A Farewell to Alms

Romantic Age or Stone Age?

Imagine for a moment life in 18th-century England. Perhaps such scenes come to mind as the one Sir Joshua Reynolds depicted in 1789 in his painting, The Braddyll Family. A woman in a flounced skirt sits with her lapdog on an ornate chair. Her husband, standing behind her in a powdered wig and red riding jacket, looks out toward the viewer, and the couple’s son, reclining languidly against a piece of statuary, holds his hat and gloves, apparently ready to stroll around the family’s estate once this tiresome business of posing is finished.

Now imagine what life was like for humanity’s hunter-gatherer forebears. It probably resembled the current lives of the Nukak, an indigenous people living in the Amazonian rain forest. A recent picture of a typical Nukak family shows two almost entirely naked women with few possessions squatting over a crude bowl in which they have gathered food (perhaps nuts). Their babies cling to them, suckling while the women work. Their shelter is a rough-thatched roof. Their life looks anything but easy.

With these two pictures in mind, consider which world you would rather inhabit – that of 18th-century...