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8. The Savanna Model Lifestyle We have seen how our ancient environment conditioned our bodies—and our very natures—for life on the savannas of east Africa. We called this lifestyle the “Savanna Model” and outlined how our ancient ancestors fed themselves for thousands of generations. Now, we look at aspects of the Savanna Model lifestyle: physical activity, social well-being, and living arrangements. Our modern lives, in all their aspects, are at variance with the way nature designed us for life. The Bond Effect is learning to live in harmony with the way nature intended. This manner of looking at who we really are elegantly resolves many enigmatic lifestyle questions. It cuts through much humbug to reveal fundamental, if uncomfortable, truths. PHYSICAL ACTIVITY A typical African Pleistocene group would camp in one place for a few days and then move on to make another camp 10 to 20 miles away. They carried very little with them, but they still had to walk all the way. They moved, not for the fun of it, but because they had to. The terrain was open, savanna-type grassland. While camped each day, the group would split up to forage for food. The women, children, and old men went off in one party, foraging for roots, fruits, tubers, berries, and easily caught bugs and animals. This party on average covered about 5 miles, they leisurely walked and rested from time to time, and after about 4–5 hours they were done. It is estimated that the average adult female energy expenditure on physical activity was 600 kilocalories (kcal) per day. This compares to 230 kcal for today’s sedentary female office worker. The able-bodied men went off chiefly looking for small game, but would Page 187 Above Page 188 Below also be collecting other edible matter on an opportunistic basis. This party would cover more ground during the day—9 to 12 miles on average. Part of the time, they would be running or jogging, to chase and trail potential game. Most of the time, they would be finished after about 4–5 hours. Less frequently, they might be away for as much as 48 hours, tracking a wounded animal. It is estimated that their daily expenditure of energy was over 1,000 kcal. Compare this to the 306 kcal of the average sedentary male office worker. There are therefore two patterns, one for each gender. Females would pass their lives exercising to a moderate extent and with low intensity. Males started their lives with the female pattern, graduated to the male pattern (vigorous and more sustained physical activity) for most of their lives, and then tapered off to lesser levels again in old age. How does this fit with what we know about human biology today? Evidence is that women do not need to exercise as long or as hard as men to maintain their health. Men need more vigorous physical activity to remain healthy. What happened to our ancestors in old age? What is striking is that old people stayed physically active until their very last days. They were athletes right to the end. Exercise and Your Health • Bone Demineralization and Fractures. The absence of exercise is
one of the factors that undermines bone health. Regular physical
activity improves bone structure, volume, and its resistance to
fracture. Elderly women can benefit from as little as one hour per week
of low-intensity activity—a 42% lower risk of hip fracture and 33%
lower risk of vertebra fracture. [1]. The rhythmic jolting
associated with walking or jogging excites the bone-building cells
(osteoblasts) into raising their tempo. In young people, the
bone-builders work faster than the bone-strippers (osteoclasts) and
their bone mass increases. Even in older people, the bone-builders will
work harder and maintain pace with the bone-strippers. • Syndrome X. Syndrome X is a metabolic disorder that represents a cocktail of
“diseases of civilization” that occur simultaneously. The main
conditions are high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, obesity,
high cholesterol, and diabetes. They all have a common link—high
insulin levels. Low exercise levels mean that more insulin has to be
secreted to handle a given glucose load. The result is more insulin
floating around creating mischief. Exercise is essential to maintaining
optimum resistance to diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and heart
disease. Page
188 Above Page
189 Below The Process of Bone Remodeling • Lymphatic Circulation. As handmaiden to blood circulation, we have a
secondary system of circulation known as the lymphatic system. This is
responsible, in part, for transporting the products of digestion to
other parts of the body, bringing immune system cells to parts of the
body under attack, and flushing away debris and toxic matter. Unlike the
blood, which is pumped around the body by the heart, the lymphatic
system does not have a pump of its own. It relies on the general flexing
of muscles to do the job. Lack of physical activity means sluggish
lymphatic circulation and a host of potential maladies. • Longevity. Studies on identical twins conducted over many years have
demonstrated what many people have long suspected—that physically fit
people live longer. In one study, it was found that in any given period,
sedentary people were 1.3 times as likely to die as the “occasional”
exercisers and nearly twice as likely to die as the “conditioning”
exercisers. The figures were the same The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 189 Above Page
190 Below for both men and women. The use of twins, often brought up apart,
was particularly useful: it meant that genetic factors could be
eliminated as possible reasons. [2]. We do not know the effect on longevity if we raised our physical
activity to the level of our prehistoric ancestors, but it would no
doubt be further improved. • Stress, Depression, and Mood. Physical exercise has a beneficial effect on a
whole range of hormones that regulate mood. Exercise restores the way
the brain chemical serotonin functions, helping to lift depression.
Physical activity puts a brake on the production of stress hormones
(such as cortisol and adrenaline), which calms feelings of panic and
stress and reduces damaging insulin production. Finally, endurance
athletes can reach a “high,” where their bodies are producing
morphine-like substances, giving them a tremendous feeling of
well-being. Physical activity is not an option but a necessity. Our bodies
are shaped by our ancestral environment and their proper functioning
relies on a particular kind and amount of exercise. Without it, the rest
of the body’s systems cannot work properly. SOCIAL WELL-BEING AND THE IDEA OF HUMAN NATURE Bear in mind that we are talking about the deep undercurrents in human nature. The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to make you aware of our deeply buried instincts. You will see how our choices, often made with the best of intentions, sometimes run counter to these savanna-bred instincts. However, bear in mind that all social interactions are highly complicated affairs: we are constantly balancing a Pandora’s box of conflicting desires, postponed gratification, calculation, and social conformity. The insights in this chapter will help you make better choices within the framework of this rich and challenging context. The social sciences deal with the social and cultural aspects of human behavior. Regrettably, these sciences were hijacked in the early part of the 20th century by academic theorists such as the German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas. They built on the romantic notions of the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who asserted, without any evidence, that man is good by nature but has been corrupted by society and civilization. If only, stated Rousseau, we could return to the state of the “Noble Savage,” we would Page
190 Above Deadly Harvest Page 191 Below
all live happily ever after.
Boas went further and asserted that humans have no inherited instincts,
abilities, or feelings. He declared that all humans are born as a
“blank slate” and behavior is purely the result of social and
cultural conditioning. Thus, we are all born with identical potentials
to become anything. In other words, there is no such thing as “human
nature.” We now know that this is quite wrong: humans inherit, with their
genes, very deeply programmed desires, feelings, and instincts. They
cannot be “conditioned” out of existence. But the social sciences
are still riddled with false notions. In consequence, we are under
pressure to change our behaviors in ways that social theorists consider
desirable. Often, these pressures cut across our savanna-bred natures,
causing distress, unhappiness, and ultimately mental illness. Social engineers wanted to believe that human behavior is
“infinitely malleable.” If necessary, they faked scientific studies
to fit their prejudices. The most celebrated case was that of Margaret
Mead. An anthropological student of Franz Boas, Mead became famous for
her doctoral research in 1925 that allegedly showed that Samoa is a
paradise in which sex is unrestricted; where jealousy, rape, and
adolescent adjustment problems are unknown. But none of it was true.
Mead never learned the Samoan language and she interviewed only two
schoolgirls who, only in their old age, admitted that they had deceived
her for their own amusement. [3]. She wrote a book about her “research” entitled
Coming of Age in Samoa. It became a best-seller and
required reading as “a classic of universal truths” in university
courses. In the book, Mead claimed that adolescent behavior in humans
could be explained only in terms of the social environment. Human
nature, she declared, was “the rawest most undifferentiated of raw
material.” It wasn’t until 70 years later, when anthropologist Derek
Freeman unearthed the truth about Mead’s sloppy studies, that her
theories were finally debunked.4 In the meantime, Western
thinking—and societies—have been distorted for several generations.
We now know that deep-seated urges and instincts underlie and direct
human behavior. Anthropologists and other researchers have studied the huge range
of different cultures around the world. From these studies, they have
teased out the characteristics that are common to all human cultures;
they call them “human universal values.”[5]. In other words, they are features that are hardwired into human
behavior and not affected by cultural conditioning. We will now examine
the main features and show how the San shape up to these features, then
we will see how they compare with common practice in our Western
culture. This will throw into relief any discord with our savanna-bred
natures. Every normal human on this planet has fundamental feelings of
pain, fear, happiness, and physical attraction. These are emotions that
manipulate our bodies for basic survival and reproduction. Indeed, it is
difficult to imagine how any The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 191Above Page
192 Below species can survive if it does not have a similar impulse system
to signal when, for example, to fight for vital space, to flee from
danger, or to mate. Hardwired Behavior Humans’ hardwired instructions are the first level reflexes,
which occur subconsciously. Typical examples are blinking, swallowing,
and the knee-jerk. Others invoke emotions, which have an evolutionary
and survival purpose—to make the brain give instructions to the body.
