 Hello, I'm Chancellor Ronnie Green. Thank you for joining me for today's Nebraska lecture. This distinguished lecture series features some of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's most notable scholars, researchers, artists, and thinkers. At Nebraska, we believe in the power of every person. For about two decades, the Nebraska lectures have showcased some of Nebraska's finest scholars, people who embody the spirit of this institution and are committed to sharing their knowledge with the public. Our speakers are renowned experts in their fields. They are scholars who strive to collaborate, breaking down the barriers between disciplines. They are educators who are committed to mentoring and shaping the next generation. They are problem solvers who have spent their careers addressing some of society's most pressing challenges. I am so proud of their accomplishments and dedication to our university and the state of Nebraska. Thank you to the Office of Research and Economic Development, the University's Research Council, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and other partners for making this lecture series possible. I hope you enjoy today's Nebraska lecture. Well, welcome. For today's Nebraska lecture, we'll hear from Ray Hames, Professor of Anthropology in our School of Global Integrated Studies. In 2020, Dr. Hames was the fourth Nebraska to be named to the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the Academy is one of the highest distinctions for a scientist or engineer in the United States as it recognizes distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. For more than 40 years, Dr. Hames has served as a leading anthropological scholar, both in the classroom here in Lincoln at UNL and through his research on Indigenous peoples in South America. Ray is an international authority on the lives of Indigenous peoples of the Venezuelan Amazon, who live in relative isolation. Before international politics blocked access in 1999, Hames spent almost three years living within and studying the Indigenous tribes firsthand. His research is primarily focused on their behavioral ecology, food and labor exchange, human ecology, marriage, kinship, and parental investment. Dr. Hames earned a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, then joined our faculty in 1980, and if you do your math, that was 42 years ago. His most recent National Science Foundation-funded project is creating a demographic and genealogical database so social scientists can use it to test theories on kinship, demographic processes, and marriage. I'm eager to hear his presentation today, in which he'll describe the diversity of hunter-gatherers and debunk some utopian assumptions we may hold about these remote societies. If you have questions for Ray, please enter them in the chat. He will answer some of them during a Q&A session after the lecture. Over to Dr. Hames. Thank you, Chancellor. Popular writers proclaim that if we are to be in tune with our hunter-gatherers' selves, we will be healthier, have less violence, conserve resources, and maintain biodiversity, work less, have a better sex and marital lives, and create greater gender equality. There are kind of two views on hunter-gatherers, a kind of classic dividing line, a Hobbesian version which says that life was short, nasty, and brutish. A Rossoean perspective that says man is born free and everywhere, he is in chains. These popular writers that I'm going to talk about, and just not popular writers, but also scientific writers, are mostly Rossoean. Most are not scientists, but some are, but the reality of hunter-gatherer life is somewhere in between. The usual suspect for our problem comes from agriculture and the rise of civilization according to the Rossoeans. Here's a quote from Jared Diamond, the adoption of agriculture was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never fully recovered with agriculture, came the gross social and sexual inequality, the diseases and deposition that cursed our existence. But there's an important point about early agriculture that I like to make in that most of the Rossoeans point to the fact that the rise of agriculture and civilization has kind of led to a degradation of the human spirit. Skeletal analyses of early hunter-gatherers who were transitioning to agriculture show that they were about three centimeters shorter than they were before they started engaging in agriculture, and had higher rates of skeletal lesions and dental abnormalities because of diet, parasitic and other diseases of living in dense settlements. But through time that increase in stature and lessening of skeletal abnormalities indicating poor health kind of got back to normal. So here's a kind of early take home message. Most Rossoeans project their social views of the good life on the hunter-gatherers, which is really a means to critique current issues by using hunter-gatherers as paragons of virtue. Unfortunately popular writers tend to cherry pick examples while ignoring counter cases. And then the final point is that there is considerable cultural diversity among hunter-gatherers. So why are hunter-gatherers important? Well simply anatomically modern humans did not come onto the scene until about 200,000 years ago. Agriculture is only about 12,000 years old. Therefore for at least 95% of our history as a species we live the life of hunter-gatherers. And given the pace of evolution many assume that our basic biological, social, and psychological attributes evolved in a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Therefore there's a kind of mismatch between what we were for 95% of our history and what we've become with the advent of agriculture and civilization. Here by the way is a picture of an anatomically modern human dated about 160,000 