Why It's Important to Know that ADHD has Deep Evolutionary & Ecological Roots
How challenging the ADHD norms didn't just threaten an idea; it threatened a hierarchy.
In the early 1990s, when I first started writing and speaking publicly about ADHD through the lens of Hunters and Farmers, the reaction from much of the academic world was swift and vicious. I wasn’t just disagreed with; I was ridiculed. Dismissed. Treated as a crank who didn’t understand “real science.” When TIME magazine put my ideas and my first book, ADHD: Hunter In A Farmer’s World, on the cover, the attacks intensified. Suddenly I wasn’t just wrong, I was dangerous.
No one embodied that backlash more than Russell Barkley, who seemed to make it his personal mission to publicly discredit me. I was accused of romanticizing ADHD, of misleading parents, of undermining serious medicine. The message from the academy was clear: deviation from the dominant deficit model would not be tolerated.
When The New York Times wrote about my theory 26 years ago, noting:
“In his book ‘Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception’ Thom Hartmann, a psychotherapist in Northfield, Vt., proposes an anthropological theory that the traits of the disorder were vital in early hunting societies. To survive, he says, those societies needed distractible, impulsive, quick thinking decision makers. The traits became a mixed blessing only when societies turned agrarian, Mr. Hartmann argues.”
Barkley suggested to the Times that I was absolutely, totally, irredeemably wrong:
“Dr. Barkley, the author of 14 books on the disorder, said: ‘This trend of making A.D.D. seem an advantage is highly detrimental. In hundreds of research studies, there is not one shred of evidence that confers anyone with A.D.D. with an increased ability in creativity, intelligence or motor skills. I categorically reject, among other myths, that people with A.D.D. are better, for example, at multitasking. I understand that this may be an effort to counter a history of low self-esteem among people trying to cope with the effects of A.D.D., but this sort of folk lore is a dangerous thing.’”
But I persisted, not because I had an ideological axe to grind, but because I knew in my gut that the story I was telling matched my own lived reality far better than the one I was being told to shut up and accept.
I’d seen it in myself and my kids. I’d seen it in entrepreneurs, artists, explorers, emergency responders, and people who thrived in chaos but withered in classrooms. The Farmer world was insisting that only one kind of mind counted as normal, and it was obvious to me that this said more about the system than about the people it was labeling disordered.
What I couldn’t prove at the time, at least not to the academy’s satisfaction, was that this wasn’t just metaphor. That it wasn’t just social commentary. That it had deep evolutionary and ecological roots.
Now, three decades later, the academy itself is finally catching up.
A research project out of the University of Cambridge, titled “Attention Profiles in Hunter-Gatherer Societies,” does something that would have been unthinkable when I first advanced these ideas. Instead of assuming that attention traits like impulsivity, hyperactivity, and distractibility are universal deficits, the researchers ask a radically different question: what if those traits only look like deficits in Farmer societies?
The project’s own summary puts it plainly, and powerfully:
“Attention and executive control including traits such as inhibition, impulsivity, and hyperactivity are studied in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) societies, where sustained focus and impulse control are highly valued. A deficit in these domains might lead to a diagnosis of a mental disorder such as ADHD. However, in non-WEIRD populations, such traits may have distinct roles or adaptive significance, particularly in environments where exploration, adaptability, and risk-taking behaviours are critical for foraging and survival.”
Read that again. Slowly.
This is not some fringe blog post or pop-psych speculation. This is the academy, in its own careful language, acknowledging the core of what I was attacked for saying in the 1990s. That the behaviors we pathologize in modern industrial societies may be mismatches, not malfunctions. That a Hunter mind dropped into a Farmer world will look broken, even though it may be exquisitely adapted for a different ecological niche.
What’s especially striking is that this research doesn’t just validate the Hunter versus Farmer frame. It expands it.
It suggests that attention itself is not a single universal faculty that some people have “more” or “less” of, but a flexible set of strategies tuned to environmental demands. Sustained focus is valuable if you’re plowing a field or filling out paperwork. Rapid shifting, scanning, and novelty-seeking are valuable if you’re foraging, tracking, or navigating uncertainty.
