Are ADHD Characteristics Leftover Hunter Genes?

So, let’s look at these characteristics and see if they give us any clues as to what ADHD is and where it came from.

Image by alper omer esin from Pixabay

The creatures that want to live a life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless, we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are ’specially well brought up shoot them for fun.
— Clarence Day, This Simian World, 1920

The National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown that the brains of people with ADHD have a different type of glucose metabolism, or at least a different rate of blood flow, from those without ADHD. This validates the neurological/physiological basis of ADHD, but doesn’t explain what it is, how it works, or where it came from. Similarly, researchers at the University of Chicago believe they’ve come close to isolating the gene responsible for ADHD, but they can’t say exactly how that gene affects the brain, or how or why it came to be part of our genetic makeup.

Theories abound positing neurotransmitter imbalances, frontal lobe abnormalities, blood-flow differences, and even the influence of excessive television viewing as a contributor to ADHD, but, at this moment, nobody knows for sure exactly what ADHD is or the mechanism by which it works.

At its core, ADD is generally acknowledged to have three components: distractibility, impulsivity, and risk-taking/restlessness. If you throw in hyperactivity, you have ADHD-Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder—which, until recently, was considered to be “true” ADD, but now is viewed as a separate condition. ADHD is the disorder that children were believed to grow out of sometime around adolescence, but it appears that most ADHD kids simply become adults with ADD, as the hyperactivity of their youth sometimes diminishes, or adults with ADHD into old age (like me!).

So, let’s look at these characteristics and see if they give us any clues as to what ADHD is and where it came from.

Distractability

Distractability is often mischaracterized as the inability of a child or adult to pay attention to a specific thing. Yet people with ADHD can pay attention, even for long periods of time (it’s called “hyperfocusing”), but only to something that excites or interests them. It’s a cliche—but true—that “there is no ADHD in front of a good video game.”

ADHD experts often noted it’s not that ADHDers can’t pay attention to anything, it’s that they pay attention to everything.

A better way to characterize the distractability of ADHD is to describe it as scanning. In a classroom, the child with ADHD is the one who notices the janitor mowing the lawn outside the window, when he should be focusing on the teacher’s lecture on long division. Likewise, the bug crawling across the ceiling, or the class bully preparing to throw a spitball, are infinitely more fascinating than the teacher’s analysis of Columbus’ place in history.

While this constant scanning of the environment is a liability in a classroom setting, it may have been a survival skill for our prehistoric ancestors.

A primitive hunter who didn’t find that he easily and normally fell into a mental state of constant scanning would be at a huge disadvantage. That flash of motion on the periphery of his vision might be either the rabbit that he needed for lunch, or the tiger or bear hoping to make lunch of him. If he were to focus too heavily on the trail, for example, and therefore miss the other details of his environment, he would either starve or be eaten.

On the other hand, when the agricultural revolution began 12,000 years ago, this scanning turned into a liability for those people whose societies changed from hunting to farming. If the day came when the moon was right, the soil was the perfect moisture, and the crops due to be planted, a farmer couldn’t waste his day wandering off into the forest to check out something unusual he’d noticed. He must keep his attention focused on the task at hand, and not be distracted from it.

Impulsivity

The characteristic of impulsivity has two core manifestations among modern people with ADHD. The first is impulsive behavior: the proverbial acting-without-thinking-things-through. Often this takes the form of interrupting others or blurting things out in conversation. Other times it’s reflected in snap judgments or quick decisions.

A prehistoric hunter would describe impulsivity as an asset because it provided him with the ability to act on instant decisions, as well as the willingness to explore new and untested areas. If he were chasing a rabbit through the forest with his spear, and a deer ran by, he wouldn’t have time to stop and calculate a risk/benefit analysis. He must make an instant decision about which animal to pursue, then act on that decision without a second thought.

