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our genes tell a different story. Pluck any two people at random, even from a relatively large population like that of southern Europe, and sequence their DNA, and you will find that their genes differ less than the genes of two chimpanzees from central Africa.
    Bushmen, bones, and “chimpiness”
    The next big step in human evolution after the great expansion from Africa was the beginning of agriculture, which facilitated larger populations and the eventual establishment of towns, social classes, and other modern accoutrements. But the time before that transition, from perhaps 60,000 to 10,000 years ago, when humans were living as hunters and foragers, is what inspires our paleofantasies. This is the time that some evolutionary psychologists call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, or EEA, when humans became what we are today. 19 In Chapter 2 I will examine the idea of such an environment, and how it may or may not be reflected in our modern behavior. Now I want to consider a more basic question: What do we know about what human life was like during this period, and how do we know it?
    Scientists have traditionally relied on three sources of information about early humans: (1) the fossils of those people and their associated artifacts, like tools and paintings; (2) the lives of modern-day hunter-gatherers—for example, the Kalahari bushmen, also called San—living what is thought to be a lifestyle closer to that of our ancestors; and (3) modern apes, particularly chimpanzees and their close relatives the bonobos, with which we share a common ancestor more recently than any other living animals. In recent years the scientist’s kit has been expanded to include a new and potentially extremely powerful tool: the examination of our own genes, which bear the marks of past natural selection in ways we are only starting to appreciate. Each of these sources has advantages and drawbacks, and each feeds into our paleofantasies.
    First let’s look at the lives of what we now call modern hunter-gatherer or forager societies, or what used to be referred to as savages. Living in exotic and nearly inaccessible corners of the world, the Kalahari bushmen, the Hadza nomads of Tanzania, or the Aché of South America have sometimes been seen as a window into life before civilization. Early anthropologists classified human societies around the world according to their supposed evolutionary advancement, with hunter-gatherers in a state of arrested evolutionary development. Therefore, the reasoning went, studying those peoples would allow us to understand life before the advent of agriculture.
    This classification, in addition to being objectionable from a sociopolitical viewpoint, is incorrect; all human groups have been evolving for the same period of time. But even after the idea that native South American Indians or other such human societies were in an earlier, and somehow more innocent or pure, state of nature was rejected, the notion that we can use them as models of what life was like for much of humanity’s past has lingered.
    If these people are hunter-gatherers and we know our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, why can’t we look at these contemporary societies and draw inferences about our earlier way of life? The answer is that we can, but to a much more limited extent than many people would like. First, contemporary hunter-gatherers are variable in what they eat, how they divide labor between men and women, the way they raise their children, and a whole host of other features of daily life. Were our ancestors more like the Aché of tropical South America, who hunt small game but also eat a variety of plant foods; or the Inuit of the Arctic, who rely on large animals like seals for much of their food? They were probably like both, at different times and in different places, but it is impossible to tell at this stage which lifestyle was more common or which features were truly universal.
    What’s more, anthropologists