Weak Ties & Families, supercharged by emotions, big brains, language, culture
J. H. Turner 2021 book on Biology and Sociology of human social evolution [Part 1]
Jonathan H. Turner wrote:
Chapter 2 Before Humans in Evolutionary Time
… [As] physical specimens, hominins were not particularly imposing when on the ground in open country. As a result, many open-country great apes probably became easy prey and went extinct
… Even more problematic for descendants of great apes was their lack of organizational structures. The only stable structure inherited from the LCA [last common ancestor] was a sense of community, which, as we will see, had some advantages when human societies began to grow. That said, communities too large and too spread out are not able to coordinate defense and food gathering in the open country … Thus, somehow, selection began to find a way to increase the organization of hominins into more stable and cohesive groups … As Homo erectus radiated out of Africa to Europe and Asia, it is likely that selection somehow pushed them to become more organized. Otherwise, they could not have easily adjusted to the diverse habitats in the many areas where they could survive … For hominins … natural selection did blindly hit upon some answers, generating some new traits and enhancing some existing ones that became part of humans’ evolved nature …
… Thus, to the extent that spoken language and culture are related to intelligence, which, in turn, is a consequence of brain size, it is clear that none of these were as important as might be thought in resolving the organizational problems of hominins. Clearly, something was happening with Australopithecines, but it was not just overall brain growth, which remained at 400–500 cc for several million years. The brain only grew dramatically, I would hypothesize, from 700,000 years ago to the emergence of Neanderthals and the first Homo sapiens around 450,000 to 300,000 years ago. Something caused this growth, and it was probably not the imperative to get better organized because group solidarities are not so much related to intelligence or even spoken language and culture as to something else that is often not adequately addressed: emotions. This increase in emotional capacities of hominins and then humans compared to other primates that increased social ties and patterns of group-level organization. But, as we will see [later], the early growth that occurred in the hominin brain was not in the neocortex as much as it was in the more ancient subcortical areas below and inside the neocortex. Indeed, the modest increase in the size of the brain during the evolution of Australopithecines to the first Homo may reflect subcortical rather than neocortical growth. It is this growth that provided the key to hominin survival and, as we will see, also to later growth in the neocortex and the capacity for speech and eventually culture …
PREADAPTATIONS AMONG HUMANS’ HOMININ ANCESTORS
Comparatively large subcortex and neocortex, allowing for the enhanced emotions necessary to enhance cognitive capacities and neocortical growth.
Hard-wired capacity for language comprehension and capacity to communicate at the level of a three-year old human child via the visual sense modality.
Protracted life history characteristics that involve for long periods of nurturance of infants revealing larger, immature brains at birth.
Mother-infant bonding, creating potential for formation of nuclear family.
Non-harem pattern of mating, allowing for choice of mating partners allowing evolution of nuclear family.
High levels of play among young, thereby increasing capacity to role take and adjust interpersonal responses to conspecifics.
Community orientation revolving around community a sonly stable unit of social organization, with capacity to mapping of community boundaries and its members, thus allowing for flexibility in meeting selection pressures for new forms of social structure.
Low levels of physical grooming, thus increasing reliance on interpersonal means of communication through role taking.
