Our Hunter-Gatherer Future

John Gowdy (RPI economics professor emeritus) argues that the stable Holocene climate was a historical fluke that made agriculture—and therefore civilization—possible. That stability is now collapsing under fossil-fuel CO2, and the coming "mega-greenhouse" (3-4°C by 2100, potentially 8-10°C after) will return Earth to Pleistocene-like climate volatility where grain agriculture is impossible. The result: human population collapse and a return to hunting and gathering. Gowdy frames this not as doomerism but as a homecoming — we were hunter-gatherers for 97% of our 300,000-year history, and every trait we value (compassion, intelligence, curiosity) evolved in that context. The policy program is radical for an academic paper: aggressive climate mitigation plus managed population decline, rewilding, and protecting indigenous cultures as a survival hedge.

Key Quotes

"For at least 97% of this time our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived as many other large predators do, in small groups within the confines of local ecosystems."

The paper's rhetorical backbone is a simple ratio. 291,000 years as hunter-gatherers, 9,000 years of agriculture. The claim that agriculture is "normal" rather than "a temporary blip enabled by a climate anomaly" is the perspective shift the entire argument turns on.

"The adoption of agriculture made the average person worse off for millennia. Physical health declined dramatically and most of the world's people were born into rigid caste systems and lived as virtual or actual slaves."

This is the part that surprises people who haven't read the anthropological literature. Gowdy cites Larsen (2006) and Cohen & Crane-Kramer (2007) to make the case that early farmers were shorter, sicker, had more tooth decay, and worked longer hours than hunter-gatherers. Life expectancy in 1900 (~30 years) was still below Upper Pleistocene levels (~33 years). The "progress" narrative of the Neolithic Revolution is a statistical illusion visible only in the last 150 years.

"Aridity proved the indispensable handmaiden of state making by delivering, as it were, an assembled population and concentrated cereal grains in an embryonic state space."

Gowdy channels James C. Scott's Against the Grain here — the argument that climate drying forced populations into concentrated river valleys where they became legible, taxable, and controllable. The state didn't invent the population; drought delivered it pre-assembled. A genuinely unsettling inversion of the standard "irrigation required centralization" story.

"The theory of 'normal accidents' suggests that complex technological systems regularly give way to failure. So collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and complexity."

Gowdy quotes a 2019 BBC report applying Perrow's normal accident theory to civilization itself. If collapse is a feature of complex systems rather than a bug of particular ones, then our tightly-coupled globalized civilization isn't more resilient than past empires — it's more fragile. Scale amplifies the cascade, it doesn't dampen it.

"The human brain has been shrinking rapidly since agriculture (from 1500cc to 1350cc)... the decrease in brain size during the last 10,000 years is nearly 36 times the rate of increase during the previous 800,000 years."

The paper's wildest section. Brain shrinkage since agriculture is a well-documented fact, not speculation — Henneberg (1988) tracked it across Europe and North Africa. Gowdy deploys it as a dark joke ("Will we be too stupid to be hunter-gatherers?") and then doubles down with the finding that CO2 at 950ppm causes 15% cognitive decline, and 50% at 1400ppm. He notes we'll hit 1000ppm ambient CO2 this century. The implication: we're getting dumber even as we need to be smarter.

"In the long run, the vision of returning to a hunting and gathering way of life is wildly optimistic compared to the technological dystopias envisioned by many science fiction authors and social philosophers."

The paper's thesis compressed into one sentence. Gowdy genuinely believes hunter-gatherer life is better than the dystopian alternatives — surveillance states, climate warlords, corporate-run arcologies. He's not being ironic. The Shepard (1998) citation gives away his intellectual lineage: eco-psychology that treats Pleistocene adaptation as the template for human flourishing.

"The inherent conflict is between nature and economic exploitation, not between nature and people."

From the rewilding section. Anticipates and intercepts the standard objection (rewilding = misanthropy) by relocating the conflict. Markets are the problem, not humans existing in landscapes. A slim distinction but the one the whole Dark Mountain / uncivilization tradition rests on.

"Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism, of sexism, of religious intolerance, of war, of gross economic inequality. But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems."

Paul Ehrlich, quoted approvingly. The paper's policy section is bracing precisely because it doesn't dress up population reduction in euphemism. Gowdy means it: family planning, female empowerment, economic equality — all the standard progressive tools — but with an explicit goal of fewer humans.

Key Themes

#concept Climate stability as civilization prerequisite. The core theoretical move. Agriculture didn't happen earlier because the Pleistocene was too volatile — year-to-year temperature and rainfall swings made grain dependence suicidal. The Holocene's unusual stability (10,000 years of it) was the necessary condition. Remove the stability, remove the agriculture.

#concept Ultrasociality. Gowdy's own theoretical framework (developed with Lisi Krall across multiple papers). Agriculture created selection pressure for groups that could scale — larger group size, complex division of labor, economies of scale. Human society became "a unified, interdependent and highly complex economic machine." Ultrasociality is the evolutionary mechanism; civilization is the phenotype.

