#title Paleoethics
#subtitle A Straightforward Guide for Modern Hunter-gatherers
#author Arutand Ederam
#LISTtitle Straightforward Guide for Modern Hunter-gatherers
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-04-05T19:11:38.162Z
#notes First Edition.
#topics original texts, indigenous, anti-tech

*** Intro

We are by now accustomed to think of hunter-gatherers as people who are about to be completely wiped out from the face of the earth. This extinction comes with the realization that hunter-gathering have been the most successful and long-lasting modality with which humans have lived on the planet. As our short-lasted civilization is bringing us to the brink of destruction many of us feel the need to readopt a hunter-gathering way of life. The great majority however understands that it is by now impossible to live as hunter-gatherers and that society is just too complex and crowded to do so. This short guide is meant for those who think of starting change from within him or herself. As a matter of fact many of us already have hunter-gathering tendencies that modern society conveniently dismisses as syndromes. This short guide provides this people some basic knowledge on hunter-gatherers so that they can be more consciously able to pursue a more natural way of living. It also provides some tips so that people can begin to abstain from the unnatural procedures of modern life and challenge a system that is systematically killing not only the environment but also the life within our social human being. In addition this guide provides a list of first-hand accounts to enable people to go more in depth into the by now extinct life of hunter-gatherers without getting caught up in any of the academic discussions that have manipulated the issue for mere ideological purposes. This guide is meant to be updated with time and at every new edition it will welcome the feedback of other modern hunter-gatherers understanding the urgency of the topic.

*** Facts

 1. Hunter-gatherers call themselves the people and call the other people the non-people. In turn the non-people call them in derogatory terms based on what they eat (fish, fat etc.) or what they don’t eat (cattle) and more recently based on where they live or how they look;

 1. Hunter-gatherers call themselves the people and call the other people the non-people. In turn the non-people call them in derogatory terms based on what they eat (fish, fat etc.) or what they don’t eat (cattle) and more recently based on where they live or how they look;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are the most successful human society; they have lived on planet earth for over 190.000 years in harmony with one another and themselves. Human civilization on the contrary has only lasted 10.000 years and it was marked by a continuous trait of genocides culminating into the ecocide of our planet;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are everyone of us. We all have been displaced by civilization. We were all children of the forest who have been more or less corrosively been forced into the power-structure of whatever empire, whether Egyptian or Assyrian or Chinese or Roman or Bantu or Aztec or European or Russian or Ottoman or American;

 1. Hunter-gatherers have great control of themselves. They are there to prove that the more society tries to control the environment the more it looses control of itself. On the contrary hunter-gatherers do not attempt to dominate nature if not only to temporarily accommodate their own human nature within it, clearing the land to set their camp and live with all the biodiversity nature has to offer rather than clear cutting it;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are outdoors people. When the weather is rainy they just keep in their huts but as soon as it is fine again they are outside off to a gathering and a hunting expedition. As soon as they succeeded in gathering and hunting they are back in their camp feasting and celebrating what mother-nature had offered them;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are mentally fit. Traumatic things could occur to them but life moves on and there is no need for any of the psychologists sedentary humans are so dependent on. An hunter-gatherer girl might get caught into the trap of a poacher. A boy might be bitten by a deadly snake. Their destiny is accepted stoically and without too much fuss;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are gender-balanced in a sense that most activities are shared equally. Certain activities tend to be more the domain of women such as the building of huts and the gathering of food and certainly giving birth while certain type of hunting is the domain of men but nonetheless there are no forms of patriarchism and matriarchism and decisions are taken together;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are all about the family. A daughter or a son may be sent to another tribe to get married in exchange for another daughter or son ensuring an healthy lineage but the tribe itself is made of related people, an extended family far from the nuclear family enforced by civilization almost as a way to prevent the social autonomy of the tribe;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are not there to be enslaved by any settler. They might work in his plantation and suddenly disappear. They might be given free beans to plant but they will simply eat these beans. They might go as far as be enrolled in a university and get the best grades but soon enough they leave they will make it back to the wilderness;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are fully affectionate people taking care of their beloved elders even if they are handicapped. After they die they may even keep next to their buried bodies to make sure they are not eaten by beasts but if a member of a community is not that beloved and is an actual cause of burden he or she may be left behind to the beasts;

