Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  HOW HUMANS FOUND A DIFFERENT WAY

  In The Hunting Apes, primatologist Craig Stanford takes the position that, although cooperative hunting was an important development in human evolution, sharing the meat was even more important. In today’s bands hunting and sharing are greatly elaborated by cultural practices and symbols,30 which means that in maintaining customary systems of meat-sharing, the political power moves tend to be far more subtle than with Ancestral Pan. In this context I think that even though some foragers habitually argue about whether ongoing meat distributions are by the rules and fair, or grouse about their shares afterward,31 underlying this cantankerousness are usually feelings of goodwill. These emotions help to enable the sociable process of equitably sharing a large carcass, for everyone will be sharing a food that is nutritionally useful to all—and is supremely delicious as well.

  The existence of these positive feelings is attested to by dozens of rich ethnographic accounts of sharing and also by the fact that serious conflict, as opposed to squabbling, is all but absent from the scores of instances of meat-sharing I’ve covered so far in my extensive LPA hunter-gatherer survey. Some ambivalence is expectable, of course, because humans are so heavily given to egoism and nepotism. But even though people from different families may bicker a bit, and in some groups they may complain loudly to remind others of how the system’s supposed to work,32 I believe that even the habitual complainers appreciate the benefits of their sharing systems, are able to make them work quite efficiently in spite of a few rough edges, and, again, can take delight in eating their favorite food with others in the band.

  That we became efficient, cooperative, equal-opportunity meat sharers was important to our overall evolutionary success, for this expanded our diet breadth and allowed us to exploit major new subsistence possibilities.33 At some level I believe that archaic Homo sapiens, with its relatively large social brain, must have understood something about the importance of hunting cooperatively and about the advantages of sharing meat among the entire band. Today, egalitarian hunter-gatherers definitely seem to appreciate the advantages of having a band with more hunters, for obviously this means that the big carcasses to share will come in more often and hence there will be fewer hiatuses when people simply have no major meat to eat.

  I think they might understand several fairly obvious long-term advantages of equalized meat-sharing, precisely because evening out consumption of this prized food provides nutritional benefits that lead to everyone’s being more energetic and healthier, for people who live precariously close to nature are likely to have such insights. In any event, modern theories out of behavioral ecology reach exactly the same conclusions and show that these human patterns34 are very much like those appearing on a purely instinctual basis among pure social carnivores, such as wolves or lions.

  All social carnivores face the same logistical problems. Not only do they have to hunt as groups in order to keep the sizable and difficult kills coming in at least fairly regularly, but they also have to share these large kills fairly even-handedly if their diet is to sustain an energetically demanding occupation like team hunting, which works best if all the members of the hunting team are decently nourished on a continuous basis.35 Dedicated social carnivores like wolves or lions are invariably hierarchical, and basically it is an evolved social structure that determines who gets how much meat. The simple fact that group members know when to dominate and when to submit prevents competitive conflict from getting out of hand, and with these pure meat eaters the challenge for natural selection has been to evolve mechanisms that ensure that some significant level of sharing takes place whenever meat is not very plentiful.

  In the face of all this hierarchy, the sharing needs to be sufficient to adequately nourish the lower-ranking team members and also to ensure that the overall gains of group hunting are not lost in fighting over meat. The likely mechanism would be that selfish, aggressive, higher-ranking individuals are evolved at least to be tolerant when it comes to sharing a carcass with subordinates. Thus, even though the sharing may be far from equitable, the large carcasses they kill will be spread around better than with bonobos or chimpanzees with the much smaller animals they capture.

  The technical name for this evening out of meat consumption is “variance reduction.”36 In humans alone, something really close to equalized meat intake is accomplished—but only with the assistance of symbols, cultural inventiveness, and the unusual capacity of our LPA groups to collectively control (or eliminate) powerful individuals who otherwise would dominate the meat scene. Because we deeply appreciate the benefits of sharing, and because we understand the politics involved, we can use various carrots and sticks to back up the relevant cultural institutions and customs once they’ve been invented. In this way hunter-gatherers see to it that their overall systems of sharing will generally work smoothly—that is, without frequent and costly serious conflict.37

  Archaic types of Homo sapiens stuck around for almost half a million years, with a relatively static and, as far as we know, relatively unimaginative stone culture that nonetheless was up to the tough job of Pleistocene survival. These humans turned to the intensive hunting of large game only 250,000 years ago, and by 200,000 years ago they were becoming anatomically but not yet culturally modern, even though their technology was improving.