Thomas Edison eloquently described how his combined distractability and impulsiveness helped him in his “hunt” for world-transforming inventions. He said, “Look, I start here with the intention of going there” (drawing an imaginary line) “in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I have arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon and it leads me off in another direction, to something totally unexpected.”

The second aspect of impulsivity is impatience. For a primitive farmer, however, impatience and impulsivity would be a disaster. If he were to go out into the field and dig up the seeds every day to see if they were growing, the crops would die. (The contemporary manifestation of this is the person who can’t leave the oven door shut, but has to keep opening it to check how the food’s doing, to the detriment of many a souffle.)

A very patient approach, all the way down to the process of picking bugs off plants for hours each day, day after day, would have to be hard-wired into the brain of a farmer. The word “boring” couldn’t be in his vocabulary. His brain would have to be built in such a way that it tolerated, or even enjoyed, sticking with something until it was finished.

Restlessness

Risk-taking, or, as described in their book, Driven to Distraction, by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey, “a restive search for high stimulation,” is perhaps the most destructive of the behaviors associated with ADHD in contemporary society. It probably accounts for the high percentage of people with ADHD among the prison populations, and plays a role in a wide variety of social problems, from the risky driving of a teenager to the infidelity or job-hopping of an adult.

Yet for a primitive hunter, risk and high-stimulation were a necessary part of daily life. If hunters were risk-or adrenaline-averse, they’d never go into the wilds to hunt. For a hunter, the idea of daily risking one’s life would have to feel “normal.” In fact, the urge to experience risk, the desire for that adrenaline high, would be necessary among the members of a hunting society, because it would propel their members out into the forest or jungle in search of stimulation and dinner.

If a farmer were a risk-taker, however, the results could lead to starvation. Because decisions made by farmers have such long-ranging consequences, their brains must be wired to avoid risks and to carefully determine the most risk-free way of doing anything. If a farmer were to decide to take a chance and plant a new and different crop—ragweed, for example, instead of the wheat that grew so well the previous year—it could lead to tragic dietary problems or even starvation for the tribe or family.

That genetic predispositions to behavior can be leftover survival strategies from prehistoric times is a theme most recently echoed in a recent Time magazine cover story on the brain. It pointed out that the craving for fat among some people in parts of the world that experience periodic famine would ensure the survival of those who were able to store large quantities of this nutrient under their skin. “But the same tendencies cause mass heart failure when expressed in a fast-food world,” the authors point out.

Even the genetic inclination to alcoholism may have positive prehistoric roots, according to evolutionists Randolph Nesse and George Williams in their book Why We Get Sick. The persistence of an alcoholic in the face of social, familial, and biological resistance and disaster, they say, reflects an evolutionary tenacity to go after neurochemical rewards despite obstacles. This tenacity may in some way be responsible for the continued growth, survival, and evolution of our species.

So the agricultural revolution highlighted two very different types of human societies: farmers and hunter/gatherers. They lived different lives, in different places.

Those persons in farming societies with the ADHD gene were probably culled out of the gene pool by natural selection, or they became warriors for their society, now hunting other humans as various tribes came into conflict. In some societies, evolving into the countries of Japan and India, this was even institutionalized into a caste system. History is replete with anecdotes about the unique personalities of the warrior castes such as the Kshatriya in India and the Samurai in Japan.

Where Have All the Hunters Gone?

If we accept for a moment the possibility that the gene that causes ADHD was useful in another time and place but has become a liability in our modern, agriculture-derived industrial society, then the question arises: why isn’t there more of it?

How did we reach a point in human evolution where the farmers so massively outnumber the hunters? If the “hunting gene” was useful for the survival of people, why have hunting societies largely died out around the world? Why is ADHD only seen among 3 to 20 percent of the population (depending on how you measure it and whose numbers you use), instead of 50 percent or some other number?

Recent research from several sources shows how hunting societies are always wiped out by farming societies over time. Fewer than 10 percent of hunting society members will normally survive when their culture collides with an agricultural society. And it has nothing to do with the hunter’s “attention deficits,” or with any inherent superiority of the farmers.

