Hunters, Gatherers, and Farmers in Modern Times
I got to talking with a friend about hunters, gatherers, and farmers and how those personality types fare in today's world. It's a popular paradigm, so I looked up a few examples ... and noticed that most people have questionable awareness of how any of those things actually worked or how they applied to major human discoveries. The first example I found was laughably inaccurate on gatherers, so I'm guessing they didn't talk to any actual gatherers. This seems to be the main weak point, but other parts are patchy too.
I started with this comparison of hunter-gatherer-farmer to neojungian typology.
Hunters - Aggressively "hunt" new opportunities - impulsive, hyperactive, have unpredictable behaviour, explore new opportunities.
Prevailingly true, but incomplete. Hunters also require environmental awareness over time, and the patience to stalk or stake for hours. It's just that the fast-twitch mode is their top layer. They're minimally concerned about the future because they feel like there's always something to hunt.
Gatherers - Passively pursue new opportunities - reflective, high impulse-control, work best when working within clearly defined structure and processes. Prospect new opportunities.
There's little passive about gathering. It's just that things happen slower -- until a bear pops out of the berry patch, and then things happen very fast. The structure might come from often working in a group or needing to know the order in which things ripen, but mostly gathering amounts to walking around looking at everything and latching onto things that are currently ready to pick. They like being able to store some things, but they're not too fussed about it, because they know there's more that can be harvested even if it comes down to tedious ones.
Farmers - Builds and cultivates relationships and opportunities, typically within existing resources. Team-player, Collaborative.
Also prevailingly true. Farmers are cultivators, builders, hoarders -- they're all about stability and they tend to get very unhappy over shakeups. They really want a cache for security.
Bear in mind that these are aspects of personality. Someone can have more than one aspect, layered, but usually one is dominant. Heck, I have all three, but they're layered hunter, gatherer, farmer. I am primarily fast-twitch and cannot turn off the hunter sight, which makes me a bad fit for modern society with all it's blinking, beeping, whizzing gewgaws. But in a quieter environment, I can slow my attention all the way down to geologic or even cosmic time. Mostly what I've done here is manage the environment for gathering. I'm a better gatherer than farmer, so there are a few gardens and a lot of yard with edible or otherwise useful stuff in it. I greatly enjoy being able to walk outside and fill a bowl with food. I can pay attention to the slow shifts over the years. But if pests encroach, I am prepared to respond at speed. So this isn't all farmemory or research; I'm actually using all three modes in my current life, just in different ways. Look at societies, and you can see that some tend to separate hunters, gatherers, and farmers quite rigidly while others are much more fluid and people take different roles at different times.
Here's one on evolutionary psychology.
The few thousand years since the time farming was invented did have a genetic impact. Farmers compared to hunter-gatherers needed to be more hard-working, more conscientious (cf. Daniel Nettle) and more defensive of their property.
LOL white people LOL
Humans have been defensive of their territory since there got to be enough of them to touch edges. They've been cultivating food plants since gatherers noticed the best food plants grew around middens (due to the best seeds winding up there in a giant pile of fertilizer), and from that, began actively encouraging the territory to make itself more convenient. When you're doing that, you really don't want other people moving in and messing with it. Maybe you negotiate, maybe you fight, maybe you just drag the trespassers into the bush and bang them. But you don't ignore it.
Farming would have involved quite a lot of cognitive, personality and behavioral changes. Strong focus on work, routine and conscientiousness were among them. Hunter-gatherer, on the other hand, needed to be more flexible and vigilant. Thom Hartman argues that ADHD is a manifestation of the hunter-gatherer mind, which is easily distractible (potential dangers, etc.) but has the ability to hyperfocus.
More specifically, farmers have a higher ability to ignore small details that tend to be irrelevant distractions in their line of work. For hunters especially, and gatherers nearly as much, small details mean dinner or death threats. Hunters often cannot turn off their alertness to small, fast changes. In today's noisy, busy environment many of them are miserable due to constant overstimulation. Either they become hypervigilant (the ADHD and anxiety crowd) or they collapse (the depression and adrenal fatigue crowd). Nobody can stay healthy under constant stress, but the fast-twitch people will wear out first.
