clever or intelligent many animals may seem, they have no ideologies; by contrast, humans definitely do. They have systematic ways of trying to understand their environment in symbolic ter m s; they possess the complex form of expression that is language; they usually work collaboratively to gain the means of life and distribute goods according to certain accepted rules; they assume communal duties and demand certain rights. In short, they develop credos that render their activities intellectually and emotionally coherent.

Whether these forms of thinking are based on custom, or are enshrined in morals and guided by magico-religious beliefs, or are based on ethics and guided by canons of rationality, they clearly influence how people do things in the real world. Indeed, however mutable they may be, these influences often have the tenacity of animal instincts.

Precisely such belief systems, or forms of spirituality, markedly alienate humans from the natural world around them and distinguish them from the animal inhabitants that coexist with them in a shared natural environment. That is to say, the very ideational systems that ecomystics cite to distinguish ‘primitive’ sensibilities from civilized ones are already highly complex, and by acting according to precepts they formulated in their minds, band and tribal peoples transcend first nature; indeed, as social beings who act consciously upon the world, they manipulate their environments as best they can, indeed change them. In this respect, band and tribal peoples open a chasm between themselves and first nature for which there is no precedent in first nature, either in degree or in kind.

Even more disturbing for ecomystical and primitivistic notions of ‘primitive’ sensibilities, the spiritual views of aboriginal cultures often pit them against their environment. The exigencies of life in a demanding world usually throw aboriginals into competition with other life-forms, a conflict that may lead to severe environmental changes that render a given habitat unfit for other animals. These changes, in turn, may result in the complete extermination of food animals, indeed their wanton destruction on a large scale.

It insults the intelligence of aboriginal peoples to burden their lifeways and spirituality with New Age interpretations that make them more selfless and less opportunistic in satisfying their material needs than modern people. Although aboriginal methods of dealing with a given environment differ appreciably from modern ones, no human beings could survive if they fatuously sacrificed their own needs for food, shelter, and self-defense in favor of other species — unless, to be sure, they attained a modern level of technical development that left them sufficiently privileged and leisured to be concerned about the welfare of non-human creatures: that is, unless they were well-fed, well-housed, and affluent — like many ecomystics and primitivists today.

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I do not wish to deprecate the good intentions of many ecomystics and primitivists who ferventiy urge us to develop a ‘Paleolithic consciousness’ out of a concern for protecting the biosphere. But certain troubling features of that ‘consciousness’ stand in the way of achieving so laudable an end.

To begin with, modern people certainly are not like Paleolithic or ‘ice age’ people. During the Euro-American ice ages, probably the great majority of Paleolithic people, as I have already noted, lived in the relatively warm or balmy climates of Africa and southern Asia. Nor do we know with any certainty how ice age people and warm-climate people really viewed the immensely different worlds in which they lived. Paleolithic people lived in such vasdy diverse climatic and environmental conditions that they could hardly have shared a common sensibility — still less the unified set of values and beliefs that ecomystics and primitivists so eagerly impute to them.

Values and beliefs in today’s aboriginal communities often do not conform to what ecomystics and primitivists think aboriginal peoples should think. Aboriginal sensibilities are generally more pragmatic and less ‘spiritual’ than Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness would have us believe.[179] As foragers, they have to know their enemies from their friends. They have to understand the behavior and habits of the animals they hunt, often in competition with animal predators. They have to develop practical techniques for coaxing herds into traps and develop systematic, carefully coordinated methods of hunting large, dangerous game lest they themselves become victims of the animals they hunt. In the uncertain and precarious wodd in winch they five, these problems could be almost endless.

In the fight of these realities, many of Oelschlaeger’s notions of ‘Paleolithic consciousness’ are far-fetched. Some seem to rest on inferences made from modern aboriginal values, which may have fitde to do with ‘Paleolithic values’. Indeed, many values held by aboriginal peoples today are likely to have been significantly shaped by their centuries-long contact with Western and Islamic cultures.

Oelschlaeger means to convey the idea that Paleofithic foragers spiritually viewed their world as pristine, and regarded first nature as ‘feminine’ , ‘alive’ , and ‘sacred’, a world in which time ‘folded into an eternal mythical present’ and ‘ritual was essential to maintaining the natural and cyclical order of life and death.’[180]

Yet Oelschlaeger is looking back upon the Paleofithic world — which lasted some two million years and which including hominids and humans that ranged from Australopithecines through Homo erectus, Neanderthals, prot o-Homo sapiens sapiens, and modern Homo sapiens sapiens — from a

naively retrospective view. He infers from modern romanticizations of band and tribal peoples the ‘consciousness’ that a wide variety of hominid and human species held in a world that was extremely varied and notable for its different and fluctuating environments.

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To begin with, the very concept of ‘Nature’ involves a long process of abstraction that reaches well into historical times. A duality between the natural and unnatural is necessary to bring the natural into clear relief conceptually. Paleofithic foragers, to be sure, were probably thoroughly informed about their habitat; indeed, a pragmatic and highly concrete knowledge of its features would have been indispensable for the survival and well-being of any foraging community. In this respect, our Paleofithic ancestors were no different from ourselves: they had, in effect, to be ‘street wise’ , completely familiar with strategies to survive. But they would have been unable to distinguish contrasts between the natural and unnatural, or to call their own world natural, for what we blithely call ‘Nature’ was all that existed around them and all they could have possibly known — that is, their habitat. The concept of Nature, in effect, could have emerged only when human beings began to transform the natural world significantly enough to bring what was not Nature into relief against a notion of Nature.

Nor is it clear that Paleofithic foragers thought of the natural world as ‘intrinsically feminine’ — whatever Oelschlaeger means by this — unless we are referring to a Mother Earth Goddess or an all-pervasive, pantheistic feminine principle associated with fertility. The very notion of a Mother Earth goddess is a blatantly anthropomorphic interpretation of ordinary natural facts of life. Such goddesses are usually embodied as distinctiy human deities with female breasts, buttocks, legs, and heads. We cannot even be sure that some female representations, like the goddess Astarte, signified a maternal principle in any general sense. In any case, goddesses like Astarte are not Paleofithic; they seem to have emerged for the first time in Neolithic and Bronze Age societies, which already approached the high civilizations of historical times.

