After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination

by Kirkpatrick Sale

When did the human species turn against the planet that we depend on for survival? Human industry and consumption of resources have altered the climate, polluted the water and soil, destroyed ecosystems, and rendered many species extinct, vastly increasing the likelihood of an ecological catastrophe. How did humankind come to rule nature to such an extent? To regard the planet’s resources and creatures as ours for the taking? To find ourselves on a seemingly relentless path toward ecocide? In After Eden , Kirkpatrick Sale answers these questions in a radically new way. Integrating research in paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, he points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of Homo sapiens ’ estrangement from the natural world. Sale contends that a new, recognizably modern human culture based on the hunting of large animals developed in Africa some 70,000 years ago in response to a fierce plunge in worldwide temperature triggered by an enormous volcanic explosion in Asia. Tracing the migration of populations and the development of hunting thousands of years forward in time, he shows that hunting became increasingly adversarial in relation to the environment as people fought over scarce prey during Europe’s glacial period between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. By the end of that era, humans’ idea that they were the superior species on the planet, free to exploit other species toward their own ends, was well established. After Eden is a sobering tale, but not one without hope. Sale asserts that Homo erectus , the variation of the hominid species that preceded Homo sapiens and survived for nearly two million years, did not attempt to dominate the environment. He contends that vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today—in some tribal societies, in the central teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the core principles of the worldwide environmental movement—offering redemptive possibilities for ourselves and for the planet.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, History, Archaeology, Sustainability, Science

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2006

Reviews

[Jack Randall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sale is a fairly famous Luddite who thinks civilization is on the verge of collapse, so I wanted to read
this to get a better idea of where he is coming from. I liked the way he assembled a lot of accumulated knowledge from others regarding the history of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, but after awhile
I realized he was picking and choosing his information to support his position: That man headed in the wrong direction when he assumed he was superior to the animals and 'nature'
The book could have been half the length and covered the same ground. Thought provoking to a point but I can't say it altered my thinking: That we are headed for disaster unless we change coursed, but I to think it is quite realistic to expect that we will, indeed change course, and our technology
will be a key to that.

[Alasdair Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not necessarily what I was expecting, although not sure what I did expect. Was interesting as an introduction to prehistoric "man", with some interesting insights into how they may have lived, the conclusions were fairly weak though, based more on assumption than evidence, and some of the parallels drawn for modern living are idealistic or naive at best ... at worst we move into super villain territory.

[David Agranoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just should have been an essay, I love his work. this one was boring.

[Dameon Launert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second reading of After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination by Kirkpatrick Sale. It had been about 15 years and I still thoroughly enjoy it.

Kirkpatrick Sale weaves a narrative of so-called prehistory, taking the reader through humanity's cultural and technological evolution the past 2 million years. In doing so, he argues that hunting culture, particularly after the last glacial maximum, was the seed for our consciousness to believe we are separate from nature and dominant over it.

He makes strong arguments, but I'm not so sure about the definitiveness of his conclusion. For instance, there are many other predators in the world. Do lions and tigers have the same beliefs? Indigenous peoples, insofar as they are not colonized, do not.

Regardless, the conclusion was merely one point in a long and fascinating narrative. In the last chapter of the book, Sale discusses how we can return to our roots, which he says are not far away, as civilization is a relatively short experiment in the grand scheme of human history. Some ideas he explored briefly include human scale, bioregionalism, deep ecology, and (anarcho-)primitivism. I agree with these ideas and some of the familiar other authors he cited.

I look forward to reading this book again 15 years from now or sooner.

[Joshua Finch]

If you ever fall under the delusion that the hunter gatherers have/had a better form of existence, even if it might have been tougher in other ways, this work is for you. Civilization is inevitable and excludes these other ways of life, for better or worse. Kirkpatrick Sale shows how our brains are just that kind of hardware that allows us to think ahead for the future. Those more primitive peoples weren't living full capacity; intentionally or not they don't stand a chance against the encroach of glacier-like civilization. Yes there is a lot of archaeology here, tying the succession of tools and environment-change evidence into the [false] bioanthropology of the skull shape changes of our [made up] common ancestors.

[The work shows that the data collected for the interpretive purposes of the atheistic-evolutionary faith, has enough flexibility-by-ambiguity to be interpreted in according to the Christian theistic scriptural history, even if the interpreter is himself atheistic! I don't accept the faith in a single-cell origin evolution. But strangely, Sale heads in the direction of my faith by way of this atheistic faith, which is sort of what theistic evolutionists do, but he's approaching it seemingly from the other side. This shows not only the flexibility of the data, but an independent corroboration of our history of things.]

So his story goes that the psychology is important, too: Mt. Toba erupts and drastically changes how we had to survive. So not only do we now organize ourselves into ever more complex systems that compete with each other, taking into account more and more of the future, but we don't have fun with this new sophistication, we are really kind of vicious about it instead because we're traumatized from the event. And besides this organization requires hierarchy, which tends to become corrupt a lot. So this book is a spanner in the works of a lot of eco-egalitarian thinking out there on their own (attempted scientific) ground. If we're going to overcome these problems and return to Eden, in this atheist/agnostic/scientistic sense, we either have to change our own biology (oh no, transhumanist engineer, please don't put chips in my brain), or use our nature rightly, whatever that means.

Well more than the title here looks like the Old Testament story of the Fall, except with a volcano being blamed for our post-Edenic exile instead of a moral failure. Is Sale a Christian? Who knows. But he seems to assemble the evidence much more coherently and effortlessly than other theorists in this eco-area I read, as you would expect from leveraging some true Christian background assumptions on protology (whether he was unconsciously using them or not). You can see how the premise of Watchmen is operating here too, whether it is from one of his own (incompatible) secularist Modern assumptions (which seems more deliberate for Sale, hence the fake bioanthropological timelines and assumption of the pseudoscience of evolution). We need another big, common Enemy, misidentified as some morally irrelevant natural phenomenon like said volcanic erruption, for the sake of our unity, or we will destroy each other instead (they did this with global warming and do it with the 'backwards' part of our nature, expressed in traditional views, which they straw-man and believe to be superceded by their pseudoscience). Say Hello to the next version of that, the corona virus. (Written 3 - 17 - 20.)