  When these archaic humans took on large-game hunting, to reduce major fluctuations in their family-level meat consumption they were obliged to share carcasses as entire bands, rather than just as smaller social units—units that probably were based strongly on maternal, fraternal, and sororal kinship and possibly also on pair bonding by breeding partners and paternal kinship. The alternative, in the absence of long-term storage, was for the lucky hunter’s social subunit or “family” to have a short-lived selfish feast when he brought in a big carcass a few times a year, probably sharing some with a few cronies, and otherwise to endure very lengthy meat famines as far as sizable ungulates like antelope or zebra were concerned.

  The set of hypotheses I shall be proposing involve earlier humans living in bands, and they involve male competition over scarce commodities like large-game meat and breeding opportunities with available females and also competition for power38 in its own right. But before I begin to put together a group of possible scenarios for moral origins, some additional background will be needed.

  EVOLUTIONARY BACKSTORY IN THE HUMAN LINE

  There are a big handful of early “hominid” species that may or may not have been directly in the human line—I say this even though when their discoverers publish in Science or Nature, they sometimes tend to imply, or even claim, that their particular species is definitely a human ancestor rather than merely some upright ape that went extinct as a side branch. All are bipedal in gait, their brains are about the size of present-day Pan, and generally for several million years they show no strong evidence of regular pursuit hunting. We may speculate that as descendants of Ancestral Pan, the well-known Australopithecines and their like at least were very likely to have hunted some small game, and with equal probability they were at least making some clever tools out of softer materials. However, if a given species was heading for extinction, it could have lost some of these ancestral traits.

  It may have taken several million years for fashioning stone materials into tools to have been expressed robustly,39 but just after 2 MYA we do see an archaeologically known upright ape species that did some scavenging and possibly some active hunting. One of these terrestrial apes may or may not have been our direct predecessor, but their skeletons continued to look quite apelike aside from being bipedal, and their brain size was only somewhat larger. If the later, somewhat larger-brained species that Louis Leakey optimistically designated as Homo habilis was our direct ancestor,40 then it would seem that in our line we’ve had the use of manufactured stone tools for several million years now, and we’ve been using them for butchery for the same amount of time. Unfortunately, it seems possible that Leakey’s “humans�
�� belonged to a highly dimorphic lineage that went extinct or even that more than one species were involved. Thus, some experts41 are reluctant to include habilis as a member of Homo.

  The first fossil with a definite and undisputed claim to human ancestorhood is Homo erectus,42 for some time a contemporary of these later upright apes. Erectus appeared before 1.8 MYA and is far more reminiscent of us than any living ape or any prior fossil. Tall and slender but very strong, its body was built for long-distance walking or running far more than for tree climbing, and its skull held a brain far larger than that of any ape—even though it was only about half the size of our own. Within a few hundred thousand years, the African version of Homo erectus was making beautifully fashioned Acheulian axes, a stone tool industry that lasted with few changes for over 1 million years. And these early African humans were also hunting more and more as, after spreading into Eurasia as an extremely successful species, they evolved in Africa into the still-larger-brained archaic Homo sapiens we’ve been discussing. That larger-brained species, after staying around successfully for several hundred thousand years, eventually turned to the active hunting of large ungulates and soon thereafter evolved into modern humans.

  Archaic Homo sapiens had quite large brains, indeed, and their bodies were made on the same lanky plan as Homo erectus but were still more modern. Toward the end of their evolutionary career, these archaics finally gave up on the very static Acheulian stone tool tradition that erectus had invented and began to manufacture implements that were more imaginative. But culturally modern they were not. For instance, they were not yet creating distinctive local cultures in short order by quickly elaborating their stone tool and other technologies in ways that were highly inventive, as today’s foragers do. Such cultural creativity, along with such things as self-adornment with seashells, the carving of phantasmagoric sculptures, cave painting, and the fashioning of musical instruments, was to come later with cultural modernity.43

  As early as 400,000 BP, these archaic predecessors of ours were hunting with carefully fashioned wooden weapons.44 Remarkably, several spears probably belonging to them were interred in anaerobic soil in Germany and preserved to the present. They are nicely made and well balanced for throwing, just like Olympic javelins, and they may well have been used for killing groups of wild horses—which means that even then the people involved sometimes had some sizable packages of meat to divide up. However, we don’t know how often they were killing such meat, and the sparse archaeological evidence cannot support the idea that back then big game was a staple dietary item that they depended on regularly enough to require a new system of sharing.

