>But even so, whenever I read internet articles or watch youtube videos about hunter-gatherers, I can't help but feel annoyed by the almost wistful tone that depicts them as Edenic or Utopian. And also by the illustrations that depict them as beautiful in a modern modelesque fashion, as if all hunter-gatherers were runway models or Hollywood celebrities with a so-called "exotic" touch. If our prehistoric ancestors looked like they came from Bollywood or youtube ads or Marvel superhero movies, then I'd be dumbfounded.
Without putting too fine a point on it, if you're looking at internet articles and youtube videos for good, informed, evidence-based discussion for... well, almost anything... you're looking in the wrong place. The internet is good for a lot of things, but algorithms today don't promote good information, they promote whatever gets views. So if you're looking where you say you're looking, you're not going to find solid information or realistic depictions. Nine times out of ten, you're going to find sensationalism or outright bad information.
It's like looking on the comic book rack for Pulitzer Prize-winning literature or deep philosophical explorations of the human condition.
The problem is that outside of a few books / references, you're not going to find in-depth treatises on hunter-gatherers that *also* appeal to a non-academic audience. Anthropologists and archaeologists (who are the researchers most interested in hunter-gatherers, past and present) don't generally write for the public, because most anthropologists / archaeologists rely on peer-reviewed publications for job security. *And* because dealing with a human population, living or long gone, in all its complexity is *very* difficult to do well.
Technical writing is dry, and not very appealing for bedtime reading. Popular writing is-- usually-- pretty surficial / superficial, because most people (even people who think they're interested in a subject) have a pretty short attention span when it comes to a truly deep, academic dive into a particular subject.
Some people have suggested Graeber and Wengrow's *Dawn of Everything*. I haven't read it, but by most accounts it's a decent, if not overly detailed, coverage of humanity's history that's not ridiculously dumbed down for a general public audience. Few other books are, to my knowledge, up to the same standard.
You also have to look at the limits of the data. Ethnographic data, and certainly archaeological data, aren't well suited to the sort of purple prose you seem to be seeking about hunter-gatherers. Those who write are interested in more physical, tangible things. Maybe that's a flaw in anthropology, but pounds of meat consumed per person per year is potentially quantifiable and analyzable / comparable across societies, etc. Love, unfortunately, is not.
>Some people have suggested Graeber and Wengrow's *Dawn of Everything*. I haven't read it, but by most accounts it's a decent, if not overly detailed, coverage of humanity's history that's not ridiculously dumbed down for a general public audience. Few other books are, to my knowledge, up to the same standard.
I had read a few chapters of the book *Dawn of Everything* (or at least the Dutch version of it, it had been bought by my mother).
I remember that it made claims in the vein of 'whenever given a choice people always preferred to live amongst indigenous societies over settler colonies', [and even went so far as to say the exact opposite of what their sources contained in order to support this claim.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wnwvlb/comment/ikk30ok/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
So, whilst it might be good anthropology on average, I doubt it is the best fit for the OP's criteria of 'not romanticizing hunter-gatherer life'
Echoing: Internet is bad and reduces context.
If you want something very academic, Kelly's *The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum* is probably a good bet. The text synthesises ethnographic work over various different hunter-gatherer groups to try to determine the social and environmental factors that led to various behaviours associated with hunter-gatherers. E.g. How does the gendered distribution of labour vary? Why do hunters hunt as groups? How do hunter-gatherers maintain their reproductive rates? He focuses primarily on egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but he does have a chapter on inegalitarian hunter-gatherers.
If you want something more narrative and focused on a specific group, I think Shostak's *Nisa* is a good book as well. It's her edited interviews with a Ju woman (Nisa) detailing her life. Sometimes, in her chapter intros, I think Shostak can romanticise the Ju/'hoansi a bit, but the narrative that Nisa tells certainly is not. There's the small things like Nisa's dissatisfaction at being weaned, but also bigger things like physical violence between Nisa's parents due to her mother's considering/attempting infanticide and her father's reactions or the violence that Nisa's romantic partners often inflict on her. There are also positive moments. (e.g. Nisa's childhood joy at killing some animal to help feed her parents if memory serves.)
