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“WHEN you have small groups like that, hunting and gathering, you spend so much person-power on hunting, raising children, caring for the old, moving gear around, setting up your homes, crafting clothing, aiding the sick, and so on, that you cannot afford gross specialisations like engineering,” writes the artificial intelligence and video games fan on Quora.
He's answering a question about why technology took off in the last 10 000 years and not before. And he's not the only one to assume that the hunter-gatherer's life, being nasty, brutish and short, was not conducive to the rise of technology. And that the farming culture which arose ten millennia back in various centres enabled people to store food, have spare time and get a jumpstart on the road to laptops and jet airplanes as a result.
Except it was the other way around. Last time I checked, experts reckoned hunter-gatherers spent something like 15 to 20 hours a week doing all the stuff outlined here, leaving them with upwards of 90 hours for creation, innovation and fun. It was the farmers who worked their buns off for poor results – there's a load of evidence showing their poor health - from the shorter heights that farmers attained compared to hunter-gatherer contemporaries, to the steep rise in dental caries that accompanies the rise of farming, to skeletons showing things like degenerative bone conditions indicating a life of hard labour, and bone lesions consequent upon the infections farming communities were more at risk of.
The assumption that’s at work here is born of a long history of believing that we Homo saps – or rather, Homo modernicus, Homo laboris – are the pinnacle of perfection, the goal towards which evolution/creation has been striving. That leads to a skewed way of looking at the hunter-gatherer vs farmer realities, both health and socio-economic: “Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. […] Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.” (Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover Magazine, May 1987)
Beliefs formed out of words and air, yet held so firmly that they pass for absolute, unquestioned truth, have also been evident in commentary on the ‘Greek crisis’. Here’s a major one: the Greeks are lazy, they just want to skive off on early pension and sit around in the sun sipping ouzo, and they refuse to reform their pension system.
Are Greeks lazy, I wondered? I went hunting, and found the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s latest figures, reflecting the actual hours worked annually per worker in member countries – Germany and Greece sit right next to each other on the chart, which makes for easy comparison. Turns out in 2014, the average Greek worker put in 2 042 hours a year – that’s roughly 42 hours a week. Up north, the average German worker was slogging away for a total of 1 371 hours a year, or closer to 28 hours a week. (A different OECD chart, hours worked per main job, puts it at 35.3 for Germans and 41.9 for Greeks.)
It’s always enlightening to do a bit of digging, I find. (Although it so often leads to more questions: how on earth can the Germans get by on so few hours – and why can’t I do that!)
More figures I found: the whole complicated Greek pension thing is compounded by the declining fertility rate in Europe. Expressed in births per woman, Greece’s fertility rate is 1.3, which is on the low side in a very low market – in Germany it’s 1.4. That’s pretty standard across much of Europe. (For the sake of comparison, the USA is 1.9.)
A quite astounding 20% of Greeks are over the age of 65 – once again, that’s pretty standard in Europe. It’s 18% and 19% in Spain and Portugal (in South Africa it’s just 6%). And much worse in Japan, with 26% over 65. It doesn’t need much number-crunching to figure out that this growing top-heaviness will eventually enfold the whole of Europe in a long crisis.
Contrary to what’s often said, the Greeks have not refused to reform their admittedly very messy system: “Pensions have been cut by an average of 27% between 2010-2014 and by 50% for the highest earners,” wrote Reuters last month. “The average retirement age was raised by two years in 2013...” 45% of Greek pensioners (over a million people, by my calculations), far from idling around sipping ouzo, are scrabbling to get by on a pension of under €700, below the poverty line. (The latest figures I can find for the average German State pension date to 2012, when it was €1300-odd.)
Cut those low Greek pensions much more and it begins to look more like a cull than anything else. Add to that the fact that “about 52% of Greek households say pensions are their most important source of income, according to a study published in January…”, which sounds like a familiar South African situation and means many younger people and children are also at risk.
These figures outline a massive human problem which is not reflected in the easy use of stereotypes that ‘other’ people are caught up in.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