The most widely cited evidence for the claims that ice age foragers ‘regarded nature as intrinsically feminine’ are the ‘goddess’ figurines — the ‘Venuses’ — found in upper Paleofithic caves and in early or middle Neolithic dwellings. The assumption that these remains are almost exclusively deities is a matter of pure faith rather than accurate knowledge; nor has much attention been given to the uses to which similar ‘Venuses’ have been put by aboriginal peoples in modern times.

Margaret Ehrenberg, in her splendid study, Women in Prehistory , warns us that these Stone Age figurines by no means support the notion that a Mother Goddess religion. — or, I would add, a view of Nature as ‘intrinsically feminine’ — pervaded prehistory. Such figurines may well have been used for pragmatic and magical ends rather than for reverential and religious ones. Ehrenberg writes:

The use of figurines in sympathetic magic to aid fertility is attested in many ethnographic examples and may have been perceived as even more important in societies where the link between male impregnation and childbirth was not fully understood . A woman wishing for a child would make, or have made, a model either of herself pregnant, or more commonly in known ethnographic examples — of the hoped-for child, perhaps shown as the adult they would eventually become. She might then carry the image around, perhaps sleep alongside it, or use it to perform other rituals.[181]

Such practices, Ehrenberg tells us, occur among a number of West African and American Indian tribes. Once the woman became pregnant, the figurine would be discarded, in much the same way that a sorcerer or shaman discards a representational figurine after completing a magical ritual. ‘The fact that both Paleolithic and many Neolithic figurines are commonly found within houses and home bases, and often among debris, would strengthen this possibility, if the image could be cast aside once it had fulfilled its function, while the idea of discarding the image of a specific deity seems less likely.’

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It is undeniable that goddesses existed in high civilizations throughout the world — at times as creative deities, at other times as destructive ones, at still other times both, but by no means always holding a supreme status in diverse pantheons. Goddesses, earth or otherwise, abounded throughout the pagan world and, in the Mary image, in Christian societies. But Ehrenberg’s highly suggestive hypothesis that female figurines do not a ‘Mother Eardi goddess’ religion make — indeed, that the figurines were merely magical and highly personal fertility symbols — is far more plausible than the belief that they enjoyed pantheistic supremacy in the Paleolithic world.

What casts even more doubt on the existence of an upper Paleolithic Mother Earth goddess religion is evidence that many upper Paleolithic figurines are not exclusively female. As Prichard E. Leakey observes, citing fifty-seven engravings of isolated human heads on the walls of the La Marche cave in Western France: ‘the so-called Venuses, statuettes with bulbous buttocks and breasts ... supposedly embody a fertility or mother-god image. Statuettes of this type are certainly very striking in their emphatic sexuality.’ But, Leakey warns,

Of the many hundreds of carved figures so far discovered throughout Europe, some can be identified as female, although most of these have natural rather than exaggerated proportions, some are clearly male, but most are, to our eyes at least, sexless , The idea of a continent-wide cult of the mother-god, symbolized by the bulbous ‘Venuses*, appears to have been greatly overstated.[182]

Perhaps the earliest known Paleolithic figurine, at this writing, is that of a male, found in a cave some 32,000 years ago at Hohlenstein, Germany. He seems to be wearing a lion’ s mask or have a lion’ s head and a male body, not unlike ancient Egyptian deities that were part human and part animal. It is impossible to say whether the figurine signifies a deity, a shaman, or a ‘big man’ endowed with community respect, but it was decidedly not female.

No less dramatic are the full-face carvings and wall-sketched profiles of male individuals who are remarkably individuated. Staring in fascinating detail and with arresting strength of character — a distinct personality and a dignified mein — is the head of a man, carefully sculpted from the ivory of a mammoth tusk, found near Dolni Vestonice in Czechoslovakia. The head dates back to some 26,000 years ago.

Upper Paleolithic sketches show men in profile whose appearance is very individuated, indeed, who seem like playful caricatures, as witness the engraved (largely male) human faces from La Marche.[183] In fact, upper Paleolithic peoples may have created artistic works for purposes no more magical than artists have today — notably portraiture and head carvings that were meant to delight or to record an image of an individual for posterity — or simply as graffiti. We can only guess at what they were meant to convey: in some cases probably magical figures, in others fertility figures, and still odiers striedy personal sketches, including caricatures. To lump all of these figures together as ‘feminine’ symbols of all-living Nature is to read back, over a span of 30,000 years, a vision that all too many mystics want Paleolithic people to have believed — not what is revealed by the evidence at hand.

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If it is true that, for Paleolithic foragers, ‘the entire wodd of plants and animals, even the land itself, was sacred,’ as Oelschlaeger asserts,[184] this assumption would hardly make them unique, even by comparison with much-maligned Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. In his very influential ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ , Lynn White, Jr, gave a warped image of the Christian tradition as inherendy antinaturalistic.[185] Although by no means alone in this fine of thinking, White’s overwhelming subjectivist and ideological explanation of the present ecological crisis greatly contributed to the ecomystical and New Age accounts of ecological problems that are so pervasive today.

However much ecomystics and primitivists may quote biblical scriptures that assign to man ‘lordship’ — more properly, *stewardship8 — over the biosphere, the fact is that Yahweh in Genesis is no less fecund and creative than any Mother Earth goddess. In scripture, the Judeo-Christian deity created the universe, light, and all manner of living beings. He created a ‘garden in Eden in the east’ , causing ‘every kind of tree that is pleasing to see and good to eat’ to ‘grow from the ground’ (Genesis 2:8–9). He is an esthetic as well as a functional deity. He is also an adoring biologist who causes ‘the water [to] teem with an abundance of living creatures, and [lets] birds fly above the earth under the ceding of the sky.’ Apparently biocentric in His oudook, despite assigning the role of stewardship to ‘man’ , He even creates ‘the great monsters of the sea and all living animals, those that teem in the waters, according to their kind, and every winged bird, according to its kind’ . He blesses them and enjoins them to be ‘fruitful and increase in number, fill the waters of the sea, and let the birds increase on the earth’ (Genesis 1:20–23).