years ago in Ethiopia. Herto is his name. He was basically like us anatomically except his brain was about 150 centimeters larger than ours. But he had all the attributes that we would describe to an anatomically modern human. So let's set the stage of that. You know who were hunter-gatherers, what were they like? Hunter-gathering and fishing was the main mode of subsistence. Generally men hunted, women gathered. They were nomadic to semi-nomadic people. Average local group size was about 30 but they existed in large regional bands of 50 to 1,000 people. And there was a lot of interaction in terms of trade, visiting, marriage, and celebration of festivals. So that kind of 30 seems like a small unit but in fact they had a really large encompassing social network. Low population density, also very little wealth differentiation. Everybody was about the same material existence, the same dietary kind of status. They were politically egalitarian except that men had more power than women and older had more power than the younger and very weak leadership. You know one saying that we anthropologists use one word from the head man and everybody does as he pleases. So what I want to talk about today largely are issues in the popular imagination of hunter-gatherers. Talk about their diet, physical activity and caloric expenditure, labor time, resource conservation, health, violence, and marriage and sexuality. So here is probably you know getting to what we ate and how we should eat according to people who promote the paleo diet. A number of them are anthropologists. Others are just popular people who want to earn some money writing diet books and so this has been going on for a while and what there's some interesting reasoning behind the paleo diet that is why it's promoted. Our body became genetically mismatched with the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry compared to what we ate during most of our history as a species and some examples are for example lactose malabsorption. It affects 36% of the people in the United States, 70% of people worldwide and it's because in hunting gathering lifestyle there was no milk after you you were weaned and so this is an example of a kind of mismatch. We've become ill some of us or most of us in the world if we can assume dairy products. The other thing for example is starch digestion. One shift has been a reliance on shifting from meat and nuts and berries to high plants high in carbohydrates and moderns have a kind of genetic change that occurred in the number of gene copies for amylase which is really good to digest carbohydrates whereas hunter-gatherers they have very little in the way of the expression of that gene so this is kind of the reasoning behind this mismatch hypothesis. So let's look at BMI body mass index and obesity obesity compared looking at us on one hand and hunter-gatherers on the other hand. In the United States the average BMI for men and women is about 28 for hunter-gatherers for females is about 24 males is 23 and if we look at it from the perspective of what is a claim to be obese using the BMI measures 43% of females 42% of males are obese but among hunter-gatherers only 4.6 for women and 1.2 for men so you can see there's a huge difference in the kind of our our stature and level of obesity compared to our ancestors for most of the our histories of species. So let's look at the empirical basis the paleo diet as many of you know it's the diet recommendation that's really high in meat overall one basic study from a dietitian at the University of Colorado Boulder noted that hunter-gatherers gained 45 to 65% of their diet from animal foods but there's a problem with a sample the data is not very good and a lot of these samples they used are the cases they used honey is not mentioned and I'll get to that in just a minute many hunter-gatherers consume less than 20 to 30% of meat with no ill effects the amount of fat consumed was unknown in these dietary surveys and the recommendation of the mean of the sample is not really a valid recommendation given the kind of variation we see with no variation in obesity or health aspects and so here's an example of some worldwide samples you can see that meat looms large in the paleo diet but there are some groups for example on the right hand side the kong and the gui whose diet is dominated by plant foods and so there's this kind of interesting variation that's found basically the higher you go north or south from the equator the more hunter-gatherer diet is composed of animal resources for example among the Inuit people 95% of the diet is from meat and fat and again no ill effects are noted I'll get to that in just a minute here's this what I want to talk about honey for the hodza who are kind of like our typical hunter-gatherers because they're so well studied 15% of the diet is from honey and you can see in this chart here that in some months and this is you know 12 month kind of dietary measure over half the diet is honey and but what you see is enormous amount of variation day to day so there is no constant hunter-gatherer diet in this sort of case so what's in the paleo diet well you see it's meat and fish dominating nuts and seeds fruits vegetables high fiber in the diet our diet the modern diet starchy greens dominate our diet legumes really rare in hunter-gatherer diet are important in our diet dairy absent from hunter-gatherer diet really present in our diet highly processed and energy-dense food again in our diet and very low fiber in our diet now what do we know about hunter-gatherer dietary choice the the assumption seems to be that they know what they should eat and that's the recommendation that we make for us one thing we know is that the macronutrients in terms of carbohydrates protein and fat vary with latitude higher you go