Well that book is very explicitly written by a anarchist activist with the intend of making the concept relevant in modern politics again.

It is not a scientific book, and I must say I have some sympathies towards anarchy myself.

Problem is, those very primitive and unspecialized cultures weren’t advanced enough to invent writing, so most if not all of their culture is lost in time, forever.

People with a political agenda have time and time again tried to make them say thing we are mostly unsure.

I am more interested in living ethnology, especially the study on native cultures around the world.

Their societies obviously are not very specialized, individuals mostly segregated by sex, age and power.

An interesting point is their demography, if life was so great, a “saturating” fertility level should easily allow their population to double every generation.

And that was never seen.

Life witnesses, for example in very early colonial Brazil seem to point that those native cultures were far from being food limited (they had plenty of free time to increase harvest intensity), but they were waging constant extermination war with “neighboring” tribes.

In fact, land was plentiful, they had to travel extensively to meet those adversaries.

The goal was genocide of all the opposing men (and not land as said by the natives themselves), either directly or after a variable period of slavery followed by ritual torture, execution and often cannibalism. Women were taken as brides by the young winners (not much polygamy in what I read it seems).

This live experience bears much stronger witness about the quality of life in those happy times.

What saved those cultures was in fact that they were not specialized enough to create more advanced weapons…

IMO