https://archive.org/stream/TheStoryOfCivilizationcomplete/Durant_Will_-_The_story_of_civilization_1#page/n101/mode/2up/search/one+life
""Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast." The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day. The natives of Austrailia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always "either a feast or a famine." There is a mute wisdom in this improvidence, as in many "savage" ways. The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the "thoughtless" native disappears. [...] "Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." Not to think unless we have to -- there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.
Nevertheless, there were difficulties in this care-lessness, and those organisms that outgrew it came to possess a serious advantage in the struggle for survival. The dog buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for the rainy -- these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they, or other subtle creatures like them, who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.
With what skill those ancestors ferreted out, from land and sea, the food that was the basis for their simple societies!"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
"Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death. For hunting was not merely a quest for food, it was a war of security and mastery, a war beside which all the wars of recorded history are but a little noise. [...] Hunting and fishing were not stages in economic development, they were modes of activity destined to survive into the highest forms of civilized society. Once the center of life, they are still its hidden foundations behind our literature and philosophy, our ritual and art, stand the stout killers of Packingtown. We do our hunting by proxy, not having the stomach for honest killing in the fields[.][...] In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the facade; in the rear are the shambles."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
"To live by hunting was not original; if man had confined himself to that he would have been just another carnivore. He began to be human when out of the uncertain hunt he developed the greater security and continuity of the pastoral life. For this involved advantages of high importance: the domestication of animals, the breeding of cattle, and the use of milk. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
"[...]The simplest known culture of the earth is with this stick or "digger" [used to dig the holes into which seed are planted]. In Madagascar fifty years ago [that is, in 1885,] the traveler could still see women arm with pointed sticks, standing in a row like soldiers, and then, at a signl, digging their sticks into the ground, turning over the soil, throwing in the seed, stamping the earth flat, and passing on to another furrow.[...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
"[...] With the domestication of animals and the forging of metals a heavier implement [of tillage] could be used; the hoe was enlarged into a plough, and the deeper turning of the soil revealed a fertility of the earth that changed the whole career of man. Wild plants were domesticated, new varieties were developed, old varieties were improved."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
"Finally nature taught man the art of provision, the virtue of prudence, and the concept of time. (Footnote: Note the ultimate identity of the words provision, providence, and prudence.) Watching woodpeckers storing acorns in the trees, and the bees storing honey in hives, man conceived -- perhaps after millenniums of improvident savagery -- the notion of laying up food for the future. He found ways of preserving meat by smoking it, salting it, and freezing it; better still, he built granaries secure from rain and damp, vermin and thieves, and gathered food into them for the leaner months of the year. Slowly it better apparent that agriculture could provide a better and steadier food supply than hunting. With that realization man took one of the three steps that led from the beast to civilization -- speech, agriculture, and writing. "
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
"To all the varied articles of diet that we have enumerated, man added the greatest delicacy of all -- his fellowman. Cannibalism was at one time practically universal; it has been found in nearly all primitive tribes, and among such later peoples as the Irish, the Iberians, the Picts, and the eleventh-century Danes. Among many tribes human flesh was a staple of trade, and funerals were unknown. In the Upper Congo living men, women, and children were bought and sold frankly as articles of food; on the island of New Britain human meat was sold in shops as butcher's meat is sold among ourselves; and in some of the Solomon Islands human victims, preferably women, were fattened for a feast like pigs. The Fuegians ranked women above dogs because, they said, "dogs taste of otter." In Tahiti an old Polynesian chief explained his diet to Pierre Loti: "The white man, when well roasted, tastes like a ripe banana." The Fijians, however, complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted better.
What was the origin of this practice? There is no surety that the custom arose, as formerly supposed, out of a shortage of other food; if it did, the taste once formed survived the shortage, and became a passionate predilection. Everywhere among nature peoples blood is regarded as a delicacy -- never with horror; even primitive vegetarians take to it with gusto. Human blood is constantly drunk by tribes otherwise kindly and generous; sometimes as medicine, sometimes as a rite or covenant, often in the belief that it will add to the drinker the vital force of the victim. No shame was felt in preferring human flesh; primitive man seems to have recognized no distinction in morals between eating men and eating other animals. In Melanesia the chief who could treat his friends to a dish of roast man soared in social esteem. "When I have slain an enemy," said a Brazilian philosopher-cheif, "it is surely better to eat him and to let him waste. ...The worst is not to be eaten, but to die; if I am killed it is all the same whether my tribal enemy eats me or not. But I could not think of any game that would taste better than he would. ...You whites are really too dainty."
Doubtless the custom had certain social advantages. It anticipated Dean Swift's plan for the utilization of superfluous children, and it gave the old an opportunity to die usefully. There is a point of view from which funerals seem an unnecessary extravagance. To Montaigne it appeared more barbarous to torture a man to death under the cover of piety, as was the mode of his time, than to roast and eat him after he was dead. We must respect one another's delusions."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.2, Pt. I, 1935
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