#Rutger bregman humankind update
#Rutger bregman humankind free

Many Ache men have multiple large dents in their skulls, evidence of past fights and their ability to recover.' Younger men were afraid of these “fully grown adult men” because of their strong alliances and the fact that they sometimes killed younger men in club fights.” Hill and Hurtado also note that, 'In the first few days some men might die, but most recovered, even if their skulls had been split after a direct hit. Anthropologists Kim Hill and Ana Hurtado write that, “Before contact, middle-aged men between thirty-five and fifty-five years old were politically powerful and monopolized many fertile women in the population. Yet the Ache have literal club fights, which were utilized as a tool of social control by powerful adult men. Contrary to our stereotype of the caveman as a chest-beating gorilla with a club and a short fuse, our male ancestors were probably not machos. Girls tended to marry very early as well, with 85% of them getting married before menarche (about 15 years of age).Ĭontrary to the available evidence, Bregman sums up his caricature, writing that, “For most of human history, then, men and women were more or less equal. Having at least one male partner around at all times for provisioning and social support was thus quite essential for child survival. This pattern was sex-biased as well, with female infants and children significantly more likely to be killed than male children. In part due to their extensive food sharing and significant reliance on male hunting, it is not uncommon for children without fathers to be killed by adult men, who don’t want to have to help provide for them. The Ache are heavily reliant on male hunting for their subsistence, with men contributing about 87% of the total calories.

Among the !Kung hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, anthropologist Richard Lee-a source Bregman selectively references for his claims about hunter-gatherer’s inherent peacefulness- notes that “All first marriages are arranged by parents, and the girls have little say in the matter.” Among the Kaska nomadic foragers of British Colombia, anthropologist John Honigmann writes that, “Ideally a man feels entitled to beat his wife if he suspects that she has been untrue to him,” although “not all men avail themselves of this permitted behavior.” Arranged marriages are customary across the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, and violence, directed towards one’s wife and/or another man, is a common male response to actual or suspected infidelity.īregman makes much of the fact that among the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay, women tend to have numerous different husbands throughout their lifetimes, but what he leaves unmentioned-or perhaps is unaware of-is that this partially reflects the particularly challenging socioecological circumstances they live in.

#Rutger bregman humankind free

Since, as Bregman correctly notes, humans spent the vast majority-upwards of 95%-of our history living in groups reliant on hunting and gathering to survive, let us consider in detail how accurately he characterizes these social systems.īergman claims that “in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased,” and that it was only with the rise of agriculture that we began to see arranged marriages and male control over female sexuality, but this is pure fiction.

#Rutger bregman humankind update

Consciously echoing Rousseau, with an update for the 21st century, the core argument is that humans are fundamentally ‘good’ (that is, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, feminist, and opposed to violence)-unless or until their minds happened to be poisoned by property ownership or corrupt leaders, which Bregman claims were lacking for most of human history.

In Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s case, he doesn’t.īregman’s latest book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, is less a history of humanity than an exercise in promoting a simplistic narrative about it to suit one’s own preferred cultural values. Being so close to the problem, how does a person escape their own cultural trappings and preferred values to understand the entirety of humanity, in all its different social and environmental contexts? It is a curious thing, to reflect on one’s nature-not simply the nature of oneself, but that of their entire species- human nature. The aim of revision is to get the distortions to match the mood of the present times-Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think, 1986.