Introduction
You often look at human history and see a bizarre catalog of strange customs, from Aztec human sacrifice to sacred cows in India. You might wonder why people adopt practices that seem irrational, cruel, or entirely self-defeating. You assume that culture is just a random collection of ideas, or that human nature is inherently violent and greedy.
Human history is driven by material, demographic, and ecological pressures rather than random chance or abstract ideas.
Marvin Harris demonstrates that seemingly bizarre cultural traits serve practical, survival-oriented functions within specific material limits. You will trace this argument across eight stages of human development.
- Why did peaceful hunter-gatherers invent grueling agriculture?
- How did warfare and cannibalism help manage human populations?
- What caused the rise of male supremacy and tyrannical states?
- Why do people worship animals instead of eating them?
1. Culture and Nature
European explorers during the age of discovery encountered groups living in diverse ways. You could find small bands of stone-age hunter-collectors in remote regions, village farmers practicing ritual warfare in the forests, and complex empires featuring standing armies and monumental architecture.
Human history follows an intelligible, rational process driven by intensification and reproductive pressure rather than random accident.
History is not merely the play of ten billion idiots. A predictable process governs how common cultural forms evolve along parallel paths across different societies.
Intensification means investing more soil, water, minerals, or energy per unit of time or area. Applying more effort eventually yields less return as resources become scarcer, lowering living standards and forcing you to invent new means of production.
Reducing population would theoretically be the easiest way to maintain a high-quality diet without extra toil. Natural reproduction makes thinning the human crop extremely difficult because heterosexual activity is genetically mandated for species survival.
To cope with population pressures without drastically lowering standards, pre-state societies frequently relied on specific measures:
- prolonged abstinence;
- crude abortion methods;
- female infanticide.
European explorers found groups living like Europe's stone-age ancestors in places like Australia, the Arctic, and the southern tips of South America and Africa, while encountering massive empires in China and the Americas. Typical hunter-collector bands consisted of 20 or 30 people, while larger village communities along the Amazon, Mississippi, and Pacific islands often reached 1,000 or more inhabitants.
2. Murders in Eden and Agriculture
Upper paleolithic hunter-collectors enjoyed high standards of health, comfort, and abundant leisure time. Archaeological evidence shows advanced craftsmanship and well-constructed artificial shelters.
Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers enjoyed abundant leisure and health until population growth and the extinction of megafauna forced a painful shift to agriculture.
Richard Lee recorded that Bushmen adults spend less than three hours per day in the quest for food. This lifestyle enabled them to maintain a diet rich in essential nutrients.
Stone age hunter-gatherers successfully limited their population growth to maintain ecological balance. They relied primarily on the physiological mechanism of prolonged lactation, which delayed subsequent pregnancies. A fertile woman requires a critical threshold of body weight consisting of fat to resume ovulation. Nursing an infant drains about one thousand extra calories per day from the mother, preventing the accumulation of necessary fatty reserves.
Bushmen mothers prolong lactation and appear able to delay the possibility of pregnancy for more than four years after each birth. When necessary, populations reinforced this natural contraceptive method with infanticide or neglect under severe stress.
The terminal phase of the last ice age brought global warming and intense human predation. As glaciers retreated, expanding forests replaced grassy plains. This ecological crisis caused the extinction of major large animal species.
Paul C. Martin used computer simulations to demonstrate that human hunters could have wiped out the Pleistocene Megafauna across North America in a few centuries. By 7000 B.C., thirty-two whole genera of large New World animal species had been brought to total extinction.
The sequence of transitions from hunting to village life differed fundamentally between the Old and New Worlds. In the Middle East, hunter-gatherers built permanent villages first to store wild grains. They subsequently domesticated nearby wild sheep and goats that were attracted to crop stubble.
In Mesoamerica, all domesticable herd animals had already become extinct. In the Tehuacán Valley, permanent houses were not built until thousands of years after the first plants like amaranth and maize were domesticated.
Old World farmers successfully integrated domestic animals like donkeys and oxen into agriculture. South American Indians domesticated llamas and alpacas, but these animals were completely unsuitable as a source of traction for heavy loads. This lack of draft animals halted the practical development of the wheel for hauling and milling in the New World.