#concept The mega-greenhouse. Not just 3-4°C by 2100 (the standard IPCC RCP8.5) but 8°C+ by 2300 if accessible fossil carbon is burned. CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere is centuries to millennia — Archer & Brovkin (2008): "Ultimate recovery takes place on time scales of hundreds of thousands of years." The effects are irreversible on human timescales. Policy conversations that stop at 2100 miss the entire story.

#concept The golden age of barbarians. From Scott (2017): after state societies collapsed, people were better off as barbarians. They had autonomy, mixed subsistence strategies, and could raid the remnants for spoils. Beckwith (2009): Greeks and Romans defected to join steppe nomads "where they lived better and were treated better than they had been back home." The post-collapse future isn't necessarily suffering — it might be liberation.

#concept CO2-induced cognitive decline. The wild card argument. Already-documented indoor CO2 effects (15% decline at 950ppm, 50% at 1400ppm) combined with projected ambient levels reaching 1000ppm. We might literally become stupider as the CO2 rises, precisely when we most need our wits.

#pattern Expansion and collapse as the agricultural default. The Akkadian empire, Old Kingdom Egypt, Classic Maya, Harappan — all show the same arc. Climate change (drought, flooding, aridification) is increasingly accepted as the primary driver. Gowdy's point: this isn't a bug, it's the operating system. Agricultural states overshoot and collapse because agriculture itself is fragile in the face of climate variability.

#tool Rewilding as low-cost resilience. Yellowstone to Yukon, European Green Belt, Buffalo Commons. The insight: these projects require almost no investment beyond regulation and easements. Nature does the rest. The wolf reintroduction cascade in Yellowstone (wolves → fewer coyotes → more small mammals → more owls, foxes, badgers) is the poster child.

#person John Gowdy. RPI economics professor emeritus. Career spent on hunter-gatherer economics, ecological economics, and ultrasociality theory. Co-author with Lisi Krall on the evolutionary economics of the Anthropocene. This paper is his synthesis: deep history + climate science + evolutionary theory.

Critical Analysis

The climate stability argument is genuinely important and under-discussed. Most climate discourse focuses on extreme weather, sea level rise, and migration. Gowdy's point is more fundamental: the variability itself is what kills agriculture. You can't farm if you don't know whether this year will be temperate or ice-age cold. This insight deserves more airtime than it gets.

But the paper has a teleology problem. Everything is framed as leading inexorably back to hunting and gathering. The argument that "agriculture won't return after collapse because hunter-gatherers didn't choose it the first time" is circular — they didn't "choose" it because the climate wouldn't let them. If the climate somehow re-stabilized (unlikely but not impossible), the full set of conditions that produced agriculture could recur. Gowdy's denial of this possibility reads more as preference than prediction.

The brain shrinkage section is fascinating but epistemically reckless. Gowdy presents cranial capacity decline as evidence of stupidity, then immediately concedes "there is no evidence that we are just as smart, or even smarter, because our brains have become streamlined." He's right that the null hypothesis should be "smaller = dumber," but he presents no mechanism and no behavioral evidence. The CO2 cognitive decline studies he cites are about indoor CO2 in poorly ventilated rooms, not ambient atmospheric levels — the dose-response relationship is not established at outdoor concentrations. This section undermines the paper's credibility even if its conclusion might be right for other reasons.

The paper's optimism about post-collapse life is a form of survivorship bias. The "golden age of barbarians" argument relies on Scott's reading of the interstices between state collapses. But those barbarians existed in a world where functioning states still surrounded them, providing trade goods, metal tools, and the spoils of raiding. A world with no states at all is a different scenario. The "environment will recover" section's examples (Chernobyl, Fukushima, the Korean DMZ) are all cases where the surrounding world was still functioning and contamination was localized. Global collapse with 8°C warming is a different animal.

The sharpest contribution is the WEIRD critique of climate economics. Gowdy's dismissal of standard economic analysis — discount rates render long-term impacts invisible, and preference surveys sample WEIRD outliers — is devastating and specific. He's not anti-economics; he's an economist pointing out that the discipline's tools break at the relevant timescales. The Clark et al. (2016) quote ("An evaluation of climate change risks that only considers the next 85 years fails to provide essential information") is a kill shot.

The paper's honesty about its own optimism is its saving grace. The conclusion admits that "the vision of returning to a hunting and gathering way of life is wildly optimistic compared to the technological dystopias envisioned by many science fiction authors." Gowdy knows this sounds unhinged. He's saying: the techno-optimist futures are less plausible than this one. Whether or not you agree, that's a position with intellectual integrity.

The paper was published in January 2020, weeks before COVID. Reading it from 2026, the "tightly-coupled, globalized system is more likely to make crisis spread" argument looks prescient in a way Gowdy couldn't have intended. The fragility thesis has aged well; the policy proposals (aggressive coordinated action) have aged terribly.

Sources: Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture and Uncivilization Last updated: 2026-05-18