[MGH: There follows more detailed discussion of each preadaptation]
… Another preadaptation is tied to community organization (rather than group organization). Animals like monkeys orient only to groups, but great apes orient to a larger social and ecological world of the home range and keep track of who belongs and who does not belong. This orientation, when accompanied by bigger brains, language, and culture, would allow the scale of human societies to grow beyond the here and now of the group. Moreover, because community was the only biologically programmed structural form, beyond mother–young offspring attachments, in the LCAs to great apes and humans, it allowed for groups to form as needed through emotional attachments rather than by genetically installed group bioprogrammers. As a result, hominins and then humans could create diverse patterns of group organization in order to meet changing selection pressures without having to overcome hard-wired bioprogrammers for particular types of groups, which is much more typical in the mammalian universe …
The last preadaptation … is for low levels of grooming and reliance on cognitive mapping of community members. Because of their low levels of sociality, great apes do not groom very much—especially when compared to other primates. Rather, great apes cognitively map the boundaries of their community and remember who belongs to this community. Thus, social relations depend on cognitive skills and use interpersonal skills to form flexible but generally weak-tie relations with community members. Great apes are not genetically locked into particular patterns of grooming, which, in turn, allows them much greater flexibility in forming social relations that would be adaptive to changing habitats …
… At first it might seem counterintuitive to note that animals that reveal predominately weak social ties, that do not form stable groups, and that often walk around alone in their communities would be so facile in such interpersonal behaviors listed [above], including picking up interactions with others in a community after not seeing them for some time, engaging in emotion-arousal greeting rituals, engaging in emotional rituals of solidarity and celebration when larger numbers of fellow community members come together, reading each other’s eyes (as well as face and body countenance) for emotional cues, achieving empathy with others, seeing themselves as objects of evaluation by others in a situation, reckoning status of others vis-à-vis self, and assessing whether exchanges of resources with others are fair and just and, in general, being capable of engaging in highly nuanced and complex interpersonal behaviors.
Yet, with a moment of reflection, it is clear why great apes can execute these nuanced interpersonal behaviors: the very lack of bio-programmers for forming bonds, kinship, and stable groups. Great apes, unlike monkeys, do not naturally form strong ties, groups, and kin units; and thus, they must actively construct and reconstruct through interpersonal skills their social world. Being weak-tied, nongroup, and non-kin oriented does not mean that chimpanzees are not social or organized at all. It simply means that they have loose and flexible patterns of relationships that must be actively worked on rather than pushed on them by genetically driven biological programmers.
Indeed, unlike mammals with genetically controlled bioprogrammers guiding the formation of social relations, great ape sociality is far more difficult to bring off: every interaction is negotiated and revolves around the mutual exchange of information and emotions where self, others, and situation are salient; where memories of past interactions are invoked; where the status and number of others co-present are assessed; where the demography of who is co-present is taken into account; and where so many other contingencies are potentially introduced. If interaction among chimpanzees or other great apes sound like human interaction, it is; and in fact, what humans do in interactions is much the same as chimpanzees can do.
Most mammals and birds are driven by “instincts”, which are “in their nature”, whereas humans must construct the flow of interaction. They must also construct the social units—from groups and organizations to macrostructures—that organize their daily lives. This type of complex and ever-contingent production and reproduction of our social relations is in our human (really great ape) nature—dramatically intensified by spoken language and culture made possible by big brains. But undergirding all these … capacities is an even more fundamental capacity: the ability to monitor, control, read, understand, emphasize, and otherwise engage in emotional behaviors because in the end, it is emotions that make human sociocultural formations either hold together or break apart.
The list of interpersonal practices outlined will be discussed [later] within the interaction complex, while the first two preadaptations—emotional and language capacities—will be examined [later] within the emotions complex …
[Conclusion]
Thus, we can now begin to appreciate the extent to which human nature is ancient, because it is the inheritance of well over 20 million years of ape evolution. Yet, at the same time, what typifies great ape nature is how loose and flexible it is compared to most other animals. A relatively few powerful bioprogrammers drive ape social relations and social structures. These patterns of weak social ties and loose group formations within a larger community would eventually allow humans to create flexible social structures and patterns of social relations that could be adjusted and adapted to new habitats constantly generating ever-changing selection pressures. It is the human capacity to use a large repertoire of inter-personal skills (inherited from the LCAs of great apes and hominins) to form social bonds, to sustain relations, and to produce and reproduce group formations that makes human societies possible. In other words, human nature is not just a bunch of drives and bioprogrammers, as it is for many animals, including most mammals. Instead, human nature is greatly affected by emotions, language, and large brains able to form culture. This nature is sustained by a set of generalized interpersonal skills and emotional capacities that are actively used to achieve what bioprogrammers or “instincts” do for many other animals.
