Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (58 page)

22. Malthus (1798), Book I, Chapter IV, paragraph 38.

23. Darwin (1871/2007), p. 208.

24. For a more detailed analysis of how modern economic theory plays out (or doesn’t) among non-state societies, see Henrich et al. (2005) and Richard Lee’s chapter titled

“Reflections on Primitive Communism,” in Ingold et al.

(1988).

Chapter 12: The Selfish Meme (Nasty?)
1. In
A Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Smith wrote, “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” 2. Gowdy (1998), p. xxiv.

3. From Mill (1874).

4.
New York Times,
July 23, 2002, “Why We’re So Nice: We’re Wired to Cooperate.” http://www.nytimes.com/2002/

07/23/science/

why-we-re-so-nice-we-re-wired-to-cooperate.html. For the original research, see Rilling et al. (2002).

5. We’ve drawn from an excellent analysis of Hardin’s paper by Ian Angus, which can be found at http://links.org.au/node/

595.

6. See Ostrom (2009), for example.

7. See Dunbar (1992 and 1993).

8. Harris (1989), pp. 344–345.

9. Bodley (2002), p. 54.

10. Harris (1989), p. 147.

11. van der Merwe (1992), p. 372. Also see Jared Diamond,

“The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (widely

available

online;

see

here,

for

example:

http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/).

12. Le Jeune (1897), pp. 281–283.

13. Gowdy (1998), p. 130.

14. Quoted in Menzel and D’Aluisio, p. 178.

15. Harris (1977), p. x. Also see Eaton, Shostak, and Konner (1988).

16. Gowdy (1998), p. 13.

17. Gowdy (1998), p. 23.

18. Harris (1980), p. 81.

19. Ridley (1996), p. 249.

20. See de Waal (2009) for much more on the biological origins of empathy and instinctive justice.

21. Dawkins (1998), p. 212.

22. de Waal and Johanowicz (1993).

23. Sapolsky and Share (2004). Also see Natalie Angier, “No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture,
New York
Times,
April 13, 2004.

24. Boehm (1999), p. 3, 68.

25. Fromm (1973), p. 60.

26. Gowdy (1998), p. xvii.

Chapter 13: The Never-Ending Battle over
Prehistoric War (Brutish?)

1. From his closing argument in the Scopes case.

2. Wade (2006), p. 151.

3. Recent studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that even before the human migrations out of Africa that began about 60,000 years ago, human populations were largely isolated from each other for as much as 100,000 years, localized in eastern and southern Africa. Only about 40,000 years ago did these two lines reunite, becoming a single pan-African population, according to this research. See Behar et al.

(2008). Full paper available online at http://www.cell.com/

AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297%2808%2900255-3#.

4. Readers interested in further exploration of the critique of Hobbesian assumptions regarding war in prehistory could begin with Fry (2009) and Ferguson (2000).

5. Pinker’s talk was based upon an argument he presents in
The Blank Slate
(2002), particularly in the last few pages of the third chapter.

6. The link to Pinker’s presentation is http://www.ted.com/

index.php/talks/

steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html. You can find many other interesting presentations at this site. You might want to search Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s talks on bonobos, for example. If you prefer to read Pinker’s remarks, an essay based upon the talk can be found at www.edge.org/

3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html.

7. Note that Pinker’s chart represents part of a chart in Keeley’s book (1996), and that Keeley refers to these societies as “primitive,” “prestate,” and “prehistoric” in his charts (pp. 89–90). Indeed, Keeley distinguishes what he calls

“sedentary

hunter-gatherers”

from

true

“nomadic

hunter-gatherers,”

writing,

“Low-density,

nomadic

hunter-gatherers, with their few (and portable) possessions, large territories, and few fixed resources or constructed facilities, had the option of fleeing conflict and raiding parties. At best, the only thing they would lose by such flight was their composure” (p. 31).

