Christopher Boehm wrote:
[Abbr. in original: BP = before the present. CA = common ancestor. LPA = Late Pleistocene appropriate. MYA = million years ago]
When humans attack and kill their enemies, we may assume that the similarities in how we and chimpanzees express hostility toward out-groupers are homologous, because we share such a recent ancestor and over 98 percent of our DNA. To be precise, territoriality of chimpanzees and humans is very likely based on similar mechanisms of psychology, which in turn are prepared by large numbers of genes that are similar. The same would go for bonobos, even though their potential for similarly territorial behavior seems to be far less violent …
… With respect to homology, ancestral dominance and fear-based responses to dominance — along with an ancestral capacity to resentfully gang up against dominants — are just two of the many preadaptations we’ll be working with. They provided the basis for humans to develop an increasingly potent type of punitive social selection that affected earlier gene pools. At first, this worked mainly through gang attacks, but eventually it led to far more refined means of social control …
… [Our Common Ancestor] lived a social life that was heavily determined by individual tendencies to dominate and, ambivalently, submit … [If] we look closely at gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, we’ll see a noteworthy shared tendency for alpha males to appear at the tops of pecking orders, and, linked to the predictable and strong competition for high rank that goes with this, we’ll also see that generally subordinates do not relish being dominated. In fact, in all four of these living apes, rebellious subordinates can form counterdominant coalitions to actively reduce the power of alphas. Gorillas do this very rarely, bonobos and chimpanzees can do it routinely, and LPA human groups do this with a real vengeance …
… It’s obvious that we share the apes’ hierarchical tendencies and have a strong potential to develop alpha males. However, the proper humans for evolutionary analysis are the LPA hunter-gatherers … and their political arrangements are quite different — even though obviously they are based on the same innate political potential. These humans, along with many of the tribal agricultural people that followed them in time, were strongly and insistently egalitarian.
If the other three African great apes can partially neutralize alpha power by forming subordinate coalitions, human foragers have carried such counterdomination virtually to perfection—at least among the adult males. When I say that hunting bands are politically egalitarian, I mean people are so intolerant of alpha-type power moves that normally no individual dares to boastfully aggrandize his own status, let alone try to boss around another hunter or take over a carcass the group wants to treat as common property …
… Thus, in human politics primitive ancestral tendencies that favor both hierarchical behavior and counterdominant behavior can be expressed phenotypically either in the form of rampant totalitarianism or in the form of radical hunter-gatherer democracy — and anywhere in between. It all depends on how people feel about hierarchy, on how badly centralized command and control are needed, and on the degree to which subordinates’ control of those above them can become decisive …
[family, rules, consensus]
… [The Common Ancestor] had maternally based families, for in all four living species the mothers associate very closely with their offspring for up to half a dozen years, while siblings also are socially close. This means that a strong matricentric family pattern goes back to 8 MYA and that minimally this more limited form of familial organization has been present in the line leading to humans ever since the time of the CA. At some point, however, humans obviously added something important: we evolved a two-parent family unit, and even though there are no really solid archaeological cues as to when this occurred, we have only to look at ourselves today to know this did take place. At latest the human nuclear family would have arrived with cultural modernity, no later than 45,000 BP, simply because archaeologists agree so unanimously that we were entirely modern by then …
… I chose to discuss this maternally based family structure up front because even such rudimentary familial behaviors provided a very important head start for the evolution of a conscience. Humans are moral because we are genetically set up to be that way, and it’s of interest that today’s small children turn into increasingly moral beings in highly predictable stages. Sympathetic feelings for others in need of help arrive quite early in infants, as does a primitive sense of right and wrong. These developments are followed by a general sense of rules …
… These learning windows make up a hard-wired sequence, but the rules themselves are not nearly so explicitly prepared by our genes. Like infant or juvenile apes, young humans learn the social rules of their groups early in life largely from significant others they are with constantly — and the most significant other of all is going to be their mother. When people learn exactly how to be moral from their cultural environments, this starts with the family. But later in life group traditions can have a very strong or even a definitive role to play, and sometimes cultural tradition can make a given behavior perfectly acceptable in one culture but taboo in another …