What makes human nature so complex and difficult to ascertain is the “supercharging” effect of much more complex and intense emotions, bigger brains, spoken language, and culture on aspects of humans’ biological nature inherited from the LCAs of the ancestors of great apes and humans. Moreover, the preadaptations and interpersonal propensities of humans that are programmed, to some degree, by our genome can be countervailed, if not subverted, by acts of human agency. Indeed, humans have often created societies that go against what is programmed into the genome inherited from the LCAs of the ancestors to humans and great apes. So, our goal is to unravel as best we can the biology of human nature, even as it is filtered by the biology of emotions, language, and culture. At times it will be difficult to disentangle what is biological and what is socially and culturally constructed, but as long as we remain attuned to what we inherited from the LCAs of great apes and humans, we can overcome the distorting effects of what humans can construct through acts of agency (culture and social structure) on what humans inherited from their LCAs and still carry in their genomes.
Chapter 3 Humans the Most Emotional Animals on Earth
… [A] person walking in the forest sensing a gnarly object that signals danger (say, a snake) may find his or her heart already pounding, experience sweating, and be in the process of jumping before this person recognizes the object to only be a fallen branch rather than a snake. Thus, the body systems that generate emotions have already been set into motion before a person is actually “cognitively aware” of what the object is. Such is the speed with which the emotional system in mammals operates, with the full meaning of the object being sensed lagging until the visual input is routed by the thalamus to the occipital lobe for full recognition. Because emotions such as fear are essential to survival (and defensive anger if cornered by danger), they can dominate individuals’ responses to their environment because they are activated so rapidly and at high levels of intensity …
[For] low-sociality and non-group-organizing animals, positive emotions were needed to compensate for … lack of strong bioprogrammers for social ties and stable groupings …[These] emotions were not discrete states as might be implied by assigning them a linguistic label … In reality, emotions flow from eyes, face, and body as sequences of gestures that communicate unfolding affecting states … thereby creating additional meanings as individuals read each other’s gestures during the course of interaction. Moreover, even if the emotions communicated are negative, they can signal internal states of one individual and often encourage sympathetic responses from others. So, negative emotions signaling distress can promote some solidarity with others when the latter are sympathetic, and out of such understanding of another’s distress, a more positive emotional bond could be formed. This exchange of more nuanced and complex sequences of affective states, both positive and negative, enables individuals to experience intersubjective states as empathy—a capacity that great apes already possess and thus could be selected. Being able to read sequences of affective gestures operates much like “emotional vocabulary” that increases intersubjectivity and solidarity. And, I would argue that this “vocabulary” began to evolve among hominins as they exchanged sequences of nuanced and layered affect during the course of interaction …
… The defining characteristic of hominins is their bipedalism, which can be seen as yet another preadaptation for an enhanced gestural language, because bipedalism freed up the hands for communication and allowed individuals to stand or sit face to face and to communicate more complex and nuanced emotions read though the visual sense modality. As gestures became organized into a true language capable of carrying complex meanings and emotions, selection began to push for not only a larger brain that would enhance the language of emotions and gestures, but moreover, selection began to work on Broca’s area and FOXP2, in particular (if necessary), to enhance the ability to download thinking into finely articulated speech capable of communicating both instrumentality and sentimentality via voice inflections, coupled with the face, eyes, and body gestures in order to reveal emotions in their most robust form. In turn, this enhanced capacity to communicate emotions would push selection on emotion centers further; and in turn, this enhanced emotionality would make growth of the neocortex ever more fitness enhancing …
… While it may seem, at first, that expanding the emotional capacities of hominins could not possibly be the key to the evolution of linguistic great apes using culture, it is important to remember that language and culture have to be built upon a neurological platform that would make growth of the neocortex fitness enhancing. Once this simple criterion is invoked, emotions become the key breakthrough, but only if the neurological capacity for language already existed in the 400 cc brains of early hominins …
Norms, values, beliefs, ideologies, and the many other symbol systems used by humans to regulate their social relations would not evolve; and moreover, they would not have any “teeth” or capacity for social control without the emotions attached to cultural codes. Emotions are what give cultural instructions their power, with positive emotions and sanctions arising from a person and others because of conformity to cultural dictates and with negative emotions and negative sanctions becoming evident when dictates are ignored or violated. The key emotions giving culture this power to control and regulate appear to be unique to humans …