Another problem for early farmers would have been parenting and teaching. As Peter Gray shows in his highly recommendable book “Free to Learn” hunter-gather children spend most of their time playing, thus learning everything they need as grown-ups through peer-learning and self-directed learning. My hunch is that the majority of kids with oppositional defiant disorder in addition to those diagnosed with ADHD and a tendency to be autodidacts in schools have inherited hunter-gatherer minds,
True, but you also have to remember that hunters are prone to fast problem-solving and not tolerant of ignoring problems. Oppositional defiant disorder is only valid if the person is unable to follow directions in pursuit of their own goals. Usually it's not a real disorder, it's a normal dispute over differing needs.
whereas the ones who easily adapt to the school system have inherited farmer minds.
Except that it doesn't actually work well for anyone. Just the hunter types show damage sooner and more openly. But if you check their health, almost none of the students are actually healthy because the environment damages their neuromuscular development.
For farmers it was probably highly important to formally teach their children early on so they could help with the many daily chores.
Maybe if you consider "formal teaching" to be "I told you to feed the chickens. Here's a broom. Now you go back in there, show that rooster who's boss, and feed the chickens."
Not only children are treated in this egalitarian way, but also women are considered equal and not supposed to be submissive to their husbands. There is no concept of “pater familias”
Bear in mind that different societies make different choices about gender (often nonbinary) and division of labor. In particular, societies that use both hunting and farming often have the women owning the land, farming it, and running everything because the men are typically out hunting -- a less frequent but high-nutrient contribution to the foodstream. In some other cultures, it's more a division between parents and nonparents. The young and the old, who are not currently raising children, do the hunting and gathering away from camp while the parenting people raise the children and do any cultivation or other land maintenance at the camp.
“Lazier” (when it comes to physical work and chores)
More hard-working
This is the argument between European-Americans and Native Americans. The Europeans think the Native Americans are lazy; the Native Americans think the Europeans are going to kill themselves and everyone else with overwork. Because Native Americans tend to work only when they need something while European-Americans tend to work all the time. A statistical analysis of how stress-related complaints are ruining America's overall health indicates that the Native American concern is valid.
Here is a pretty good professional approach to the divergence, in which a clue-having boss has created a dual intake process for new employees based on their personality type, thus aiming to give people what they need in order to succeed with the traits they have.
Hunters want challenge; Gatherers want connection.
Generally true.
Within the program, Hunters are given challenges immediately, but at a rate slower than the one that will be expected of them after the first month. We impose only limited restrictions, instead focusing on building confidence through constructive criticism. Gatherers, meanwhile, are given opportunities to build self-confidence through tasks with less pressure.
Assuming you lump farmers and gatherers together, this system should work pretty well. Certainly it will work better than using the same approach with everyone. And you could get similarly good results with any other major personality split -- there are companies that sort introverts and extroverts, for instance, because they need both private-office and shared-office workers, so they have to figure out who works best in which environment.
Understand how they fail and how to pick them back up.
Very astute. Everyone has to learn how to cope with failure, which is necessary to the educational process; but not everyone does it the same way. You have to make sure that people in a high-failure environment, like a new job, have access to the right coping tools.
Place equal value on Hunters' and Gathers' respective professional goals.
In most fields, you need both. Typically, hunters fetch you new things and gatherers maintain what you already have, for example customers or products for sale. Only a few places really emphasize one over the other -- frex, cutting edge research is all or mostly hunters while backmining research is all or mostly gatherers.
Gatherers strive to constantly collect knowledge, process that knowledge and know what to do with it on the other end to feel successful.
Note that hunters soak up information too, but they do it differently and handle it differently. A hunter is filling in a background against which changes are notable; they have to know the forest to find the deer. A gatherer is creating a database that they use all of, because the whole damn forest is their prey. If you want to find one piece of data, you want a hunter; if you want to build a database, get a gatherer.
