Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (24 page)

panorama

in

all

its

mistaken

despair:

“Competition for limited resources is the engine of evolutionary change,” he writes. “Any population that reproduces without inhibition will eventually outstrip the resources upon which it depends and, as numbers swell, individuals will have no alternative but to compete more and more desperately for dwindling resources. Those who can secure them will flourish, and those who cannot will die.”9

True, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far, because Smith forgets that our ancestors were the original ramblin’

men (and women)—nomads who rarely stopped walking for more than a few days at a stretch. Walking away is what they did best. Why assume they would have stuck around to struggle “desperately” in an overpopulated area with depleted resources when they could simply walk up the beach, as they’d been doing for uncounted generations? And prehistoric human beings never reproduced “without inhibition,” like rabbits. Far from it. In fact, prehistoric world population growth is estimated to have been well below .001 percent per year throughout prehistory10—hardly the population bomb Malthus assumed.

Basic human reproductive biology in a foraging context made rapid population growth unlikely, if not impossible. Women rarely conceive while breastfeeding, and without milk from domesticated animals, hunter-gatherer women typically breastfeed each child for five or six years. Furthermore, the demands of a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle make carrying more than one small child at a time unreasonable for a mother—even assuming lots of help from others. Finally, low body-fat levels result in much later menarche for hunter-gatherer females than for their post-agricultural sisters.

Most foragers don’t start ovulating until their late teens, resulting in a shorter reproductive life.11

Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin were themselves surrounded by the desperate effects of population saturation (rampant infectious disease, ceaseless war, Machiavellian struggles for power). The prehistoric world, however, was sparsely populated—where it was populated at all. Other than isolated pockets surrounded by desert, or islands like Papua New Guinea, the prehistoric world was almost all open frontier.

Most scholars believe that our ancestors were just setting out from Africa about fifty thousand years ago, entering Europe five or ten thousand years later.12 The first human footprints probably weren’t left on North American soil until about twelve thousand years ago.13 During the many millennia before agriculture, the entire number of
Homo sapiens
on the planet probably never surpassed a million people and certainly never approached the current population of Chicago.

Furthermore, recently obtained DNA analyses suggest several population bottlenecks caused by environmental catastrophes reduced our species to just a few hundred individuals as recently as 70,000 years ago.14

Ours is a very young species. Few of our ancestors faced the unrelenting scarcity-generated selective pressures envisioned by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin. The ancestral human journey did not, by and large, take place in a world already saturated with our kind, fighting over scraps. Rather, the route taken by the bulk of our ancestors led through a long series of ecosystems with nothing quite like us already there. Like the Burmese pythons recently set loose in the Everglades, cane toads spreading unchecked across Australia, or the timber wolves recently reintroduced to Yellowstone, our ancestors were generally entering an open ecological niche. When Hobbes wrote that “Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe,” he was unaware of just how cooperative and communicative wolves can be if there’s enough food for everyone. Individuals in species spreading into rich new ecosystems aren’t locked in a struggle to the death against one another. Until the niche is saturated,

such

intraspecies

conflict

over

food

is

counterproductive and needless.15

We’ve already shown that even in a largely empty world, the social lives of foragers were anything but solitary. But Hobbes also claimed prehistoric life was
poor,
and Malthus believed poverty to be eternal and inescapable. Yet most foragers don’t believe themselves to be impoverished, and there’s every indication that life wasn’t generally much of a struggle for our fire-controlling, highly intelligent ancestors bound together in cooperative bands. To be sure, occasional catastrophes such as droughts, climatic shifts, and volcanic eruptions were devastating. But most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world, chock-full of food. For hundreds of thousands of generations, the omnivore’s dilemma facing our ancestors lay in choosing among many culinary options.

Plants eat soil; deer eat plants; cougars eat deer. But people can and do eat almost anything—including cougars, deer, plants, and yes, even soil.16

The Despair of Millionaires

Poverty … is the invention of civilization.

MARSHALL SAHLINS

A recent
New York Times
article under the headline “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” begins,

“By almost any definition—except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley—Hal Steger has it made.” The article notes that although Mr. Steger and his wife have a net worth of roughly $3.5 million, he still typically works twelve-hour days plus another ten hours on weekends.

“A few million,” explains Steger, “doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

Gary Kremen (estimated net worth: $10 million), founder of Match.com, an online dating service, explains, “Everyone around here looks at the people above them.” He continues to work sixty to eighty hours per week because, he says,

“You’re nobody here at $10 million.” Another executive gets right to the point, saying, “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”17

This sort of thinking isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. A BBC

report from September 2003 reported, “Well-off is the new poor.” Dr. Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, set out to study the “suffering rich” and found that four of every ten people earning over £50,000 (roughly $80,000 at the time) felt “deprived.” Hamilton concluded,

“The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the imagined concerns of today’s rich.” Another recent survey in the United States found that 45 percent of those with a net worth (excluding their home) over $1 million were worried about running out of money before they died. Over one-third of those with more than $5 million had the same concern.18

“Affluenza” (a.k.a. luxury fever) is not an eternal affliction of the human animal, as some would have us believe. It is an effect of wealth disparities that arose with agriculture. Still, even in modern societies, we sometimes find echoes of the ancient egalitarianism of our ancestors.