The shift from nomadic hunting to sedentary agricultural life resulted in an overall deterioration of human physical health. J. Lawrence Angel found that upper paleolithic adult males averaged 177 centimeters in height, while twenty thousand years later males grew no taller than 165 centimeters.
3. The Origin of War and Proteins
Organized intergroup combat is a very ancient practice, extending back into prehistory long before the rise of the state. Prehistoric war weapons were identical to hunting tools and soft-tissue wounds do not fossilize, but evidence of mutilated skulls dates back 500,000 years. The oldest fortified town of Jericho proves warfare existed by 7500 B.C.
Pre-state warfare and female infanticide function as ecological mechanisms to regulate population and preserve environmental resources.
Common explanations for war fail to explain why pre-state warfare is so deadly or why it occurs selectively. War as solidarity fails because less lethal activities could achieve group togetherness. War as play and human nature fail because killing is not universally admired and societies can rapidly shift from peaceful to warlike without genetic changes. War as politics does not apply to band and village societies because they lack the apparatus to extract taxes, tribute, or political expansion.
Peking Man skulls show signs of being smashed at the base, and pre-Biblical Jericho featured elaborate walls, towers, and defensive ditches by 7500 B.C.
In band and village societies, warfare functions to disperse populations and create ecological buffer zones that preserve natural resources. Pre-state groups do not conquer territory like states do, but their raids and destruction of settlements increase the average distance between groups. This creates uninhabited no man's lands that serve as essential animal sanctuaries and plant preserves, protecting species that would otherwise be depleted by human activity.
Male combat deaths alone cannot limit population growth because most males are reproductively superfluous. Because band and village societies are typically polygynous and a single male can impregnate multiple women, the group's fertility rate is determined by the number of adult women rather than adult men. Combat fatalities mostly affect males, leaving population growth rates largely unaffected unless female numbers are restricted.
Pre-state warfare and female infanticide are mutually linked cultural solutions that regulate population growth by valuing sons and devaluing daughters. Because military success depends on brawny male combatants using hand-held weapons, societies preferentially rear sons and practice female infanticide through neglect, abuse, or killing. This sex-specific limitation of female children effectively depresses the group's overall birth rate and solves the Malthusian dilemma under pre-industrial conditions.
The Yanomamo represent a key case where male fierceness, intensive warfare, and female infanticide are tied to a recent population expansion driven by new technology and crops. Despite claims that resources are abundant, the Yanomamo experience high rates of internal feuding and warfare over women, accompanied by high rates of female infanticide in the central war zone. The adoption of steel tools and plantains and bananas about 100 years ago sparked a population explosion, leading to environmental depletion of game animals and increased village fissioning.
Jacques Lizot and Napoleon Chagnon documented high juvenile sex ratios and village splitting among the Yanomamo, starting from a single village 100 years ago to 2,000 people across twelve villages.
Depletion of animal protein resources around expanding tropical-forest villages triggers internal tensions, leading to village breakups and warfare. As villages grow larger than their traditional limits, daily activity depletes game animals for miles around. Hunters must travel farther and stay overnight, which is dangerous in a war zone. When meat supplies falter, domestic tensions rise, wives taunt husbands, adultery increases, and villages eventually split up and disperse.
4. Male Supremacy and Pristine States
Male supremacist institutions arose not from human nature, but as a direct by-product of warfare and the male monopoly over weapons.
Feminists have tried to argue that male supremacy is not natural by claiming it never existed among band and village societies or was exaggerated by male observers. However, statistical data from ethnographic records overwhelmingly show structural biases against women, which are tied to the organizational demands of warfare. George P. Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas lists 1,179 societies, showing patrilocality is three-fourths common while grooms living with brides is only one-tenth.
The type of warfare practiced by a society determines whether its social organization becomes patrilineal or matrilineal. Internal warfare involves small raiding parties attacking nearby villages speaking the same language, favoring patrilineality. External warfare involves large raiding parties penetrating deep into distant, distinct enemy territories, which promotes matrilocality and matrilineality because married men move away from their paternal roots and foster peace with neighbors. The Iroquois engaged in external warfare, were matrilineal and matrilocality-based, while the Yanomamo engaged in internal warfare and were patrilineal.