A clear example is when a lion attacks. Our body’s sensors, chiefly
the eyes and ears, send signals to the brain. The brain speeds up the
heart and puts the muscles in overdrive. We feel this cascade of
activity as fear. All this happens subconsciously—it is an automatic,
hardwired reflex. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa
College of Medicine, specializes in finding out how the brain detects
emotion and feeling. The brain is receiving billions of reports every
second from every cell in the body. The brain then integrates these
reports and we perceive the result as an emotion. [6]. “Background” emotions
work at a subconscious level and only surface to our consciousness
vaguely: we can feel “under the weather” or we can have an
instinctive dislike of someone. “Primary” emotions are basic ones
such as fear, sadness, and happiness. Yet another category concerns
“social” emotions, which evolved to make us behave in appropriate
ways in society and in personal relationships. They are genetically
programmed feelings such as conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy,
shame, humility, dignity, rejection, humiliation, moral outrage, sorrow,
mourning, and jealousy. When we talk about “programming,” “hardwiring,” and
“genetically programmed emotions,” where do these features come
from? The answer, quite simply, is in our genes. In the words of
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, genes “are the replicators and
we are their survival machines.”[7]. Down through the eons, genes
in bodies that failed to reproduce died out. We are all carriers of
genes that succeeded in getting into the next generation—millions of
times over. To do that, they had to make sure that the bodies they found
themselves in were fit for survival. In this regard, we still inhabit
bodies honed to perfection for successful gene transmission in the
savannas of east Africa. 192
Deadly Harvest Above 193
Below Genes can aid their reproduction more subtly too, by helping
copies of themselves that are in other bodies. They manipulate the body
they are in to help other bodies survive if they are likely to contain
copies of themselves. We perceived this manipulation as instincts,
emotions, and feelings. Human mothers feel more like risking their lives
to save their own baby than they do for an unknown person; it is a
phenomenon that we call, quite naturally and innocently, maternal
instinct. Instincts, Emotions, and Feelings For example, humans are programmed with instructions that say,
“If you see tasty food, eat it until it is all gone.” This worked
fine in our ancestral homeland as food was not abundant, was largely
bland in flavor, and required work to obtain. Today, that hardwired
instruction is self-defeating. Food is abundant, food companies are
experts at making it appealing and tasty, and we have lost the link
between obtaining food and the work required to get it. Our emotions are
crying out “eat”! Humans, as well as many other creatures, have mechanisms that can
override the hardwiring. We can still choose to not eat even if the food
is there, even if we are hungry or if the food is tasty. But this
requires two things: the recognition that there is a good reason to
override our instinct and the exercise of willpower to carry it out.
This process is unpleasant and stressful. The culture we grow up in provides the “reason” to override
our instincts. It imposes a set of behavioral values that are commonly
accepted by society, often strongly bound up with religious doctrines
that have developed over centuries. Frequently, cultures impose
behavioral patterns that are quite at variance with human nature. Taboo is from a Polynesian word (tapu) that means a prohibition
imposed by social custom against a particular behavior. Humans seem to
be hardwired to adopt taboos in general. However, the nature of the taboo can be whatever
the culture programs into the brain circuits. For example, to Western
culture, cannibalism is taboo, whereas it was common practice in many
peoples from the Polynesians to the Aztecs. Taboo, and especially its
breaking, arouse incredibly deep, visceral emotions. There are many
taboos that seem to be common to all cultures; they are “human
universal values.” An example is the taboo against incest, which is
the result of imprinting, a device by which our genes maximize their
survival into the next generation. Taboos that have arisen for this
reason are good for well-being; most others are not necessarily so. We
must, therefore, make fundamental distinctions among those The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 193 Above Page
194 Below notions that come to us because of our hardwiring, those
imprinted at an early age, and those that are programmed into us as
“ideas.” Ideas and Indoctrination The Vienna-based founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, had a
remarkable nephew, Edward Bernays, whose family migrated to America when
he was a baby. In 1919, Bernays opened a marketing agency in New York.
He offered techniques using Freud’s psychological principles to
“influence people to buy products they don’t need or want.”
Bernays coined the term public relations for this technique. Bernays
used these psycho-techniques with remarkable success; for example, in
the 1920s, to persuade women that it is acceptable to smoke in public.
His delighted client, the American Tobacco Company, saw cigarette sales
soar. Bernays “engineered” public opinion in many other celebrated
cases, including the idea that bacon is a breakfast food. We have all been indoctrinated from the earliest age: by our family, schools, health professionals, sociologists, our cultural belief system, and much else. In matters to do with food, for example, we are under constant, sophisticated, and persuasive assault by the food industry. For generations, they have provided, free of charge, attractive yet self-serving propaganda in the form of educational materials to schools. They take charge of food supplies in schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Various lobbies, including dairy, snack-food, sugar, fast-food, processed food, and cattlemen, deploy the most sophisticated psychological techniques to seduce us into buying their products. We have the challenge of understanding how our minds are being manipulated. When we have done that, then we have the next mental challenge— changing our habits. LIVING ARRANGEMENTS 194
Above Deadly Harvest 195
Below quietly and doing tasks by the firelight. Sleep would come around
9:30 P.M. and they would wake up with the sun. The creatures from whom we are descended, Homo erectus, discovered fire at least one
million years ago. We can imagine the nights with strange unknown
rustlings in the dark; the campfire must have been a great comfort. We
all feel, even today, the fascination of a fire: gazing reflectively
into the flames is a pleasure deeply anchored in our psyches. Campfires
constitute a flickering island of reassurance going back to the
beginning of human existence. This is our naturally adapted prelude to
sleep. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, populations, even in the West, did not have the luxury of much light after dark. They just had flickering whale-oil lamps and beef-fat candles; people still followed ancient ancestral sleep rhythms. Since 1900, light at night gradually became more common, first with gas lighting and then with electric light. The net result is that we do not prepare our brains for sleep in the way nature envisaged. Today, the average American sleeps two hours fewer than in the 1960s. He or she certainly sleeps less—and less well—than the ideal for which our naturally adapted sleeping pattern has programmed us. Some of the consequences are predictable: loss of concentration, lowered resistance to stress, and a depressed immune system. An unexpected consequence is that sleep deprivation reduces appetite-suppressing hormones such as leptin and it increases hunger-inducing hormones such as ghrelin—the less we sleep, the more we overeat Sunlight as Human Food Years ago, we never used to worry about how much sun we got.
Parents would even urge their children to play outside and “make some
vitamin D.” This was a key insight: sunlight is an essential piece of
nutrition for humans. The scares over sunburn-induced skin cancers have
caused a hysterical overreaction. The modern denial of sunshine has led
to a surge of diseases that are connected to sunlight deficiency,
including cancers, rickets, and depression. Cancer researcher E.M. John found that cancers are much more
prevalent in the northern cities of the U.S. than in the southern rural
states. In particular, the risk of breast cancer is increased by three
times. [9]. Researcher William Grant
estimates the yearly toll from cancers caused by lack of sunshine at
100,000 cases and 40,000 deaths; this is four times the mortality from
skin cancer. [10]. The vitamin D deficiency
disease, rickets, thought to be vanquished long ago, is resurging in
cities. We all need to get adequate sunshine; just be sensible and avoid
burning. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 195 Above Page
196 Below Population Density Researcher John Calhoun published a pioneering animal study 40
years ago and found that crowded female rats had low fertility rates and
high rates of miscarriage and death in childbirth; they also had poor
nesting and poor parenting behaviors. Male rats had high rates of sexual
deviation, homosexuality, aggression, violence, cannibalism,
pathological depression, and withdrawal. There were high rates of social
disorientation, infanticide, and infant mortality. Calhoun finished his
report with the observation that we might advance our understanding
“about analogous problems confronting the human species.” [11]. Does this have the ring of truth to it? Today’s high population
densities have put us on a treadmill requiring industrialized, intensive
forms of society. Many of us are worn down by congestion, crowds, and
lack of time to even think. We dream of lives in closer contact with
natural surroundings. There is no doubt that our mentalities are best
adapted to much lower population densities. TERRITORIALITY Each band had its vital space or territory of some 200 square
miles. We use the term vital space deliberately: this territory provided everything vital for
survival, especially food. But it was also the land where their gods,
heroes, and spirits dwelt, where their dearest dead were laid. Even
though they were nomadic within this territory, every nook and cranny of
it was familiar to them—it was “theirs” and the feeling of
ownership is desperately important. In contrast, should they venture
onto adjacent territory, they would feel uncomfortable and out of place
because they were trespassers. The band had to hang together for
survival and to protect their vital space from adjacent bands. This
pattern of existence has molded deep characteristics into the human
psyche. 196
Deadly Harvest Above 197
Below In particular, band members strongly identify with, and give
their loyalty to, their own band. In other words, humans have a strong
genetic predisposition to identify with their own “in-group” and to
be suspicious of “out-groups.” The need to have a feeling of
“belonging” to a group is a human universal value. In-Group, Out-Group Genes, Relationships, and Conflict We all possess genes that work
to help copies of themselves lying in other bodies. Of course, we
cannot know precisely which bodies contain copies of our genes.
