Waterhole Economies: The Only Economies That Never Collapsed

Pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer economies were waterhole economies, and were the only human economies that never collapsed.

Ninety-seven percent of the time Homo sapiens lived on Earth, or until about 12,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food, living a type of subsistence lifestyle in economies that relied on hunting and fishing animals, foraging for wild vegetation and other nutrients, and converging around waterholes to slake their thirst. Their economies required a daily pursuit and collection of wild foods to make a living, collecting numerous species over whose reproduction and sustenance they had no control.

And yet, they were the only human economies that persisted without collapse for 97 percent of our species’ existence, and somehow managed to do so for those 290,000 years mostly without ravaging the planet’s habitats and ecosystems and destroying its biodiversity, nor threatening the pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies that relied upon them to make a living, with risks of a potential extinction the way twenty-first century economies are threatening humans today.

It bears asking (don’t you think?): Is there something our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer forebears knew about how to make a living and survive on this Earth, without destroying its ecosystems and biodiversity, that Neolithic Revolution through twenty-first century humans, notwithstanding all our accumulated knowledge, science, technologies, innovations, and supposed superiority — still don't get? Clearly, the answer must be yes. But what?

Join me in exploring what modern humans may have forgotten.