Not An MBA

Nomads and Evolution

Contemporary nomadism, i.e. cyber foraging in new economy 2.0, is not a simple rejection of corporate conformity. Nomadic behaviors, whether in the deserts of SW Africa or in the urban savannah of java programmers and joomla junkies, is as natural as air and water. It is in fact a return to our genetic roots. It is in our hardwiring. It is our genetic heritage, and the font of our natural instincts. What does this have to do with contemporary work and the trend towards remote-working and coworking?

Everything! Advances in the neurosciences, evolutionary psychology (EP), and evolutionary anthropology now paint a picture of humans’ evolutionary past that helps us see today more clearly. While controversial in some quarters, neo-Darwinism is an illuminating new lens through which to understand virtually all aspects of postmodern society.

The basic outline of this perspective, often referred to as EP (evolutionary psychology), unfolds in the following way. The starting point for understanding the EP perspective is the (seemingly controversial) recognition that as a species Homo Sapiens sapiens are hard wired as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Our hominid lineage emerged from preceding Australopithecens species around 3-4 million years ago (mya), and various Homo species (Habilis, Erectus, and Sapiens) emerged over those millions of years. Throughout this entire period hominids were organized as bands of families moving about as nomadic hunter-gatherers on the Savannah plains of East Africa. We know that by about 1 mya hominid species were already hunting big game, having devised both the technology and the organizational skills to take down animals larger and more physically powerful than themselves. This process literally moved early hominids up the food chain.

Between 200,000ya and 100,000ya, anatomically modern humans (i.e. Homo Sapiens sapiens) emerged and migrated out of East Africa into the Old World and eventually throughout the entire world. This out-migration populated the planted and gave us our common life today. From this emergence, roughly 200,000ya, anatomically modern humans continued to thrive as a species as nomadic hunter-gatherers for almost 200,000 more years, until 10,000 years ago. Around 10,000 years ago marked the beginning of the end of global-wide hunter-gatherer adaptations. While there are scattered exceptions out there in the world still, the 10,000 years ago mark ushered in the beginning of “civilization” and the end of our most natural forms of human adaptations.

10,000 years ago saw the agricultural revolution, which was defined by the domestication of plants and animals. A massive breakthrough in many respects, the agricultural revolution, first in the Middle East but eventually in Asia and the New World, created several things for the first time in human evolution: significant food surpluses, need for control over the redistribution of those surpluses, administration, taxation, bureaucracy, specialization of labor, standing armies and, above all, sedentism. The agricultural revolution created the conditions for “civilization” and sedentism.

With sedentism came the emergence of ‘civilized’ city states such as Sumeria, Ur, and Mesopotamia. Later emerged the empires of Egypt and Greece and Rome and Mesoamerica and the Indus Valley, and a thousand plagues and wars later, voila, here we are. Other than a scattering of hunter-gatherers here and there, most of the cultures and peoples of the world have been absorbed into various versions of sedentary ‘civilization.’ My relentless use of quotes in using the word ‘civilization’ is a dead giveaway.

However, if one views the long evolutionary march of humans through time, i.e. from 4 mya->200,000ya->10,000ya to today, it becomes clear that this ‘civilization’ thing is but a very recent invention. As a species, we have spent the overwhelming majority of our existence adapted as nomads, as hunter-gatherers. The genetic and cognitive requirements of this long adaptation have made us who we are. The environment in which our genetic foundation developed was radically different than it is today. We adapted in entirely different types of certainty and uncertainty, we were much more vulnerable in many ways and more self-sufficient in other ways. Our original adaptive environment was filled with different forms of risk that made us much more in-tuned to certain survival behaviors and instincts than those that we need today. In short, we are living out of context, in an environment for which we are not adapted…