In his review of hunter-gatherer social life in The Tangled Wing, Melvin Konner notes the pervasiveness of intensive infant care. This care was typically provided by mothers, but also by engaging fathers, younger female relatives (aunts, sisters), and younger children. Such care might seem indulgent to our modern, Benjamin Spock-trained sensitivities, but in hunter-gatherer culture, it was a given. Thus, Konner observes that the !Kung infant is
carried in a sling at the mother’s side, held vertically in continuous skin-to-skin contact. Reflexes such as crawling movements in the legs, the use of the arms to move and free the head, and grasping responses in the hands allow the infant to adjust to the mother’s movements and avoid smothering in her skin and clothing. These movements also signal the infant’s changes of state, teaching the mother to anticipate its waking, hunger, or defecation. The hip position lets infants see the mother’s social world, the objects hung around the neck, any work in her hands, and the breast. Mutual gaze with the mother is easy, and when she is standing the infant’s face is just at the eye level of keenly interested ten-to twelve-year olds, who frequently initiate brief, intense, face-to-face interactions. When not in the sling, infants are passed from hand to hand around a fire for similar interactions with adults and children. They are kissed on their faces, bellies, and genitals, sung to, bounced, entertained, encouraged, and addressed at length in conversational tones before they can understand words.
The mother indulges the infant’s dependency completely in the first year and the second year resists it only slightly. Nursing is continual, four times an hour throughout the day on average, triggered by any slightly fretful signs. Close contact for the first two years allows for a much more fine-grained responsiveness by the mother than can be attained in a culture where mother and infant are often apart.
Caregiving is a way of life in humans, and has been wired into our nervous system in the forms of emotions, such as sympathy and filial love.
FACE TO FACE
A second feature of early humans’ social EEA is that it was almost continually face-to-face. Don’t be misled by the hours you spend alone, commuting, on the Internet, on your cell phone, or fingering your BlackBerry while eating in your car. The amount of time we spend alone is a radical aberration for our species (and a source of many contemporary social and physical ills). Early humans required one another to accomplish the basic tasks of survival and reproduction. They did so in highly coordinated, face-to-face interactions. Cooperative child rearing, where relatives and friends traded off duties, was central to quotidian life, as hinted at in Konner’s quotation above.
Studies of archaeological sites reveal consistent evidence of cooperative hunting for meat—a critical part of early hominid diet. Relative to many of the animals early humans hunted—bison, elephants, rhinoceroses—our predecessors were weak and slow of foot, and lacking in the fangs, claws, speed, and strength seen in other predators. Early hominid strength was found in coordination and cooperation. For example, at Mauran, in the French Pyrénées, a massive accumulation of bison bones near a river, thought to be 50,000 years old, suggests that teams of Neanderthals banded together to force herds of bison off cliff edges, to fall to their deaths.
The continual coordination required of early human social life coevolved with morphological changes that gave rise to our remarkable capacity to communicate, which is unlike that of any other species in terms of precision, flexibility, sensitivity, and band width. Unlike our primate relatives, the human face has relatively little obscuring hair (which most likely was lost in the hot African savannah, for purposes of cooling), making it a beacon of social messages. And our facial anatomy includes more facial muscles than those of our primate relatives, in particular around the eyes, allowing for a much richer vocabulary of expressive behavior originating in the face.
The evolving capacity to communicate is even more pronounced in the human voice. With emerging bipedalism in our hominid predecessors, the human vocal apparatus evolved dramatically. Compared to our primate predecessors, the human vocal tract is elongated. As a result, the tongue has greater range of movement at the back near the larynx, allowing for the capacity to produce a remarkable variety of sounds. Some of the great apes, for example, have an extremely limited repertoire of vocalizations, which reduces to a few grunts. Humans, in contrast, can exhort, punish, threaten, tease, comfort, soothe, flirt, and seduce with the voice.
Our evolving capabilities to communicate co-evolved with our broader capacity for culture, our tendency to produce artifacts, to imitate, to represent and spread information across time and space with language. As charming as chimps and bonobos are, careful studies of their social existence find little evidence of anything remotely resembling culture—a point many have recently made in suggesting that the human capacity for imitation, symbolic language, memory, and coordination is radically different from that of our primate relatives. In humans our basic emotional tendencies can quickly spread to others, through mimicry, imitation, and communication. The spread of emotions like compassion, love, and awe becomes the basis for social ritual and ethical guidelines, and binds individuals into cooperative groups.
CRO-MAGNON CEOS
Our Cro-Magnon anthropologist would readily discern a third feature of early human social life—that it is hierarchical. Every moment of early hominid social life, from who sleeps with whom to who eats what to who touches whom, was stratified. In contemporary humans, individuals fall into social hierarchies with remarkable ease. In research with my colleague Cameron Anderson, we have found that hallmates, within one week of having moved into college dormitories, are nearly unanimous in singling out those whom they report to be of high status, having respect, prominence and influence in their emergent groups. They likewise readily agree in their judgments of who occupies the lower rungs of the totem pole. Differences in status quickly emerge in younger children (down to two years old, where status hierarchies have been observed on the seemingly egalitarian circle rugs of preschools). And don’t be fooled by gender-based assumptions: The concern for status is not just a male thing. Female adults attain comparable levels of status with just as much alacrity and effect. This is echoed in recent studies by Frans de Waal and others, who have documented clear hierarchies in female chimpanzee life. Primate social life is hierarchical, in large part because hierarchies enable group members to decide how to allocate resources with speed and minimal conflict.
Yet the hierarchical social organization of higher primates and early humans differs dramatically from that of other species. In higher primates and humans, lower-status individuals can readily form alliances, most typically dyadic coalitions, which potentially negate many advantages that higher-status individuals might enjoy in physical size or power. In addition, humans developed several forms of social communication—for example, gossip—by which low-status individuals can comment upon and determine the status of other group members. The emergence of coalitions and alliances in group life, and the capacity for low-status individuals to comment on the reputations of those in power, placed new demands upon high-power individuals. Their power would come to rest increasingly upon the ability to engage socially and advance the interests of the group.
Frans de Waal has found in his groundbreaking studies of primate politics that with the rise of the capacity of lower-status individuals to form coalitions, “alpha” males and females must rely on social intelligence to acquire and retain their privileged positions. Pure intimidation displays—chest pounding, random fang-bearing charges, throwing stones, and din making—are and were still stock-in-trade for alpha chimps and bonobos and our human predecessors, but new skills were required. Higher-status primates spend a great deal of their day smoothing over the rough edges of their group’s social existence. They are the ones who are likely to mediate conflicts, for example by bringing adversaries into physical contact with one another and encouraging grooming activities that reduce conflict. They are the ones who make sure that more equitable allocations of resources occur.