William Golding’s classic novel, The Lord of the Flies, paints a grim portrait of human nature, illustrating how, without the constraint of civilization, we descend into savagery. Yet, in the end, the mere presence of an adult brings the chaos to an immediate end. So, ignoring for the moment how we can draw conclusions about human nature from a work of fiction, does this really tell us about human nature, or a world where we suddenly find our elders disappeared, and our traditions broken?

Three years ago, I wrote about that very problem among elephants. Elephants have some of the most intense social lives observed among any animal. They teach their young, and mourn and bury their dead. Elders teach young elephants how to behave, but poachers target big, old bulls for their tusks, and government culling programs eliminate elephant elders. “The result is the unraveling of elephant society. Without elders to show them how to live as elephants, the social bonds they rely on so intensely break. The whole species becomes poised on the brink of madness.” Young males, without guidance, seem to go insane from the trauma of their family’s murder, showing many of the same signs of PTSD as a human would. These traumatized elephants attack humans, even in whole villages; they rape and kill rhinoceroses.

In Calvin Luther Martin’s first book, Keepers of the Game, he describes the tragedy of early, post-contact North America. Eastern woodland Indians understood disease as a symptom of a larger imbalance—usually, a greedy hunter who took too much meat. The apocalyptic smallpox epidemics that burned across North America, killing as much as 90% of the population, must have seemed like the end of the world. The animals had betrayed their ancient pact with human communities, visiting untold death upon them, and for what? What crime had they committed? They felt like the end of the world had come (and in many ways, it had). Europeans have often painted the speed with which Indians handed over beaver pelts in those early years as a sign that no ecological “Noble Savage” ever existed. Luther looks beyond that, to the way the Indians themselves experienced the affair, to find a different story. The feeling of despair and betrayal led to a general malaise—and many who wanted revenge. They conspired with Europeans to destroy so much of the native beaver population precisely because they wanted to destroy the world. They knew their world had ended, but before they faced complete annihilation, they wanted revenge against the other-than-human persons who betrayed them. Faced with their own extinction, they wanted to see the whole world die with them.

Those native people lived on, though; and, so did the beaver. Despite a conflagration of mistrust and betrayal, both survived the calamity, albeit in much reduced numbers, in communities now torn by the experience. Throughout his other books, Luther traces the trauma of North America through such experiences. Eastern woodland Indians, like native people everywhere, revere their elders. They have spent many years becoming native to their place, and know it better than any others could. They have the most important knowledge of all: the practical knowledge of living in a particular place, its patterns and rhythms. They know the traditions better than any, not just because they have practiced them throughout a long lifetime, but because they have learned the patterns and rhythms of that place well enough to understand where those traditions come from. The guidance of such elders keeps a community from losing itself in an orgy of vengeance and hatred; but our story began with the smallpox epidemics that killed the majority of the people, including the elders.

The Agricultural Revolution brought with it the Neolithic Mortality Crisis. Jared Diamond describes it succinctly in his 1987 article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (PDF): “Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.” Life expectancy at birth dropped from 26 to 19. As Mark Nathan Cohen details in his book, Health & the Rise of Civilization, the Agricultural Revolution brought with it a sharp drop in life expectancy, followed by a recovery, but not entirely regaining the ground lost until the past century, and only then among the privileged classes of the First World. Cohen points out that even for Neolithic data, the skeletons of the wealthy seem to skew the result. As horrifying as the Neolithic data seems, the reality probably looked much worse.

Imagine such a world, where thirty years makes you an old man. In a shockingly short window of time—perhaps as little as a single generation—life expectancy dropped so completely that elders simply didn’t exist anymore. We lost our elders, and with them, our traditions. While discussing this data, Giuli asked an incredibly astute and important question: what if that explains the pathology of civilization? What if that trauma, the sudden cutting off from our elders and tradition, drove us insane—just like the elephants? What if it threw us into a post-apocalyptic world—just like the eastern woodland Indians? What if, for 10,000 years, we’ve struggled with how to handle that trauma, but never succeeded, because we never had any elders to guide us—like the lost, abandoned children from The Lord of the Flies?