Trivers insight was to see that creatures help other members of their
species in proportion to their degree of relatedness. In this way, a
child gets 50% of his or her genes from the mother and 50% from the
father. A mother has 50% of her genes in each child, and 25% with each
grandchild. By the same token, a child shares 50% of his or her genes
with siblings and 25% with maternal aunts and uncles. In the forager society,
everyone was related to one another in some way, so there would be
“gene pressure” to help and cooperate with each other and to
refrain from feuding with and killing each other. [16]. Even in modern societies, the more closely people are genetically
related, the more likely they are to come to one another’s aid,
especially in life-or-death situations—”blood is thicker than
water.” Genetic relatedness feeds directly into in-group/out-group
conflict: such conflicts are really battles between gene groups
manipulating their host bodies for supremacy in the struggle for life.
Page
198 Below Humans are not the only creatures to be hostile to out-group members. Male chimpanzees patrol the borders of their territory, and if they find a strange male, they kill him. [17]. According to Frans de Waal, a leading authority on the social intelligence of apes, “Sometimes a small group of chimpanzee males stealthily enters a neighboring territory to overwhelm a single male that they viciously beat and leave to die.” [18]. Likewise, if a lone chimpanzee becomes aware of out-group males intruding on his territory, he becomes worried and his hair stands on end. [19]. Buried in these accounts is the assumption that out-group
hostility is a male phenomenon. However, females had every reason to
fear strangers too: they could be raped, abducted, or murdered, and the
same fate could happen to their children. Women who allowed that to
happen did not pass on their genes to the next generation. Women who
survived are therefore those programmed with successful survival
responses. A landmark study led by Shelley Taylor shows that women respond
to extreme danger with a cascade of brain chemicals, including one
called oxytocin. These hormones drive women to tend children and gather
with other women. Dr. Taylor dubs this the “tend and befriend”
response. [20]. This is in opposition to the
men’s “fight-or-flight” response. It is interesting to reflect
that, in an emergency on the African savanna, the women were programmed
to round up the kids and get everyone into a huddle, while the men,
pumped up on testosterone and adrenaline, battled off the danger. We all, therefore, are deeply programmed to mistrust strangers.
However, with the rise of farming and the concentration of multitudes of
humans into cities, how is this mistrust managed? In the words of Jared
Diamond, “People had to learn, for the first time in history, how to
encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.” [21]. Every person in the world has to learn how to
manage relationships with strangers. This is a process of indoctrination
designed to paper a veneer of “civilized” behavior over innate,
mistrustful insecurities. Society manages this at two levels: as
individuals, we are taught to suppress our natural tendencies and become
self-effacing. We avoid eye contact, we stoop our shoulders, we look at
the ground, we scurry along with small steps, we avoid confrontation, we
are taught “courtesy” and polite manners. At the level of the
state—through institutions such as the police, military, and the legal
system—it alone enacts laws and it is the final arbiter in the
settlement of disputes. Social idealists add a third pressure: the
theory that humans ought to want to live in “diverse” communities. Here we see a number of divergences from our naturally adapted instincts. Our human natures are telling us that we are most comfortable when we are living and working with people “like us”; that we need to “belong” to a group, give it our loyalty, and reject outsiders; that we should take personal responsibility for protecting our in-group, and its territory, from out-groups; and that 198
Deadly Harvest Above 199
Below males have different reactions to females when danger threatens.
However, all these deep instincts are frustrated by modern living
arrangements. From these insights, we can predict that multicultural societies
are likely to be more neurotic and stressful. By suppressing, even
denigrating, normal roles for male aggression, societies will suffer
increased levels of unorthodox activity: violence, hooliganism, gang
warfare, and criminality. The frontier defenses of Western countries,
protected with razor wire, harsh deserts, and armed patrols, are an open
invitation to a Third-World youth to test his mettle. It is normal for
the defenders to feel viscerally opposed to the invasion of their
in-group territory by such outsiders. We have given the impression that each forager band operates in
hostile isolation from its neighbors, but this is not entirely true.
Neighboring bands also needed to cooperate at many levels. Wives would
almost always be brought in from an out-group. Potential husbands from
one group had to visit the other group to find mates and negotiate
terms. There would be exchanges of gifts and other obligations. Everyone
thus had uncles, aunts, cousins, and other family members in nearby
bands whom they would visit on occasion. In extreme situations, such as
those of the San who live in a particularly hostile natural environment,
bands contracted understandings for emergency access to resources,
notably water, in times of distress. The “natural” size of an in-group is therefore the extended
family as denoted by the forager band. With the rise of agriculture and
the concentration of populations into larger units such as towns and
cities, the size of the in-group had to increase. This was not always
easy—somehow people had to sink their differences and invest their
loyalty into a grouping that included other extended families. The rise
of a charismatic leader who inspired everyone’s loyalty was part of
the answer. Another part of the answer is provided by the need to
cooperate to fight off an external threat. As George Washington said to his fractious and jealous
state-loyal armies, “Either we hang together or we shall surely hang
apart.” The Normans welded together the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of
England by deploying another, long-term strategy—that of instilling a
sense of national patriotism. They used the tools of pageantry, flags
and foreign wars. In this way, one of the earliest nation states was
born. It grouped together peoples who had the same language, culture,
and religion and gave them a national identity. This, it seems, is about
as good as it gets. Political entities that group together peoples of different
languages, religions, or sharp cultural differences are inherently
unstable. We see this all over the modern world. Yugoslavia and Somalia
broke up in bloody conflict. Rwanda, Congo, and Sudan suffered genocidal
massacres of one ethnic community by another. In yet others, low-level
conflict continues like a running sore: India (religious conflict), Sri
Lanka (out-group Tamil settlers against indigenous peoples), The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 199 Above Page
200 Below Chechnya (indigenous peoples against out-group Russian
occupiers), Northern Ireland (indigenous Irish against out-group
occupiers), Spain (Indigenous Basques against out-group occupiers), and
Palestine/Israel (indigenous people against out-group occupiers). We
draw the uncomfortable conclusion that the notion of a multicultural
society is a contradiction in terms. Warfare At the time Churchill wrote that (1925), the world was still
reeling from the carnage of World War I. It had been so traumatic that
politicians (but not Churchill) billed it as “the war to end all
wars.” Churchill had a layman’s pragmatic and unromantic opinion of
human nature. Meanwhile, the experts—social anthropologists— were
turning their misty eyes to the ideal of the Noble Savage. They thought
that warfare was the result of bad upbringing. So, is there any truth in the idea that humans are naturally
warlike? We have the archaeological remains of Stone Age battlefields
and everywhere we look are signs of humans killing humans in murderous
conflicts. The American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon extensively
studied the Yanomamo, a tribe of the Amazon rainforest, for over 30
years and he estimated that 30% of males died violent deaths from
warfare. Our model forager tribe, the San, frequently warred with
neighboring groups: they had a murder rate greater than America’s
inner cities. In one account, one band avenged a killing by sneaking
into the killer’s camp and murdering every man, woman, and child as
they slept. [22]. The Australian Aborigines had
a similar pattern—jealousies, vendettas, and revenge killings were
frequent features of aboriginal life. Neighboring camps would be raided
and bitter fights would be fought to the death. American anthropologist
W. Lloyd Warner lived among the Aborigines of Arnhem Land from 1909 to
1929. He estimated that 200 men died in organized warfare during that
period. [23]. The total population was only
3,000, so this was a colossal rate of casualties. Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has summarized the proportion of
male deaths caused by war, even today, in a number of primal societies.
