Bold, Thievish and Not to Be Trusted

At a time of increasing concern with the problems of pollution and scarcity of raw materials, and growing disillusionment with the belief in infinite technological progress, there is for many a powerful attraction in the way of life of the rapidly disappearing hunter-gatherer societies and a nostalgia for the apparent equilibrium they have established with their environment Thus in his influential Stone Age Economics the eminent anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins argued most persuasively that the hunter-gatherers of palaeolithic times created the 'original affluent society', affluent not because of the abundance of their material possessions, but because of their satisfaction with very little; ‘they had the Zen solution to affluence'.