In one study reported in Discover magazine, the authors traced the root languages of the peoples living across central Africa. They found that at one time the area was dominated by hunter-gatherers: the Khoisans and the Pygmies. But over a period of several thousand years, virtually all of the Khoisans and Pygmies (the “Hottentots” and the “Bushmen” as they’ve been referred to in Western literature) were wiped out and replaced by Bantu-speaking farmers. Two entire groups of people were destroyed, rendering them nearly extinct, while the Bantu-speaking farmers flooded across the continent, dominating central Africa.

The reasons for this startling transformation are several.

First, agriculture is more efficient at generating calories than hunting. Because the same amount of land can support up to ten times more people when farming rather than hunting/gathering, farming societies generally have roughly ten times the population density of hunting societies. In war, numbers are always an advantage, particularly in these ratios. Few armies in history have survived an onslaught by another army ten times larger.

Second, diseases such as chicken pox, influenza, and measles, which have virtually wiped out vulnerable populations (such as native North and South Americans who died by the millions when exposed to the diseases of the invading Europeans), began as diseases of domesticated animals. The farmers who were regularly exposed to such diseases developed relative immunities. While they would become ill, these germs usually wouldn’t kill them.

Those with no prior exposure and thus no immunity, however, would often die. So when farmers encountered hunters, they were killed off just by exposure to the Farmer’s diseases.

And finally, agriculture provides physical stability to a culture. The tribe stays in one spot while their population grows. This provides them with time to specialize in individual jobs: some people become tool-and weapon-makers, others build devices which can be used in war, and others create governments, armies, and kingdoms. This gives farmers a huge technological advantage over hunting societies, which are generally more focused on day- to-day survival issues.

So now we have an answer to the question: “Where have all the hunters gone?”

Most were killed off, from Europe to Asia, from Africa to the Americas. Those who survived were brought into farming cultures either through assimilation, kidnapping, or cultural change, and provide the genetic material that appears in that small percentage of people with ADHD.

Further evidence of the anthropological basis of ADHD is seen among the modern survivors of ancient hunting societies.

Indigenous Hunters Today

Cultural anthropologist Jay Fikes, Ph.D., points out that members of traditional Native American hunting tribes behave, as a norm, differently from those who have traditionally been farmers.

The farmers, such as the Hopi and other Pueblo Indian tribes, are relatively sedate and risk-averse, he says, whereas the hunters, such as the Navajo, are “constantly scanning their environment and more immediately sensitive to nuances. They’re also the ultimate risk-takers. They and the Apaches were great raiders and warriors.”

A physician who recently read my first book, and concluded that he saw proof of the Hunter/Farmer concept in his work with some of the Native Americans in Southwest Arizona, dropped me the following unsolicited note over the Internet:

“Many of these descendants of the Athabaskan Indians of Western Canada have never chosen to adapt to farming. They had no written language until an Anglo minister, fairly recently, wrote down their language for the first time. They talk ‘heart to heart,’ and there is little ‘clutter’ between you and them when you are communicating. They hear and consider everything you say. They are scanning all the time, both visually and auditorially. Time has no special meaning unless it is absolutely necessary (that’s something we Anglos have imposed on them). They don’t use small talk, but get right to the point, and have a deep understanding of people and the spiritual. And their history shows that they have a love of risk-taking.”

Will Krynen, M.D., noted the same differences when he worked for the Canadian government as the physician for several native North American tribes, and during the years he worked for the Red Cross as a physician in Southeast Asia. After reading my first book, he wrote:

“I’ve worked among indigenous hunting societies in many parts of the world, from Asia to the Americas. Over and over again I see among their adults and children that constellation of behaviors we call ADHD. In those societies, however, these behaviors are highly adaptive and actually contribute to the societies’ success.

“Among the members of the tribes of northern Canada, such as the caribou hunters of the McKenzie Basin, these adaptive characteristics—constantly scanning their environment, quick decision-making (impulsiveness), and a willingness to take risks— contribute every year to the tribe’s survival.