 1. Hunter-gatherers just see things for what they are. Unlike a civilized man who sees a person in an animal, the hunter-gatherer just sees food and eat it. While only taking what they need they do not pick up the traits of those who do not eat meat but have discriminating castes or those who are strictly vegetarian and animal-loving but commit the worst of genocides;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are generally speaking harmless to one another. In rare circumstances they can go as far as isolating and eventually killing an individual that has gone mad and is a serious danger to the community but usually any type of animosity is settled with singing and dancing;

 1. Hunter-gathers are straight like their arrows. There are very little evidence of homosexuality and in general they are not obsessed about sexual intercourse as a middle-class person may be, caged like an animal with all his or her frustrations;

 1. Hunter-gatherers make fun of the dogmatic rituals of the settlers. The latter people force them to comply to these rituals and the hunter-gatherers may do so only for the free food that comes with them. In no time however they set free from all the non-sense of initiations and weddings and funerals of the settlers;

 1. Hunter-gatherers believe in mother-nature who provides them with shelter and food but have no other superstitions that are not related to her. The first byte of the food they hunt and gather may be given to nature but what sedentary culture see as evil, such as the period of a woman, they see as an extraordinary event worth celebrating;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are extremely knowledgeable of their surroundings. Generation after generation they know of every little vine and root and nut and leave and how to identify tracks and even how to read the stars in the horizon. They are excellent botanists unable to understand the farmer-mentality of the settlers getting rid of biodiversity in order to impose their mono-cultures;

 1. Hunter-gatherers do not conceive rigid private properties. They might use a stick to identify the space where they sleep in case there are no leaves nor branches to build their huts. They keep within a broad territory and if settlers invade it with their cattle they occasionally feed on this cattle because it is what nature gives them within the territory they feel they belong to;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are very mindful people who spend much time in constructive leisure activities cultivating nothing but themselves. Rather than breaking their backs working in the fields they get what the wilderness give them and then enrich their lives storytelling, doing decorative work and singing and dancing;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are highly vulnerable to the vices of civilization. Alcohol and drugs have turned the noble savages into brutes, wounded animals of the wilderness relegated within the confines of a reservoirs with fences and walls. Abstaining from these vices is the first step out of such a confinement;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are very fit people and make fun of the settlers who do not know how to walk. If they spot some bees they can climb in no time up a tree and fearlessly fetch a honeycomb, their greatest delight. The fittest can even run after an eland and kill it as an actual animal predator;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are honest people. They share what there is to be shared in the fashion their costumes tells them to. It is not the big hunter to get the big share but who has provided the arrow. Not who reaches the honey comb first on top of the tree gets it but who first spots it. To this extent there is not even a word for theft since everyone gets his or her share;

 1. Hunter-gatherers take no pride in being superior to one another. They do feel superiors to settlers and scorn them but if one hunter-gatherer gets a big game he returns to the village and sits quietly in a corner without manifesting any pride and without taking any credits;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are respected by the other top predators who co-exist with them and are aware of their value. They do not try to annihilate these predators but there is a reciprocal sense of respect. Lions hunt at night and humans during the day yet they share the same waterhole. As soon as hunter-gatherers get replaced by tourists lions begin to attack the latter;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are too often used to justify political ideologies. Fascists and communists alike make use of them praising their courage or their egalitarian well-being but hunter-gatherers want nothing of it. When approached by some feminists with their anti-patriarchal doctrine hunter-gatherer women see no use of it and just keep alongside their hunter-gatherers male partners;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are relatively free to marry and divorce and even get more than one husband and wife. This freedom ensures a strong bound between the members of a tribe especially in the event of one member losing his or her partner;

 1. Hunter-gatherers have a sense of belonging. While incapable of understanding the concept of private property they do hunt and gather within a territory they move seasonally within putting up a new camp whenever the food around them becomes scarce. Their nomadism is then to be considered a circumscribed practice rather than a form of aimless adventurism;