[24]. The proudly independent
Jivaro tribe in Peru is notorious for their use of poison-dart
blow-pipes and head-hunting. Keeley estimates that some 60% of Jivaro
males die in battle. Half a world away, the Mae Enga of the New Guinea
highlands lose 35% of males in murderous conflicts. In contrast,
European and American male battlefield deaths in the 20th century (which included two world wars) averaged less than 1% per
year. 200
Deadly Harvest Above 201
Below It seems, then, that for most of human evolutionary history,
human males have been involved in bloody conflict. There are a few other
species that also do this—chimpanzees, gorillas, and wolves are
examples. A common thread is this: the killing is of “them,” the
out-group. The fact that there are indeed other species that seek to
exterminate their own kind, albeit from an out-group, forces us to
recognize the possibility that this trait is, in some way,
evolutionarily advantageous. Richard Wrangham, professor of anthropology
at Harvard University, says that evolution favored humans and chimps who
warred because “this makes grisly sense in terms of natural
selection.” Successful males, the ones that survive, enjoy high status
among other males. High-status males are strongly attractive to females
and have more matings, so they generate more offspring. The genes
sitting in successful warriors become more common, while the genes in
wimps don’t get into the next generation in the same numbers. We are
all descended, on average, from males who were better-than-average
murderous warriors. A second consequence of early male death in battle is highly
important yet little remarked: adult males were in a minority. Females
sometimes outnumbered them by two to one. Most men had at least one
“wife” and many had two or more. There was competition among women
to “get a man.” Warfare, then, was a way for males to get rid of
some of the competition. Genes in males who promoted warfare and who
were successful warriors spread throughout the population. We cannot hope to deal with modern conflict if we do not
recognize the hardwiring in young males that drives them to risky
activities and violence. Of course, the violence is only a means to an
end. It leads to high status, which is an important staging post on the
way to the end. However, the only end that counts is getting the genes
into the next generation. WORKING PATTERNS The men, meanwhile, would go off in ones and twos on their
hunting trips. Stealth was of the essence and so talking was kept to a
strict minimum, just enough to convey facts about their quarry. Often,
communication was simple signs. The men would follow prey along all
kinds of unpredictable paths. The prey decided “where to go” and the
men had to somehow keep track of where they were. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 201 Above Page
202 Below Laurens van der Post describes how he followed a band of Bushmen
while they chased an eland for several days: “The trail twisted and
turned so much that I had no idea where we were or in which direction
our camp lay. But Nxou [chief hunter] and his companions had no doubt.
That was one of the many impressive things about them. They were always
centered. They knew, without conscious effort, where their home was, as
we have seen proved on many other more than baffling occasions.” [25]. He should not have been so surprised. Many studies have shown
that men today still have remarkable powers of “way-finding”
compared to women. [26]. The men had a fine eye for the signs of suitable quarry—they
were expert trackers. When they hunted down a quarry, the result was
brutal: it was bludgeoned or stabbed to death. The spoils were hacked up
as necessary and carried back to the camp. The men’s occupation was
largely competitive and their status with other males depended on their
success. On return to the camp, each hunter would distribute the spoils in
a particular way: his wives and children received the largest part and
other portions were distributed to more remote relatives and people who
were owed debts. The actual details might vary with circumstance and
from tribe to tribe. However, there is one aspect that is a human
universal value and of fundamental importance: wives, and sometimes
other recipients, would receive more than they could consume, so they
would have a surplus they could use to endow gifts and return favors.
The wives and the rest of the man’s entourage would therefore derive
status from the exploits of “their” man. The women could easily collect enough food to feed the whole
family. However, a woman is vulnerable to someone stealing that food.
Higher-status women and other men were lying in wait to bully and
browbeat that woman out of her hard-won resources. The reason that this
rarely happened is simple: she had “her man” who would protect her
against any aggression. In chapter 1, we asked “Why would a woman need
a man?” Here, we have most of the answer: without a man committed to
her physical protection, the chances that she and her children would
survive were reduced. On average, women who were not driven to seek a
male bodyguard were less likely to get their genes into the next
generation. So, the women went out foraging every day and they took their
babes-in-arms (up to 4 years old) with them. Men were not invited to,
and did not volunteer for, the working party. The total working day was
4–5 hours and a woman could find enough food to feed the family. What
pointers are there for 202
Deadly Harvest Above 203
Page Below us today? We might tentatively suggest that it is normal for a
woman to go out to work, but that she has her small children with her.
It would be normal for a woman to work with other women and not with
men. It is probable that women have different inborn talents and ways of
working compared to men. They probably find comfort if their working
environment allows them to talk freely. In contrast, the men went hunting at irregular but frequent
intervals. Their activity was often dangerous, required strength,
violence, subtle reading of animal tracks, and ingenuity. They were
excited by the challenge and tended to underrate the risks. Mostly, they
worked alone and in silence and often their efforts were unsuccessful.
Sometimes, they formed teams that worked closely together to achieve a
kill. It was work that women could not do. The results of a man’s work
would decide his status with other men. If done well, it would buy him
gift-giving power and bring admiration and appreciation from his
womenfolk. What lessons might there be for us today? Again, this is
sensitive territory. However, we might tentatively suggest that men have
innate talents different from women’s talents. They prefer to work
alone or in a project-focused team with other men. Their way of working
would clash with women’s way of working if they had to work together.
A man needs to feel that his work is important and something women could
not do. He works hard for success, proudly anticipating the admiration
of his womenfolk. Until recent times, working patterns often fit quite closely to
this specification. Even in the upheaval of industrialization, most
occupations were segregated Male Hierarchy
Page
204 Below The women worked in large groups in factories, concentrating on
the finer work such as cotton and lace-making. The men did the perilous
and dirty jobs such as those in coal mines, shipbuilding, or blast
furnaces. The men took pride in their daily wrestle with danger; they
had a sense of fulfillment, of purpose, and of camaraderie. The Modern Workplace for Men and Women There is, however, a deeper and more potent source of distress. A
man’s work (hunting) was where he went to get his sense of identity,
where he found prestige and a sense of self-worth. A woman did not go to
work (foraging) to find her identity—she got that by being a mother to
her children. Modern ideas of work destabilize this major asymmetry. We
can expect a man to feel diminished if a woman does the same job; at the
least, he will not feel special or important. Here, we lose an important
prop to self-esteem, especially for a male of low status. The situation
gets even worse if, in the hierarchy, he is subordinate to a woman. In
these circumstances, the man’s workplace, instead of being his main
source of self-respect and status-enhancement, will be the opposite—an
unhappy place that reminds him daily of his mediocrity. An unplanned
consequence is that such men will seek their identity, status, and
prestige outside the workplace. Some might do it in innocent ways,
through pastimes, hobbies, and sports. Many others will find it in
street gangs, violence, and organized crime. A similar problem arises with equal pay. Until recent times, men
and women mostly worked in different occupations, so there was nothing
to compare. It gave a sense of responsibility and purpose for the man to
be the “breadwinner”— he took pride in it. He brought home more
pay than his wife and this gave him status. He was important to the
prestige of the family and the sharing out of his wages had direct
parallels with his forebears’ sharing out of meat. In recent years,
the workplace has become feminized. Coal miners, steelworkers, and
ship’s stokers have had to learn how to stack supermarket shelves and
flip hamburgers. Most occupations have women doing the same work as men
and they expect the same pay. This has an unexpected consequence:
men’s pay 204
Deadly Harvest Above Page
205 Below trended down to the level of women’s pay. The man’s salary is
no longer special. Indeed, in many situations, the woman can support
herself and her children on her own. As a hunter, a man would take pride in being quick-witted,
ingenious, and a master of solving the clues left by his quarry. A man
would feel his self-esteem swell as he recounted his exploits to the
other men. These exploits deployed a combination of hardwired talent and
intelligence. It was the kind of smartness that had no parallel in the
world of women. In our modern society, this aspect of human endeavor has
morphed into the process called “education.” Authorities have made
an immense effort to promote female scholarship: they bias teaching
methods to favor the way girls learn best. Boisterous boys are treated
as behavior problems and, under pressure from the schools, their parents
dope them with Ritalin to make them docile. [27]. The policy has worked. By the year 2003, 60% of American college
graduates were women. This sounds good, but it means that, for every
four women with a degree, there are only three men. One man in four will
find himself paired with a woman who is more educated than he is. This
is a third area where a low status male will be reminded daily of his
inadequacies. [28]. The “natural” order of things in the workplace has been upset
by social engineering. The irony is that most women will not see any
problem. If they earn more than their man, they will say, “I don’t
mind. What I earn is for both of us and I am happy to share it.” If
they are more educated than their man, it is a similar reaction. Women
in this situation are puzzled that their man is not consoled by such
generosity. For women, these matters are not central to their identity
and they cannot imagine the devastating feelings of inadequacy that a
man experiences. Many women today can now have their cake and eat it too. A
woman’s chief source of self-esteem and identity—her ability to have
a family—will never go away. At the same time, she can pursue an
occupation in ways that were unimaginable just a generation ago. Her
problems are the mirror image of the man’s. She will find it harder to
find a suitable man and when she does, her relationship with him will be
bedeviled by his crises of esteem and identity. If indeed she pursues a
high-powered, all-consuming career at the expense of developing a family
life, she might find that the harvest is bitter. Genes never let the majority of women ignore their true priority:
family and quality of life. This translates through to the money-earning
scores of women. If there is a sex-gap in pay, it is because women make
a clear trade-off between career and family. Social economist Satoshi
Kanazawa, who has carried out pioneering and detailed scientific
analyses in this field, states, “My conclusion is that the sex gap in
pay exists because women have better things to do than to earn money, reproductively speaking.” [29]. He makes the point that
money-earning for men is the route to getting more genes into the next
generation. This is not the case for women—their route is through
nurturing their offspring. Page
206 Below
Suckers, Cheats, and Grudgers Pale Ebenezer thought it
wrong to fight, “The first thing that happens
is a dramatic crash in the population of suckers as the cheats
ruthlessly exploit them. The cheats enjoy a soaring population
explosion, reaching their peak just as the last sucker perishes. But
the cheats still have the grudgers to reckon with. During the
precipitous decline of the suckers, the grudgers have been slowly
decreasing in numbers, taking a battering from the prospering cheats,
but just managing to hold their own. After the last sucker has gone
and the cheats can no longer get away with selfish exploitation so
easily, the grudgers slowly begin to increase at the cheats’
expense. In due course, the proportion of Suckers increases and the
cycle starts all over again.” This is a lurid analysis of the
social dynamics in many species, including humans. Forager society was
organized with checks and balances such that the tendency to cheating
was swiftly recognized and then punished. 207
Below Wrongdoing to the San is not always what might be expected. They
don’t think lying is particularly bad and stealing is so certain of
discovery that it rarely happened (“it would only lead to trouble”).
