ABSTRACT
Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that human nature was intrinsically good until it was sullied by civilization. The fashionable view at present is that human nature was bad from the very beginning and civilization has only given wider ranges of expression to its fundamental bestiality. Granted the animal origins of humankind and therefore of its instincts, social evolution brings about a progressive emergence of humanity from animality. The casualness with which Stone Age and modern hunters abandoned the carcasses of horses or buffaloes after the kill points to another unpleasant aspect of human behavior—wastefulness and carelessness. Humankind has been careful of its resources only in periods of scarcity. The European forests looked neat until recent times chiefly because dead wood was valuable fuel; villages remained essentially free of litter only as long as objects were transmitted from generation to generation and had to be used over and over again.
