Richard Gould: Learning From Ancient Human Cultures

Richard Gould is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brown University (where I was his student) and one of the foremost experts on hunter-gatherer societies. In the 1960s, he and his wife spent years living with the aborigines in Australia’s Western Desert, observing first-hand their way of life. Through study of these people and many others around the world, his work focused on understanding how human culture and behavior adapts to environmental stress, risk and uncertainty.
We’ve invited him to this week’s podcast to discuss what insights ancient cultures may be able to offer in terms of “natural human behavior” that may fit well within our specie’s blueprint. Humans lived sustainably, with their food systems and each other, for many millennia. And yet, in today’s modern age, we have infinitely “more” than these primitive societies, but have much less general happiness (and are fast-exhausting our resource base, to boot). Are there best practices for being human that we can perhaps re-learn from our cultural predecessors?
One of the principal findings of Gould’s work is that hunter-gatherer societies, while often rarely exceeding subsistence-level living standards, were quite successful at meeting their needs. Each day when they awoke, they knew what was expected of them, and why it was important. So their work had clear and obvious meaning — to them and those in their tribe. This stands in stark contrast to modern society, where our base needs may be easily met, but we have an endless string of unfulfilled wants and manufactured “needs” that advertising and the media constantly bombard us with — creating a chronic sense of lacking and insecurity in our society.

This post was published at PeakProsperity on Sunday, October 12, 2014,.