 1. Hunter-gatherers have a great brain capacity. Not only they are able to memorize a multitude of places and more or less relevant details that are related to them but also they have great knowledge of their history and their family history and of the oral history that is transmitted from generation to generation along with the very in depth knowledge on their own environment;

 1. Hunter-gatherers love their children extremely. They let them play freely and through playing they let them acquire their agility and the skills necessary to be valuable assets for the tribe. In the rare event a baby is born at a time a mother has to already sustain another baby with her milk, with much sorrow she has to abandon the former to sustain the life of the latter;

 1. Hunter-gatherers seek a strong bond with other tribes by marrying each other but also by bringing gifts to one another. These relations ensures that feuds are avoided and that the jealousy among the tribes can be tamed. It is worth noting that in order to bring a gift to another hunter-gatherer in another tribe a hunter-gatherer can go through considerable troubles;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are circular not only because their camps are circular and they sit in circle around the fire but also because what they take from nature is given back to her in different cycles such as with the making of clothing made of worn-out tents or with their feces that are rolled away by insects;

 1. Hunter-gatherers have been corrupted through the years with the introduction of domesticated animals such as horses and other neolithic products such as metal and wine and tobacco. This explains the more destructive features of some tribes even if they kept on hunting and being nomadic;

 1. Hunter-gatherers welcome the runaway colonizers. They are generally suspicious about farmers who try to persuade them to work for them but once they understand that a person is honestly willing to leave like them in the wilderness he or she becomes their brother or sister;

 1. Hunter-gatherers can also be sedentary people who have decided to make it back to the wild in order to defy an increasingly decaying civilization;

 1. Hunter-gatherers are highly intelligent; attending no school they are able to pick up several languages spoken by the settlers who irremediably colonize their wild land;

*** Tips

 1. Try not to work for banana-farmers meaning people exploiting the land and/or other people like yourself. Not only stay aloof from these farmer-minded people but try not to contribute to their stocking away capital and prestige;

 1. Try to work as little as possible and spend the rest of your time with your tribe, your extended family celebrating life on earth playing music and dancing and painting and storytelling. In this respect do not subscribe to a mainstream culture that is too often a way to celebrate power with its idols and disconnect from the local environment;

 1. Try to be cynical of all the authorities surrounding you. Spot any form of hierarchy and if you are told to execute orders do it badly. Desert any form of regimentation as soon as you can;

 1. Try to keep your dwelling and that of your family like a tent. Do not search for perfectionism but just warm it up with your human being;

 1. Try to take your tribe out to the bush for a hunting and gathering expedition. In a urban setting see the city as your forest and make it a scavenging expedition;

 1. Try not to stock away capital for yourself and your tribe but share it among hunter-gatherer people like yourself;

 1. Try to let the wilderness take over and put your investments in purchasing cheap land and enable it to grow back into a primeval forest;

 1. Try to spot the neolithic practices going against the rewilding of the earth and of society. When you can, stay away from contributing or supporting big and small corporations connected to nature and human exploiting practices;

 1. Try to stay fit scorning any form of sedentary living. Going out in the outdoors is your praying and back in the indoors celebrate your creativity along with that of your other family members;

 1. Try to make children and love them and teach them the way of the wild subtracting them whenever you can from the regimentation imposed to them by the system. Keep them on the move in their bodies and brains;

 1. Try to abstain from any of the sedatives that can turn you into a neo-conservative settler. Realize that alcohol and drugs and other form of entertainment may turn you dependent to the system;

 1. Try not to cultivate nor domesticate anything but your very self. The wilderness with all her biodiversity can regrow outside you but also inside you;

 1. Try to ostracize anyone around you who attempts to become big. Do not refrain to have prejudices against him or her showing some level of aggressiveness and disdain;

 1. Try not to take any credits becoming big yourself. Don’t worry about your reputation beyond your tribe but just put your body and soul for your people and your surroundings;

 1. Try not to consume too processed products. Consume what is fresh and raw also when it come to the culture you absorb;

 1. Try not to be afraid of death and accept your mortality in view of the renewal of the species but also in view of not being a burden to your tribe and the environment;