Indeed, Ecclesiastes informs us that ‘God wants to test [humans] and let them see that they themselves are animals. For the destiny of humanity and animal is identical: death for one as for the other. Both have the same spirit; humans have no superiority over animals for all passes away like wind. Both go to the same place, both come from dust and return to dust’ (Genesis 3:18–20, emphasis added). Could biocentrists ask more of the most generous Mother Earth goddess in religious literature, east or west?

The ‘sacredness’ of the world would have not been specific to Paleolithic foragers, then, assuming with Oeschlaeger that they held such a view, or for that matter, to contemporary Judaism and Christianity, which are consistently disdained by ecomystics and primitivists as ‘anti-naturalistic’ . The attempt to impute to Paleolithic foragers a uniquely naturalistic spirituality to which we must somehow return — despite all we actually know today about the causes of phenomena that were complete mysteries to them — reflects not only bad anthropology but disquieting naivety.

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Any religion that included a creator deity, male or female, treated the creator’s work as divine or ‘sacred’ . Indeed, far more problematical today is whether Paleolithic foragers were actually religious in the sense that we ordinarily define that word, or whether their belief systems, to the extent that we can guess what they were, were mainly pragmatic and instrumental.

What ‘primitives’ really believed may be very different from what is generally supposed. Nearly all foraging societies known to modern anthropologists had already been affected by Western cultural mores and religions before trained Euro-American investigators reached them. Artifacts from Paleolithic foragers allow us to make guesses about what they thought, but in an era awash with mysticism like our own, it is necessary to show great prudence in making inferences about the figurines, sketches, paintings, and other materials from late Paleolithic caves — and not to leap from these remains to mystical notions about the psychological ‘archetypes’ and ‘innate’ gender sensibilities, so much in vogue today.

Aside from their esthetic value, these Paleolithic remains seem to be primarily magical in function, particulady those that depict animals.[186] Paintings, drawings, and sculptures that survive from the Aurignacian and Magdalenian foragers of some 30,000 years ago in the caves of southern France and the Spanish Pyrenees (the so-called classic area of the late Paleolithic remains) commonly depict animals, in some cases clearly being attacked by hunters. Are these depictions magical efforts to assure success in the hunt? Are they evidence of magical efforts to increase the dwindling population of overhunted game animals? Do they reveal a respectful attitude toward the animals pursued? These questions are impossible to answer — nor are there any Paleolithic hunters around to answer them for us.

In fact, the range of functions these paintings, sculptures, and drawings had may have been legion. Circular incised dots on an ivory plaque suggest that Paleolithic people may have developed some sort of calendar; a cave lion engraved on a stalagmite is pitted by marks that suggest it was used as a target for throwing stones. Many animals are depicted in such amazing and sensitive detail that it is hard to suppose some esthetic intention was not as important as ‘religious’ ones. Hunting scenes may have been painted to celebrate episodes of specific hunts rather than as magical and ritual symbols, or they may have been used to instruct the young in hunting techniques. Although most paintings and sketches portray animals, hundreds of them depict human beings — and of both sexes.

A multitude of possibilities could have led our late Paleolithic ancestors to produce the artifacts, figurines, and paintings in their caves and dwelling sites. The most likely common denominator that provides us with a plausible account of the animal figures and the scenes involving them is that they served the ends of sympathetic magic: the simulation by means of figurines, paintings, and drawings of successful events, like hunts and pregnancies. They are hardly evidence of‘reverence’ either for a nim als or for a Nature that presides over human welfare and destiny. Such concepts are strikingly historical, as distinguished from prehistorical, more the products of civilization than we would like to think. Again, a concept like Nature has meaning only to people who have already created ‘unnatural’ environments like villages, towns, and cities, pushing forests and wildlife back to ever more secluded areas where they did not interfere with such ‘unnatural’ activities as agriculture and urban life.

It is eminently reasonable to suppose that the paintings and sculpture we find in Paleolithic caves and dwelling places had basically pragmatic functions. They were most likely meant to assure success in pregnancies and hunts and help people acquire the material means of life. Magic and the implements used to deploy it were ultimately guided by an everyday means-ends or instrumental rationality — not simply by a mysterious ‘wisdom’ about an incomprehensible Nature — to acquire meat, skins, bones for implements, and the like. We cannot fault Paleolithic foragers for employing specious magical techniques that, apart from the confidence they gave them, in no way enhanced their success. The figures painted on cave walls were not the living animals they hunted, and the images that they or their shamans depicted were strictly analogies. As such, they were no more effective in luring game into the range of their weapons than a board game of Monopoly makes its players wealthy or poor.

Whether these magical practices enhanced their respect for animals or wilderness is doubtful. The attitudes of modern band and tribal peoples toward the game they kill, even toward their domesticated animals like dogs, are anything but gende. Suffice it to say that respect is a vague word, with multiple meanings. To ecomystics and primitivists it might mean love, awe, reverence, a religious intuition, or ‘biophilia — some allegedly instinctive longing for wilderness and wildlife. All of these possibilities actually presuppose a host of unstated beliefs or beg the questions they are meant to answer.

If anything meaningful can be said about Paleolithic paintings and carvings, it is that the foragers who produced them held a pragmatic belief in the power of magic, or what Sir James Frazier regarded as primitive man’s science.[187] That our prehistoric ancestors held such belief systems is completely understandable in view of how litde they knew about the often frightening natural forces that determined their wellbeing. What is incomprehensible is that millions of ostensibly civilized people today, even educated urban dwellers, firmly believe that Paleolithic and modern aboriginal beliefs provide a more valid, insightful, and superior account of the natural world than the brilliant explanations given by modern science.