In the early 1960s, a physician named Stewart Wolf heard about a town of Italian immigrants and their descendants in northeast Pennsylvania where heart disease was practically unknown. Wolf decided to take a closer look at the town, Roseto. He found that almost no one under age fifty-five showed symptoms of heart disease. Men over sixty-five suffered about half the number of heart problems expected of average Americans. The overall death rate in Roseto was about one-third below national averages.

After conducting research that carefully excluded factors such as exercise, diet, and regional variables like pollution levels, Wolf and sociologist John Bruhn concluded that the major factor keeping folks in Roseto healthier longer was
the nature
of the community itself.
They noted that most households held three generations, that older folks commanded great respect, and that the community disdained any display of wealth, showing a “fear of ostentation derived from an ancient belief among Italian villagers relating to
maloccio
(the evil eye).

Children,” Wolf wrote, “were taught that any display of wealth or superiority over a neighbor would bring bad luck.” Noting that Roseto’s egalitarian social bonds were already breaking down in the mid-1960s, Wolf and Bruhn predicted that within a generation, the town’s mortality rates would start to shift upward. In follow-up studies they conducted 25 years later, they reported, “The most striking social change was a widespread rejection of a long standing taboo against ostentation,” and that “sharing, once typical of Roseto, had given way to competition.” Rates of both heart disease and stroke had doubled in a generation.19

Among foragers, where property is shared, poverty tends to be a nonissue. In his classic book
Stone Age Economics,
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that “the world’s most primitive people have few possessions,
but they are not
poor.
Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”20 Socrates made the same point 2,400 years ago: “He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.” But the wealth of civilization is material. After reading every word of the
Old Testament,
journalist David Plotz was struck by its mercantile tone. “The overarching theme of the Bible,” he wrote, “particularly of Genesis, is real estate. God is …

constantly making land deals (and then remaking them, on different terms)…. It’s not just land that the Bible is obsessed with, but also portable property: gold, silver, livestock.”21

Malthus and Darwin were both struck by the characteristic egalitarianism of foragers, the former writing, “Among most of the American tribes … so great a degree of equality prevailed that all the members of each community would be nearly equal sharers in general hardships of savage life and in the pressure of occasional famines.”22 For his part, Darwin recognized the inherent conflict between the capital-based
civilization
he knew and what he saw as the natives’

self-defeating generosity, writing, “Nomadic habits, whether over wide plains, or through the dense forests of the tropics, or along the shores of the sea, have in every case been highly detrimental…. The perfect equality of all the inhabitants,” he wrote, “will for many years prevent their civilization.”23

Finding Contentment “at the Bottom

of the Scale of Human Beings”

Looking for an example of the world’s most downtrodden, pathetic, desperately poor “savages,” Malthus cited “the wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” who had been judged by European travelers to be “at the bottom of the scale of human beings.” Just thirty years later Charles Darwin was in Tierra del Fuego, observing these same people. He agreed with Malthus concerning the Fuegians, writing in his journal,

“I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.”

As chance would have it, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the
Beagle—
the ship on which Darwin was sailing—had picked up three young Fuegians on an earlier voyage, and brought them back to England to introduce them to the glories of British life and a proper Christian education. Now, after they’d experienced firsthand the superiority of civilized living, FitzRoy was returning them to their own people to serve as missionaries. The plan was for them to show the Fuegians the folly of their “savage” ways and help them join the civilized world.

But just a year after Jemmy, York, and Fuegia had been returned to their people at Woollya cove, near the base of what is now called Mount Darwin, the
Beagle
and her crew returned to find the huts and gardens the British sailors had built for the three Fuegians deserted and overgrown.

Eventually, Jemmy appeared and explained that he and the other Christianized Fuegians had reverted to their former way of living. Darwin, overcome with sadness, wrote in his journal that he’d never seen “so complete & grievous a change” and that “it was painful to behold him.” They brought Jemmy aboard the ship and dressed him for dinner at the captain’s table, much relieved to see that he at least remembered how to use a knife and fork properly.

Captain FitzRoy offered to bring him back to England, but Jemmy declined, saying he had “not the least wish to return to England” as he was “happy and contented” with “plenty fruits,” “plenty fish,” and “plenty birdies.” Remember the Yucatán. What looks like even extreme poverty—“the bottom of the scale of human beings”—may contain unrecognizable forms of wealth. Recall the “starving” Australian Aboriginal people, happily roasting low-fat rats and noshing on juicy grubs as revolted Englishmen looked on, certain they were witnessing the last demented spasms of starvation. When we start
detribalizing
—peeling away the cultural conditioning that distorts our vision—“wealth” and

“poverty” may reveal themselves where we least expect to find them.24

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Selfish Meme (Nasty?)

Richard Dawkins, author of
The Selfish Gene,
coined the term
meme
to refer to a unit of information that can spread through a community via learning or imitation the way a favored gene is replicated through reproduction. Just as egalitarianism and resource- and risk-sharing memes were favored in the prehistoric environment, the selfishness meme has flourished in most of the post-agricultural world. Even so, no less an authority on economics than Adam Smith insisted that sympathy and compassion come to human beings as naturally as self-interest.1

The faulty assumption that scarcity-based economic thinking is somehow the de-facto human approach to questions of supply, demand, and distribution of wealth has misled much anthropological, philosophical, and economic thought over the past few centuries. As economist John Gowdy explains, ’

“Rational economic behavior’ is peculiar to market capitalism and is an embedded set of beliefs, not an objective universal law of nature. The myth of economic man explains the organizing principle of contemporary capitalism, nothing more or less.”2