WATERHOLE ECONOMIES

Layne reevaluates the benefits of humanity’s societal underpinnings in this nonfiction work.

While the pre-agricultural era often invokes images of a primitive humanity in sharp contrast to the progress of civilization, the author suggests that we have much to learn from our primordial ancestors. The experiences of these early societies, per Layne’s intriguing interpretation, illustrate the viability of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that was able to sustain humanity through 97% of our existence. While subsequent civilizations adopted various economic models, they each inevitably faltered. The lynchpin of early humanity’s success, according to the author, was the adoption of a “waterhole economy” that was “survival-driven by design.” This structure, in which humans made daily pilgrimages to a waterhole, prioritized sharing, environmental stewardship, and group survival. The book’s first few chapters emphasize the evolutionary need for waterhole economies and place humanity within a larger context of Earth’s other living creatures. The book’s middle section transitions to discuss the development of civilizations, which fundamentally changed the trajectory of humanity and our relationship to the environment; while waterhole economies emphasized “living inside Earth’s habitats and ecosystems,” subsequent civilizations have been defined by their attempts to live “outside” of such ecosystems through endless quests to conquer nature and maximize human domination. Building on this thesis, the book’s back half makes the argument that our current model (accelerating environmental decay and climate change, reliance on nonrenewable energy, and the embrace of technology that runs counter to our evolutionary drive to survive) threatens the future of our species by defying the lessons handed down from our ancestors. Skeptics may be wary of the book’s glamorization of the era (anthropological evidence points to the existence of endemic warfare among early humans), but Layne nevertheless makes a compelling argument about the wisdom of our distant relations. A well-researched volume backed by more than 500 interdisciplinary endnotes, the book is written in an accessible style, and the text is supplemented by dozens of full-color photographs, tables, and diagrams.

Fascinating lessons from early humanity.