Both types are essential. And both types complement the other. That's why giving both sides of this "personality coin" opportunity to grow professionally requires a two-pronged approach that will eventually lead your company to a better balanced, more successful workforce.
Prevailingly true, and you will always get better results letting people be themselves and playing to their strengths than by trying to make them all the same. Work with the brains you have, and make sure people know that you value all those different things.
Going back to our forest image: the more species a forest has, the stronger, healthier, and more resilient it is. A monocrop or close to that is very vulnerable.
It occurs to me that a key difference among the personality types relies on speed vs. patience.
* Hunters require maximum speed. They have to be adept at quick decisions in order to attack prey or defend against predators. The type of patience they require is measured in hours, and is a very alert patience. A still-hunter must be able to remain unmoving until a good target presents itself, and then act swiftly to bring it down. They need background awareness of their environment and prey behaviors so they can perceive small, fast changes against the background. This knowledge laid the foundation of livestock agriculture.
* Gatherers require moderate speed. They have to pick things efficiently and remain alert for possible predators, but much of their work is methodical. They need enough patience for things like gleaning wild grain from a valley -- and enough insight to discern which stands are dense enough to generate more calories than expended in picking them. Their observation also applies to learning which foods taste best and how to promote their spread: the precursor of crop agriculture.
* Farmers have the least requirement for speed and the most requirement for patience. They have to hustle in planting and harvest seasons, but most of their work requires them to be patient for years. From the hunters and gatherers before them, they got the abilities to assess and manage livestock and crops, over time in the same place rather than quickly. They have to observe the impact of their actions on their environment and make changes if necessary. Trouble is, push the patience this far and change becomes difficult, which is why numerous civilizations have collapsed due to poor agrarian choices. The same happened with hunters and gatherers, we just have less evidence of that because it was farther back; farmers haven't had enough evolutionary time to get as good yet, although excellent practices like permaculture do exist.
The past shapes the present, even when people don't always see it. But the more you know about the past, and especially diverse experiences of the past across many cultures in various times and places, the better equipped you are to recognize and act on repeating patterns.
I started with this comparison of hunter-gatherer-farmer to neojungian typology.
Hunters - Aggressively "hunt" new opportunities - impulsive, hyperactive, have unpredictable behaviour, explore new opportunities.
Prevailingly true, but incomplete. Hunters also require environmental awareness over time, and the patience to stalk or stake for hours. It's just that the fast-twitch mode is their top layer. They're minimally concerned about the future because they feel like there's always something to hunt.
Gatherers - Passively pursue new opportunities - reflective, high impulse-control, work best when working within clearly defined structure and processes. Prospect new opportunities.
There's little passive about gathering. It's just that things happen slower -- until a bear pops out of the berry patch, and then things happen very fast. The structure might come from often working in a group or needing to know the order in which things ripen, but mostly gathering amounts to walking around looking at everything and latching onto things that are currently ready to pick. They like being able to store some things, but they're not too fussed about it, because they know there's more that can be harvested even if it comes down to tedious ones.
Farmers - Builds and cultivates relationships and opportunities, typically within existing resources. Team-player, Collaborative.
Also prevailingly true. Farmers are cultivators, builders, hoarders -- they're all about stability and they tend to get very unhappy over shakeups. They really want a cache for security.
Bear in mind that these are aspects of personality. Someone can have more than one aspect, layered, but usually one is dominant. Heck, I have all three, but they're layered hunter, gatherer, farmer. I am primarily fast-twitch and cannot turn off the hunter sight, which makes me a bad fit for modern society with all it's blinking, beeping, whizzing gewgaws. But in a quieter environment, I can slow my attention all the way down to geologic or even cosmic time. Mostly what I've done here is manage the environment for gathering. I'm a better gatherer than farmer, so there are a few gardens and a lot of yard with edible or otherwise useful stuff in it. I greatly enjoy being able to walk outside and fill a bowl with food. I can pay attention to the slow shifts over the years. But if pests encroach, I am prepared to respond at speed. So this isn't all farmemory or research; I'm actually using all three modes in my current life, just in different ways. Look at societies, and you can see that some tend to separate hunters, gatherers, and farmers quite rigidly while others are much more fluid and people take different roles at different times.
