[1] In the southeastern Pacific Ocean, on the piece of land known as Easter Island (now a territory of Chile), stand several hundred massive stone monoliths. These carvings, called “moai,” are recognizable by their oversized heads, heavy brows, long noses, elongated ears, and protruding lips. While they average four meters in height and 12.5 tonnes, the largest is almost 10 meters tall, and the heaviest weighs 86 tons. The upright sculptures are scattered around Easter Island, many installed on platforms called “ahu” along the coast, while others are more inland, and several stand near the main volcanic quarry of Rano Raraku. The Rapa Nui people of the island built a total of 887 of these impressive statues between the 12th and 16th centuries. They were, it is said, symbols of religious and political authority, embodiments of powerful chiefs or ancestors who faced inland toward the island’s villages, perhaps watching over their creators, keeping them safe.

[2] While the very creation of such monoliths – most out of volcanic ash with stone hand chisels – is an impressive feat, what is more remarkable (not to mention mysterious) is how they were transported to their resting places. In the past, most researchers associated the building and transportation of the moai with widespread deforestation on the island and the eventual collapse of the Rapa Nui civilization. This hypothesis is based, in part, on the fact that the pollen record suddenly disappeared at the same time as the Rapa Nui people stopped constructing the moai and transporting them with the help of wooden logs. How exactly would logs facilitate the movement of the statues? Most proponents of this method believe that the people created “rollers” by arranging parallel logs on which the prone statues were pulled or pushed. They would not have required an entire roadway of logs since logs from the back could be placed at the front, creating a moving platform of sorts. To make it easier to roll, and keep in position, the statue would be placed on two logs arranged in a V shape.

[3] One proponent of this idea of rolling the statues in a prone position is Jo Anne Van Tilburg, of UCLA. Van Tilburg created sophisticated computer models that took into account available materials, routes, rock, and manpower, even factoring in how much the workers would have to have eaten. Her models supported the idea that rolling prone statues was the most efficient method. As further evidence, Van Tilburg oversaw the movement of a moai replica by the method she had proposed. They were successful, but evidence that it was possible is not necessarily evidence that it actually happened. Van Tilburg was not the only one to have experimented with rolling the statues. In the 1980s, archaeologist Charles Love experimented with rolling the moai in an upright position, rather than prone, on two wooden runners. Indeed, a team of just 25 men was able to move the statue a distance of 150 feet in a mere two minutes. However, the route from the stone quarries where the statues were built to the coast where they were installed was often uneven, and Love’s experiments were hampered by the tendency of the statues to tip over. While Love’s ideas were dismissed by many, the idea of the statutes tipping over along the route was consistent with the many moai found on their sides or faces beside the island’s ancient roads. Local legend held that the statues “walked” to their destinations, which would seem to support an upright mode of transportation. In fact, rolling was not the only possible way of transporting the moai in an upright position.

[4] In the 1980s, Pavel Pavel and Thor Heyerdahl had experimented with swiveling the statues forward. With one rope tied around the head and another around the base, they were able to move a five-ton moai with only eight people, and a nine-ton statue with 16. However, they abandoned their efforts when their technique proved too damaging; as they shuffled the statues forward, the bases were chipped away. This confounding factor led most to believe that an upright, rope-assisted walking method was incorrect.

[5] But many now believe that they were, in fact, transported upright. In 2012, Carl Lipo of California State University Long Beach and Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii teamed up with archaeologist Sergio Rapu to refine the upright walking idea. They found that the statues that appeared to be abandoned in transit had bases with a curved front edge. This meant they would naturally topple forward and need to be modified once they reached their destinations. But that curved edge also meant they could easily be rocked forward using a small team of people and three ropes attached to the head. Indeed, their experiments demonstrated the feasibility of this method, and their theory has gained traction.

[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] “Original Affluent Society” have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins’s principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, hunter-gatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers’ hours. Refusing to maximize, many were “more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .

Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . . .

But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data—the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.

With its title’s nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s famously skeptical portrait of America’s postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, “The Original Affluent Society” brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers’ lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow “the Zen road to affluence”: not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by “progress,” this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . .

Viewed in today’s context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as “left behind” by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins’s effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.

RESIDENTS of Lozère, a hilly department in southern France, recite complaints familiar to many rural corners of Europe. In remote hamlets and villages, with names such as Le Bacon and Le Bacon Vieux, mayors grumble about a lack of local schools, jobs, or phone and internet connections. Farmers of grazing animals add another concern: the return of wolves. Eradicated from France last century, the predators are gradually creeping back to more forests and hillsides. “The wolf must be taken in hand,” said an aspiring parliamentarian, Francis Palombi, when pressed by voters in an election campaign early this summer. Tourists enjoy visiting a wolf park in Lozère, but farmers fret over their livestock and their livelihoods...

As early as the ninth century, the royal office of the Luparii—wolf-catchers—was created in France to tackle the predators. Those official hunters (and others) completed their job in the 1930s, when the last wolf disappeared from the mainland. Active hunting and improved technology such as rifles in the 19th century, plus the use of poison such as strychnine later on, caused the population collapse. But in the early 1990s the animals reappeared. They crossed the Alps from Italy, upsetting sheep farmers on the French side of the border. Wolves have since spread to areas such as Lozère, delighting environmentalists, who see the predators’ presence as a sign of wider ecological health. Farmers, who say the wolves cause the deaths of thousands of sheep and other grazing animals, are less cheerful. They grumble that green activists and politically correct urban types have allowed the return of an old enemy.

Various factors explain the changes of the past few decades. Rural depopulation is part of the story. In Lozère, for example, farming and a once-flourishing mining industry supported a population of over 140,000 residents in the mid-19th century. Today the department has fewer than 80,000 people, many in its towns. As humans withdraw, forests are expanding. In France, between 1990 and 2015, forest cover increased by an average of 102,000 hectares each year, as more fields were given over to trees. Now, nearly one-third of mainland France is covered by woodland of some sort. The decline of hunting as a sport also means more forests fall quiet. In the mid-to-late 20th century over 2m hunters regularly spent winter weekends tramping in woodland, seeking boars, birds and other prey. Today the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs, the national body, claims 1.1m people hold hunting licences, though the number of active hunters is probably lower. The mostly protected status of the wolf in Europe —hunting them is now forbidden, other than when occasional culls are sanctioned by the state —plus the efforts of NGOs to track and count the animals, also contribute to the recovery of wolf populations.

As the lupine population of Europe spreads westwards, with occasional reports of wolves seen closer to urban areas, expect to hear of more clashes between farmers and those who celebrate the predators’ return. Farmers’ losses are real, but are not the only economic story. Tourist venues, such as parks where wolves are kept and the animals’ spread is discussed, also generate income and jobs in rural areas.

Many human phenomena and characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things – are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people. . . .

[T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea . . . cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] . . . They are instead due entirely to the different [government] policies . . . At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . . Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding . . . [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all nonnative (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.

Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don’t react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing “cultural determinism,” “historical determinism,” or “individual determinism,” and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing “geographic determinism” . . .

Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today.

Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.

A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship . . . Most historians and economists don’t acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.