… Once guilt and shame are in place, they encourage the further elaboration of cultural codes because they can now be “enforced” by powerful negative emotions and subsequent pain that individuals wish to avoid. External social control involving negative sanctions by others, which can often arouse counter-anger and thereby disrupt social relations, is increasingly complemented by self-sanctioning by individuals as they experience shame and guilt. It becomes possible to have social control without so much counter-anger arising from external negative sanctioning by others, thereby enabling groups to sustain their solidarity even as individuals engage in internal self-control …
Yet, somewhat ironically, as shame and guilt become powerful emotions of social control as part of human nature, the growth of the brain and rewiring of subcortical areas and their relation with the prefrontal cortex as well as the frontal lobe, where longer-term memories are stored, allow for the activation of what are viewed as defense mechanisms …
… I view repression as the master defense mechanism because it removes full awareness of the negative emotions and feelings about self, at least to a degree. The other defense mechanisms generally generate one of the negative emotions or, as is the case with sublimation, produce positive emotions that are experienced by a repressed person. Anger is the most likely emotion to be experienced, but fear/anxiety and sadness/depression can also emerge. The key is that the full impacts of shame and, in particular, guilt are mitigated. Thus, a large brain can also evolve to reduce the power of key emotions essential for social control that “protect” the person but may still disrupt social relations if anger, fear, and sadness become chronic as the only emotions experienced by a person and released during interaction with others.
In the simple hunting and gathering societies of early humans, repression was less needed because of the simplicity of social relations, but as societies have grown in complexity and, as a result, have elaborated cultural codes codified into moralities, expectations on individuals have increased and, when violated, will be negatively sanctioned by others or explicit agents of social control and … lead to the activation of one or more of the defense mechanisms …
[Conclusion]
The two preadaptations examined in this chapter—neurological wiring for (1) emotions and (2) language—allowed new elements of humans’ biological nature to evolve. Indeed, once emotions increased fitness (by increasing social bonds and group solidarities) among hominins in more terrestrial and open-country habitats, a critical chain of events was set into motion. The direction of natural selection would lead to not only the elaboration of emotions but to brain growth and language, which, in turn, would make social control increasingly cultural and emotional among evolving hominins and … set the stage for further elaborations of human nature.
Chapter 4 Why and How Did the Human Family Evolve?
Among most mammals, the organization of each species revolves around solving the problem of reproduction … [but] great apes and, hence, the last common ancestor (LCA) of great apes and humans had little structural basis for reproduction. Adult males and females were promiscuous; and except for a few cases, adult males and adult females did not form permanent social relations. Thus, paternity was never known in humans’ distant ancestors, and biological fathers were not involved with the care and raising of their offspring. Only mothers and their preadolescent offspring would form a strong bond, which was broken at puberty as both sons and daughters transferred away from their mothers for the rest of their lives—at least before the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees began to settle in a more terrestrial habitat. Yet, the nuclear family, which early sociologists like Auguste Comte (1830–1842) saw as the basic building block of society—indeed the functional equivalent of the “cell” in the societal “organism”—stands in stark contrast to the reality of humans’ inherited biology.
How, then, did the nuclear family ever evolve when paternity was not known and offspring left their mothers at puberty? The result of these biology-driven activities was to cut off lineal ties across generations and even ties of offspring to their parents and to their siblings. The nuclear family is, therefore, not natural to humans as many would think, but rather had to be constructed for hominins to survive and take up hunting and gathering without powerful bioprogrammers pushing for this pattern of social organization.
The only relatively stable social structure organizing the LCAs of humans and great apes was the larger community or home range that could be many square miles. This structure appears, if chimpanzee behaviors are any guide, to have been defended against incursion by other males. Community members knew the boundaries of their community and the demography of who should be present. Within the community, however, there were no permanent groups among the LCAs. Although periodic parties could hook up, only to disperse, many individuals wandered around their community alone or occasionally with another for a brief time.
