If you are in search of good news these you’d best grab what you can when you can. That is what I did when I accidentally stumbled upon an online paper published by three scientists under the title “Human Mortality Improvement in Evolutionary Context.” Here’s the take-away. (Spoiler alert: it’s heavy going.) We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees.
Wow! Wild chimpanzees.
I happen to be interested in hunter-gatherers because I am one--in both a metaphorical and a literal sense. My metaphorical gatherings come mainly from eclectic not to say odd-ball reading (sample above), while my material gatherings are mainly the by-products of my therapeutic ambulation. This week the two have merged in curious fashion. My medical advisors are trying to keep my molecules moving by beginning with my legs. So I am supposed to take what is for me a substantial and challenging walk every day, and I have frequently alluded to these walks, occasionally even described them in blog posts. The possible satisfactory walking routes are of course limited, but also varied, and most of them avoid pavement in favor of sylvan paths. On the whole the routes are very pleasant. But I always enjoy walking more if I can hunt and gather as I go. According to season I can sometimes gather fungi or nuts. Within the next ten days the raspberry harvest, which promises to be huge, will be hanging over, or beside, many footpaths. But my staple quarry are little white pebbles roughly between the size of peppercorns and ping pong balls. As these little white pebbles are a geological feature of much of the local topsoil rather than seasonal vegetation, they are my gathering mainstays, so to speak; but they probably do require some explanation.
A nice feature of our house is a little atrium, or enclosed garden, open to the sky, probably fifteen feet square. It has some floral plantings and shrubbery, a tiny pool with a spouting dolphin-mouth faucet electrically controlled by a switch in our kitchen, and a short gravel path along which our pet turtles, Chloë and Hector, sedately parade. A heavily used bird feeder hovers above. One day it occurred to me that this quirky little secret garden, which gets only a few daily hours of direct sunlight, could use a little more light. It might be further improved if the pathway gravel, instead of being a dull gray, were a light-attracting shiny white. And since wherever I walked I was noticing a scattering of little while pebbles, often half-buried in hard earth, I thought I might start gathering a few on the daily round. All I needed to carry was a small pointed metal tool to loosen some of the pebbles, and as a receptacle a quart-sized plastic milk container, the mouth of which was, I discovered by happy chance, a serviceable size-gauge. Early experience suggested that if I gather a hundred or so a day for, say, three years, one might begin to see results. And it’s usually more fun than not to be “doing something”—even if what you are doing is pretty footling.
Of course, I encounter many other walkers, runners, and bicyclists along the route—either coming toward me or overtaking my leisurely pace from behind. These people are likely to see me scour the ground, lean over, poke at things with a strange weapon, and put something into a milk bottle. About a third pretend they don’t see me. Another third are curious as hell but too polite to say anything but “Nice day for it,” or some such, let alone ask what “it” is. But some small number do ask. I always tell them: “I am gathering white pebbles.” Maybe half of this group persists: “What for?” Again, I always answer truthfully: “To brighten up my atrium path.” We are now talking about small numbers. I can tell that the fraction of the fraction believing me is maybe fifty percent. It is not easy to mask incredulity and dark suspicion. What the skeptical think I was doing is unclear to me, but it obviously isn’t anything good, and I shall not be surprised if I find a detective at my door one day.
In my secondary hunter-gatherer role, also known as library mode, or the bibliographical, I was this week reading a few short stories. I picked up my de Maupaussant, and almost immediately stumbled upon the classic “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”). How could I have failed to think of it in this connection before?! You may well know the plot, but here it is in brief. In some benighted corner of nineteenth-century rural Normandy, two prosperous peasants, Maitre Hauchecorne and Maitre Malandain, are, for reasons unstated, ancestral enemies. Hauchecorne is a compulsive hunter-gatherer skinflint who picks up anything he finds along the way that might conceivably prove useful in some conceivable circumstance. Walking into the village of Goderville on a market day, he spots a small piece of discarded string on the path before him, leans over, and picks it up. One never can tell when a piece of string might come in handy! Only then does he realize that his nemesis, Malandain, is watching him from a distance. Embarrassed to be so discovered, Hauchecorne then makes a show of looking around a wider area as though for something valuable he has dropped. This is a technique well known to anyone who has ever been threatened with discovery while intending to take a pee behind a tree, should such people exist. The market activities continue into a kind of communal lunch, which is interrupted by the announcement of a horn-blowing town crier. I love this detail, because as recently as the early 1960s Joan and I lived in a delightful Provençal village where there still was such an official! The town-crier’s electrifying announcement is this. A certain local citizen has lost a wallet containing 500 francs and business papers, having apparently dropped it on the road to Goderville. Has anyone any relevant knowledge? Handsome reward offered, etc. “Aha,” thinks Malandain, “So that was what Hauchecorne was up to!” He informs the police of what he thinks he saw, and soon the whole village buzzes with gossip. To no effect does Hauchecorne keep repeating “It was only a bit of string!” Nobody believes him. I mean—who would pick up a dirty piece of string? Eventually the lost wallet is found intact and restored to its owner, but by then, it’s way too late. Hauchecorne’s reputation as thief, liar, or fool—take your pick--has set in the concrete of village malevolence. Poor Hauchecorne spends the last of his few tormented days telling and retelling his story to unbelieving neighbors. “It was only a piece of string!”
There seem to be at least two things worth pondering in all this. One of the sadder maxims of La Rochefoucauld is that even “in the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing.” The alacrity with which so many of us are quick to think the worst of strangers is perhaps even more frightening.