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That magic was not the sole component of Paleolithic ideologies is suggested by basic belief systems found among aboriginal peoples almost everywhere: the belief in spirits, in visions, and in spectral powers that were either beneficent or harmful and in one way or another had to be propitiated — a belief, alas, that is only too present today, in our chrome-plated techno-industrial-cybemetic society.[188]

Judging from what we know about existing band and tribal peoples, probably all Paleolithic people believed in the existence of ‘spirits’, a ‘spirit world’, and later some kind of spiritism. What is the source of their beliefs, how did they develop, and what attitudes toward wildlife and wilderness did they reflect?

The most likely source of primitive spiritism seems to be dreams, a night-world sort of wisdom that is still practiced among ecomystics today. Among aboriginal believers, spiritism gives supernatural explanations for phenomena that we can now explain in strictly naturalistic and scientific terms.[189] Aboriginals who lack an understanding of dream images (a vexing problem even until well into modern times) would take recourse to spirits to explain the reappearance of the dead in dreams, or the occurrence of bizarre events in sequences that were out of the ordinary.

Dreaming itself would have suggested the existence of another world, possibly more potent one than the waking world, a spirit world that presides over human welfare and to which the individual and the community held some sort of obligation. This sense of obligation may have been induced by outright fear — not necessarily by ‘reverence’. Shamans embroidered tins spirit world into a complex universe in its own right, embellishing dream materials in ways that gave these often cynical practitioners considerable personal power and many material privileges. Since dreams can be very complex, bizarre, and frightening, people who could not account for them would be vulnerable to the claims of any canny individual who professed to be able to interpret them, as is the case even in a secular society like our own that minimizes the importance of the supernatural. Shamans have always been available to give interpretations of inexplicable occurrences for suitable rewards.

The shamanistic imagination should not be underestimated: it can be a formidable power in elaborating myths as well as magical practices. Figures on late Paleolithic cave walls suggest that they were present very early on in foraging cultures. They probably provided increasingly complex magical techniques, devised assorted myths and rituals, explained the meaning of individual dreams, and preyed on collective fears, especially those engendered by hghtning, thunder, and earthquakes. Much to their material advantage, shamans would have exploited these inexplicable phenomena and given interpretations of portents and dangers in dreams, as well as more mysterious phenomena like storms, meteorites, comets.

Actually, we probably tend to overstate the simplicity of late Paleolithic cultures and their resemblance in this respect to band or tribelike cultures today. There is ample evidence, as I have suggested that in the great Pyrenees mountain passes, late Paleolithic hunters were creating hierarchical forms of social organization, mainly gerontocracies, and fabricating tools on a markedly industrial basis — not unlike handworked assembly lines of present-day vintage. Mass manufacture was not restricted to modern times by any means.

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Late Paleolithic foragers, to be sure, knew very well how to survive under extremely inhospitable conditions. They were familiar with animal behavior and developed superb techniques for harvesting game. They knew how to select nutritious food plants and avoid toxic ones. Their knowledge of their habitats and their ability to gain subsistence horn them was exceptional in every degree.

But their knowledge about the real sources of climatic, geological, and stellar events — would have been minimal. Their spiritism was in large measure a compensation for their ignorance, an attempt to explain the unknown and all that which was clouded in mystery. In the absence of authentic knowledge about dreams and seemingly cosmic phenomena, their shamans contrived a highly imaginative corpus of explanations structured around analogies and fancies, often blatantly serving social interests that involved power relationships within and between their communities.

Much of this knowledge was patently anthropomorphic, filled as it was with talking animals, mysterious omens, and a multitude of humanlike myths and analogical magical techniques designed to give order, meaning, and stability to the world. Accordingly, myth, magic, and cosmic narratives made the puzzling and mysterious facts of life comprehensible to human minds. More commonly than not, they were probably contrived not simply to explain phenomena but to legitimate the authority of emerging hierarchical strata.

To show how the dream and spirit wodds are rendered anthropomorphic and subject to shamanistic control, the belief system of the Makuna Indians of Colombia is a valuable example. As Kaj Arhem, who spent two years with these people, observes:

When Makuna men go hunting and fishing they also, in their conception, carry out an exchange with the animal world, They believe that in another dimension of reality, all animals are people; they have houses and gardens, musical instruments and ritual ornaments, chants and dances, as people do. They are grouped into communities inhabiting particular territories and also have their headmen, or ‘masters of the animals’. Before major hunting and fishing expeditions — such as those preceding the [community’s] Spirit Dance — a shaman must visit the long houses of the fish and game animals and negotiate with their headmen. The shaman offers them spirit foods, coca and snuff, and is promised fish and game in exchange.[190]

What is intriguing about the Makuna cosmology is not only the reciprocity between humans and animals and the active role shamans play in negotiating the interactions between the two; this can be expected in most animistic views of reality. But the ‘spirit world’ in Makuna cosmology mirrors in every detail all the features of Makuna society and culture. That is to say, Makuna society is completely extrapolated into a spirit world.

What is reality here, and what is not? Do the Makuna regard the animal world as sacred, or have they merely recreated animals as spirits that institutionally and culturally suit their own needs? Indeed, where does the patent anthropomorphism of the Makuna turn into a de facto anthropocentrism that transmutes all animals into human beings — socially as well as individually — thereby rendering them objects of human manipulation in shamanistic ‘negotiations’? The fact that the Makuna ‘animals’ behave like human beings and are organized into distinctly human social institutions with headmen is a patently anthropomorphic view of the ‘spirit world’ that cleady belies the popular myth that aboriginal peoples identify with non-human life-forms. It is not humans who ostensibly become’ or even co-exist with animals; it is animals who apparently become human.

