Debunking the myths of civilization and learning from prehistoric humans (interview with dr. Christopher ryan of civilized to death)
Dr. Christopher Ryan (@thatchrisryan) is a psychologist, the podcast host of Tangentially Speaking, and the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships. His latest book—a fascinating read which critically and inquisitively examines how civilization has affected our livelihoods and wellbeing as humans—is Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress.
In this podcast episode, Christopher sheds light on the common misconceptions people often have of our prehistoric relatives; how the advent of agriculture turned egalitarian hunter and gatherer communities into ones with hierarchical power structures that created social inequality; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Christopher and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Mountain Twin by Joel Porter (@JoelPorterMusic)
“Agriculture introduced the concept of private property to human behavior and the human lexicon for the first time, and then we started to see each other as property.”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes.
On our common misconceptions of prehistoric humans:
“Probably the most common [misconception we have of prehistoric humans] is that nobody lived past 35 years old.
I taught medical anthropology in a medical school in Barcelona for a couple of years; it was interesting that even the medical students believe this, but this is totally wrong.
Homo sapiens, our species, typically lived into their sixties and seventies in the wild, and chimpanzees live into their fifties.
The misconception comes about because of a combination of misunderstanding and as I argue in Civilized to Death, also the ‘psychological payoff’ that we get from believing that we live twice as long today: ‘No matter what other problems we have, well, at least we've doubled the human lifespan!’
But we haven't. In fact, it's a statistical error based on infant mortality and archaeological findings that show that a lot of children died at a very young age. So when you average the ages and include those children, you get a statistical life expectancy at birth of 35.
But that doesn't mean that people were old at 35; nobody was ever old at 30 or 35.
[Even] doctors will say, ‘But we've doubled the human lifespan, and the reason we have back problems is that our body wasn't designed to last for 70 years—it was only designed to last for 30 or 35 years.’
This is totally false, and yet everyone seems to believe it.”
On distinguishing the differences between different 'pasts’:
“The ‘past’ is a very big place, and it's not all the same.
People talk about ‘the past’ as if there's some sort of universal past that we can compare to the present, and that's simply not the case.
If you're talking about 300 years ago, then that argument [that we're better off health-wise today than ‘the past’] is true—there were a lot of infectious diseases that were killing people 300 years ago, such as smallpox, cholera, influenza, and tuberculosis, which we now have ways to deal with through vaccines and antibiotics.
But if you're talking about prehistory—before agriculture—none of those diseases even existed among humans.
All of the diseases I just mentioned are pathogens that came over from domesticated animals to human populations after those animals were domesticated and we were living in very close proximity to them and to their waste products.
Tuberculosis came from cattle; smallpox came from chickens and ducks; influenza and all of these diseases come from the results of civilization.
So when someone says, ‘But now we can treat all these terrible diseases that killed people in ‘the past,' it's true if you're talking about medieval Europe. But it's not true if you're talking about 20,000 years ago, because those diseases didn't exist.
To me, that's like someone saying, ‘Thank God we've got airbags and seat belts now because all our ancestors died in auto accidents.’
Well, yeah, people died in auto accidents twenty or thirty years ago not having seatbelts or airbags, but not 20,000 years ago, because there were no cars.”
On how the advent of agriculture created hierarchical power structures and inequality:
"Pre-agricultural people were egalitarian in virtually every sense: Male and female relations were much more egalitarian, and the treatment of children was much more balanced. Even the treatment of animals was more respectful and balanced.
Agriculture introduced the concept of private property to human behavior and the human lexicon for the first time, and then we started to see each other as property—the status of women plummeted from being equal to men to being essentially equal to farm animals, possessions of men.
If you read the famous quote from the Old Testament, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife,’ I always thought that referred to respecting someone else's marriage.
But if you read it in context, what you see is that it's actually about respecting another man's property: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife nor his house, nor his ox, nor his slave’—that's the context of that line.
What's happened with the transition from hunter-gatherers to post-agricultural societies is you get political hierarchies—you get the sense of ownership. You can own property, land, animals, and even other people.
Hunter-gatherers have no understanding of this—no concept of owning land or other people...”
On how inequality impacts the wellbeing of society and of individuals:
"If you look on a national level, the countries that report the highest levels of life satisfaction are countries that have the smallest disparity of wealth.
In other words, being extremely wealthy doesn't help you. You're winning the game, but what are you winning? You're winning social isolation, and you're winning the distrust of people around you—if you follow the arguments in Civilized to Death.
On an individual level, we're really not better off. Even the luckiest among us is not significantly better off than hunter-gatherers.
So what have we been doing for the last 10,000 years? Who benefits from this explosive population growth and these explosive technological advances?
If the life satisfaction of even the luckiest among us is not clearly higher than that of hunter-gatherers, then what's propelling this? It doesn't seem to be congruent with the argument that we're often told that life is getting better for us. It actually isn't.”
Final words of wisdom:
"It's very important to take control of your destiny. Don't count on civilization to save you, because civilization can't even save itself. So as much as you can, take control of your own destiny.”