north or south from the equator the more meat and fat are parts of the diet as I mentioned before what we know from economic ampologies hunter-gatherer is attempt to maximize their net rate of caloric return through foraging that means they're trying to be as efficient as possible in foraging so the resulting diet depends on the cost and benefits of pursuing various food types as predicted by a diet breath model in optimal foraging theory so the question becomes are some forager diets better or worse than others we have no idea all the diet seem to be adequate they don't seem to suffer from any of the kind of ills that we suffer from for example high BMI or they have very very little in the way are almost nothing in the way of metabolic disorders such as hypertension diabetes blood sugar high levels or abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels they're dietetically associated in our society so the point is despite the variation they have in their diet they don't have any thing that remotely resembles the kinds of problems that we have in terms of chronic illnesses now given their active lifestyle and relative lack of obesity do hunter-gatherers expand more calories this really recent research has been done heavily publicized in science and nature and if you look at the bottom chart it looks at total energetic expenditure for men and women the two dark bars for men and women represent the the haza the group that eats lots of honey that I showed you before in a group that's close to hunter-gatherers called the chimani what you see is that there's hardly any difference between men compared to South Africans US and Jamaican and people in the Netherlands only about 200 more calories per day and total energetic expenditure total caloric expenditure if you look at the women they are exceeded by women in modern societies but then if you look at the top so the point is that they're not more energetically active than we are on average or if they are just a little bit but if you look at physical activity in terms of moderate to vigorous physical activity you see the two dark bars there for men and women much much higher than what we expend in and moderate physical activity is essentially brisk walking vigorous you begin to up your heart rate and your ventilation rate and so this is a very interesting result a kind of unexpected result but a result that is really well documented and so we can call this I think it's frustrating it's called a constrained energy paradox and that is frustrating because we don't fully understand the reasoning behind it even though the data is there to suggest this is the case so there are limits to how many calories we can burn active people only burn about 200 calories more per day than inactive people the more active we are and a lot of people who experience this as they go through a dietary restriction the fewer calories we expend we are when we are in active so our basal metabolic rate goes down and so we have this constrained energy output that goes on so consequently the problem of dietary obesity is perhaps better solved through caloric reduction now we've been designed by natural selection to be a hungry species and eat whenever we can and one way to look at it is the calories for us have become really really cheap if you look at the figures on the haza and the shimane there you see that for every hour they work they only get maybe one to two thousand calories an hour okay if you look at us especially the change through time which essentially marks the increase in obesity we can get up to twenty thousand calories for an hour of wages and so that is a huge you know difference you know one to two thousand versus twenty thousand and so the suggestion I would make perhaps you know caloric restriction is the thing that we need to to focus on health status hunter-gatherers typically have high rates of infectious diseases and parasitism in fact their infant mortality rate that is the number of children who die before they reach one year of age is about twenty to twenty five percent now the good news is they have an absence of diseases of civilization or non-infected diseases included cardiovascular disorders I mentioned hypertension diabetes blood sugar abnormalities abnormal cholesterol triglycerides and the lowest measures ever of coronary orthodosclerosis of any population ever made and so there once they get through that childhood reach about the age of 15 then their average life expectancy goes up to about 68 years and of course we live longer but it has to do with modern medical interventions that allow us to do so there's some interesting research on cognitive impairment like the West about the age of 60 there's a bit of moderate cognitive impairment equal to moderns compared to hunter-gatherers but they have the lowest rates of Alzheimer's disease of any population ever studied and this is work on the haza and the and the chimone do hunter-gatherers work less than we do a lot of popular authors would say that we've been civilized to death we're kind of in a rat race another work by my sussman and so the common claim is that hunter-gatherers work only three to four hours a day seven days a week but this is largely based on a single incomplete study of the song bushman that live in the Kalahari a well-studied group and again this is an example of popular writers cherry picking their their evidence while they do work less than we do we got to put it in context and here's something I published about 25 years ago and if you looked at the left-hand column going from hunter-gatherers to Amazonians New Guineans agriculturalist and Western European peoples what you find is that hunter-gatherers do work less than modern Europeans or agriculturalists and I get to the agriculturalists in just a minute but other people like