Comparison of the Life Satisfaction Between the Hunter Gatherer and Neolithic Communities

Do you think life in a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer community really was happier than living in a Neolithic agricultural community?

First and foremost, there are several pros and cons for either of the categories if you were to weigh them against each other. With that being said, I personally and based off the readings, think that the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer community would have been more likely to be happier than living in a Neolithic agricultural community.

By the end of the Ice age, when people started farming due to the glaciers being melted and its possibility, it opened a number of opportunities for the good. Farming allowed a larger population. The then – hunter-gatherers could now lead a more stable non-nomadic lifestyle by not following a herd of the group, dislocating now and then, rather - lead a more stable life. The abundant resources and farming techniques helped allow this despite the several downsides. For instance: With agriculture, people moved from eating meat to wheat, rice corn, and more plant-based diet. This led to an overall decline in health due to the lack of nutrition within the diet. Whereas in a hunter-gatherer’s life, they would have put effort into getting the meal for their survival and hence had a diversified nutritious diet due to the non-plant based diet. This led to overall shrinkage in body size in the Neolithic period. Subsequently, illness’s like flu, etc. started becoming widespread and common– indicating the lack of immunity as they adopted this newer lifestyle.

In “The Original Affluent Society”, the hunter gatherers are crowned as the real affluent community. Hunter-gatherers here are compared to the “western way of affluence” where the man’s wants are many but the resources are finite, hence leading to an increased production to compensate, while the hunter-gatherers' desire and wants are minimum and few, indicating how two societies take different paths to “affluence”. Sahlin also states that hunter-gatherers had a marvelously varied diet due to the abundance of flora and fauna.

To what seemed inadequate and unusable to the majority in the modern world, seemed otherwise to the hunter gatherers, and now with evidences as to how knowledgeable and alert they were about their environment and surroundings, they were able to manipulate and convert it into valuable resources. This, in turn, reduced their time in the search for food. In fact, it was so successful a lot of them did not know what to do with their free time. With that being said, Sahlin argues that an average male worked around 44.5hours and female 40.1 per week respectively – both of which is STILL less than the total number of hours spent working in the modern household. By trusting the nature and using them only when they was a need of resource to survive adequately, did they use the nature, and that too wisely.

We can also understand as to why the Neolithic agricultural community era was the beginning of downfall amongst people. As time went on, diseases come with the Neolithic revolution due to the improper treatment of sewage and cattle waste and the lack of immunity. As trade and commerce took off now, one could gain wealth through commerce by trading, although this exposes the far separated community to the diseases that they haven’t been in contact with through traders. As the villages flourished, they started grouping into states called “chiefdoms”. And they had their own chiefs that acted as the head of the state.

From this point on, inequality comes into existence. Property and wealth accumulation also contribute to inequalities in terms of gender and economic disparities. There was a loss of diversity in flora due to the planting of only one crop and removing the rest of the crops, which again, lead to diseases, plagues, etc. Subsequently in the process, animals were also affected by diseases which in turn affect the humans, as they spread and has harsh effects.

Hence although civilization and societies along with trades and commerce flourish to what it has becomen in the current day, many may wonder as to why all the community decided to adopt into this agricultural lifestyle from hunter-gatherers despite its pitfall. One of the main reasons could be that since a) the opportunity purely just presented itself for them to do so.

By nature, when you find something that is reliable and resourceful(farming) and much easier (than hunting), it is human tendencies to stick to the latter.

To conclude, with all theories and explanations taken into consideration, I think hunter-gatherers were happier than the Neolithic community – not due to the abundance of resources but due to the abundance of pitfalls that arise later on, which they never had to go through in the first place.