Modern hunter-gatherers are imperfect windows onto ancestral human life

Evidence

For 99.99 percent of their existence, human beings lived in relatively small hunter-gatherer bands. The Hadza, therefore, are a rare, if elusive, glimpse into our past. Evolutionary anthropologists warn us that we should be careful about extrapolating from modern-day hunter-gatherer populations to the ancestral conditions before the Holocene period that marked the start of the agricultural revolution. For one thing, despite some important shared characteristics, there is no such thing as a cookie-cutter hunter-gatherer group; there is considerable variability in the cultural traits of modern-day hunter-gatherers, their social complexity, and group size. Also, it is possible that unlike pre-Holocene foragers, modern-day foragers occupy marginal habitats that were left unclaimed by agricultural societies, who nevertheless influenced them in myriad ways. Another worry is a survivor bias that could distort our observations: modern-day hunter-gatherer groups that have survived to this day may be highly unusual relative to most such groups that have existed, for reasons that are lost in the mists of history. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s analytical frame: the marginal-habitat and survivor-bias caveats set epistemic limits on using any modern foraging group as a proxy for ancestral human religiosity, which matters for testing ‘Big God’ emergence claims. — connects to: Most hunter-gatherer societies faced frequent or continuous warfare with high death tolls. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 564
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 395