Nor does it follow that, because the Makuna have turned animals and their communities into exact replicas of their societies, they believe that the entire world is ‘alive,’ as many ecomystics and primitivists claim. ‘Animism’ , as the nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Tylor called the view that everything in the world is living, by no means leads to seeing life everywhere in one’s surroundings. Tylor’s assertion that an American Indian would ‘reason with a horse as if rational’ should not be taken to mean that an Indian regarded inanimate things as such as alive.[191] Aboriginal peoples are not so absurd as to view stones and horses, for example, as equally alive. However ‘animistically’ they regard the natural world in theory, in practice they apply their animistic views with considerable discretion. In everyday life, as Bronislaw Malinowski has shown, they dealt with rocks and animals on very different terms, just as many religiously inclined people today separate their belief systems from the practical demands of survival in the mundane world.[192] When A. Irving Hallowell asked an old Ojibwa Indian if ‘all the stones we see about us here [are] alive’ , he received a very shrewd response. ‘No!’ replied the old Ojibwa emphatically, ‘But some are’ Perhaps he meant those that were useful in one way or another to his people.[193]

None of these observations are meant to claim that techniques discovered by band and tribal peoples are lacking in practical value* Quite to the contrary: if anyone today wanted to hunt mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and longhorn bison with spears and with bows and arrows, the lore about animal behavior accumulated by our late Paleolithic ancestors might indeed be invaluable* Should a time come when society returns to a world of ‘scattered human population that lives by fishing, hunting, and food-gathering’ , as Edward Abbey suggests, we might want to invoke their ‘wisdom’.[194] Perhaps we could ‘re-enchant’ the world with the fables that they believed in — assuming we could empty our heads of all the scientific and technical knowledge that presumably burdens our civilization* Whether such a return or revival is possible in a culture that knows a great deal about phenomena that were complete mysteries to men and women of the remote Paleolithic period, the reader will have to decide.

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The notion that their ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ fostered in our distant ancestors a conservationist and respectful attitude toward wildlife, forests, and the various ecosystems they inhabited is perhaps the main reason that the virtues of a revived ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ are promoted today by ecomystics and primitivists, few of whom are themselves likely to really befieve that animals live under headmen in a: ‘spirit world’ or that the dream world is as real as the objective world around them.

How ‘Paleolithic’ or ‘primitive’ are modern aborigines, who seem to live like our Paleolithic ancestors and presumably provide us with evidence of the prehistoric world? Most anthropologists now agree that the foraging communities they encounter have already been profoundly altered by earlier Euro-American contact, particularly by missionaries, traders, and soldiers. As the eminent social anthropologist Clifford Geertz warns: the remote ‘ “out-of-the-way 55 peoples’ whom cultural anthropologists in the past studied as ‘natural communities’ were not relics of the distant past. Geertz writes:

The realization, grudging and belated, that this is not so, not even with the Pygmies, not even with the Eskimos, and that these people are in fact products of larger-scale processes of social change which have made them and continue to make them what they are — has come as something of a shock that has induced a virtual crisis in the field [of anthropology].[195]

The 15,000 or 20,000 years that have passed since the late Paleolidiic were not a cultural and social vacuum but deeply affected even the most isolated aboriginal peoples today. Today’s ‘primitives’ — and they are disappearing like snowflakes in a summer heat wave — underwent complex developments that separate them from the late Paleolithic peoples whose remains are the objects of extravagant fantasies.

In the 1960s many anthropologists adopted idealized visions of‘primitive’ innocence and well-being. A ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium, held at the University of Chicago in April 1969, promulgated a myth of ‘affluent’ foraging cultures and the existence of pristine ‘primitive’ communities.[196] It gave the mystical ‘counterculture’ and later New Age children an idea that they wanted to hear: namely, that civilization is bad, and that neo-primitives (an oxymoron) adorned with flowers and beads are deliriously good* Various ‘Pleistocene’, ‘Paleolithic’ , and ‘early Neolithic’ spiritualities sprouted up like mushrooms after a rain.

Careful research done since the ‘Man the Hunter’ conference indicates that people in foraging cultures suffered and suffer from considerable material insecurity. Monographic material reviewing aborigines at various levels of‘primitivity’ are at odds with 1960s myths that our ancestors enjoyed ‘affluence’ and lived enviably pacific or untroubled fives. Many of the modern-day foragers whom anthropologists once described as enjoying ‘affluent’ , even leisurely fives actually suffered serious material deprivations, and their fives were often quite short.

Nor should we be under any illusions that aboriginal foragers are a direct continuation of Paleolithic foragers; rather, they were driven from stable, largely horticultural ways of life into inhospitable deserts and forests* The Kalahari desert San people, or Bushmen, are a striking case in point, as Edwin N. Wilmsen and his colleagues have shown.[197] These hunter-gatherers, so widely celebrated in the pop anthropology literature of the past few decades as a leisurely and materially secure people, seem to have undergone several transitions from food cultivators and pastoralists to hunter-gatherers. To call them Paleolithic, let alone idealize their fifeways as ‘affluent’ , is arguable to say the least. Their much-lauded cooperative oudook and tendency to share things was easily undermined in recent decades, and they now seem to be as acquisitive as the Europeans with whom they have been favorably contrasted.

Reasonable speculations based on similar facts can be made about many other present-day bands that were probably pushed back into inhospitable areas by competing tribes as well as by Europeans, and who were obliged to use very simple, often attenuated tool-kits by comparison with the more advanced techniques they had developed earlier* Some were forced to adopt simpler and less satisfactory ways of life because of invaders and competitors for resources. Thus the Yuqui Indians, ‘discovered’ in the 1950s, initially seemed free of European influence and ‘blessed’ with tools that were even more primitive than those of late Paleolithic peoples of some 30,000 years ago.[198] The Yuqui had never seen Europeans until their lands were invaded by missionaries (whom they initially killed) and the Amazon jungle near their community domain was deforested. They wore no clothing, and their weapons consisted exclusively of bows and arrows. They had no tools apart from the clawed legs of animals.

But significantly, their society had a slave caste, and after further study, anthropologists have good reason to befieve that their ancestors had once had a fairly complex horticultural society with pottery and social hierarchies. They became foragers because centuries earlier they were obliged to flee farther and farther into the Amazon forest to escape predatory European colonists, until they lost all memory of their past.

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Present-day band and tribal peoples must have undergone considerable cultural changes since the late Paleolithic. Indeed, due not only to their contact with other cultures, as well as Euro-American ones, they probably differ considerably from their own ancestors of only a few centuries ago.

