Are “Hunter Gatherer” Cultures Really “Paleo”?

by Carl Wieland
Creation Ministries International

The traditional view of so-called ‘cultural evolution’ is that hunter-gatherer societies became agricultural societies, which then became industrial ones, and so on. Technology, it has long been taken for granted, always increases. When anthropologists came across a hunter-gatherer society, the standard assumption was that they had never, in their cultural past, had an agricultural society.

However, the Bible teaches that human society before the Flood already had the capacity for herding, agriculture, manufacture of musical instruments, metalworking and city-building. When we come across a hunter-gatherer society today, since these are the descendants of people who built a city at Babel, the inference is clear. Even though such hunter-gatherer societies show no sign of (for example) agriculture, they have descended from societies which did practise this.

It is therefore of great interest to creationists whenever evidence emerges that societies can in fact lose technology (such as the Tasmanian aborigines appear to have done). Also, when studies reveal that a particular hunter-gatherer society has descended from an agricultural society in relatively modern times.

One such incidence is the story of the Moriori. Around a thousand years ago, Polynesian farmers colonised New Zealand to become the Maori. Soon afterwards, a group of Maori colonised the Chatham islands, 800 km (500 miles) east of New Zealand. They became known as the Moriori. In 1835 Maori invaders with guns, axes and clubs invaded the Chathams, enslaving and killing most of the Moriori. The rest were largely wiped out over the succeeding few years by their Maori conquerors.

Interestingly, although they had, in common with the Maori, been an agricultural society, the Moriori had long since reverted to become hunter-gatherers. This made sense for them—the islands were too cold to grow the largely tropical Maori crops. Without being able to store surpluses of crop food, they “could not support and feed nonhunting craft specialists, armies, bureaucrats and chiefs”. They were therefore an intrinsically less warlike society, which made them vulnerable to the Maori attack.

The lesson thus is that hunting-gathering is not a sign of being ‘primitive’ or ‘less-evolved’ but can be a means of coping with a particular situation in which people find themselves. In turn, the types of social structures and technologies relied upon by such cultures become appropriate to that situation.

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Carl is the Managing Director of Creation Ministries International (Australia), a position he has held since 1987, when it was called Creation Science Foundation, then Answers in Genesis. He was the founding editor of Creation magazine (in 1978) that now has subscribers in over 100 countries.

Carl’s formal qualifications are in medicine and surgery, and he is a past president of the Christian Medical Fellowship of South Australia. He no longer practises medicine, having been in fulltime ministry since 1987. He is in great demand as a speaker on the scientific evidence for Creation/Flood, and its relevance to Christianity. Able to hold both academic and lay audiences, he has lectured extensively in Australia and around the world, and has engaged in a number of public debates with prominent evolutionists.

Read The Full Article Here: http://creation.com/moriori-hunter-gatherers