The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [36]
True, there is not much specialisation in modern hunter-gatherers. In the Kalahari or the Australian desert, apart from the gathering women, the hunting men and maybe the shaman, there are not too many distinct occupations in each band. But these are the simple societies left in the harsh habitats. In the relatively fertile lands of west Eurasia after 40,000 years ago, when bands of people were larger and lines of work were diverse, specialisation had probably grown up within each band. The Chauvet rhino painter was so good at his job (and yes, archaeologists think it was mainly one artist) that he must surely have had plenty of time off hunting duties to practise. The Sungir bead maker must have been working for a wage of some kind, because he cannot surely have had time to hunt for himself. Even Charles Darwin reckoned that ‘primeval man practised a division of labour; each man did not manufacture his own tools or rude pottery, but certain individuals appear to have devoted themselves to such work, no doubt receiving in exchange the produce of the chase.’
Innovation networks
According to the anthropologist Joe Henrich, human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements – that is how culture evolves. The bigger the connected population, the more skilled the teacher, and the bigger the probability of a productive mistake. Conversely, the smaller the connected population, the greater the steady deterioration of the skill as it was passed on. Because they depended on wild resources, hunter-gatherers could rarely live in bands larger than a few hundred and could never achieve modern population densities. This had an important consequence. It meant that there was a limit to what they could invent. A band of a hundred people cannot sustain more than a certain number of tools, for the simple reason that both the production and the consumption of tools require a minimum size of market. People will only learn a limited set of skills and if there are not enough experts to learn one rare skill from, they will lose that skill. A good idea, manifest in bone, stone or string, needs to be kept alive by numbers. Progress can easily falter and turn into regress.
Where modern hunter-gatherers have been deprived of access to a large population of trading partners – in sparsely populated Australia, especially Tasmania, and on the Andaman islands, for example – their technological virtuosity was stunted and barely progressed beyond those of Neanderthals. There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference – their collective brains.
The most striking case of technological regress is Tasmania. Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology. Human beings reached Tasmania at least 35,000 years ago while it was still connected to Australia. It remained connected – on and off – until about 10,000 years ago, when the rising seas filled the Bass Strait. Thereafter the Tasmanians were isolated. By the time Europeans first