… Thus, the specific rules we internalize from parents and peers are culturally maintained by local groups, rather than being firmly encoded in our genes. However, although many of these rules can vary widely across cultures, among LPA foragers many of the more socially important rules do appear to be universal. For instance, no hunter-gatherer community condones either killing another group member without proper cause, or theft or cheating within this primary group, and the same appears to be true of all humans in all walks of social and cultural life …
… [It] helped if there were already in place a good capacity to strategize about social behavior and to calculate how to act appropriately in social situations — especially when a behavior could get an individual in serious trouble with a dominant other, be this a single individual or, at times, a sizable coalition … Just like ourselves, chimpanzees and bonobos are quite adept at coping with the power of others, so the development of a rule-based moral capacity had a nice head start …
… [It’s] especially important to understand that the person [like the apes in lab experiments] can become the center of a hostile group’s attention if his or her actions seriously offend its moral sensibilities. The aforementioned capacity to take on the perspective of others not only underlies the ability of individuals in human communities to modify their behavior and follow the rules being imposed by the group, but it also allows people acting as groups to predict and insightfully cope with the behavior of “deviants” …
… When large-brained animals are evolved to live in hierarchical social groups, they are likely to exhibit a fairly sophisticated basis for assessing the motives of others, either in order to competitively dominate them or simply to survive and try to flourish in a less stressful subordinate role. Perspective taking also can involve reckoning what a group of others may do if an individual’s behavior makes her or his peers become so aggressive that they begin to act as an angry, aroused coalition. All of these skills are useful to the individual, and their strong persistence among all four of the African great apes today (technically humans are, whether we like it or not, an African ape) tells us that they have been providing individual fitness benefits for at least 8 million years …
… Following the Rules — Or Else:
At a bare minimum, humans and the three other ape species that originated in Africa also know intuitively what a “rule” is. This usually involves a stronger individual’s demanding a certain type of behavior or insisting on the absence of an unwanted behavior, and the expectation is backed up by a potentially hurtful authority. However, for a Bushman hunter-gatherer, living in some remote place out on the vast Kalahari Desert, the most salient authority of all will be the egalitarian local group as a whole. The band can be a stern authority, indeed, first because its social expectations are intensified by being moral, and second because such people are in the habit of using weapons to kill mammals the size of humans or larger. This means that an outraged group can become an aggressively hurtful group.
People like Bushmen or Pygmies gossip incessantly and are highly judgmental, and group opinion is something to be feared because moral outrage can lead to ostracism, expulsion from the group, or even execution. This is true of all hunter-gatherers. For instance, as we saw [earlier], if an overbearing individual were to kill one band member and then killed another, as a repeat killer and disliked dominator he’d be dealt with by this collective authority — whether he hunted and gathered out on the Australian semidesert or on an arctic tundra or anywhere else. And he’d be dealt with lethally.
Among modern humans … authority, be it “informal,” or formalized in statute, or religious, brings with it specific, well-understood rules. We can state such rules in terms as varied as “Thou shalt not steal” or “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” … Among hunter-gatherers, the supreme authority is the local group that camps together as a band, and Émile Durkheim has described beautifully the near-tyranny that such groups have over the individuals who are driven to conform.
Among chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, certain basics seem strikingly similar. Dominant individuals easily impose “rules” on their inferiors. For instance, a subordinate knows that if a small prime feeding site is encountered by a foraging party, the rule is Don’t make the first move, or else you’ll be aggressively threatened or physically attacked by a proprietary dominant. Such nonmoral rules have mainly to do with feeding priority or male access to females for mating, but sometimes they arise out of competition for political position, pure and simple. Indeed, in the wild male chimpanzees devote a great deal of energy to seeing who can rise higher in the male dominance hierarchy, and they bear scars to prove it. (Females are far less competitive.)
Compared to chimpanzees, bonobo males seem much less obsessive in competing with other males, but they, too, bear scars, probably mostly from the females who unite to go up against them and contest their authority, while in the wild bonobo females also compete for alpha status.
