A Persistent Anthropological Myth

The idea that early hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and shared all or most of their resources with each other is remarkably persistent, despite the enormous counter-evidence.  Razib interviewed the anthropologist Manvir Singh, and even though only subscribers can get the transcript of that, links to two Aeon articles by him were included.: 

Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong

 and

Beyond the !Kung: A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale.

A sample of Singh: 

Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. To take an influential example, the economists Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi have argued for 20 years that property rights coevolved with farming. For them, the question is less whether private property predated farming, but rather why it appeared at that time. In 2017, an article in The Atlantic covering their work asserted plainly: ‘For most of human history, there was no such thing as private property.’ A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’

Historical narratives matter. In his bestseller Humankind (2019), Rutger Bregman took the fact that ‘our ancestors had scarcely any notion of private property’ as evidence of fundamental human goodness. In Civilized to Death (2019), Christopher Ryan wrote that pre-agricultural societies were defined by ‘obligatory sharing of minimal property, open access to the necessities of life, and a sense of gratitude toward an environment that provided what was needed.’ As a result, he concluded: ‘The future I imagine (on a good day) looks a lot like the world inhabited by our ancestors…’

But it's just not true.  You can see that these are not outdated texts with ideas already on their way out, being kicked as they exit ashamedly by the back door. These are still believed, and even insisted upon.  They are similar to the myth of the peaceful savage, which Lawrence Keeley exploded 25 years in War Before Civilization, yet still persists.  Because people want it to be true, not because it is. It fits their picture of the nature of mankind, of what civilization has done, what colonization has done, not least, their political stances of what we should do now.

CS Lewis pointed out decades ago that there is no cause to believe current hunter-gatherers are a stand-in for previous millennia of them.  The agriculturalists and the industrial societies have taken over niches of their own, consigning the hunter-gatherers to the leftover space.  What they are doing now is an adaptation to their environment, not necessarily their preferred mode. This is not mere theory and corrective, the tendency to recognise private property is far more common than the primitive communism that sends moderns into such rhapsodies. Worse, the extreme egalitarianism sometimes has its own very dark side in infanticide and other killings of tribe members who are going to be a permanent burden. 

The Aché had among the highest infanticide and child homicide rates ever reported. Of children born in the forest, 14 per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls were killed before the age of 10, nearly all of them orphans. An infant who lost their mother during the first year of life was always killed.