The Freudian Oedipus complex is not an innate biological feature of human nature, but a cultural product created by male supremacist institutions and the demands of raising aggressive warriors. Freud inverted the causal arrow by deriving warfare and male dominance from childhood sexual frustrations and castration anxiety. In reality, the childrearing objective of producing aggressive males and passive females creates castration fears and penis envy, making war the cause of the Oedipus complex rather than its result. Bronislaw Malinowski showed that Oedipal rivalries exist even among matrilineal, avunculocal Trobriand Islanders, though the authority figure is the mother's brother.
Marriage and descent institutions consistently exhibit strong male biases across band and village societies. Children are counted in the father's descent group five times more often than the mother's. Polygyny occurs over 100 times more often than polyandry, acting as a reward for masculine aggressiveness, whereas bride-price compensates the bride's family for lost productive and reproductive services. Jill Nash brought to attention the Nagovisi of Bougainville as a rare single case of economic compensation given to the groom's family.
Environmental circumscription and population pressure transformed voluntary redistributive chieftainships into coercive feudal states.
Ambitious producers known as big men utilize redistributive feasts to increase production and gain a following, laying the institutional groundwork for early political hierarchy. Agricultural villagers intensify production by rewarding hard work through massive feasts where organizers redistribute food while keeping nothing for themselves. Over time, these redistributors and war leaders accumulated influence, though initially lacking coercive power and bearing personal financial liabilities for their followers. Douglas Oliver studied mumis among the Siuai on Bougainville, where a host mumi named Soni gave away thirty-two pigs at a feast attended by 1,100 people on January 10, 1939.
When populations expanded inside regions bounded by ecological barriers or harsh transition zones, people could not easily escape to new land. This impaction forced subordinate groups to accept permanent dependency, taxes, and tribute in exchange for protection or access to resources, allowing redistributors to become kings. John Beattie described the Bunyoro in Uganda, where a hereditary king called the mukama ruled over 100,000 people occupying an area of 5,000 square miles, granting land dispensations in exchange for tribute.
The rise of the state transformed human existence from a condition of communal freedom and economic autonomy into servitude under bureaucratic and military elites. Before the state, resources were communally owned, work schedules were individually set without bosses, and individuals held equal shares of nature. With the state, access to nature required permission paid through taxes, tribute, or labor, while coercive power was monopolized by specialist-soldiers and officials. Across the past five or six millennia, nine-tenths of all the people who ever lived did so as peasants or servile castes. Pristine states emerged in three definite instances: Mesopotamia at about 3300 B.C., Peru about the time of Christ, and Mesoamerica about A.D. 100. Old World pristine states also arose in Egypt about 3100 B.C., the Indus Valley shortly before 2000 B.C., and the Yellow River Basin shortly after 2000 B.C.
5. Mesoamerican States and Cannibalism
The Olmec civilization represents an arrested stage of incipient statehood rather than a full state-level polity. Low regional population densities and a lack of severe ecological impaction prevented them from developing further.
La Venta in Tabasco featured an earthen cone 420 feet in diameter and 105 feet high, along with 50-ton carved stone stelae and colossal stone heads.
The classic Maya civilization developed in the Peten jungle on a vulnerable ecological base that ultimately led to total population collapse. Environmental degradation such as deforestation, soil erosion, and changing precipitation patterns caused the collapse of their civilization.
At Tikal, population densities reached up to 40,000 inhabitants in its rural perimeter, but after A.D. 800 construction ceased, and the region became virtually depopulated.
To support high population densities, the Maya intensified agriculture through tree crops and extensive water-control networks. The Maya adapted by planting breadnut trees around homesteads and constructing sophisticated canal, moat, and reservoir networks.
At Edzná in Campeche, aerial photographs revealed a network of canals, moats, and reservoirs radiating from the ceremonial center to control water and renew field fertility.
In the Valley of Mexico, successive agricultural intensifications led to larger states, culminating in the Aztec empire.
Teotihuacán reached a peak population of 125,000 people in the eighth century A.D. before experiencing a cataclysmic collapse around A.D. 700.
The Aztecs institutionalized human sacrifice on an unprecedented mass scale, integrating it into state religion and warfare.
At the 1487 dedication of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlán, an estimated 14,100 prisoners were sacrificed over four days, and Spanish conquistadors counted over 136,000 skulls on central racks.