As we’ve established, these nomadic (immediate-return) hunter-gatherers

are

most

representative

of

human

prehistory—a period that is,
by definition,
before the advent of settled communities, cultivated food, domesticated animals, and so on. Keeley’s confusion (and thus, Pinker’s) is largely due to his referring to horticulturalists, with their gardens, domesticated animals, and settled villages, as

“sedentary hunter-gatherers.” Yes, they
do
occasionally hunt and they sometimes gather, but because these activities are not their
sole
source of food, their lives are dissimilar to those of immediate-return hunter-gatherers. Their gardens, settled villages, and so on make territorial defense necessary and fleeing conflict much more problematic than it was for our ancestors.

They—unlike

true

immediate-return

foragers—have a lot to lose by simply fleeing aggression.

Keeley acknowledges this crucial difference, writing,

“Farmers and sedentary hunter-gatherers had little alternative but to meet force with force or, after injury, to discourage further depredations by taking revenge” (p. 31).

The point bears repeating. If you live a settled life in a stable village, have a labor-expensive shelter, cultivated fields, domesticated animals, and too many possessions to carry easily,
you’re not a hunter-gatherer.
Prehistoric human beings did not have any of these things, which is, after all, precisely what made them “prehistoric.” Pinker either fails to appreciate this essential point, or simply ignores it.

8. Societies in Pinker’s chart:

The Jivaro cultivate yams, peanuts, sweet manioc, maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, tuber beans, pumpkins, plantains, tobacco, cotton, Jivaro banana, sugarcane, taro, and yam. They also traditionally domesticate llamas and guinea pigs and later the introduced dog, chicken, and pig.

The Yanomami are foraging, “slash-and-burn” Yanomami horticulturists. They cultivate plantains, cassava, and bananas.

The Mae Enga grow sweet potatoes, taro,

bananas, sugarcane, Pandanus nuts, beans, and Mae Enga various leaf greens, as well as potatoes, maize, and peanuts. They raise pigs, used not only for meat but for important ritualistic celebrations.

About 90 percent of the Dani diet is sweet potatoes. They also cultivate banana and cassava. Domestic pigs are important both for Dugum Dani currency used in barter and for the celebration of important events. Pig theft is a major cause of conflict.

The Murngin economy was based primarily on fishing, collecting shellfish, hunting, and gathering until the establishment of missions and the gradual introduction of market goods Murngin in the 1930s and 1940s. While hunting and gathering remain important for some groups, motor vehicles, aluminum boats with outboard engines, guns, and other introduced tools have replaced indigenous techniques.

The Huli’s staple food is the sweet potato. Like Huli other groups in Papua New Guinea, the Huli prize domestic pigs for meat and status.

9. This, according to Fry (2009).

10. Knauft (1987 and 2009).

11. To make matters even worse, Pinker juxtaposes these bogus “hunter-gatherer” mortality rates with a tiny bar showing the relatively few war-related deaths of males in twentieth-century United States and Europe. This is misleading in many respects. Perhaps most important, the twentieth century gave birth to “total war” between nations, in which civilians (not just male combatants) were targeted for psychological advantage (Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki …), so counting only male mortalities is meaningless.

Furthermore, why did Pinker not include the tens of millions who died in some of the most vicious and deadly examples of twentieth-century warfare? In his discussion of “our most peaceful age,” he makes no mention of the Rape of Nanking, the entire Pacific theater of World War II (including the detonation of two nuclear bombs over Japan), the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia, several consecutive decades-long wars in Vietnam (against the Japanese, French, and Americans), the Chinese revolution and civil war, the India/Pakistan separation and subsequent wars, or the Korean war. None of these many millions are included in his assessment of twentieth-century (male) war fatalities.

Nor does Pinker include Africa, with its never-ending conflicts, child soldiers, and casual genocides. No mention of Rwanda. Not a Tutsi or Hutu to be found. He leaves out every one of South America’s various twentieth-century wars and dictatorships infamous for torturing and disappearing tens of thousands of civilians. El Salvador? Nicaragua? More than 100,000 dead villagers in Guatemala?
Nada. Absolutamente
nada.