[31]. On the other hand, breaking
of respect for ownership of a resource is severely sanctioned. The
furious “owner” killed the man who took honey from the tree where
he, as “finder,” had made his mark. Other disputes arise over the
share of a major kill. There are no formal institutions for enforcing
rules, contracts, or obligations, so individuals or little groups have
to take matters into their own hands. Squabbles break out for all kinds
of reasons but, unlike those with neighboring tribes, they have to find
ways to resolve them internally. We now understand that human society (and even chimpanzee
society) operates on a transactional basis. Favors are given and
received, deals are done—society can only function if these
understandings operate properly. In this way, humans (and chimpanzees)
are programmed with social feelings: of obligation to someone for a
favor received, of rightful dues for favors given, of outrage against
cheating and injustice, of revenge against cheaters, and of retribution
to redress a wrong. People who are emotionally driven to retaliate
against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more
credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited. One of the curses of human nature is the vendetta: a grudge by
one group is avenged, which in turn provokes a new revenge. The cycle
continues seemingly without end. The 16th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes recognized that to
break the cycle an independent law enforcer was needed. In his major
work, Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that people
should be prevented from taking the law into their own hands. Rather,
they should entrust the redressing of grievances to a third party, the
state, that would impartially decide the case and carry out any
retribution. The state acts as intermediary, prevents revenge, and makes
punishment a neutral act. In this spirit, states around the world have The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 207 Above Page
208 Below instituted systems of justice and punishment on which they have
the monopoly. This system has proved to be remarkably successful in
reducing tit-for-tat punishments and the overall level of violence in
society. MALE-FEMALE RELATIONS In humans, males are, on average, 20% bigger than females. This
is a strong indication that human males have been hardwired over
millennia to physically compete with other males for access to females.
This competition has a number of consequences. Males who are not up to
success in physical combat might use other strategies. They will form
alliances with other males who act as their sidekicks. (Chimpanzees, who
do not benefit from physical superiority, deploy this strategy
frequently.) So, some males get to their objective by being good at
doing deals with other males. All males will be careful to avoid
revealing their weaknesses. In this way, males that are genetically
programmed to avoid showing their emotions, to avoid signs of distress
(such as crying), and to not talk about their feelings will all do
better in competition with other males. When males do talk, it will be
mainly to convey factual information that reveals nothing about their
degree of insecurity. In contrast, the female of our species is generally physically
weaker, less violent, and programmed to cooperate with other females in
the foraging workplace. However, they were also in competition with
others for resources and favors from “their man.” In this regard,
human females have developed two strategies: the first is physical and
aggressive, but the second is more prevalent and subtle. This is the use
of indirect means to obtain their objective—females who are good at
reading moods, analyzing motives, and probing for weakness, and who can
use these skills to undermine their rivals, will do best. More of their
genes will get into the next generation. Girls begin to show these
traits as young as three years old. [32]. There is a fundamental, and decisive, biological difference
between the sexes. The female can only have one pregnancy at a time,
while males can impregnate many females at a time. This asymmetry
applies throughout the animal kingdom. In the numbers game, genes that
get their host male to mate with many females rather than just one will
spread faster. There is, therefore, a strong 208
Deadly Harvest Above 209
Below selection pressure for males to mate with as many females as
possible. In contrast, there is no selection pressure for females to
mate with more than one male. She can still have only one pregnancy at a
time and the number of partners makes no difference. In humans, a
female’s success in child rearing depends on the commitment of a male
to protect her, so she will do even better if she can stop the male from
diluting his commitment with other females. We are all descended from males who, on average, impregnated many
different women. Geneticists estimate that an astonishing 8% of the
Mongol population is descended from Genghis Khan, who had many
concubines. [33]. In contrast, we are all
descended from females who were good at getting male commitment, were
clever at stopping the male from committing to other women, and
ruthlessly fought other women for a major share of the male’s
resources. Herein lies a strong source of male/female conflict—the
genetically programmed male agenda is diametrically opposed to the
female one. Sexual Selection Males are in strong competition to attract a woman. Those who are
not naturally endowed might try another tactic—bluff. A man might give
outward appearances of being strong and with good commitment potential,
but how is the female to be sure? How many of his stories about his
exploits are really true? Some males might be good at deception on this
score, so the female has to develop finely tuned antennae to detect it. How do truly meritorious males convince a female that they are
not bluffers? One interesting evolutionary strategy is handicapping. The
peacock trails a long cumbersome tail behind him, which makes him more
vulnerable to predators. So, why do cumbersome-tailed peacock genes
persist in the gene pool? The probable answer was first formulated by
Israeli researcher Amotz Zahavi. [35]. It is a way for a peacock to show a peahen that he really is
strong: he can carry this burden around and still survive. In modern
terms, it is like the man who drives a Hummer rather than a sensible
car—he is showing to the females that, in spite of the immense burden
of monthly payments and gas costs, he is fully functional and a
magnificent source of good genes. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 209 Above 210
Below Here, we have a powerful mechanism to explain why “keeping up
with the Jones’s” is a ubiquitous preoccupation: status is relative.
As soon as Hummers become common, males are driven to take on yet more
onerous commitments and habits. They must progressively strive for a
higher-status job, move to a better neighborhood, eat at expensive
restaurants, and wear pricey designer clothes. Even if the man is
married, he cannot step off the treadmill: his wife gets her status from
her husband and she will be pushing him just the same. There is a huge
irony in all of this. Evolutionarily speaking, the only purpose of a
male striving for high status is to get more matings than average and so
more genes into the next generation. In modern Western society, the
process of acquiring status symbols becomes the end in itself. The
reason? The Western concept of marriage. Marriage How do the man and woman find each other? The woman’s first
marriage is usually when she is very young. In San society, a girl’s
first marriage is between 13 and 15 years of age, before she has reached
puberty.38 The parents will negotiate a
marriage with a carefully selected man. They try for the best status
they can find—someone who will bring security, reflected glory, and
some Female Puberty and Fertility 211
Below
In our discussion so far, we have avoided stating the obvious:
that human societies are by nature polygamous, or more precisely “polygynous.”
That is, The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 211 Above 212
Below they are societies where males (but not females) have more than
one mate at a time. In other words, polygyny is a human universal value.
Most populations of the world today practice it—the only major
exception is Western culture, where monogamy is the socially imposed
rule. This was not always the case. The doctrines associated with
monogamy were adopted by the Christian church in the early Middle Ages.
Up until that time, even popes and priests had wives and concubines.
Then, an ancient Greek mind-virus known as “asceticism” took hold.
Asceticism takes the view that true spirituality can only be obtained
through abstinence of earthly needs, including sex. According to the
ascetic doctrine, celibacy is the ideal that we should all strive for.
