Book Review: A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century is a daring, intelligent and thoughtful look at humanity’s past, present and future. Subtitled ‘Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life’, these co-authors are both evolutionary biologists and a married couple.

The initial chapters introduce the human species’ role as the animal that can adapt to any circumstance, and then cover a brief history of the lineage preceding humans since life “blinked into existence” on Earth. The third chapter is spent on the central conundrum that our bodies and our psyches are evolved for a world in which we no longer live and that this is cause of many problems. Furthermore, that our tendency to innovate in the face of these problems is solving as many of these problems as it is exacerbating. This paradoxical idea is what the authors define as modernity. The state of having so rapidly culturally advanced from our ancestral state that we are no longer evolved to fit it, and every solution to this that we propose is a bewildering double-edged sword.

The bulk of the book is then divided into chapters where each takes an area of life and considers how modernity is impacting us in the context and what we may be able to do to help ourselves. These areas are Medicine, Food, Sleep, Sex and Gender, Parenthood and Relationships, Childhood, School and Becoming Adults. Eight giant topics, each of which deserves its own book, but that all of us should deeply care about as they are fundamental to our human experience. Somehow each of the topics is so central to our lives that they can seem almost redundant or boring to bring up, but they should actually be a central focus of anyone wishing to understand and optimise their life.

For me, the final two chapters are where the book gets really exciting. ‘Culture and Consciousness’ explores our current knowledge of what consciousness is and is where the authors make some new propositions about the evolved nature of both. The authors propose that consciousness is individual, it is evolved so that one person can break new boundaries or invent a new technology that can come to benefit everyone. Culture is the collective, it is the mechanism that behaviourally aligns everyone together so that everyone does not have to re-learn everything about how to survive themselves, it is an efficient diffusion of accumulated inherited wisdom. It strikes me that nearly every societal debate is had over how to optimally balance the two sides of this coin. ‘The Fourth Frontier’ deals with the future. It is neither foolishly hopeful nor irrationally gloomy. It is a call to action for all of us. Highlighting that we cannot go back to hunter gatherer lifestyle, but that we must carefully and cautiously find a way forward, bringing only what is beneficial and discarding what is harmful, because we haven’t a choice.

As a popular science reader, I found the book held a refreshing perspective, and if anything was unsatisfyingly short. As a PhD candidate studying genetics and human past, I enjoyed the succinct and palatable explanation of evolutionary concepts.

The authors walk a difficult stylistic line between robust scientific literature and popular reading for the layman. At times I feel they slip too far into personal anecdote which may detract from the credibility, though perhaps the layman reader would have the alternate opinion. The authors do fabulously with stories that they do include, they may illustrate a point, or to connect the reader to the authors, this is a very warm book where you often feel as though you’re sitting around sharing a yarn with Bret and Heather. While perhaps less scientific, the embellishment of narrative serves to personify the ancient humans that would have explored their world. Giving life to people that are usually just data points or samples in test tubes, despite the fact they are our heritage. In any case, this is a book written fantastically to satiate layman and scientist alike.

While the discussions of modern sex and relationships through the evolutionary lens are both interesting and useful, I believe there is a tendency to be overly conservative here. Especially as the authors themselves have been married for long enough to have skipped many of the current perils of modern love. While many of their suggestions are justified, they fail to distinguish between those of us trying to set up families and those not. The case can easily be made for monogamy and conventionalism when trying to construct a safe child-raising environment, but so many adult individuals today do not fall into this category. I do not think the author’s conclusions that we should avoid pornography and casual sex are entirely wrong, but rather they shouldn’t be so deterministic about them, human sexuality and relationship is far more variable than many realise, and I’d refer the reader to Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan’s Sex At Dawn for an intriguing evolutionary investigation of the origins of human sexuality.

For the evolutionary biologists out there, the book goes further than just another colloquial summarisation of science for the masses. Heying and Weinstein propose novel scientific advances to established evolutionary theory. These include a rejection of the false dichotomy of nature vs. nurture in lieu of an all-encompassing mechanism whereby culture itself is an evolved epigenetic mechanism that serves the genome, and the formulation of a three-step test to identify if a phenomenon is adaptive or incidental. If there is a critique, it is that the scientist in me yearns to see this explored in a more in depth and technical way, and I can only hope they continue the work.