In all of these contests, the rules are both simple and important to individual fitness. The dominator, acting as an authority, insists on either an immediate tangible concession or a sign of deference or appeasement, and as long as this ensues, things will go smoothly. With humans, often it is “society,” rather than a single individual, that serves as the authority, but … the imposition of at least a few “rules” on individuals by sizable groups was already under way with the Common Ancestor and even more so with its successor, Ancestral Pan …
… In Hierarchy in the Forest, when I analyzed the pervasive pecking orders that can be factored into the Common Ancestral equation, it was clear that chimpanzees are so hierarchical that every male knows exactly whom he can back down and whom he must submit to; there’s even a specialized subordinate greeting that makes this clear. Among gorillas, huge silverbacks intimidate all the adults in their harem, while the females have their own pecking order. Bonobos’ social dominance hierarchies are complicated by the fact that males don’t form coalitions and pairs of females regularly gang up against otherwise dominant males and thereby often manage to control the best food. Human hierarchies can be more complicated still, but all of us live in groups with pronounced hierarchical tendencies, and living in such groups requires an understanding of rules …
… If we look to the 150 LPA hunter-gatherer bands that most closely resemble more recent prehistoric human societies, we’ve seen already that they’re highly egalitarian. Minimally, this means that all the active hunters (generally the adult males) insist on being seen as equal and that among themselves they tolerate no serious domination — be this in hogging vital food resources or in bossing others around. Based on assumptions coming out of behavioral ecology, I [make] the case that very likely such egalitarianism arose — or was greatly intensified — when our predecessors began to go after large game in a serious way.
We’ve already seen what happens with the Bushmen, who preemptively put down a self-aggrandizing citizen before he — it always seems to be a he — can get up a head of steam in the direction of building himself up and acting superior. With such people there’s still some possibility for upward social mobility in the sense that sometimes a wise individual may be accorded the status of temporary or permanent band leader. However, that person is expected to behave with humility, for the accepted leadership style permits nothing more assertive than carefully listening to everyone else’s opinion and then gently helping to implement a consensus — if this spontaneously forms. Such decisions may involve a band’s next move or the group’s taking action against a serious deviant, but such leaders by themselves cannot settle on an outcome; this is a decision for the entire group …
[the meat]
… It’s clear enough that meat is a prized food, for apes that are not given a share seldom leave the scene. They steadfastly bide their time hoping somehow to get some meat, and often enough these unsuccessful chimpanzee beggars become highly frustrated and prone to quarrel among themselves. In both bonobos and chimpanzees, the impression is one of gluttonously selfish possession, combined with rampant cronyism when it comes to limited sharing of this most precious of all foods. The overall sharing process seems to be shaped both by individual political power and by personal alliances.
Biologist Nicholas Blurton-Jones sees chimpanzees’ meat-sharing as a kind of “tolerated theft”. This means that it’s all about power, and the meat possessor isn’t really being generous at all. Rather, he or she realizes that the other hungry apes could fight to take away the carcass, so it’s best to share it with them — and thereby preempt their strike. However, in free-ranging chimpanzees I know of no record of a gang attack in which a stingy meat possessor was physically assaulted and dispossessed, even though often enough up to half or more of the apes present are being given no meat …
… Of course, even when ape mothers share with their infants, it’s difficult to demonstrate that sympathetic feelings are at work, and such interpretations are still more difficult with adults. But if we set aside the question of motives, it’s clear that Ancestral Pan’s rather limited sharing pattern — based on what bonobos do at their rather rare meat feasts as a least common denominator — provided an important preadaptation in terms of behavioral potential. Thus, when archaic humans finally decided to turn from hunting small game (and probably aggressively scavenging a large carcass once in a while) to actively hunting sizable ungulates as a major and regular part of their subsistence, they already had something rather significant to work with in the meat-sharing department — even though the sharing pattern would have been involved with dominant possession and the favoring of cronies and therefore would have been quite lopsided.
In The Hunting Apes, primatologist Craig Stanford takes the position that, although cooperative hunting was an important development in human evolution, sharing the meat was even more important. In today’s bands hunting and sharing are greatly elaborated by cultural practices and symbols, which means that in maintaining customary systems of meat-sharing, the political power moves tend to be far more subtle than with Ancestral Pan. In this context I think that even though some foragers habitually argue about whether ongoing meat distributions are by the rules and fair, or grouse about their shares afterward, underlying this cantankerousness are usually feelings of goodwill. These emotions help to enable the sociable process of equitably sharing a large carcass, for everyone will be sharing a food that is nutritionally useful to all — and is supremely delicious as well.
The Source:
Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame, New York Basic Books 2012 [pp. 94-99, 104-109, 138, 141]
Christopher Boehm primatologist, anthropologist and Professor of Biological Sciences, also author of Hierarchy in The Jungle (2001), died late last year.
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