When I first wrote ADHD: Hunter In A Farmer’s World, I was arguing against a culture that insisted on measuring every mind by Farmer metrics. I was saying, essentially, that we had built schools, workplaces, and institutions optimized for agricultural and industrial efficiency, and then acted surprised when people with Hunter cognition struggled inside them.
What the Cambridge research makes clear is that this isn’t just a cultural critique. It’s an evolutionary one. The Farmer world is historically recent. For most of human existence, adaptability, exploration, and risk-taking weren’t liabilities. They were survival traits. And even today, in moments of rapid change or crisis, those traits often reassert their value.
Looking back, the attacks from the academy make more sense now. Paradigms defend themselves. Once a system defines certain behaviors as disordered, it builds entire professions, funding streams, and identities around that definition. Not to mention billions in drug and therapy sales. Challenging it doesn’t just threaten an idea; it threatens a hierarchy.
But science, at its best, eventually circles back to reality.
I don’t take any pleasure in having been right while being pilloried. What matters is that parents, teachers, clinicians, and policymakers are finally being given permission to ask better questions. Not “How do we fix these kids?” but “What kind of world are we asking them to live in?” Not “How do we suppress this behavior?” but “Where might this behavior actually be useful?”
The most gratifying part is realizing that the Hunter/Farmer frame is even bigger and more explanatory than I imagined thirty years ago: it’s not just about ADHD. It’s about how societies choose which minds to value. It’s about what happens when a civilization optimized for stability collides with a reality defined by rapid change.
The irony is that the very traits the Farmer world has tried hardest to stamp out may be the ones we need the most right now. And after decades of being told I was wrong, it’s quietly reassuring to see the academy finally say, in its own words, that us Hunters were never broken to begin with.
We were just living in the wrong world.
Thank you for your insights. My husband, Dale Hammerschmidt, was one of the members of your early internet CompuServe community that discussed and promoted the ideas that became the neurodiversity movement. Our two children grew up in an accepting environment thanks to the ideas that came out of those discussions. My bookshelf attests to that influence.
I too, saw this in the late 90's, teaching third grade when all the deficit labels were being flung about: ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome, and autism, stuck on kids seen as "troubled learners." And, what a price these individuals paid then and since, this negative singling out destroying any positive sense of self.
Coming across your descriptions as hunters and farmers at that time, definitely fit into the reality I saw in the ADHD kids, so thank you, Thom. I too saw their necessity to think and act outside the box, having the energy to do that, and needing a physical outlet of that energy to be able be in a classroom. One of my very smart and kind students, whose high energy tendencies had created stress for prior teachers, and thus himself and family, needed to stand up behind his chair during heightened times requiring listen and absorbing. This enabled him to focus his attention on the lesson at hand, his energy given an outlet.
ADHD has these ear marks of purposeful differences, of which Thom speaks, these gifted, necessary differences within our society. Additionally, I found all on the "autism spectrum" to have
the needed differences to see life in a connective way, with others and nature, they seeing deeper and larger paradigms and patterns in life, perceiving aspects of reality that fit life like pieces in a beautiful puzzle.
Since Descartes (I think, therefore I am) and Bacon, in the mid-1800's, the west and much of the world have been on a linear fishing line, pulled out of our broader connective view of life, into seeing only what linear thought sees of it. Thought, now Intensely heightened by tech, uses numbers and letters, delineating differences, very helpful for shaping some good ideas, but focused on primarily, unable to put the full puzzle of life together; that calling for our intuition, gut inspirations, and deeper knowings of what joins us together.
The structures created by our linear thinking, are now more rigid than ever as they divide us and are about to collapse. It's time to embrace our modes of connective perception, that of deep heart and right brain functioning, for our over-focus on the differentiating left brain, leaves us Deficit of our inner knowings, our receptive, connective abilities of intuitions, hands-on activities, our individual passions, and more, all this the balanced use of what we were given: two brain hemispheres, along with the heart's knowledge, to create: a humane and beautiful world.
A re-definition of ADD, applying to all on the autism spectrum is "Attention Differently Directed."