However, being practical, the church recognized that humans need to
reproduce. It adopted a compromise doctrine that allowed ordinary folk
to make babies but kept the sexuality to a minimum. A man could marry
just one woman, provided he entered an indissoluble contract to stay
with her for life. The Christian sect was determined to regulate the
marital and sex lives of its adherents. By various means, it got kings
and parliaments to adopt monogamy into law and make it virtually
impossible to divorce. However, the instituting of monogamy has some interesting
consequences. It intervenes massively in a delicate balance, the one
where men strive for several mates and women strive for an exclusive
deal. This intervention hands women the exclusive deal. To make sure
that there is no back-sliding, the marriage contract is shored up with
legally enforced sanctions. In practical terms, the male’s
evolutionary drive is subordinated to the satisfaction of the female’s
evolutionary drive. Secondly, it has the effect of distributing the females almost
equally among the men. This is good for low-status males, for even they
will find someone to pair up with. It is even more important in modern
societies, where the proportion of males is equal to females. The limits
to this were illustrated in the aftermath of World War I. During that
time, the major combatants, France, England, and Germany, lost young men
at the same rate as in hunter-gatherer times. As a result, there was a
dearth of young men after the war. With the rigidities of monogamy, many
young women stayed in spinsterhood for the rest of their lives. We saw earlier that in Pleistocene times, high-status men would
have many offspring and low-status men few or none. The kinds of genes
that make for high status in Pleistocene times included those for
risk-taking, bravery, strength, aggressivity, heroism, female
protection, ingenuity, and hunting skills. In the Western world, for
over 1,000 years now, genes in low-status men have been spread at the
same rate as those for high-status men. No one knows what this means for
the future. Mating Games 212
Deadly Harvest Above 213
Below with another woman. But why would a woman be interested in taking
a lover? After all, she only needs one man at a time: a second man
contributes nothing to the number of children she can have or the
protection that the husband provides. The main answer, unsurprisingly,
lies in the genes. A woman might be attracted to another man if her
genes sense that he will give her offspring a better start in life. A
woman may well have a husband, but does he have the best genes in the
barnyard? If she has a low-status husband, her current genes will do
better if she can mate with a man whose genes are better than her
husband’s. She will be attracted to mate discreetly with high-status
males. Whence the excessive insecurity of a low-status male when a
high-status male is hovering around his wife. Conformity of individual members to the norms of the group is
shored up by social emotions such as moral outrage, revenge, remorse,
and guilt. The emotions themselves are human universal values, but the
norms to which they are applied are not. In the West, we are conditioned
to the idea that monogamy is the social norm. It is interesting to
notice how the social emotions are expressed when confronted with
norm-breakers, particularly males. The full weight of moral outrage is
unleashed against them: they are called “cheats,” “two-timers,”
“home-breakers,” and “cads.” The husband has only given his commitment to the raising of his
own genes. One of the worst things that can happen to a gene is that it
finds itself in a body which, instead of promoting further copies of
itself, is promoting someone else’s copies. Such a case can occur if
the wife has been sexually active with some other male. The husband
could find himself raising another male’s genes. Males are therefore
descended from a line of males who did a better than average job of
ensuring that they were raising their own genes. How did they do this?
There are several gene strategies and the most powerful is that the gene
is coded to provoke feelings of sexual jealousy. The male, once he has
made a commitment to the female, will be jealous, almost insanely so. He
will get violent if he senses that his woman is attracted to another man
and if higher-status men are interested in her. Jealous violence also
has a preemptive role in deterring infidelity. These effects are
strongest if the woman is in her prime for childbearing and if the male
is low status. [42]. Even so, no man is exempt
from these emotions— they are part of the hardwiring. This brings us to one of the fundamental worries for a woman, an
emotion deeply programmed from our Pleistocene past—fear of neglect
and abandonment. On average, the genes of women who allowed themselves
to be neglected or abandoned did not survive so well. She will be
constantly seeking reassurance that her man is not planning any changes.
She has sensitive antennae trying to second-guess his thoughts. A woman
will be jealous of a rival mainly because she fears dilution of his
commitment, resources, and status, even abandonment. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 213 Above 214
Below So far, we have been talking rather mechanistically, but what
about love and affection? These are powerful emotions, a kind of madness
even. Nevertheless, it is a human universal value that, in the matter of
marriage, they take a secondary role. The vast majority of societies
(outside the Western middle class) see marriage as a contract, best
arranged by those who have a cool understanding of the issues. They see
the addled states of lust and romantic love as an unreliable basis for
such an important commitment. In forager societies, women are more focused on keeping their
children alive than on developing intimacy with their husbands. [43]. Love is the icing on the
cake: all other things being equal, women still prefer men with whom
they can develop an intimate and emotionally satisfying relationship, [44] although this appears to be
more of a luxury than a necessity. [45]. Women also prefer men with whom they feel
physically safe and who are physically capable of protecting them should
the need arise. [46]. Sexual jealousy is not the only reason why domestic situations
turn to violence. We have seen that there is asymmetry in the way women
and men handle problems. Women are good at using words and they use this
ability to pursue their argument by indirect means with elaborate
emotional verbal tactics. Men, on average, are not good at handling
emotional verbal cut-and-thrust. The female ability to exquisitely
torment their dignity and self-esteem maddens them. They feel impotent,
frustrated, and outmaneuvered, faced with the seeming irrational,
unjust, and slippery nature of the argument. In contrast, men are made
to pursue their arguments by simple, direct means: physically. In other
words, men are best at physical warfare, while women are best at
psychological warfare. There are several reasons why domestic conflict in forager
societies was low. First, women and men were thrown together less—they
simply did not interact in areas where they were psychologically
unsuited. Also, in modern society, both women and men have heightened
expectations of the other, expectations that are unrealistic and
frustratingly unrealizable. Finally, should a dispute arise in a forager
society, the man had no hesitation parrying the woman’s psychological
aggression with some low-level physical aggression. In the modern world,
the use of physical aggression is thoroughly condemned, which has the
interesting consequence of disarming men in domestic disputes, leaving
the female verbal and psychological weaponry intact. Many men can cope
with this, but all have to suppress their natural inclinations. PARENTING 214
Deadly Harvest Above 215
Below Fertility Assessment How does a man tell if a woman
is fertile? He has no way of directly measuring it, however, his genes
have an indirect way—he detects “attractiveness.” Women rated
attractive by men consistently have higher levels of reproductive
hormones and fertility. On average, a woman who looks young, has a
curvy hourglass shape, [48] taut and vibrant skin, [49] good muscle tone, a pleasing
voice, [50] and exudes a mysterious aura of
sexuality [51] is probably fertile. These signals might only be a crude guide, but
on average a man would do better to mate with a woman like that than
one who did not display these signs. A male can never be totally sure if he is the father of the
children borne by his wives. This uncertainty plays itself out in many
ways. One of them has to do with nephews and nieces. In many societies,
men develop stronger relationships with their sister’s offspring than
with the ones that purport to be theirs. He and his sister have the same
mother with total certainty. In other words, he is bound to share some
genes with his nephews and nieces by his sister. Many societies such as
the Romans and Anglo-Saxons worked this out, even if they did not know
about genes—they talked about being “blood relations” and sharing
“bloodlines.” All this is not to say that forager fathers ignored children
totally. He will happily dandle a small child on his knee for a bit, but
the child is part of the women’s world and his role, at this stage, is
to be protective of his child’s safety and interests. Only when a boy
is approaching his rite of passage to manhood does the father take on a
responsibility for his daily instruction—he becomes his buddy. In
modern times, do not expect a father to change a diaper with any sense
of warm, nurturing love. In contrast, expect him to intervene forcefully
if his child is bullied in the park, and he will be right there when it
is time to take his son to a ballgame. Child Rearing The Savanna Model Lifestyle
215 Above 216
Below child rearing for all of our evolutionary past. It is therefore
likely that parents and children are genetically programmed for this
child-rearing pattern even today. In forager populations (typified by
the San), on average, women had their first child at 19 years old and
the last by the age of 49. The mother usually goes off into the bush
alone to give birth. [52]. Australian Aborigines
followed a similar pattern. If the group is on the move, the woman pulls
off to the side to give birth, tie the umbilical cord, and wash the baby
if there is water nearby. If she is in camp, she will go off into the
bush with another woman for companionship. [53]. It is a human universal value
that childbirth is treated as an entirely female and private matter. Men
are not invited to, and show no interest in, its mysteries. Infant mortality is high: 20% die within the first year of life.
On occasion, the mother practiced infanticide on the newborn for one or
more reasons: if the child is born too soon after an earlier one; if it
is physically defective; if twins are born (in which case one is
killed); or if the woman feels too old to breastfeed another baby. [54]. The Aboriginal women gave
birth to six to eight children in a lifetime, of which estimates suggest
that nearly half were killed at birth. [55]. There is no suggestion that there is any gender
choice in these life-and-death decisions. Babies and toddlers are breastfed until about three to four years
old. The mother then introduces easily chewed, solid foods after the
first teeth have broken through. Children tended to be spaced at least
four years apart. That is, a new child is not allowed to compete with an
older child for the mother’s breast milk. The San believed that breast milk was for the fetus, so a woman
stopped breastfeeding a child as soon as she became pregnant again, not
when the new baby was born. At this point, the current child is weaned
and has to manage entirely on solid foods. Weaning is never an easy time
and children often suffer depression that lasts a long time. During the day, the mother carries her baby in a light sling on
her hip. The baby is facing forward and has unfettered access to the
breast. The child suckles at will, even if he is not getting any milk.