“These same behaviors, however, often make it difficult for tribal children to succeed in western schools when we try to impose our western curriculum on them.”

But what sent humankind onto the radical social departure from hunting to farming? Few other animals, with the exception of highly organized insects such as ants, have developed a society that is based on anything that approaches agriculture.

In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski points out that 20,000 years ago every human on earth was a hunter and forager. The most advanced hunting societies had started following wild herd animals, as is still done by modern Laplanders. This had been the basis of human and pre-human society and lifestyle for several million years.

Until 1995, the earliest hard evidence of human activity (and hunting activity at that) came from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Africa, with fragments of stone tools and weapons that dated back 2.5 million years. More recently, University of Southern California anthropologist Craig Stanford is quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying that recent research he conducted in Africa indicates that early hominids may have been tribally hunting as early as 6 million years ago.

So for 6 million years we and our ancestors were hunters, and suddenly, in a tiny moment of time (10,000 years is to 6 million as less than 3 minutes is to a 24-hour day) the entire human race veered in a totally new direction.

The Agricultural Revolution

The reason for the change, according to Bronowski and many anthropologists, probably has to do with the end of the last ice age, which roughly corresponds to the beginning of the agricultural revolution. (Bronowski and most authorities place the agricultural revolution as occurring roughly 7,000 to 12,000 years ago.) At that time, mutated grasses appeared simultaneously on several continents, probably in response to the sudden and radical change in climate. These grasses were the first high-yield, edible ancestors of modern rice and wheat, and provided the humans who lived near where they appeared with an opportunity to nurture and grow these staple foods.

Those people with the Farmer-like patience to grow the crops evolved into the farming societies, and rid their ranks of the impulsive, sensation-seeking Hunters among them. Those persons who were not patient enough to wait for rice to grow maintained their hunting tribes, the last remnants of which we see today in a few remaining indigenous peoples on the earth. The Old Testament, for example, is in large part the story of a nomadic hunting tribe moving through the wrenching process, over several generations, of becoming a settled farming tribe.

Eastern Religious Views of ADHD

In India there also appears to be a very different view of ADHD than is conventional in the United States. During the monsoon season of 1993, the week of the Hyderabad earthquake, I took a 12-hour train ride halfway across the subcontinent to visit an obscure town near the Bay of Bengal. In the train compartment with me were two Indian businessmen and a physician; we had plenty of time to talk as the countryside flew by from sunrise to sunset.

Curious about how they viewed ADHD, I said, “Are you familiar with the personality type where people seem to crave stimulation but have a hard time staying with any one thing? They hop from career to career, and sometimes even from relationship to relationship, and never seem to settle down.”

“Ah, we know this type well,” one of the businessmen said, the other two nodding in agreement.

“What do you call it?” I asked.

“Very holy,” he said. “These are old souls, near the end of their karmic cycle.” Again the other three nodded agreement, perhaps a bit more vigorously in response to my startled look.

“Old souls?” I said, thinking that a very odd description for what we call a disorder.

“Yes,” the physician said, taking his turn in the conversation. “In our religion, we believe that the purpose of reincarnation is to eventually free oneself from worldly entanglement and desire. In each lifetime we experience certain lessons, until finally we are free of this earth and can merge into the oneness of what you would call God. When a soul is very close to the end of those thousands of incarnations, he must take a few lifetimes and do many, many things, to clean up the little threads left over from his previous lifetimes.”

“This is a man very close to becoming enlightened,” the second businessman added. “We have great respect for such individuals, although their lives may be difficult.”

The first businessmen raised a finger and interjected: “But it is the difficulties of such lives that purify the soul.” The other two nodded in solemn agreement.

“In America we consider this a psychiatric disorder,” I said.

All three looked startled, then laughed.