I said to them you know mama they work least of all and also and these people are essentially transitioning to early horticulture so they do work less than we do but there are other groups who are agriculturalists who who work even less now there's one thing that's really interesting and this bears further research if you look at all the orange bars they exceed the blue bars except for hunter-gatherers that means that women work more than men except in hunting and gathering society and what's really interesting about these time allocation measures is that they don't take into consideration child care now some of you may think that changing the dirty diaper is a leisure time activity most of us don't and so the what I would argue is that the the excess of labor time shown here in these studies by by women if they were to include child care activities they would far exceed the amount of time that that men work so I want to turn to now hunter-gatherer violence here's a picture I took outside my hut the group I studied the on a mama very warlike they're getting ready for a raid they're going to go up river and attack the village that had been bothering them for for some time and we've got this international bestseller called humankind a hopeful history by a writer called Rucker Bergman and it's an international bestseller and essentially says that once again agriculture and civilization is the culprit that's led to all the problems that we have today and he says that hunter-gatherer societies were inherently peaceful anti-war equal and feminist a really extreme was so in reviews as usual lots of positive reviews by non experts unfortunately experts tend not to review these books because they're really not worth their time and so we have a pundits doing these reviews and I want to kind of focus on this really sort of perspective what we know about warfare in pre-industrial societies and what I'm going to argue is that the Hobbesian perspective life is short nasty and brutish to some extent is true here's a book that was really really important war before civilization by Lawrence Keely and then a later much more popular book by Steven Pinker Pinker at Harvard who's a cognitive psychologist and our cognitive scientist and evolutionary theorist better angels of our nature but that data that he used to argue for a decrease in warfare is essentially based on this archaeologist by the name of Lawrence Keely here's something I published to kind of put things in perspective this came out a couple years ago if we look at causes of death we find that at hunting and gathering society 12% of all deaths are through violence either through homicide or warfare if we turn to agriculturalists or horticulturalists it goes to 24% so it is true that hunter-gatherers compared to many other pre-industrial peoples have less warfare is still pretty high when you think about it and let's put it in greater perspective if we look at pre-industrial societies and tribal level societies these are outside of state societies we find that the average are see the in 20% of all deaths are essentially through violence in World War two and this is the one that really kind of surprises people 1% of the European population died during the 1900s to the 2000 from warfare now we know the millions of deaths that were caused we know of the horrible situation in Ukraine coming today but again we're looking at really large populations and so even though we've got massive deaths they don't really compare to what went on throughout most of our history so hunter-gatherers have lower the lowest death rates in any of pre-industrial societies but is much higher than what goes on today at 12% compared to 1-2% in the 19th century causes of war among hunter-gatherers competition over scarce resources this is pretty common throughout the world abduction of women for marriage revenge against wrongs cycles a few that seem to go on largely because there's no central authority to kind of like authoritatively settle disputes among people and this is because hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian they don't like to be told by anybody what to do or how to settle their disputes leadership is really weak so that leads to an inability to stop these fuse once they get get going now let's turn to another kind of I think is largely a myth sometimes called the ecologically noble savage I wrote a long piece in the annual review of anthropology on this topic but they claim that hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the environment and they the argument is they have a number of environmental practices that permitted prevented the extinction of species and maintain biodiversity they were called guardians of the rainforest in the famous Rio summit there you see a picture there of sting sitting next to these Brazilian Native Americans and the idea that you know we really have to follow their kinds of methods for dealing with the environment but I would argue and many others would too that their so-called conservation is simply a side effect of a simple technology and a low-demand placed on resources it's not by any kind of design practices like we have for game conservation only going after males you know roosters and not hymns and things of that now when incentives emerge to external demand of colonial powers then degradation starts so hunter-gatherers were kind of like not over exploiting the resources also the Colonials come in their area invading the land and then they want furs skins feathers etc etc so we see the evidence of widespread degradation largely caused by colonial contact but these native peoples really wanted the steel goods to make their lives easier so and they didn't fully kind of understand the effect that they would have on their only later on their own biodiversity and