A dumb question about anthropology

Sometimes I get asked to sit on committees for areas I know nothing about. I ask a lot of dumb questions about the most basic foundations of the subject because what else am I going to ask? I used to have a lot of self-doubt and would worry that I would look stupid. Eventually though, to my surprise, I saw how a foundational question can really stump someone. When you dive deep into a subject, you tend to lose focus on the bigger picture of why you think a certain way. As a lesson to myself, I now always try hard to think about the dumb questions that might stump me and how I would answer them.

Here is my dumb question about anthropology.

When researchers want to know how humans behaved in the past (as a running example, let’s think about what mating and sex looked liked), we seem to have three foundational techniques: (1) look for archaeological evidence, (2) look at current subpopulations that have been isolated from modern society, and (3) look at primates closely related to humans — in particular chimpanzees and bonobos.

Mental Model 1

My dumb question concerns (2). It seems so obvious that a subpopulation isolated from modern society would continue to exhibit pre-modern behaviours today. “Modern” here can mean any marker: development of agriculture, the state, technology, etc. A mental model effortlessly jumps into my mind: I see a timeline, where at some point in the past, modern society veered off in its own direction. The subpopulation that didn’t follow is stuck there, frozen in time. So naturally, they are our best clue at what human behaviour looked like before the paradigm shift we are interested in.

Mental Model 2

My difficulty with mental model 1 only happened after some reflection. There is a basic problem that is obvious in hindsight: the subpopulation isn’t actually frozen in time. In fact, like us, the subpopulation is also years and years removed from the marker. Those years, hundreds/thousands/ten-thousands (depending on the marker), that have elapsed caused a massive change for us — why do we assume there was no change for them?

Some shifts can be easily inferred. We can infer that our ancestors did not have microwaves, and if the subpopulation we are looking at does not have microwaves, then they seem to have followed a “straighter” timeline from our shared past. The dangerous inference is that becasue their technology is closer to our common ancestors, then the way they, for example, mate and have sex must also be closer to our common ancestors. Yet we know that the way we mate and have sex is influenced, to a non-trivial extent, by culture. Cultures change over time. They certainly change over thousands and tens-of-thousands of years, with or without microwaves.

Mental Model 3

Instead, I would suggest we think of pre-modern subpopulations as just like us: they are a subpopulation that are just as removed from our common past as we are. There was a past fork: we went one way and changed a lot along the way, and they went a different way and still changed a lot along the way even if their changes weren’t visible things like agriculture, states, and microwaves.

I don’t want to push this too far but I feel like there is even a touch of elitism at play here. We believe that we evolved so far from our past selves because of our modern inventions — that our veer off the timeline of history (see Mental Model 2) was so dramatic — that it is hopeless to reconnect to our past by looking internally. But perhaps, all this modernity was just a distraction that stopped us from improving at a personal, interpersonal, community and societal level. Maybe it is us who are our past ancestors; just lifted into a new setting, while various subpops that side-stepped modernity spent the ensuing years honing an approach to life that from most reports is happy, healthy, and ecological. Maybe we should look at pre-modern subpops for our future, not our past.

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