I was in an undergraduate anthropology class several decades ago, and the professor was going on and on about how natural selection is a dumb process that operates entirely outside any sort of preexisting plan or intentional design. A student in the class asked a question about the possibility of intentional evolution. This notion, a variation on eugenics, is a central component of modern transhumanist thought: why not intentionally select for characteristics that would improve the human species and increase its future fitness?
The professor quickly shot down the idea by pointing out that natural selection is a population’s response to specific environmental conditions. You can’t select characteristics in advance because there is no way of knowing what specific demands and opportunities might be present in future environments. He said that for all we know, susceptibility to diabetes might be the thing that prevents the extinction of the human species, and then went on to offer up sickle cell anemia as an example. Sickle cell anemia is a genetic mutation that is deadly if you inherit a gene from both parents, but that offers protection from malaria if you inherit only one.
This logic applies to the idea, prevalent in primitivist circles, that humans will need to learn specific hunting and foraging skills in order to survive in a post-civilized world. Many primitivists look to archaeological evidence and hunter-gatherer ethnography as sources for what post-civilized society should look like. I think that this might be a mistake. It is definitely not a mistake to use this information diagnostically, as a way of identifying the many points of disconnect between civilization and authentically human ways of living. But it is probably a mistake to use it prescriptively. And the reason is that a post-civilization world is guaranteed to be very different from the pre-civilization one. At least for the first few millennia.
Preserving indigenous nature-based practices and acquiring competence with traditional methods of foraging and hunting are worthwhile activities in their own right. But these skills and practices will not necessarily be relevant for future generations trying to navigate the specific opportunities and demands of post-civilization conditions. Knowing what worked in the past may only offer broad generalities about the what will be needed in the future.
Assuming that there is a future.
Even the notion that future humans will be hunters is not a sure thing. Very few animals may survive the current mass extinction. Also, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the animals that manage to survive the collapse of civilization will be toxic. Even now, prion diseases related to mad cow disease are showing up in deer, elk, and moose. And the oceans’ fish may be inedible too. There is enough radioactive material sitting in already leaking containers on the banks of the Columbia River at the Hanford nuclear site to kill the world’s oceans multiple times over.
It may be a vegan future for humans. Or perhaps an insectivorous one.