12. For example, see Zihlman et al. (1978 and 1984).

13.
Why War?
available online at http://realhumannature.com/

?page_id=26. After we contacted him to ask how he could possibly justify the omission, Smith at first cited Wrangham and Peterson’s dismissal of bonobos as being less representative than chimps of our last common ancestor.

When we pointed out that many primatologists argue that bonobos are probably
more
representative, that even Wrangham had revised his opinion on the point, and that in any case,
it is factually wrong to say that chimps are our

“closest non-human relative” without mentioning bonobos,
he finally relented and added two brief references to bonobos to his lurid descriptions of chimps’ “bloody wars of attrition.” Since the online essay was an extract from his book, which was already in print, it seems unlikely these reluctant changes are reflected there.

14. Ghiglieri (1999), pp. 104–105.

15. For a review, see Sussman and Garber’s chapter in Chapman and Sussman (2004).

16. The quote is from de Waal (1998), p. 10.

17. Goodall (1971), cited in Power (1991), pp. 28–29.

18. Strangely, even though he agrees with this central point made by Power, de Waal barely mentions her work—and only to dismiss her, at that. In an endnote in his 1996 book,
Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans
and Other Animals,
he writes, “On the basis of her reading of the literature, Power (1991) has argued that provisioning at some field sites (such as Gombe’s banana camp) turned the chimpanzees more violent and less egalitarian, and thus changed the ‘tone’ of relationships both within and between communities. Power’s analysis—which blends a serious reexamination of available data with nostalgia for the 1960s image of apes as noble savages—raises questions that will no doubt be settled by ongoing research on unprovisioned wild chimpanzees.”

This dismissal of Power’s analysis strikes us as unjustified and uncharacteristically ungenerous. Regardless of whether or not she felt “nostalgia for the 1960s” (an emotion we didn’t detect in her book), de Waal admits her analysis “raises questions” that merit investigation. These questions threaten to recast a great deal of data concerning chimpanzee social interactions—of great interest to de Waal, one of the world’s leading authorities on chimpanzee behavior and a man whose scholarship demonstrates deep respect for critical analysis.

19. Ghiglieri (1999), p. 173.

20. For a review of these reports and a rebuttal to Power’s argument, see Wilson and Wrangham (2003). The paper is available online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org.

21. Nolan (2003).

22. Behar et al. (2008). Also, for an excellent review of this material, see Fagan (2004).

23. Turchin (2003 and 2006).

24. Readers with mental images of Sioux (Lakota) chiefs with eagle-feather war bonnets rippling in the wind should keep in mind that in the generations before first contact with whites, disease spread through many tribes and the arrival of horses brought severe cultural disruptions, leading to conflict between groups that had been at peace previously (see Brown, 1970/2001).

25. Edgerton (1992), pp. 90–104.

26. Ferguson (2003).

27. On Christmas Day, 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman read this prayer to a world audience: “Give us, O

God, the vision which can see thy love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust the goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts, and show us what each one of us can do to set forth the coming of the day of universal peace. Amen.”

28. Tierney (2000), p. 18. Tierney’s book sparked a conflagration that makes any chimpanzee community seem downright pacific in comparison. The bulk of the controversy concerns Tierney’s charges that Chagnon and his colleague, James Neel, may have caused a fatal epidemic among the Yanomami. Not having examined these charges in detail, we have nothing to add to that discussion, limiting our critique to Changnon’s methodology and scholarship as it applies to Yanomami warfare.

29. By comparison, Chagnon’s total time among the Yanomami adds up to about five years. Readers interested in knowing more about the Yanomani might start with Good (1991). This is a very personal and accessible account of his time living with them (and ultimately, taking a wife there).

Tierney (2000) outlines the case against Chagnon, though going far beyond the critiques we’ve outlined here. Ferguson (1995) offers an in-depth analysis of Chagnon’s calculations and conclusions. For more of Ferguson’s views on the origins of war, the following two papers can be downloaded from his departmental web page (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/socant/