The sucking reflex appears to be an Natural Family Planning 217
Below Almost as bad as weaning from mother’s milk is the process of
“weaning from the back”—when the mother ceases to carry a child
once a new baby is born. From then on, the older child is not carried
again. But children love to be carried, they delight in the physical
contact with their mothers, and they hate the pressures imposed by
toddling to keep up with the mother’s foraging. Weaning from the back
gives rise to similar kinds of behavior as breast weaning: temper
tantrums, refusals to walk, demands to be carried, and refusal to be
left in the village while the mother goes gathering. Sibling Conflict At another level, genes sitting in a child will try to improve
his survival chances by restricting competition from newcomers. For a
baby suckling at his mother’s breast, the worst thing that can happen
to his genes is if the mother gets pregnant too early. She will stop
breastfeeding him, thus increasing his chances of dying. Hardwiring
makes small babies ultra-sensitive to their mother becoming intimate
with a man. If there is the slightest suspicion, the baby becomes
demanding, tries to divert attention, cries, and bawls. The distraught
mother drops any amorous intentions and seeks to find out what can be
ailing the child. There is nothing wrong with him, but she is not to
know that. This is one reason why young children want to climb into
their parents’ bed. Their chief, pre-programmed drive is to keep their
parents apart. In other words, we are all descended from a succession of
infants who were successful at slowing down the arrival of new,
competing siblings. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 217 Above 218
Below Parent-Child Conflict Childhood Although a forager child circulates freely, he nevertheless has
an acute sense of his place in the family tree. From an early age, he
knows his mother and then identifies his father, brothers, sisters, and
other relatives. He seems to have an instinct that immediately fixes the
degree of genetic relatedness and therefore the degree of genetic
investment that can be expected. Children, once weaned from the woman’s back, stay behind in the
campsite with the older women and the men who were not hunting that day.
The children were mostly left to play among themselves, but the
grandmothers kept a watchful eye on them. Not many species have
lifespans that cover three generations, so there must be an evolutionary
reason why this should be—something about having grandparents around
that promotes survival of their genes in their grandchildren.
Researchers believe that grandparents, and in particular grandmothers,
played a vital role in the survival of humanity. [59]. Grandmothers are strongly
programmed to nurture their grandchildren. Both boys and girls would sometimes accompany the women on their
foraging expeditions and thereby learn some foraging skills. However,
they were not expected to forage on behalf of the family. From the age
of about 11, boys were inducted into hunting with the men; girls never
went on the hunt. [60]. There were not many children in the typical band, perhaps 20 or
so from 218
Deadly Harvest Above 219
Below infancy to 14 years old. [61]. Unlike in modern societies, where children of the
same age are put together, each forager child found himself with only
one or two others in a similar age group. Older children helped younger
children and taught them what they knew, and younger children were
dragged upwards in games by having to compete with older children. Researcher Marjorie Shostak recorded the life histories of eight
San women. [62]. According to her account, older children were involved in sex
play, including sexual intercourse. The adults regarded this as
unexceptional, but scolded the children if they were not discreet. There
is an innate prudery at all levels and no one likes to be observed. This
may explain why daughters were married off before puberty—that is,
before they get pregnant without a man to take responsibility. In this
regard, it is interesting to consider the question of incest avoidance.
Normally, children grow up with an aversion to having sexual relations
with their close kin. This is a product of childhood “imprinting,”
the phenomenon we mentioned earlier in the section on taboo. Our brains
are hardwired with an instruction that says: “If you have grown up
with this person in your family, don’t even think about being intimate
with him.” On the other hand, if a child is separated from his or her
close kin at birth, there is no such imprinting. An Indulgent Upbringing Children mostly stayed within the circle of the camp. The adults
taught them about dangers, but, in reality, the risks of their life in
the encampment were few. The adults kept a wary eye out for the children
if they strayed out into the bush. On the whole, in their simple lives,
there was little need for the adults to nag and scold the children. No
worries about the children messing something up, being dirty, breaking
valuable objects, or running into traffic. The general picture is of a
carefree childhood with few responsibilities and the comfort of being
surrounded by a benevolent community of relatives, leading to a
well-adjusted existence. When we look at both our ancient history and our understanding of
genetic biology, we can identify some suggestive pointers for today.
Ideally, it looks as The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 219 Above 220
Below though a woman should allow at least four years between births.
She should allow breastfeeding/sucking for at least three years. She
should provide plenty of intimate body contact and avoid giving the baby
the impression that it is forgotten or abandoned; the child sleeps with
her. The family would live in convenient daily contact with a large
extended family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Grandmothers are on
hand all the time and have a vital child-care role. The environment
should allow an indulgent upbringing with little need for scolding. These are apparently the desirable goals, but they are a long way
from modern life. Perhaps only the first one—four-year birth
spacing—would be simple to implement today. Nevertheless, once a
mother understands these goals, she has a chance of steering her life in
a helpful direction. She can avoid fighting harmful battles and focus on
the necessary ones. Sibling rivalry is a genetically programmed feature
of existence and parents have to battle it even-handedly as best they
can. Parent-child conflict is normal in many areas: weaning is always a
difficult time with tantrums and tears and the mother has to resist them
in a sensible way. Weaning from the intimate body contact is also a
difficult time: it is normal for the child to be depressed. Parents have
to resist manipulation by the child’s psychological warfare. MYTHS AND RITUALS Many males were killed in battle, so there were not so many
living well into old age, but one would be designated as the headman. He
was the successful survivor of many life-and-death battles, the
high-status “alpha-male,” and he had many wives and children. The
remaining elders were also venerated in some way, and they were the
repository of know-how and tribal memory. Old men were indispensable
sources of survival expertise and entertaining stories, the precious
guardians of the tribal heritage. In contrast with today’s society,
old people were not only useful, they fulfilled an essential role in the
well-being of the band. 220
Deadly Harvest Above 221
Below People cluster in little groups during the day, often talking as
they make artifacts or perform other tasks. At night, families talk late
by their fires or visit other family fires with their children.
Frequently, the men and women form their own groups. The subjects of
discussion are quite distinct. “The men’s imagination turns to
hunting. They converse musingly, as though enjoying a sort of daydream
together, about past hunts, telling over and over again where game was
found and who killed it. They wonder where the game is at present, and
say what fat bucks they hope to kill. They also plan their next hunts
with practicality.” [63]. The women talk about who did
or did not share food with them as well as their anxieties about not
having food. They also complain about their arduous foraging day and the
long trudge home. They talk at length about their lovers, husbands,
sexual experiences, or the time they went into the bush to give birth.
They would not dream of discussing such matters when a man is in
earshot, because men had “their talk” and women had theirs. [64]. All primal peoples, whether we look at the San, Australian
Aborigines, or Hadza, are deeply attached to their land and feel deeply
connected to the nature that surrounds them. In tests made on people
from all over the world, they consistently picked out a picture of blue
sky, rolling parkland, and the occasional animal as being the most
pleasing. [65]. Other studies show that
American children are less likely to suffer distress if they live in
natural surroundings of greenery rather than in concrete buildings and
asphalt-lined parking lots. [66]. The closer we are to natural surroundings, the more comfortable
we feel. The San dance on many occasions. Both men and women dance, often
all night long, working themselves up into a delirium. This kind of
behavior is a human universal value and it does not require much
imagination to see Western parallels with the atmosphere in nightclubs
and discos. People everywhere like doing it and clearly there is some
kind of healthy mental relief to be found from the experience. About
once a week, the San adult males indulge in a sacred “fire dance”
that goes on from dusk until dawn. [67]. All the members of the band are present and the
women sit in a tight circle singing and clapping and helping to raise
the state of dancing frenzy. The men dance in a circle around the women
until they go into a trance-like state, where they have mystical,
hallucinatory experiences. In this state, and foaming at the mouth, they
literally play with fire, skipping through the embers or even scooping
up them up. The men describe their experience as a process of death and
rebirth. “You give up what you are, give up your identity, enter the
unknown, willingly going into fundamental mysteries and so enter the
state of transcendence.” [68]. The American professor of comparative mythology,
Joseph Campbell, describes this as the classic tale of the hero’s
journey into the unknown. The boy becomes a man and the man becomes a
hero. After the dance, the Bushman is reborn as an ordinary, fully
functioning man. These are deep themes, found all over the world and in
all societies. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 221 Above 222
Below Rites of Passage Up to now, the hunt has been a mysterious activity of the mature,
initiated males. They disappeared into the bush for hours or days on end
and, on their return, related proud tales of valor, ingenuity, and
derring-do. Often, they came back with the meat-prize, something which
raised their status in the eyes of those who depended on them. It is a
big moment in the life of a boy when he is allowed on his first hunt.