Aztec sacrifice and cannibalism functioned as a state-sponsored system for producing and redistributing scarce animal protein and fat. Mesoamerica suffered from a severe deficit of domesticable animal resources, making human flesh a crucial source of nutrition for soldiers and officials.
6. Religion, Taboos, and Material Priority
Early Old World states practiced human sacrifice without incorporating the bodies into widespread redistributive feasts. While early states in Mesopotamia, China, and the Mediterranean practiced ritual human sacrifice, they did not redistribute human flesh for consumption. Prisoners were increasingly integrated into the labor force as agricultural workers or soldiers as state power grew.
As states expanded, rulers used animal sacrifice and universalistic religions to maintain social order instead of cannibalism.
Across Eurasia, animal sacrifice served as the basis for communal redistributive feasts that reinforced the image of kings as generous providers. These animals fed on grass and stubble indigestible by humans, converting low-cost plant resources into valuable protein. At the dedication of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem, 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep were slaughtered for redistributive feasting.
As large imperial systems exhausted resources and population pressures mounted, rulers could no longer sustain open-handed generosity with meat. Religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism shifted focus to spiritual salvation, obedience, and divine protection of the meek. Hammurabi declared himself the shepherd and provider of his people while establishing legal codes to protect the weak against the strong.
The Inca Empire sustained a large population and centralized administration by relying on llamas and guinea pigs rather than human sacrifice for protein. Llamas grazed on high-altitude puna grasses unusable by humans, providing an efficient meat source and allowing the Inca to incorporate defeated populations into agricultural labor. The Inca Empire extended 1,500 miles from northern Chile to southern Colombia and supported a population of about 6 million people.
Growing food plants directly is energetically far more efficient than feeding plants to animals to produce meat. The net calorie return on human effort invested in plant production is on average about ten times greater than from animal production. Grains convert 0.4 percent of sunlight into edible matter, while feeding grain to cattle yields meat containing only 0.02 percent of the original sunlight.
Religious food taboos, such as the biblical prohibition against eating pork, originated as adaptive responses to environmental degradation and high production costs. Raising pigs required feeding them grains that competed directly with human consumption as ancient Middle Eastern populations deforested the landscape. Forests in Anatolia were reduced from 70 percent to 13 percent of total surface area due to human pressure.
Most other creatures forbidden in Leviticus were wild or working animals with inherently low benefit-to-cost ratios for settled agriculturalists. Carnivores were scarce and difficult to hunt, while draft animals were far too valuable for transport, traction, and milk to be slaughtered for casual meat consumption. The Koran retained the pig taboo but permitted the consumption of camel flesh under emergency conditions for desert nomads.
7. The Sacred Cow and Hydraulic Trap
Extreme population pressure turned beef into an Indian religious taboo, while large-scale irrigation projects trapped hydraulic societies in recurring dynastic cycles.
Early Vedic texts and archaeological remains from Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and Hastinapur show that high-caste Aryans and priests regularly consumed animal flesh, including beef, mutton, and buffalo, especially during redistributive feasts and hospitality rituals. Scholars like Om Prakash cite early Vedic texts noting that fire was called the eater of ox and barren cows, and barren cows were killed at weddings and to feed guests. This occurred around 1000 B.C., which marked the upper limit of the early Vedic period when animal flesh was dined on with considerable gusto after the first large settlements appeared along the Indus River in 2500 B.C.
As the Ganges Valley population surged and deforestation reduced resources, families faced severe droughts triggered by monsoon fluctuations. Because oxen were indispensable for plowing and cows bred replacements, slaughtering cattle threatened the entire food production cycle, turning beef into a taboo to remove temptation. India held an estimated population of 50 to 100 million in 300 B.C., with at least half living in the Ganges Valley. During the period from 300 B.C. to A.D. 300, the great twelve-year drought described in the Mahabharata occurred where wells dried up, agriculture halted, and starving people resorted to cannibalism when cattle were gone.
In contrast to India's sacred cow, China adopted the pig as the primary village scavenger because regional climates and grazing lands favored swine over zebu cattle. G.F. Sprague estimated that China produced 250 to 260 million swine in 1972, raised primarily as a household enterprise on waste materials. Rural Chinese derived 97.7 percent of their calorie diet from plant foods versus 2.3 percent from animal products.