Our early ancestors were probably not hunters, despite many claims by primitivists and sociobiologists that human beings are genetically predisposed to hunt or have an inborn love of wildlife. As I have noted ealier, archaeological artifacts and a growing body of anthropological opinion now support the view that, until the middle Paleofithic, about a million years ago, early hominids were more likely to be the prey than the predator. Using stone implements to crack open the long bones of herbivores for marrow, they were more likely scavengers than predators.

This way of acquiring protein-rich foods countervails the present-day image of ‘man the hunter’. As Robert J. Blumenschine and John A. Cavallo observe: ‘This question [of Man the Hunter] matters perhaps as much as any in evolutionary studies because it touches on the definition of human nature. Unfortunately, the answer given by the theory of Man the Hunter is based more on sexual and other prejudices than on the fossil record and the ecology of finding food.’[199] The literature on this subject has grown so considerably that the conclusion of‘man the scavenger’ is now becoming the conventional wisdom of paleoanthxopologists.

After tracing the ‘Man the Hunter’ notion from the 1969 conference, Blumenschine and Cavallo show that closer studies in the late 1970s and the 1980s produced increasing evidence that our hominid and even Homo ancestors were sophisticated scavengers, gaining an edge on other scavengers by developing increasingly effective crushing and cutting tools. Although the opportunistic hunting of small animals probably always existed among hominids and humans, it is likely that until human beings developed projectile weapons like spears and later bows and arrows, they scavenged on the prey of powerful predators, particularly leopards, who often leave their partly eaten kill in trees. Their sharp cutting tools and hand axes may have given them key advantages over other scavengers: they could quickly butcher animal remains before they were driven away by large predators, and they could crush open long bones that contained nutritious marrow and that even hyenas, with their powerful jaws, could not crack open. This scavenger position has been supported most recently by the detailed studies of Donald Johanson, the discoverer of the Lucy fossil, and his colleagues.[200]

In what paleoanthropologists increasingly call the ‘Human Revolution’ — reflected in changes in the technological and artistic evidence of Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe some 40,000 years ago — a rich repertoire of implements was developed, as well as art, with a rapidity and on a scale that has no precedent in earlier times. In part, tins revolution can be attributed to the development of syllabic languages; partly, too, the revolution can be attributed to a very rich cultural evolution, the elaboration of human communal ties into fairly complex social institutions like clans and probably tribal forms of organization.

In a sense, human beings as we know them had arrived. They were rich in potentialities for self-consciousness, complex communication, rationality, cooperation, and social organization, marked by innovative abilities and a capacity to know, intervene, and change the natural world purposefully to a degree unknown to any other life-form.

How did these people deal with the world practically, whatever their spiritual equipment may have been? “What can we tell from the archaeological and ethnographic evidence about Paleofithic attitudes toward conservation and wildlife? How ecological were they in dealing with other life-forms existentially, not only spiritually?

We have every reason to befieve that as far back as the times of Homo erectus, our ancestors were prepared to alter their ‘wild’ environment in every way that served their advantage. Having gained the ability to use fire, erectus probably burned away forests to create grasslands on which game were to subsist for millions of years. Moreover, we have every reason to suspect that erectus cunningly used torches to stampede game animals over cliffs and chase off predators to gain access to their kills.

If Homo erectus altered the environment over time with fire, it is certain that more evolved forms of the human genus did so on a sweeping scale. Much of what seems like original grassland in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas might still be covered by dense forests were it not for the burnings our distant ancestors systematically practiced over many thousands of years. Indeed, large parts of pre-Columbian America looked more like parkland than forest at the time of European contact, because of the repeated fires native peoples fit to provide open spaces for large herbivores, for the removal of brush that could conceal their enemies, and for gardening.

As Stephen J. Pyne observes in his detailed study, Fire in America, ‘the virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For this condition, Indian fire practices were largely responsible.’[201] Evidence of human activities in dense forest areas appear to be sufficientiy widespread for modern anthropologists and botanists to question how ‘original’ many tropical forests actually were, even in the Amazon and certainly in tropical Africa.

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Our Paleolithic ancestors, like any other life-form, almost certainly used their habitats to the full. In North America, the retreat of the last glaciers about 11,000 years ago was marked by the rapid extinction of more than 80 per cent of the great Pleistocene mammals — an immensely higher percentage of extinctions than those that occurred in the immediate postglacial period on other continents. As Paul S. Martin has put it, the last retreat of the glaciers in America was probably marked by ‘overkill’ of large mammals, primarily by peoples with increasingly sophisticated weapons and hunting techniques.[202] Long before Europeans landed on American shores, fauna like the mammoth, mastodon, giant ground sloth, huge armadillos, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, large beavers, and various bear species, as well as camels and horses — which had evolved on the continent and survived only because they had migrated to Eurasia — were completely gone.

Some have tried to explain the disappearance of these species as a result of the ecological changes that followed the retreat of the glaciers. Perhaps, but many of these mammals had survived previous glacial and interglacial alterations, giving us little reason to suppose they could not survive the last of the postglacial climatic and ecological changes. What makes it difficult to accept an explanation based entirely on climatic change is the fairly recent discovery of a remarkably well-preserved mastodon, an animal presumably dependent upon the widely prevalent spruce-tree environments of the glacial period. The stomach remains of this extinct animal indicate that it had adapted quite satisfactorily to the bog-type environment favored by animals like the moose, which was widespread in the immediate postglacial world.

Significantly, the many ecological niches opened by these extinctions of Pleistocene fauna in North America were subsequently occupied by the Old World animals, which gave North America its celebrated character as a biotic ‘paradise’: short-horned bison, elk, moose, caribou, bighorn sheep, and the like. Unlike camels and horses, these animals did not evolve on the American continent but rather migrated to it from Eurasia.

