It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter-gatherers was [impressive], and that 5m to 8m foragers who populated the world on the eve ofthe agrictural revolutiom were divided into thousands of separate tribes with thousands of different languages and cultures.

This, after all, was one of the main legacies of the cognitive revolution.

Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic makeup, who lived under similar ecological conditions, were able to crrate very different, imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.

For example, there is every reaosn to belueve that a forager band that lived 30,000 years ago in the spot where Oxford University now stands would have spoke  a different language from one living where Cambridge is now situated. One band might've been beligerent and the other peaceful. Perhaps the Cambridge band was communal while the one at Oxford was based on nuclear families. The Canterbridgians might have spent long hours carving wooden statues of their guardian spirits, where as the Oxonians may have worshipped through dance. The former perhaps believed in reincarnation while the latter thought this was nonsense. In one society homosexual relationships may have been accepted, while in the other they were taboo.

In other words, while anthropological observations of modern foragers can help us understand some of the possibilities available to ancient foragers, the ancient horizon of possibilities is much broader and most of it is hidden from view.

The heated debates about homosapiens natural way of life missed the point. Ever since the cognitive revolution, there hasnt been a single, natural way of life for sapiens. There are only cultural choices from a bewildering palette of possibilities.