humans are civilised and cultured, we are detached from the rest of nature. as i write this article on a MacBook Pro i am sat drinking a glass of red wine from Rioja and listening to Bossa Nova. the room is clean and well lit.

outside though, a metre 20 metres from my house, is darkness. there is an ancient farm located behind the house and the fields are dark and there are wooded areas. i live on the side of a steep valley and if i look across it from an upstairs window i see a densely wooded mountain with barely a sign of human activity.

humans (homo sapiens) were hunter gatherers for the vast majority of their history, which is generally believed to be anywhere between from 100,000 to 200,000 years. all of this changed dramatically some 10,000 years ago when the vast majority of humans ceased being hunter gatherers and instead began to cultivate wild crops and domesticate animals. this is known as the agricultural revolution.

humans discovered that by manipulating and cultivating nature they had found more reliable and abundant means of nutrition. this cultivation however was very time and labour intensive. this required humans to give up on their nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle and instead to live in permanent settlements.

the explosion of calories led to an explosion in population and eventually the settlements became larger and more populous. with an ever increasing population ever more complex systems of governance were needed. all of this eventually leads us to the present day, and to myself in my clean, well lit room.

10,000 years is the mere blink of eye in the history of humankind. for the majority of the last 10,000 years as well, the results of the agricultural revolution were incredibly precarious. a crop failing posed the very real threat of death, or at the very least, a much harder existence (life was already pretty hard for the vast majority of people).

this precariousness and the fear that we might return to a more primitive and stark existence rests deep in our subconscious minds.

this leads me to the various similar figures from folklore, present in cultures the world over, that i shall refer to in this article with the term: wild man.

the leading characteristic of the figure is it’s wildness. the archetype of a wild man stretches back well into the mists of time, and back to the very early days of the agricultural revolution and the earliest permanent settlements.

the wild man is the antithesis of civilisation and of culture. the term ‘culture’ originally comes from the greek term ‘cultura animi’, a term used by Cicero meaning cultivation of the soul. this agricultural metaphor, used to describe the development of a philosophical soul, later broadened in its definition to include the arts and other human intellectual achievements regarded collectively. civilisation is cultivated in the same way the wild hills and dark forests were by the earliest men and women.

it has been posited that the archetype of the wild man is a collective memory of the few members of the population that remained as hunter gatherers after the majority had settled in fixed villages.

dorothy yamamoto in her book ‘the boundaries of the human in medieval english literature’ posits that the wildness that the wild man inhabits is not entirely beyond the reach of humans, and that the wild man instead lives in a threshold or liminal zone at the very edge of human activity. it is because the wild man is primitive, wild, and beast like, yet still recognisable to us, that the archetype is so deeply rooted in our collective memory. in the wild man we see ourselves and the very real possibility of our reverting to a similar state. with the wild man we see a beast that is a little too close to home.

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