lack of conservation and so but what I emphasize if you look at biodiversity in areas inhabited by native people they've got the highest biodiversity in the world largely because they're shielded from external demands in the past they essentially went after resources for their own people not for some external market in in Europe or the United States there's an idea among my my paleontological colleagues geologists that native Americans when they first came over were responsible for the extinction of the megafa megafa are essentially animals larger than 100 pounds and what we know is about the time that that humans came to North America there were megafa they hunted horses they hunted mammoths and the argument is that these megafa disappear giant ground sloths that weighed maybe a couple tons all sorts of really large animals like giant bison it was a consequence of over hunting but I think this is probably wrong the this overkill as is called I happened much too quickly there was a decline historically in the megafa anyway as people were coming over so I would disagree with my geological colleagues some of them anyway who thought that humans coming over from North America encountering large game animals who are completely naive to the dangers of these two-footed predators led to their extinction now this book is really interesting it's called sex at dawn made the best seller list and was an inspiration to some extent for the polyamory movement or consensual non-monogamy they made a number of claims that we have in much in common with promiscuous chimps and bonobos bonobos are a kind of chimp a little bit smaller and that we were designed to have multiple mating relationships at one time so this is the argument they make for hunter-gatherers and then when agriculture comes on the scene then we kind of get to monogamy they also argue that sexual jealousy is not natural I get to that in a minute it challenges the centrality of pair bonding and monogamous mating as what is they call the standard model but most anthropologists believe the thing that really led to the transition or market difference between us and chimpanzees is that we had monogamous relatively long enduring relationships and not this kind of promiscuous mating that chimpanzees have is that most theorists would argue this is like a central step that kind of socially differentiates us from chimpanzees so they're challenging this and of course the invention of agriculture is the usual culprit and so anyway here's what I think is actually the case true there are some societies in which individuals are permitted to have extra pair extra-marital partners but they're exceptionally uncommon and they're highly restricted where they do occur and again among hunter-gatherers pair bonds that are relatively stable sometimes they're monogamous sometimes they're polygynous that is a man is allowed to have more than one wife typically there's only very few men who have this sort of situation also if you have this free and easy sexuality why isn't the case that most deadly internal conflict in small-scale societies is a consequence of adultery again doesn't make sense in terms of their models and then also women are highly selective and select their marital partners who help support their their offspring which is something that we've been able to demonstrate time and time again so what's kind of really irksome to me to some extent is that my research with my former student Katie Stark whether has been used to kind of make an argument for this polyamory sort of situation when we talk about polyandry which is relatively rare but we show that it was much more common than people thought which is a woman allowed to have more than one husband at a time again it does occur it's a lot more common after we documented but it has nothing to do with consensual non-monogamy these are very restricted kinds of relationships so I kind of have a personal stake in these popularizers who are trying to characterize the nature of hunter-gatherer life and suggest that we should be like them so here's some final thoughts there is tremendous diversity among hunter-gatherers they are source for you know popular writers who essentially suggest that we could cure our current problems if we were just to act like our ancient hunter-gatherer selves but you know this is really not the case because the practices hunter-gatherers have are in the context of hunter-gatherer society which is a different context than we have but also suggest that their impact on the environment was minuscule compared to our impact and that hunter-gatherer activity levels and some elements of their diet should be a model nevertheless for us all and that the risk of violent death is less today than it was among hunter-gatherers of course if we bring up the situation of Ukraine and the possibilities of tactical use of nuclear weapons and that is essentially off the table so thank you very much for your attention we'd be happy to entertain some questions well thank you Dr. Haymes for offering us this window into these remote societies and we should be proud as a university that you've engaged in this research and we're grateful for your expertise and to our viewers of today's Nebraska lecture who have joined us if you have questions you're welcome to submit them to Dr. Haymes using the chat button at the bottom of your screen I might start off with one or two Ray was there more sexual equality in hunter-gatherer societies compared to others it's a good question the the short answer is no but it depends on how you measure it you could talk about domestic authority within the household you can talk about power between households in the village or you can talk about village to village leadership roles etc etc and or then you can talk about do you have a choice of