Here's one on evolutionary psychology.
The few thousand years since the time farming was invented did have a genetic impact. Farmers compared to hunter-gatherers needed to be more hard-working, more conscientious (cf. Daniel Nettle) and more defensive of their property.
LOL white people LOL
Humans have been defensive of their territory since there got to be enough of them to touch edges. They've been cultivating food plants since gatherers noticed the best food plants grew around middens (due to the best seeds winding up there in a giant pile of fertilizer), and from that, began actively encouraging the territory to make itself more convenient. When you're doing that, you really don't want other people moving in and messing with it. Maybe you negotiate, maybe you fight, maybe you just drag the trespassers into the bush and bang them. But you don't ignore it.
Farming would have involved quite a lot of cognitive, personality and behavioral changes. Strong focus on work, routine and conscientiousness were among them. Hunter-gatherer, on the other hand, needed to be more flexible and vigilant. Thom Hartman argues that ADHD is a manifestation of the hunter-gatherer mind, which is easily distractible (potential dangers, etc.) but has the ability to hyperfocus.
More specifically, farmers have a higher ability to ignore small details that tend to be irrelevant distractions in their line of work. For hunters especially, and gatherers nearly as much, small details mean dinner or death threats. Hunters often cannot turn off their alertness to small, fast changes. In today's noisy, busy environment many of them are miserable due to constant overstimulation. Either they become hypervigilant (the ADHD and anxiety crowd) or they collapse (the depression and adrenal fatigue crowd). Nobody can stay healthy under constant stress, but the fast-twitch people will wear out first.
Another problem for early farmers would have been parenting and teaching. As Peter Gray shows in his highly recommendable book “Free to Learn” hunter-gather children spend most of their time playing, thus learning everything they need as grown-ups through peer-learning and self-directed learning. My hunch is that the majority of kids with oppositional defiant disorder in addition to those diagnosed with ADHD and a tendency to be autodidacts in schools have inherited hunter-gatherer minds,
True, but you also have to remember that hunters are prone to fast problem-solving and not tolerant of ignoring problems. Oppositional defiant disorder is only valid if the person is unable to follow directions in pursuit of their own goals. Usually it's not a real disorder, it's a normal dispute over differing needs.
whereas the ones who easily adapt to the school system have inherited farmer minds.
Except that it doesn't actually work well for anyone. Just the hunter types show damage sooner and more openly. But if you check their health, almost none of the students are actually healthy because the environment damages their neuromuscular development.
For farmers it was probably highly important to formally teach their children early on so they could help with the many daily chores.
Maybe if you consider "formal teaching" to be "I told you to feed the chickens. Here's a broom. Now you go back in there, show that rooster who's boss, and feed the chickens."
Not only children are treated in this egalitarian way, but also women are considered equal and not supposed to be submissive to their husbands. There is no concept of “pater familias”
Bear in mind that different societies make different choices about gender (often nonbinary) and division of labor. In particular, societies that use both hunting and farming often have the women owning the land, farming it, and running everything because the men are typically out hunting -- a less frequent but high-nutrient contribution to the foodstream. In some other cultures, it's more a division between parents and nonparents. The young and the old, who are not currently raising children, do the hunting and gathering away from camp while the parenting people raise the children and do any cultivation or other land maintenance at the camp.
“Lazier” (when it comes to physical work and chores)
More hard-working
This is the argument between European-Americans and Native Americans. The Europeans think the Native Americans are lazy; the Native Americans think the Europeans are going to kill themselves and everyone else with overwork. Because Native Americans tend to work only when they need something while European-Americans tend to work all the time. A statistical analysis of how stress-related complaints are ruining America's overall health indicates that the Native American concern is valid.