Preindustrial societies dependent on large-scale irrigation and flood control recurrently evolved highly centralized, despotic managerial bureaucracies. Managing massive river systems, dikes, and canals required monumental construction projects executed by armies of workers under centralized command. Building the Great Pyramid of Cheops employed 84,000 men working eighty days a year for twenty years. This immense administrative concentration led to rigid class structures and autocratic rulers who maintained order through terror and severe punishments. World population grew between 87 million and 225 million between the appearance of the first states and the beginning of the Christian era, requiring seasonal employment of 100,000 able-bodied men for Old Kingdom monumental projects in Egypt.
Ancient hydraulic empires experienced repeating cycles of bureaucratic corruption, infrastructure decay, dynastic collapse, and subsequent reconstruction. As dynasties aged, officials grew corrupt and neglected public works, causing canals to silt up and dikes to leak. In China, the Yellow River broke its dikes in 132 B.C., flooding sixteen districts and remaining open for twenty-three years until Emperor Wu-ti personally supervised repairs. This led to famine, rebellion, and foreign invasion, collapsing the regime while China's overall population range was maintained close to 50 million from A.D. 2 to A.D. 742. New rulers inevitably had to restore the hydraulic infrastructure to capture the wealth of the empire, restarting the cycle of population growth and eventual decay.
8. Capitalism, Industrial Bubbles, and Energy
European feudalism collapsed in the fourteenth century because the manorial mode of production reached its ecological limits due to rising population density and declining agricultural efficiency. Transalpine Europe population density was about nine persons per square mile in A.D. 500. England reached a density of thirty persons per square mile in A.D. 1086. The Black Death carried off between one-quarter and one-half of the population in 1348.
Unlike hydraulic societies where dynastic collapses led to centralized waterworks, European feudal crises birthed industrial capitalism.
In thirteenth-century England, grain prices almost trebled while English exports of wool rose by 40 percent. English barons extracted the Magna Carta from King John at Runnymede in 1215, ensuring each baron remained a king in his own castle. Chinese emperors could arbitrarily suspend trading licenses, but European private industry grew alongside parliamentary monarchies.
Major technological changes between 1500 and 1830 occurred under duress in England due to timber famines and land scarcity. Annual convictions for larceny in England rose 540 percent between 1805 and 1833, and 26,500 people were hanged. The industrial revolution triggered a demographic transition driven by the fuel revolution, the contraception revolution, and the job revolution. The English birth rate dropped below 30 per thousand in 1900 and fell below 20 per thousand in 1970 after the vulcanization process enabled mass production of contraceptives in 1843.
Modern industrial capitalism is a fossil fuel bubble facing severe environmental depletions. M. King Hubbert calculated oil production to peak in 1995 and coal production to peak in 2100. In the United States, 2,790 calories of energy are used to produce one can of corn containing 270 calories, while 22,000 calories are required to produce 100 grams of beef.
The exhaustion of fossil fuels creates material conditions for centralized energy despotism that you must actively prevent.
- Break the cartels that monopolize the present system of energy production.
- Create new decentralized forms of energy technology.
Cultural determinism reveals how unconscious modes of production trapped past societies in recurring crises. Recognizing these material constraints allows you to preserve political democracy and make the future less dependent on impersonal forces.
10 Key Ideas
- Human history is driven by material, demographic, and ecological pressures rather than random chance or abstract ideas.
- Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers enjoyed abundant leisure and health until population growth and the extinction of megafauna forced a painful shift to agriculture.
- Pre-state warfare and female infanticide function as ecological mechanisms to regulate population and preserve environmental resources.
- Male supremacist institutions arose not from human nature, but as a direct by-product of warfare and the male monopoly over weapons.
- Environmental circumscription and population pressure transformed voluntary redistributive chieftainships into coercive feudal states.
- In the Valley of Mexico, successive agricultural intensifications led to larger states, culminating in the Aztec empire.
- As states expanded, rulers used animal sacrifice and universalistic religions to maintain social order instead of cannibalism.
- Extreme population pressure turned beef into an Indian religious taboo, while large-scale irrigation projects trapped hydraulic societies in recurring dynastic cycles.
- Unlike hydraulic societies where dynastic collapses led to centralized waterworks, European feudal crises birthed industrial capitalism.
- The exhaustion of fossil fuels creates material conditions for centralized energy despotism that you must actively prevent.