 1. Try to relay on empirical knowledge. Be skeptical of scientific knowledge as it originates from the will to dominate nature;

 1. Try to put your roots in a territory, a hunter country. Explore it consistently and learn from it as a book no matter if the wilderness is constantly prevented by civilization and its machinery;

 1. Try to disregard any form of superstition and religion. Consider the sky-gods as only a justification of centralized power and consider superstitions as mental disorders of sedentary people;

 1. Try to live a frugal life without any luxuries and material wants. Find in yourself and your tribe and potential wilderness around you the ever lasting richness to fully satisfy your being;

 1. Try to make of speed walking your main sport. Otherwise avoid any of the sports that are just but the rituals enacted by the system to fulfill the void that it leaves by preventing us from developing our inner nature;

 1. Try to keep your life as simple as possible avoiding to be too dependent to the system and its bureaucracy. If you feel enslaved learn from the pygmies who get caught by the farmers to work in their plantations and escape as soon as they can;

 1. Try to take advantage of civilization. It is disrupting the primeval nature where you and your tribe could live an affluent life so show no remorse to take a banana now on then but just don’t get to use to it;

 1. Try to use walking as your main medium of transportation. Consider traveling with any other vehicle such as by plane or by car or by bike or on a horse a substitute that does not fulfill the type of immersive activity that walking does to your mind;

 1. Try to develop your judgment based on how much other people adhere to their nature. See whether they walk the outdoors and see whether they also spend an active life indoors exploring their consciousness. If you detect that there is none of them and a person is a middle-class individual conforming to the rules stay away from him or her as you would stay away from a beast kept in a cage;

 1. Try not to be literal about being environmental. Use whatever medium your surrounding environment has to offer you in order to enforce your autonomy and carry on your hunter-gatherer practice. Actually see those who are too literally environmental as your potential enemies in that they can become authorities who can separate you from nature with their puritan ideology;

 1. Try to consider yourself not so much a hunter-gatherer who has to make it back digging up roots from the ground but a super-hunter-gatherer who is able to content him or herself with what the environment has to offer while in fact developing a super-consciousness freed from the mechanical obligations of any system;

 1. Try to understand that your freedom is your autonomy to live back in a natural environment without any artificial imposition. To this end think of the freedom that the system allows you as only a set of liberties for you to be able to tolerate it, liberties that too often turns you away from your nature and therefore the possibility to be truly free;

 1. Try to consider that to free humanity and the planet from suicide, revolution begins within you. By disconnecting yourself from the many dependencies that link you to the system you can begin to reconnect to your tribe and the surroundings;

 1. Try to broaden your concept of rewilding not merely as the act of getting subsidies from the system in order to plant a few trees. Rewilding ought to be total and involve each human being who ought to recover his or her biodiversity regrowing his or conscious away from the monocultivation and regimentation actuated by the system to preserve and grow its own centralized power;

 1. Try to fear nothing but the products of domestication with its derailed creatures and monster institutions. Even if you cannot avoid them try to choose in the end what your nature dictates you and that is to keep close to your local environment and community while promoting a more natural way of life if not only via the example you can provide;

 1. Try to fulfill your natural responsibility without delegating them to any institution and its machinery. Only through this effort you will be able to regenerate your tribe as well as your surroundings. In this sense always think that the etymology for ecology is family and that is your main task;

*** Sources

<biblio>
 1. *The Forest People* by Colin Turnbull

 1. *The Harmless People* by Elizabeth Marshal Thomas
</biblio>

Selected first-hand accounts on second-degree hunter-gatherers:

<biblio>
 1. *Nunamiut* by Helge Ingstad

 1. *My People the Sioux* by Luther Standing Bear

 1. *An African in Greenland* by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

 1. *The Bolivian Diary* by Ernesto Che Guevara

 1. *Child of the Dark* by Carolina Maria de Jesus
</biblio>

*** Tribes

 1. Hazda of the Eyasi lake

 1. Ju/‘hoansi of the Kalahari desert

 1. Mbuti of the Ituri forest

 1. Nunamiut of the Brook Mountains

 1. Onge of Little Andaman

 1. Selk’nam of the Tierra del Fuego