Mothers and offspring were, therefore, left to fend for themselves within the community, with fathers never being known and other adult females as relative strangers to each other because of their immigrant status as refugees from other communities who, of course, were welcomed by males to replace the females who had been born in a community and left at puberty. New immigrant females were simply tolerated by other females, and females would sit together to let their children play. Yet, the community’s females did not generally form close relations because they had not grown up together and were, in essence, strangers to each other.
What is even more remarkable is that as the brain began to grow with later species of hominins, infants had to be born earlier and were, therefore, less neurologically developed, making them highly vulnerable. If one were living during the time of the first hominins, it would be easy to predict that they would not survive open-country terrestrial habitats, and yet they did. Humans’ nature is thus tied to how hominins were able to create the nuclear family and more stable group structures within the larger community or home range.
This pattern of weak social ties and lack of permanent group-level structures, especially kinship structures, is rare among mammals … In this chapter, our goal is to lay out in more detail the preadaptations for the kind of kinship systems that did eventually emerge among late hominins, and, more generally, the nature of group formations. Because emotions were the bonding force driving these formations, it should not be surprising that human families and group structures … are often unstable and blown apart by negative emotions. Rather than see these as pathologies, we should recognize that such instability is … inherited from low-sociality and non-group-forming LCAs that were forced to become group oriented or die.
Community as the Structural Basis of Social Organization
Community as the Natural Social Form
Humans have a natural tendency to have a sense of community … Identifying with community is often more automatic than with groups and organizations because stable groups and organizations are, in evolutionary terms, recent constructions that are not driven by bioprogrammers the way orientation to community is.
While this orientation to community worked against stable kin units and groups among the ancestors of great apes and hominins, it would become a preadaptation for what human societies would become: huge, populated by millions of individuals. No other mammal can come close to this kind of scale in societal organization, primarily because they have powerful bioprogrammers for kin and group organization that limit their horizons. For a large mammal like humans to be able to construct societies on the scale of tiny insects is a rather remarkable achievement … It begins with a community rather than with kin or group organization. And … the mega societies that humans now live in may be more “natural” to an evolved ape than those societal formations—horticultural, pastoral, and agrarian societies—that evolved after hunting and gathering was displaced by more settled forms of social organization …
… When great apes meet up, they engage in interaction rituals signifying mutual recognition and, it appears, interact rather easily, seeming to remember the last time that they interacted. Thus, even with their relatively small brains (375–400 cc) great apes can cognitively map their community, both its geographical boundaries and its demography. This propensity to not only reckon community but to conceptualize this community in abstract terms is, I think, yet another preadaptation for humans’ eventual capacities to hold conceptions of larger symbolic communities in their minds and to respond to expectations of these larger, more remote communities … Even among simple hunting and gathering bands of several nuclear families, the larger system of bands speaking a common language could be conceptualized even if actual interactions with these remote “others” were rare.
It is the ability, then, to look beyond the local group that is critical critical, not only for being a member of a larger society but for being a member of a larger category of others, such as fellow ethnics or fellow religious worshipers. Indeed, conceptualizing a supernatural realm inhabited by sacred forces and beings is but an extension of the basic tendency among small-brained great apes to see beyond the present and the immediate. With a larger brain, the horizons of late hominins and early humans would be dramatically expanded.
Yet, the immediate problem facing hominins was not to organize mega societies but to form kin units able to protect young and vulnerable offspring, to form groups to coordinate food gathering and hunting, and to protect group members from predators. An orientation and cognitive mapping of community would prove necessary when larger-scale societies began to evolve; these were not the cognitive capacities that hominins needed as they sought to adapt to more terrestrial environments millions of years ago. This orientation to community, however, did not restrict the nature of the kinship system nor the forms of group structures that would evolve. In a sense, the lack of bioprogrammers for particular types of kin relations and groups allowed natural selection room to pursue a variety of strategies before hitting upon the one that would enhance the fitness of early hominins … increasing the range, varieties, and nuance of emotions to forge stronger bonds that, in turn, would eventually allow the brain to grow and thereby make spoken language and culture fitness enhancing.