“In America, you consider our most holy men, our yogis and swamis, to be crazy people, too,” said the physician with a touch of sadness in his voice. “So it is with different cultures. We live in different worlds.”

In the Hunter/warrior societies of northern India and Europe, religious rituals were developed to teach focusing and concentration. These include saying the Rosary in the Roman Catholic tradition, with the beads serving to provide a form of biofeedback, constantly reminding the person not to allow their mind to wander. In Hinduism prayer beads called a Mala are often used in Mantra meditation, where a single sound (such as “Om”) is repeated over and over again.

That the Hunting societies, with their culturally-ingrained prevalence of ADHD-like behaviors and highly distractible people, would create concentrative religious rituals to teach them to focus makes perfect sense. Focusing is something which doesn’t come naturally to their people, so it’s evolved as a learned behavior in the culture.

In traditionally agricultural societies, however, the meditative techniques are quite different.

From Trungpa Rimpoche and Osel Tensig I learned Vipassana, or mindfulness, and practiced the technique for ten to fifteen hours a day at the Karmé Chöling retreat center in Vermont.

In this Tibetan Buddhist system, the goal is not to concentrate the mind on one point, but to empty the mind and be fully aware. It’s practiced with the eyes open; whenever a thought arises which may become the focus of concentration, we visualized it as a bubble we would mentally reach out and pop as we noted to ourselves that we were thinking. This released the thought and returned the mind to empty awareness.

The goal of this form of meditation is not focus, but its opposite. As Berkeley-based Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo wrote in his essay, On the Psychology of Meditation, Vipassana and Zen represent “the negative way” form of meditation, and come from the East. Mantra, rosary, mandala, and prayer represent the opposite, Western “concentrative or absorptive meditation.”

Thus, the agricultural societies of southern Asia, farmers for millennia with a highly focused society and people, naturally developed cultural rituals which train awareness and distractibility. These systems teach them to resist their natural impulse to concentrate their attention.

Shunryu Suzuki (1905-1971), one of Japan’s most famous Zen masters, founded the Zen Center in San Francisco, which I visited briefly in the late 1960s. In the prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a collection of his talks, he writes:

“In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means ‘beginner’s mind.’ The goal of [Zen] practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind....

That in the West we have missed this distinction between types of religious rituals and their significance when viewing context-or spectrum-disorders like ADHD is largely attributable to the influence of Sigmund Freud on modern psychological and philosophical thought.

He wrote forcefully against religion and its seductions, noting that “the derivation of religious needs [come] from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father.”

Carl Jung was the first psychologist of any stature to challenge Freud’s view and assert that meditative practice wasn’t itself an expression of neurosis, but perhaps even a potential treatment for illness. Erich Fromm later developed these ideas even more fully, but Fromm and Jung are still both largely outside the mainstream of contemporary psychotherapeutic thought.

A view ranging from world history to entrepreneurship to religion and culture amply shows the distinctions between Hunters and Farmers. And we see that the institutions of contemporary Western society, rooted as they are in the agricultural/industrial model, tend to make misfits of Hunters.

Solutions

Whether or not the Hunter/Farmer model as a way of viewing ADHD is ultimately demonstrated to be good science or not may be less than vital. For the moment, it provides us with a way to view this condition that leaves self-esteem intact. It accurately models and predicts how and why medications are helpful, and reframes our techniques for working with Hunter-type individuals in schools, the work place, and in relationships.

Like the (as yet unproved) electron-flow model for explaining electricity, the Hunter/Farmer paradigm allows us to get our hands around a phenomenon, wield it to our benefit, and empower the lives of people.

If ADHD is part of our genetic heritage, it cannot be seen as an excuse for a person’s failings. It’s merely an explanation of behavior, one that then provides the first steps toward overcoming those obstacles which, in the past, so often caused failure.

Nonetheless, we can reform our schools, in particular, to make them more Hunter-friendly. This would include having more active instructional methods, more hands-on work for children, shorter class times, smaller class sizes, and exercise between classes whenever possible.