who you marry most women in hunter-gatherer societies don't have a choice some do in terms of a political realm again they tend not to ever have positions of authority within the entire village and so there's lots of dimensions you can use you know for example can they own property or how much can they own property so it's a kind of a multi-dimensional kind of question that we could develop to kind of make those measures but in general the answer is no but one area they they're pretty much free to divorce if they're unhappy with the marital arrangements made by their their parents then they can divorce and find someone who is more they're more comfortable with and you mentioned in your lecture chimpanzees which of course are our closest evolutionary correct you know on the evolutionary scale to two humans 99.9% right right right is and of course the human genome was shown us a lot about a lot a lot about that as well the what what role do they play in evolutionary evolutionary modeling about what's distinctive about human society well the idea and it's only really an assumption is that you know we at that time had a common ancestor and that was much like the chimpanzee where they had for example as I mentioned promiscuous mating one major transition that most scholars would argue is that the major thing that differentiates us is the development of non promiscuous mateys and then also another feature is that chimpanzee males don't invest in their own offspring human males do the reason they don't is because of promiscuous mating you don't know who paternity so that's one the other thing too is that chimps especially is the common chimpanzee the bonobo there's some difference between the two they don't they have antagonistic relationships with their neighbors it's a complete war one-on-one you know group-on-group a human hunter-hunter gathers even though they engage in some warfare have peaceful relationships they can have war-like relationships but peaceful relationships with many of their neighbors and they visit exchange marital partners celebrate etc etc so those are two main differences that kind of like mark our transition from chimps to what's unique about us so kind of back to the sexuality side one of our one of our listeners asked the question can you discuss sexuality and when in terms of age individuals were expected to become sexually active well again there's quite a bit of variation but typically until a young girl has pastor first men sees and typically they can't marry till then and they have their first child usually around 18 years of age and so when they're physiological capable of reproduction that is when they're allowed to get married so really then I'm a geneticist myself on the animal side right so really the generation link isn't dramatically wouldn't be dramatically different you know we usually think of 25 there's been a real trend in later and later marriage right but they typically don't have their first child till about 18 or 19 because they're a period of kind of a serility that goes on irregular cycling and so they begin reproducing about 18 or so right and another question from a viewer is what initiated the drastic change to a sedentary lifestyle from constantly being on the move and why I guess the real question they're asking is why maybe hadn't it happened earlier well it had to do with well some hunter gatherers were fairly sedentary where they had a super abundance of resource if you look at the Northwest Coast of North America salmon runs allow them to be sedentary but with the development of agriculture you have to stay in place and watch the fields nurture the crops protect them etc etc so that leads to what we call sedentism because you're essentially tied to locked on an area of of land that has all your food resource you still do some hunting and gathering so that forces you to settle down and not move around right so less nomadic exactly yeah and another question are hunter gatherer characteristics similar globally or are there geographic factors that influence certain patterns you mentioned a little bit of that in your talk as you go away from the equator if so what are some of those notable distinctions well you know we have a concentration of resources like I was mentioning salmon runs we get really large populations of hunter gatherers especially you know we're fishing aquatic resources are really important we mentioned the thing about diet and environment for you go away from the equator the more you spent more your diet changes to to heavy meat and so there's lots of little kind of ecological factors that can affect the size of a group how often they split up and re-aggregate and how often they fight whether they're kind of contested over resources that are locally fixed so there's lots of environmental factors that affect their lifestyle and our maybe last question for you Ray is given all the pressures facing all societies example of climate change economic pressures warfare you mentioned you mentioned among others what does the future look like for hunter gatherers societies well unfortunately they typically exist in marginal areas that are of little use to anybody like deserts and so they exist where moderns haven't found a way to exploit the environment they live in they are disappearing they are changing they are being integrated into the national economy and so they will disappear at some some time they're fewer and fewer as time goes on well great lecture Ray and congratulations on the body of your work or as we mentioned 42 years you know it just here at the University of Nebraska but congratulations on a great lecture for the chancellor's lecture series for this spring and and all of our our virtual viewers are giving you a big round of applause thank you very much thank you for having me