Thus, emotions were the key to filling in needed kin and group structures among community-oriented hominins, if hominins were to survive … [as a] solution to the problem of making a weak-tie, non-groupforming animal more social and group oriented …
The Evolution of the Nuclear Family
We are now ready to put together a scenario about why and, more importantly, how promiscuous descendants of the LCA of great apes and hominins could create the nuclear family, which is the key structure from which hunting and gathering bands were constructed. Thus, much of human nature is connected to how hominins organized reproduction of the species in something not natural to evolving great apes: the nuclear family. Without this critical transformation to hominin societies, humans could not have evolved. How, then, did blind natural selection bring about this most improbable creation—the nuclear family? This basic social structure was not, I believe, part of humans’ biological nature. Yet it was … essential to the survival of all hominins trying to adapt to more open-country terrestrial habitats, at first in Africa and then later in Europe and Asia.
The Primal, Pre-Kinship “Horde”
It may seem a bit odd to evoke an old concept from scholars first speculating in the nineteenth century on how the first groups, and kin groups in particular, evolved [references]. This is the concept of the horde, and for many early-twentieth-century scholars, such as Durkheim (1912), there had to be some kind of social formation that preceded highly organized groups like the nuclear family. None of these scholars had the advantage of being able to do cladistic analysis on great apes to make their inferences, but they were, I believe, essentially correct. High levels of group organization were not endemic to the ancestors of humans, and thus, there must have been a “transitional form” in the movement from less to more organized groupings. The term horde was often used as a kind of conceptual gloss or filler. It may seem to be an archaic term, but it is rather close to the actual pathway by which hominins carrying the great ape genetic legacy for weak social ties became increasingly organized into group structures …
From Horde to Nuclear Family
Thus, it appears that the initial horde that evolved out of chimpanzee-like community formations of unrelated female immigrants, sons and their mothers, male friends, and brothers could be adapted to quasi hunting and gathering lifeways (with retreat to the forests at night). These tendencies can occur with relatively small-brained chimpanzees who are probably like the first hominins (5.0 to 4.5 mya). If we move forward in evolution to Homo habilis (2.2 mya) or early Homo erectus (2.0 to 1.8 mya), where selection had already increased the range of emotions for forming social bonds, we can see that the horde that formed likely consisted of stronger ties among (1) brothers born into the community, (2) their male friends, (3) their mothers (protected by the sexual avoidance bioprogrammers from incest), and (4) probably some females who had immigrated into a community that was increasingly trying to organize into more stable groupings. Shortly, or during this initial formation of the horde, sisters of brothers would stay in the group, at least until sisters reached puberty. Figure 4.1 [see above] outlines in more graphic form what I see as the sequence of events leading to the emergence of the horde, or precursor to the nuclear family.
As the horde evolved, selection on structures such as the septum, the source of pleasure for sex, increased capacities for emotions of love, commitment, loyalty, and so on, that led to increasingly closer relations among sexual partners, mostly incoming females from other communities. There may also have been patterns of relations among males, brothers, and their friends’ mothers, but the key was to begin pulling the conjugal couple together. Incest avoidance was probably not complete, but these evolving hominins would soon learn of the consequences of inbreeding (gene-based deformities). At the same time, mother-son incest avoidance and perhaps the Westermarck effect among brothers and sisters who had played in their youth could lower rates of sex between males and their young sisters who had yet to transfer away from their mothers. Moreover, this same Westermarck effect could also have applied to any of a male’s brothers and friends if they had engaged in roughhousing play activities with this male’s sister as data on humans indicates that play involving physical contact among young males and females who are not siblings also activates the Westermarck effect in early adolescence. As brains grew, perhaps as the beginnings of speech became evident, culture as a force behind social organization would begin to be used to specify sexual taboos and … appropriate relations among conjugal partners and their offspring.
