Humans didn't live in cities till a few generations ago. And it shows. We still behave in some very primitive subconscious ways which show our ancestry as hunter-gatherers in a jungle. I suggest you take a closer look at two different (for the record, wholly imaginary) people walking through a mall. One is a mid twenties guy in jeans and a t-shirt which says Look the other way. The other one is a early twenties girl with two friends. They walk down the shop floor extremely confidently but very differently.
Hunter & Gatherer: Who'd be hunting for clothes and who's be gathering ? Even a casual observer will not have any problem finding an answer for that question - which is left as an exercise to the reader. The traits are almost painfully obvious on second thought.
Rather than head off into a discussion of how/why this evolved and end up pissing off half the human race (by intention or accident), I'll just go ahead into the subject.
Threat, Opportunity and Other stuff: That is exactly how an ideal hunter would see the world. You'd want as few distractions as possible. Gather enough information to remove one more variable of the landscape from your conscious thought system. It is either a threat or an opportunity - anything else can be ignored. Of course, when there's a mammoth thundering towards you, you can hardly be bothered by how beautiful the sunrise is.
Since humans were never intended to be carnivores and lack any real professional equipment for the job, we can't completely remove the imagination and creativity from the hunter either. A complete lack of imagination would spell disaster for a creature which would be helpless without crafted tools and co-operation.
The Hunter was not just a way of life, it was a state of mind too. There's still a bit of Hunter in each one of us. It revels in the chase rather than the result, where as the gatherer prefers to accumulate rather than capture. We are both, but we are neither truly.
For, thus the book of Genes read - ' Call me not the hunter or the gatherer. Call me a survivor'.
--Calvin: I wonder why we think faster than we speak.
Hobbes: Probably so we can think twice.
posted at: 12:44 | path: /observations | permalink |