Here is a pretty good professional approach to the divergence, in which a clue-having boss has created a dual intake process for new employees based on their personality type, thus aiming to give people what they need in order to succeed with the traits they have.
Hunters want challenge; Gatherers want connection.
Generally true.
Within the program, Hunters are given challenges immediately, but at a rate slower than the one that will be expected of them after the first month. We impose only limited restrictions, instead focusing on building confidence through constructive criticism. Gatherers, meanwhile, are given opportunities to build self-confidence through tasks with less pressure.
Assuming you lump farmers and gatherers together, this system should work pretty well. Certainly it will work better than using the same approach with everyone. And you could get similarly good results with any other major personality split -- there are companies that sort introverts and extroverts, for instance, because they need both private-office and shared-office workers, so they have to figure out who works best in which environment.
Understand how they fail and how to pick them back up.
Very astute. Everyone has to learn how to cope with failure, which is necessary to the educational process; but not everyone does it the same way. You have to make sure that people in a high-failure environment, like a new job, have access to the right coping tools.
Place equal value on Hunters' and Gathers' respective professional goals.
In most fields, you need both. Typically, hunters fetch you new things and gatherers maintain what you already have, for example customers or products for sale. Only a few places really emphasize one over the other -- frex, cutting edge research is all or mostly hunters while backmining research is all or mostly gatherers.
Gatherers strive to constantly collect knowledge, process that knowledge and know what to do with it on the other end to feel successful.
Note that hunters soak up information too, but they do it differently and handle it differently. A hunter is filling in a background against which changes are notable; they have to know the forest to find the deer. A gatherer is creating a database that they use all of, because the whole damn forest is their prey. If you want to find one piece of data, you want a hunter; if you want to build a database, get a gatherer.
Both types are essential. And both types complement the other. That's why giving both sides of this "personality coin" opportunity to grow professionally requires a two-pronged approach that will eventually lead your company to a better balanced, more successful workforce.
Prevailingly true, and you will always get better results letting people be themselves and playing to their strengths than by trying to make them all the same. Work with the brains you have, and make sure people know that you value all those different things.
Going back to our forest image: the more species a forest has, the stronger, healthier, and more resilient it is. A monocrop or close to that is very vulnerable.
It occurs to me that a key difference among the personality types relies on speed vs. patience.
* Hunters require maximum speed. They have to be adept at quick decisions in order to attack prey or defend against predators. The type of patience they require is measured in hours, and is a very alert patience. A still-hunter must be able to remain unmoving until a good target presents itself, and then act swiftly to bring it down. They need background awareness of their environment and prey behaviors so they can perceive small, fast changes against the background. This knowledge laid the foundation of livestock agriculture.
* Gatherers require moderate speed. They have to pick things efficiently and remain alert for possible predators, but much of their work is methodical. They need enough patience for things like gleaning wild grain from a valley -- and enough insight to discern which stands are dense enough to generate more calories than expended in picking them. Their observation also applies to learning which foods taste best and how to promote their spread: the precursor of crop agriculture.
* Farmers have the least requirement for speed and the most requirement for patience. They have to hustle in planting and harvest seasons, but most of their work requires them to be patient for years. From the hunters and gatherers before them, they got the abilities to assess and manage livestock and crops, over time in the same place rather than quickly. They have to observe the impact of their actions on their environment and make changes if necessary. Trouble is, push the patience this far and change becomes difficult, which is why numerous civilizations have collapsed due to poor agrarian choices. The same happened with hunters and gatherers, we just have less evidence of that because it was farther back; farmers haven't had enough evolutionary time to get as good yet, although excellent practices like permaculture do exist.
The past shapes the present, even when people don't always see it. But the more you know about the past, and especially diverse experiences of the past across many cultures in various times and places, the better equipped you are to recognize and act on repeating patterns.