#42: Primal City (Part 1): Why Urbanists Should Study Hunter Gatherers

This episode is part 1 of a series about  human evolution, our prehistory and Hunter Gatherer ways of life. Why should urbanists be interested in this? In this episode I make the argument that:

• We evolved over 2 million years as foragers and it is the only environmentally and socially sustainable way of life we know of.
• Living this way, embedded within ecosystems, is what what we are optimised for and therefore how human beings thrive.
• Life in our prehistoric past (and in modern hunter gatherer bands) is not nearly as awful as we think. In fact we can learn a lot from their approach to life, work, play and community.

This means that our pre-history should be a key design consideration in architecture and urban design. In part 2 (and maybe 3) I will set out specifically what this means for urban design.

Sources:
Civilised to Death, Christopher Ryan
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Uncivilised Genes, Gustav Milne
https://theconversation.com/hunter-gatherers-live-nearly-as-long-as-we-do-but-with-limited-access-to-healthcare-104157
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-hunter-gatherers-fundamental-human-social-networks.html

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The Green Urbanist podcast is hosted by Ross O'Ceallaigh.