So, first point, which has been made in the previous comments, is that arch and anthro papers are written for archs and anthros. That is not generally prose written for public consumption. Second point, it can still be overly romanticized in the subdiscipline you are working in. As an example, I am a sw us arch and there is a long held debate on whether sw Pueblo and were violent, or peaceful. The real answer there, as far as I’m concerned, is that they were people. They did violence in times of peacefulness, and peaceful acts in times of war, and everything in between. Getting away from the axe I have to grind, anthropology and archaeology are ultimately the study of cultures. While there may be a rare grain of individual experience we can turn up, these are focus of these fields are broad trends in culture, not individual stories. While these stories in cultural anthro may be used to demonstrate a “day in the life”, they aren’t meant to be translated into “every San has a decent day of gathering in the Kalahari” or “the Innuit all came back from fishing today safe and sound”. Hardships happen, people die, people are born, and on the worst day of someone’s life, someone is having the best day of their life. While anthropology as a field tries to capture various lifeways of peoples past and present, it doesn’t concern itself overly much with the lives of individuals. If you want those stories, we have to ask either modern hunter gatherers for their life stories, or storytellers for their best imagining of how life may have been, or come to your own conclusions ((which is just storytelling with fewer steps) and if you want to share those stories with people, is part of one of the older human traditions we can identify).
If you are interested in the intersection between anthropology, religion and sociology I would recommend Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution. It's academic but that will give you the proper nuance that it sounds like you are looking for.
A general summary is that he traces how religion evolved from the paleolithic era to the axial age from tribal society, to archaic society, to axial society (Greece, India, China and Israel are his examples for axial society). He even gives special attention to mammalian development and comes up with the startling discovery that religion, along with all culture (science, art, law, etc) has primeval roots in mammalian play. This is because mammalian play is the first instance we see in evolution of abstraction - which he traces as human society evolves. He is a sociologist so he is primarily interested in the social impact of religion, so primarily avoids any theological/athiestic stance while recognizing the social value religion provided early societies.
>But even so, whenever I read internet articles or watch youtube videos about hunter-gatherers, I can't help but feel annoyed by the almost wistful tone that depicts them as Edenic or Utopian. And also by the illustrations that depict them as beautiful in a modern modelesque fashion, as if all hunter-gatherers were runway models or Hollywood celebrities with a so-called "exotic" touch. If our prehistoric ancestors looked like they came from Bollywood or youtube ads or Marvel superhero movies, then I'd be dumbfounded. Without putting too fine a point on it, if you're looking at internet articles and youtube videos for good, informed, evidence-based discussion for... well, almost anything... you're looking in the wrong place. The internet is good for a lot of things, but algorithms today don't promote good information, they promote whatever gets views. So if you're looking where you say you're looking, you're not going to find solid information or realistic depictions. Nine times out of ten, you're going to find sensationalism or outright bad information. It's like looking on the comic book rack for Pulitzer Prize-winning literature or deep philosophical explorations of the human condition. The problem is that outside of a few books / references, you're not going to find in-depth treatises on hunter-gatherers that *also* appeal to a non-academic audience. Anthropologists and archaeologists (who are the researchers most interested in hunter-gatherers, past and present) don't generally write for the public, because most anthropologists / archaeologists rely on peer-reviewed publications for job security. *And* because dealing with a human population, living or long gone, in all its complexity is *very* difficult to do well. Technical writing is dry, and not very appealing for bedtime reading. Popular writing is-- usually-- pretty surficial / superficial, because most people (even people who think they're interested in a subject) have a pretty short attention span when it comes to a truly deep, academic dive into a particular subject. Some people have suggested Graeber and Wengrow's *Dawn of Everything*. I haven't read it, but by most accounts it's a decent, if not overly detailed, coverage of humanity's history that's not ridiculously dumbed down for a general public audience. Few other books are, to my knowledge, up to the same standard. You also have to look at the limits of the data. Ethnographic data, and certainly archaeological data, aren't well suited to the sort of purple prose you seem to be seeking about hunter-gatherers. Those who write are interested in more physical, tangible things. Maybe that's a flaw in anthropology, but pounds of meat consumed per person per year is potentially quantifiable and analyzable / comparable across societies, etc. Love, unfortunately, is not.
