Waterhole Economies: The Only Economies That Never Collapsed (Paperback or Softback)

"FASCINATING LESSONS FROM EARLY HUMANITY." - Kirkus Reviews

2026 NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS - FINALIST (HISTORY - NON FICTION)
2026 20TH ANNUAL NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS – FINALIST (NATURE, HISTORY-GENERAL)

Pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer economies were waterhole economies, and were the only human economies that never collapsed.

Ninety-seven percent of the time Homo sapiens lived on Earth, or until about 12,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food, living a type of subsistence lifestyle in economies that relied on hunting and fishing animals, foraging for wild vegetation and other nutrients, and converging around waterholes to slake their thirst. Their economies required a daily pursuit and collection of wild foods to make a living, collecting numerous species over whose reproduction and sustenance they had no control.

And yet, they were the only human economies that persisted without collapse for 97 percent of our species’ existence, and somehow managed to do so for those 290,000 years mostly without ravaging the planet’s habitats and ecosystems and destroying its biodiversity, nor threatening the pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies that relied upon them to make a living, with risks of a potential extinction the way twenty-first century economies are threatening humans today.

It bears asking (don’t you think?): Is there something our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer forebears knew about how to make a living and survive on this Earth, without destroying its ecosystems and biodiversity, that Neolithic Revolution through twenty-first century humans, notwithstanding all our accumulated knowledge, science, technologies, innovations, and supposed superiority — still don't get? Clearly, the answer must be yes. But what?

Join me in exploring what modern humans may have forgotten.

Author with a non-anthropocentric world-view informed by looking at the world, human history, civilizations and innovations, from an evolutionary perspective; whose views of life has been influenced by experience living and working in multiple countries and cultures including among remnant hunter-gatherer aboriginal Indians in the South American rain forest; and one whose extensive emerging technology experience, global technology R&D background and repeat software startup entrepreneurship enables him to view, ask and sometimes answer the deep questions as to whether our inventions, technologies and innovations are driving our survival or potential extinction as a species - questions sometimes missed when our human origins, journey, and potential destination are all too often explored mostly from an economic and human-only perspective.