Still, we are not obliged to accept the ‘overkill’ argument to agree that many now-extinct fauna were hunted down by proto-Indian foragers and ultimately exterminated, without any ‘spiritual’ restrictions on their ways. Whatever their ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ may have been, they were prepared to hunt game with few ‘spiritual’ constraints. Deep layers of bison bones have been found at the foot of cliffs, over which Indians stampeded thousands of animals for centuries, probably in numbers that far exceeded the uses to which their carcasses could have been put. Accumulations of bones at one site examined by Brian Reeves of the University of California reached a depth of thirty-five feet. At still another site. Jack Brink of the Archaeological Survey of Alberta estimates that, over the centuries, 123,000 bison were stampeded over a single ‘jump site’ by Indian hunters. As Brian Fagan observes in his survey of such cliff sites, ‘the Blackfoot practiced bison hunting and butchering on a near-industrial scale for many centuries’, settling down nearby in semipermanent camps, ‘trading the spoils of the chase to people living long distances away.’[203]

Native Americans were by no means the only foraging peoples who engaged in the massive and systematic killing of animals. Late Paleolithic hunters in Syria, for example, seem to have learned how to ‘funnel’ gazelles into killing and butchering sites during their seasonal migrations until they were completely exterminated.[204] In Pyrenean passes and other mountain areas, such practices occurred until game was virtually or completely wiped out. Indeed, fertility rituals may have been a very practical response to the decline of the great faunal herd animals that had fallen prey to late Paleolithic foragers. The disappearance of these game animals can hardly be attributed to climatic changes alone. The domestication of animals may even have preserved certain species whose extinction was at risk, as the hunting prowess of late Paleolithic peoples became increasingly sophisticated and deadly.

No native American hunting practices, to be sure, exculpate the massive extermination of wildlife that followed the settlement of the Americas by Europeans. The destruction of the great bison herds on the plains — possibly exceeding forty million in two or three decades — by white hunters in the nineteenth century has no equal among native peoples. I wish only to emphasize that the American Indian, Pyrenean, and Syrian hunters of thousands of years ago did no more than what any animal would have done: they tried to find ample quantities of food and good shelter — in short, to survive and to use their intelligence to make their fives as comfortable as possible.

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Nor is there any reason to believe that quasi-religious scruples about the ‘sacredness’ of life made our prehistoric ancestors necessarily kinder or gender in their treatment of wildlife than people ax today.

Modern aborigines notoriously mistreated the animals they caught, often indicting needless pain upon them. For generations, gardening peoples in Borneo made a practice of killing pigs by furiously beating them to death, on the theory that their roasted fiesh was particularly tender after these practices. Eskimos were extremely harsh in dealing with their huskies, often kicking and striking them with little or no compunction, as were many Plains Indians in their treatment of their own dogs. Colin Turnbull, in his generous and appreciative account of the Ituri forest pygmies of Central Africa, was shocked to see how a sindula, a tasty dogfike creature, was tormented after it was caught in a net following a collective hunt. Repeatedly speared to the laughter of the pygmies, observes a shocked Turnbull, the animal ‘still writhed and fought’ until ‘a third spear pierced its heart’, and it was finally put out of its misery. Turnbull reports:

At other times I have seen Pygmies singeing feathers off birds that were still alive, explaining that the meat is more tender if death comes slowly . And the hunting dogs, valuable as they are, get kicked around mercilessly from the day they are born to the day they die... When I talked to the Pygmies about their treatment of animals, they laughed at me and said, ‘The forest has given us animals for food — should we refuse this gift and starve?’ I thought of turkey farms and Thanksgiving, and of the millions of animals reared by our own society with the sole intention of slaughtering them for food.[205]

These are the remarks not of an arrogant European but of an anthropologist whose affection for the pygmies is attested in every fine of his writings.

My point is not to exculpate abuses of animals today by adducing abusive attitudes among ‘primitive’ peoples — cruelty to animals is inhuman and insupportable wherever and whenever it is practiced. But it is the height of naivety to suppose that because Paleolithic or modern foragers occasionally exercised a pragmatic restraint on killing certain species or tabooed them altogether, they regarded them or their fives as ‘sacred’. Often a wide gulf existed between what they seemed to believe (generally for very utilitarian reasons) and what they actually practiced. Seemingly uplifting exclamations by certain modern native American shamans and spokespeople, for example — to the effect that the wolf, bison, bear, or eagle is ‘our cousin’ or ‘our brother’ — do not mean that their ancestors treated these animals with fervent consanguinity only a few generations earlier.

Rituals centering on food animals like bison or bears were often performed for very practical reasons: to ‘coax’ them into becoming prey during a hunt or to allay their ‘spirits’ after they were killed. The pragmatic core of these ceremonies rested on analogical premises that are no different in principle from childish fears of encountering werewolves or vampire bats. Their ceremonies took the form they did because they knew little about the biotic factors that produce game for hunts. To early peoples, spirits abounded everywhere, not because they thought everything was alive but because the dream world itself was a continual source of perplexity. These spirits were not necessarily benign; indeed, if anything, they were often malevolent. Disease, it was believed, was caused by spirits, as were births, be they of children, bison calves, or bear cubs. If our late Paleolithic ancestors probably knew little or nothing about human reproduction, why should they have known more about animal reproduction? If they believed that human children are created by spirits, why should they have had a different view of bison calves or bear cubs?

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Superstition being superstition, aboriginal spirit-beliefs were not only wrong but often ecologically deleterious. Calvin Martin has recently opined that before European contact, boreal forest Algonkians were conservationists who hunted selectively, in a ‘contractual’ relationship with game animals by which both humans and animals agreed not to ‘ruin’ each other. After contact, when the Algonkians died of European diseases in great numbers, they regarded the animals as having violated the ‘contract’ and spread epidemics among the tribes. As a result of this alleged breach of faith, so Martin’s thesis goes, the Algonkians slaughtered animals wantonly in the belief that they were malevolent disease agents.[206] This thesis has been strongly controverted; some anthropologists have found that the Cere, with whom Martin deals, may never have been conservationists at all.

Indeed, Ceres seem to have believed ‘that game animals killed by hunters spontaneously regenerate after death or reincarnate as fetal animals’, as Robert A. Brightman observes in a fascinating review of the literature on their magico-refigious concepts.