This immediately separates him from his sisters and mother—this is
something that the womenfolk will never experience. In a similar way, many spiritual matters have been surrounded in
mystery. “It is forbidden to talk of these things except by men who
have been initiated in the mysteries of the dance,” reported a Bushman
to Laurens van der Post.69
Now religious secrets are
revealed. As part of this process, the initiate is required to commune
for the first time with the “supernatural,” which he does in trances
induced by frenzied dancing, fasting, or the use of mind-altering
plants. Often, body parts are modified as part of the ritual: penises
are circumcised, noses are pierced, teeth are filed, or faces are
tattooed. Without them, the male is not a fully-fledged adult. Finally,
the boy has to undergo an ordeal. The manner of the ordeal varies
enormously from society to society, but they all have one thing in
common: the boy has to show bravery worthy of a man. When he has
finished, he knows in his soul that he is now a man. In Western culture, there was, up until recent times, machinery
that reflected similar processes, albeit in a much weaker form and with
patchier coverage. Traditionally, these were provided by military
academies, boarding schools, and various quasi-military cadet
organizations. Civilian examples include the Boys’ Brigade and the Boy
Scouts. They all had their rituals, traditions, and ordeals. Now, the
Boy Scouts have had to eliminate rough, body-contact games and, after a
Supreme Court ruling, military academies are obliged to admit women. In
many areas, initiation ceremonies have been driven underground and often
take dysfunctional forms. Thus, clandestine university fraternity
“hazings” and military initiation ordeals occasionally give rise to
scandal, accusations of bullying, and even death of the initiate. In many ways, we have dismantled male initiation rituals. We are
raising a population of boy-men, in touch with their feminine side but
hesitant in their masculinity. It should not be surprising, then, if
some young men prefer life in a street gang or criminal activity. There,
they find the excitement, danger, challenges, 222
Deadly Harvest Above 223
Below and combat that their souls crave. Of course, many men are able
to divert their primitive instincts into ones that are more socially
acceptable. For example, low-status males might find an outlet in
competitive sports by becoming a star player at basketball or football.
Schools used to understand this very well and made sure that every boy
developed himself in competitive games; this is not necessarily the case
anymore. Other men find satisfaction in intellectual pursuits, such as a
fulfilling career as a doctor, journalist, or architect; these are the
lucky ones. Most men still end up as bank clerks, assembly-line workers,
and shop assistants. Males experience a midlife crisis when it dawns on
them that they will never make it to the top—their fate is to join the
ranks of the also-rans. In our Pleistocene past, men were daily presented with
opportunities to be heroic. This heroism was driven by the rewards: the
admiration of the womenfolk and the opportunity to win a new woman. It
is a theme present throughout all folklore right up to the present day.
Now, if a young man goes up to his sweetheart and says, “I want to
prove myself to you, give me something dangerous to do,” she is most
likely to say “Don’t be silly, you might get yourself killed.”
Most men today will live their lives never having been heroic. It is
remarkable how many men now in their eighties, having led uneventful
adult careers, revert to reminiscences of their youthful exploits in
boot camp. It was the episode that defined their identity, just like an
initiation rite, which in a way it was. Heroism, of course, is a high-risk activity and the hero could
lose his life. How did our forebears cope with the early deaths of young
men? Part of the answer lies in the initiation rite. At this time, the
mother experiences the brutal wrenching of her child away from her—she
loses her “little boy” to the world of men and feels a sense of loss
and bereavement. Today, we fight death at every turn and refuse to “go
gentle into that good night.” LESSONS FOR TODAY Within this group, there were sub-groups, notably the family,
consisting of mother and children plus father. A significant feature of
the family grouping is that it is much more loosely knit than our
so-called nuclear families of today. The ancient fundamental or nuclear
family unit was the mother and child. This has been a special
relationship down through the ages in all cultures. Fathers floated
around in the inner circle, but were not part of the nucleus. It is to
the chagrin of many husbands when they find that, as soon as a child is
born, they are no longer the center of their wife’s attention, which
is now focused on the baby. The
Savanna Model Lifestyle 223 Above 224
Below As soon as the child was weaned from his mother’s back, he was
brought up in large part by the grandmother and other relations. The
father played only a small role. In her daily life, the mother had long
conversations with other mothers while foraging and with all women when
back at the camp. The father was chiefly solitary while on the hunt and
indulged in “man-talk” with the other men back at the camp. The
husband interacted with his wife for short periods of the day, mainly to
discuss factual matters and arrange the food sharing, most of which had
been contributed by her. In other words, the women mostly found their companionship with
other women. The men found their companionship in their solitary
communion with nature on the hunt and with the other men back at the
camp. Even so, we must visualize these separate gatherings going on
within the close confines of the encampment. The groups were only a few
feet apart and, even if they had separate conversations, they would feel
close to one another. The children would wander freely from one to the
other. This picture contrasts sharply with how Western society has
evolved, in just the last 50 years. Not only today’s mother but also
the father are expected to be round-the-clock parenting machines. In
fact, they are victims of the “Blank Slate” philosophy, bamboozled
into believing that their children are amorphous lumps of putty who
would stay that way unless they spend every moment of the day shaping
them with constant entertainment, instruction, and “quality time.”
Parents are made to feel guilty for every misfortune and inadequacy that
befalls their children. However, a host of studies, including those on
identical twins brought up in different environments, show that they
grow up with the same personalities. A parent can ensure that a child
learns the piano where another does not, but as people they grow up just
the same.70 Mostly, the child’s genes
orchestrate how he or she turns out, even down to political affiliation
and degree of religiosity. [71]. In the words of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, “All those
differences among parents and homes have no predictable long-term
effects on the personalities of their children. Not to put a fine point
on it, but much of the advice from parenting experts is so much
flapdoodle.” [72]. In a similar way, there is an expectation among middle-class
Western parents that they should be companions for each other. In one
sense, they are: they operate as a team to ensure the survival and
well-being of the genes lying in their offspring. However, in almost
every other way, metaphorically speaking, men and women are from
different planets. John Gray, in his book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, confronted head-on the
doctrine that men and women should have identical drives and
personalities. [73]. As we have seen, they have
different desires, objectives, ways of talking (and of not talking),
ways of working, parenting, interests, innate talents, and physical
attributes. The relationship between husband and wife in middle-class Western
society is one of the most vexed. It plainly is not working and has to
be constantly 224
Deadly Harvest Above 225
Below maintained and repaired by a massive industry of marriage
guidance counselors, self-help books, and talk show therapists. Many of
them identify the symptoms quite accurately. However, no one outside
evolutionary psychology draws the obvious conclusion: that the way we
structure family life today is excruciatingly dysfunctional. It is as
though we put a cat and a dog—both excellent creatures in their own
right—into a sack and expect them to get along. Men and women need to structure their joint lives differently.
Today, we expect a man and a woman to coexist in intense proximity in a
little box. However, as we have seen, although a husband and wife might
have concern and affection for each other, they do not make natural
round-the-clock buddies. And if the reader feels we have focused more on
the male predicament than the female one, this flows naturally from the
state of affairs today. The Western world has become feminized to such
an extent that the male qualities mentioned earlier—risk-taking,
bravery, strength, aggressivity, heroism, female protection, ingenuity,
hunting skills—have no place or role. In forager society, each individual had a much higher degree of
“social connectedness,” a phrase sociologists use to describe the
number and quality of links a person has with other members of the wider
family. Husbands and wives had less intensity of contact with each other
but a much richer and developed suite of contacts with everyone else in
the band. This looser arrangement is the “natural” state. In this chapter, we have explored the way our ancient ancestors
lived their lives for eons. We have seen how many factors, such as the
power of our genes, quite naturally lead to conflict in many situations
and to harmony in others. This overview has brought out the major themes
controlling our feelings, which in turn control the way we behave. In a
great many ways, they operate at cross-purposes to the way our modern
society demands. Since the farming revolution, humans, without realizing
it, have been forced to pioneer new manners of living. In the process,
many natural checks and balances have been removed and artificial ones
have been instituted. We have mostly avoided making formal recommendations and instead
we lay out the issues for you to think about. Our society is structured
with such rigidities that in many respects it is hard to change your own
life within it. However, examine the issues and question how they relate
to your own circumstances. You may find that you can make adjustments,
subtle or otherwise, that help you get in touch with the naturally
adapted heritage that makes you most comfortable. Our evolutionary psychology illustrates how our current lives are
out of sorts with our savanna-bred natures. This discord is adversely
affecting our health just as our nutritional habits are. We must
remember, too, that there is no going back. We have become so numerous
that our prosperity and survival depend on structuring society in new,
complex, and unproven ways.
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