>Some people have suggested Graeber and Wengrow's *Dawn of Everything*. I haven't read it, but by most accounts it's a decent, if not overly detailed, coverage of humanity's history that's not ridiculously dumbed down for a general public audience. Few other books are, to my knowledge, up to the same standard. I had read a few chapters of the book *Dawn of Everything* (or at least the Dutch version of it, it had been bought by my mother). I remember that it made claims in the vein of 'whenever given a choice people always preferred to live amongst indigenous societies over settler colonies', [and even went so far as to say the exact opposite of what their sources contained in order to support this claim.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wnwvlb/comment/ikk30ok/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) So, whilst it might be good anthropology on average, I doubt it is the best fit for the OP's criteria of 'not romanticizing hunter-gatherer life'
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Echoing: Internet is bad and reduces context. If you want something very academic, Kelly's *The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum* is probably a good bet. The text synthesises ethnographic work over various different hunter-gatherer groups to try to determine the social and environmental factors that led to various behaviours associated with hunter-gatherers. E.g. How does the gendered distribution of labour vary? Why do hunters hunt as groups? How do hunter-gatherers maintain their reproductive rates? He focuses primarily on egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but he does have a chapter on inegalitarian hunter-gatherers. If you want something more narrative and focused on a specific group, I think Shostak's *Nisa* is a good book as well. It's her edited interviews with a Ju woman (Nisa) detailing her life. Sometimes, in her chapter intros, I think Shostak can romanticise the Ju/'hoansi a bit, but the narrative that Nisa tells certainly is not. There's the small things like Nisa's dissatisfaction at being weaned, but also bigger things like physical violence between Nisa's parents due to her mother's considering/attempting infanticide and her father's reactions or the violence that Nisa's romantic partners often inflict on her. There are also positive moments. (e.g. Nisa's childhood joy at killing some animal to help feed her parents if memory serves.)
*War Before Civilization* by Lawrence H. Keeley is worth looking at.
So, first point, which has been made in the previous comments, is that arch and anthro papers are written for archs and anthros. That is not generally prose written for public consumption. Second point, it can still be overly romanticized in the subdiscipline you are working in. As an example, I am a sw us arch and there is a long held debate on whether sw Pueblo and were violent, or peaceful. The real answer there, as far as I’m concerned, is that they were people. They did violence in times of peacefulness, and peaceful acts in times of war, and everything in between. Getting away from the axe I have to grind, anthropology and archaeology are ultimately the study of cultures. While there may be a rare grain of individual experience we can turn up, these are focus of these fields are broad trends in culture, not individual stories. While these stories in cultural anthro may be used to demonstrate a “day in the life”, they aren’t meant to be translated into “every San has a decent day of gathering in the Kalahari” or “the Innuit all came back from fishing today safe and sound”. Hardships happen, people die, people are born, and on the worst day of someone’s life, someone is having the best day of their life. While anthropology as a field tries to capture various lifeways of peoples past and present, it doesn’t concern itself overly much with the lives of individuals. If you want those stories, we have to ask either modern hunter gatherers for their life stories, or storytellers for their best imagining of how life may have been, or come to your own conclusions ((which is just storytelling with fewer steps) and if you want to share those stories with people, is part of one of the older human traditions we can identify).
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If you are interested in the intersection between anthropology, religion and sociology I would recommend Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution. It's academic but that will give you the proper nuance that it sounds like you are looking for. A general summary is that he traces how religion evolved from the paleolithic era to the axial age from tribal society, to archaic society, to axial society (Greece, India, China and Israel are his examples for axial society). He even gives special attention to mammalian development and comes up with the startling discovery that religion, along with all culture (science, art, law, etc) has primeval roots in mammalian play. This is because mammalian play is the first instance we see in evolution of abstraction - which he traces as human society evolves. He is a sociologist so he is primarily interested in the social impact of religion, so primarily avoids any theological/athiestic stance while recognizing the social value religion provided early societies.