We know the end result of this movement through a horde phase of social organization: hunting and gathering bands built from nuclear families (consisting of parents and their offspring), revealing a clear division of labor where men hunt and females gather (often assisted by offspring and, at times, adult males). Once culture begins to evolve, selection can work much more rapidly because intelligent hominins like Homo erectus can make rules, the violation of which can lead to activation of powerful emotions like guilt and shame that can bring direct negative sanctions from others (anger, for example), which can then activate fear as well. The key was to get sufficiently organized in order to survive and let what natural selection had started—growing subcortical emotion centers to a point where enhanced emotions would make enlarging the neocortex fitness enhancing. Once this process began, language and culture could be used to order social relations, thereby increasing fitness further. And even before Homo sapiens evolved, it is clear that this basic societal form was highly adaptive because Homo erectus … was able to migrate to Europe, Asia, and down to southeast Asia. Other forms of humans, such as Neanderthals, could also live in diverse and often somewhat harsh environments.
During these monumental transformations from loose-knit communities to more organized hordes and, then, to nuclear families and nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, selection was working on the pre-adaptations … Rather sophisticated behavioral and interpersonal capacities of hominins carried much of the burden that sustained social relations clearly present in the great apes today. As the range, intensities, and nuance of emotions increased with selection on the subcortex of the hominin brain, the brain began to grow and open the door to language and culture. As a result of interpersonal skills that all great apes and, hence, all members of the horde possessed grew more powerful, allowing late hominins to overcome the barriers to the nuclear family. As a consequence, the great ape and then horde structure could be transformed into the nomadic bands composed of a half dozen or more nuclear families wandering a territory in a nomadic and seasonal route around a home range. Other bands would do the same. Bands sharing language and culture might also share territories, but it is more likely that they had somewhat different nomadic routes within a larger home range. All this was possible, of course, because humans sustained their orientation to a larger community and to larger horizons beyond the group. The bioprogrammer to reckon community was thus not wiped away but was instead supplemented by a larger palette of affective states that increased the abilities of animals with high levels of interpersonal acuity to form stronger social bonds. Even as descendants of the LCA separating hominins from the ancestors of chimpanzees began to form nuclear families and bands, it was not direct bioprogrammers doing to heavy lifting. Rather it was interpersonal skills charged up by new emotions and growing cognitive capacities that allowed later hominins to form new kinds of flexible social structures that were only indirectly related to their biology … The result was a basic structure—the hunting and gathering band—that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, but this basic structure did not lock humans into small-scale, group-level organization as is the case with other primates. About 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, the evolution of mega societies of many millions of persons would begin. Even as humans became more group oriented, they never lost their great ape capacity to visualize a universe beyond simple groupings—for great apes, community—but, for humans, complex layers of ever-larger societies and intersocietal systems. Groups allowed for survival, particularly the nuclear family [and] more extended forms of social organization …
… The cognitive mapping of the community, and low levels of inter-personal grooming among great apes, does appear to be a node on which natural selection could go to work …
[Conclusion]
One consequence of the absence of hardwired traits for group formations was that natural selection had to work around this deficiency and discover a different route (i.e., enhanced emotions to brain growth to language to culture). This route ensured that the structures that did emerge would be highly flexible. They could be adapted to diverse habitats, as is evident in the migrations of late Homo erectus and early humanlike forms. They would make the construction of mega societies not only possible but, as we will explore, more in tune with humans’ evolved nature than were early patterns of horticulture and agrarianism. This flexibility relies on the sophisticated behavioral and interpersonal capacities of humans—capacities were inherited from the LCAs of the ancestors of great apes and humans. Even though these capacities were subject to selection, it may be that by simply energizing these capacities with more intense, diverse, and nuanced emotions, selection may not have had to alter them in significant ways. Indeed, by enhancing emotions, selection set into motion a direction of evolution that led to bigger brains, more cognitive capacities to deal with others, language, and culture—all of which made the interpersonal capacities of hominins more powerful without having to subject them to direct selection. Thus, much of what I can confidently proclaim to be “human nature” is, in reality, great ape nature, supercharged by emotions, bigger brains, language, and culture.
The Source:
Jonathan H. Turner, On Human Nature The Biology and Sociology of What Made Us Human, Taylor & Francis 2021
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.