Manitoba Ceres in the 1980s call this process akwanaham otoskana, ‘[animal] covers its bones’. Such events are taken for granted by some Cere trappers. I was told on a number of occasions that an adult , trapped animal was ‘the same one’ that had been killed the previous winter, Modern Ceres also state that ritual procedures for disposing of animal bones and blood prefigure and influence animal regeneration and rein-carnation. This knowledge was present in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and probably derives from archaic strata of Algonquian culture.[207]

Brightman’s conclusion from Cere attitudes toward animals demonstrates that ‘ecological wisdom’ depends far more upon knowledge and rationaL behavior than upon the vagaries of spiritism. Brightman observes:

If hunters are unaware that animals can be managed, they may also be unaware that they can be hunted to depletion. It cannot be assumed that Ceres and others involved in game depletions initially understood their own role as determinants. Rather than inhibiting overkillreligious definitions of the human-animal relationship encouraged it insofar as they premised an environment of primordial abundance in which game could not be destroyed but only temporarily displaced. Some contemporary Rock Ceres reproduce this traditional understanding, Similarly , some Osnaburgh House Ojibwas stated in the 1960s that conservation was unnecessary because animals were ‘given’ to hunters when they were needed. These understandings are held also by subarctic Athapaskan groups.[208]

The Ojibwa view that animals are ‘given’ to the hunters, presumably by beneficent spirits, is very similar to the Ituri forest pygmy’s view, as it was presented to Turnbull. As we have seen, the pygmies frankly declared that they could torment animals mercilessly because the forest spirit gave captured game to their community for their own disposition. In fact, although there is a certain amount of evidence for conservation among the forest Indians of North America, far more evidence exists for lack of conservation among forest tribes such as the Montagnais and very strikingly among Iroquoians in the Great Lakes region, who believed that, ‘for all kinds of animals, whether they need them or not, ... they must kill all they find, for fear, as they say, that if they do not take them the beasts would go and tell the others how they had been hunted and that then, in times of want, they would not find any more.’[209] There are as many, possibly more, reasons for believing that precontact Indian spiritism fostered overkill of game animals rather than for holding the ecomystical belief that they lived in ‘fraternal’ solidarity with them.

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Again, these examples are not intended to defame native American or African foragers, still less exculpate the predatory behavior of Euro-Americans for their wanton destruction of wildlife environments throughout the world. I simply wish to explode ecomystical and primitivistic myths that foragers were somehow less pragmatic in dealing with their environment than any other life-form. In fact, they used it to the hilt, all their spiritism to the contrary notwithstanding. Moreover, the relationships of foragers to animals were very tenuous. The fact that late Paleolithic hunters painted animals on their cave walls or sculpted them does not mean that they viewed them as ‘brothers’ any more than they would view a mushroom as kin. The notion that a particular species, or for that matter, all animals, had a Chief Spirit was no inducement for treating individual animals with any more ‘respect’ than the worship of God, in the Western world, has made individuals ooze with kindness for the less fortunate humans in their midst.

If foragers regarded the world as alive, as ecomystics claim, this view can he explained by the fact that much of it was alive. Their world was largely organic, and it was the only world they knew. If it was sacred in their eyes (assuming they conceived of the sacred in any modern Euro-American sense), it may very well be due to their strong and pragmatic need to ‘communicate’ with their environment — more realistically, to control it to some degree. Magic and rituals were seen as effective means of attaining very pragmatic ends and of explaining an unknown spirit world that appeared in their dreams. Unlike modern humans, they did not understand the real origins of disease, the causes of sudden changes in the weather, eclipses, earthquakes, even the full meaning of death.

To extoll magico-religious attitudes irrespective of their truthfulness, simply because they have a superficial affinity with certain ecological sensibilities today is grossly misleading. If modern foragers hold an idyllic ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ as though time had not affected their thinking after 20,000 years, they hold such beliefs because of ignorance, not because of any archaic wisdom. Notions celebrated as ‘Paleolithic’ by modern ecomystics and primitivists rest more on analogy than on supportable ideas, and they are inspired more by a spirit world deriving from inexplicable dreams than by ecological understanding.

To call for the revival of‘Paleolithic spirituality’ is to ask human beings to accept ignorance as a value, indeed, to ‘disenchant’ the fascinating world that has been opened to them by science, philosophy, social theory, and psychology. Humanity’s hope, I wish to contend, lies not in a return to a mythopeic past that was riddled by ignorance and superstition and naive awe; nor does it lie in a passive acceptance of the status quo, riddled by greed, competition, and domination. It lies in a future that will draw from the past whatever is worth retaining, including the highly cooperative spirit that existed within foraging but largely parochial ‘primitive’ communities on the one hand, as well as the universalism and sense of human commonality that movements for emancipation have advocated in the modern era.

If cooperation and universality can be melded together, there is a possibility that a truly rational society might emerge in which a ‘reenchanted’ humanity nourishes a spirituality informed by sharing, a society informed by cooperation, and by a sensibility that gives due recognition to the well-being of the natural as well as the social world.

Primitivism stands woefully at odds with any attempt to achieve such a sensibility. In one sense or another, it seeks to turn back the clock, to go back to a mythic Golden Age of intellectual and social innocence that never existed. In the best of cases, primitivism argues for a non-rational mentality based on contrived myths about ‘primitive reverence’ for a mystified Nature in which humans can intervene only for the most limited reasons. In the worst of cases, it offers a misanthropic view of humanity, an identification of Nature with pristine wilderness, and a hatred of rationality, science, and technology.

Both views are antihumanistic. Resting on deep ecology’s biocentrism, and on a host of ideas developed by postmodernists, they deny the unique position of humanity in social evolution, or worse, they dissolve it in a mythic animal-human community that renders any distinctions between animals and humans impossible to make — ironically depriving human beings of any responsibility for non-human life and its welfare. Once again, Harold Fromm’s ‘invisible puppeteer’ is at work, mistaking the seemingly autonomous antics of the puppets for the puppeteer’s manipulation of them.