  By 250,000 BP, however, according to archaeologist Mary Stiner,45 the evidence for large-game hunting as a serious and routine pursuit of archaic humans becomes overwhelming. Our African ancestors’ subsistence continued to be heavily based on plant foods, but large animal carcasses were being relied upon as well, and animal flesh was no longer merely an occasional major treat. Actively pursued sizable ungulates like antelope were now a staple, and for the theoretical reasons given previously the acquisition and disposition of this important food had to be well integrated into a nomadic foraging lifestyle that previously, in all likelihood, had involved a primary dependency on staple plant foods, along with some small game, far more than on occasional large-game windfalls. That’s our general evolutionary backstory as far as subsistence is concerned. But with respect to politics within groups, there’s much more to say.

  A COMPLETE NATURAL HISTORY OF GANG ATTACKS

  We’re particularly interested in subordinate coalitions and in how they became potent enough to all but neutralize the alpha role in a species that remained (and still remains) innately prone to form social hierarchies.46 At 8 MYA behavioral phylogenetics has told us with a substantial degree of probability that the CA had a largely unexpressed potential for subordinate coalitions to attack dominators who rubbed the majority of their immediate social community the wrong way. With gorillas as the least common denominator, such ancestral rebellions are conservatively judged to have been either merely potential or quite rare. However, at 6 MYA the same conservative methodology tells us that in all likelihood Ancestral Pan not infrequently attacked disliked dominators to reduce their power, with the possible outcome of wounding or, more rarely, death. This punitive type of social selection had at least the occasional effect of significantly disadvantaging the genes of those bully types who were attacked—even though in general domination surely continued to pay off handsomely in feeding and mating contexts.47

  In suggesting that such social selection could have been lethal, I’m thinking about what we know for certain about the two Pan species and also about what seems very likely. As we’ve seen, humans use capital punishment widely, but only once has a non-scientist actually observed a counterdominant, group-inflicted death within a social community in today’s Pan. Primatologists in fact have described several cases of subordinate rebellions that certainly seem to have resulted in death—but technically a scientifically conservative ethologist could count them only as gang attacks leading to “disappearances.”

  At the Mahale field site in Tanzania, chimpanzee Ntologi, an aggressive former alpha male, was gang-attacked by members of his own community and was never seen again by the Japanese fieldworkers there.48 As chimpanzee males can’t safely immigrate into hostile neighboring groups, he likely died. Goblin, the alpha-male chimpanzee at Gombe when I was there, was gang-attacked so fiercely that he fled into exile, subsisting for months in peripheral areas where—if he’d been caught by an enemy patrol—he’d have been killed right on the spot.49 Goblin in fact survived to live for many years as a socially accepted male in the group that had rejected him, but Ntologi was never seen again. It’s possible that he died of his wounds or that he was caught by enemies; he might even have died in exile of natural causes, but in any event he was definitely put at lethal risk by being exiled, as was Goblin.

  Similarly, a sizable group of wild bonobo females in Zaire attacked a male bully, biting severely at his digits, and after moving away with many serious wounds, he was never seen again.50 He may have died of his wounds, but it’s at least conceivable that he might have immigrated to another group, even though bonobo males very often show definite signs of hostility when two communities meet by chance.51 Thus, he too can be counted as a “probable” with respect to dying of his wounds. In both species, then, it’s likely that even in the absence of manufactured lethal weapons, serious gang attacks can lead to mortality and hence a major loss of fitness. And we already know about the use of capital punishment by human foragers.

  Accordingly, we may assume that throughout human prehistory well-armed subordinate coalitions, if properly motivated, could gang-attack high-ranking group members and do them serious or lethal damage. We may also assume that when large-game hunting was added to the human subsistence pattern, this provided a new social stimulus that favored a definitive solution for the alpha-male problem—in case it hadn’t been resolved previously.

  A MAJOR WORKING HYPOTHESIS

  In scientific research we sort out theories according to their “provability,”52 their predictive power, their general plausibility, and, more generally, how satisfactory the explanations are that they generate. In attempting to build an explanation of moral origins, the best I will be able to do is to provide working hypotheses—some of which some scholars may see as being merely glorified hunches, while others may see them as highly worthwhile leads for future research.

  The theory I’ll be developing in this chapter is that the advent of our moral conscience came through the agency of a special type of natural selection, namely, social selection as this has been discussed in Chapter 3 and elsewhere. Basically, this involved the effects of human preferences, either in choosing others in useful partnerships or in coming down hard on disliked deviants.

  Specifically, the first part of the moral origins argument is that in our human past when group punishment became
severe and frequent, this significantly affected the human gene pool because punishment reduced the fitness of deviants. The second and less obvious part of the argument is that as the severity and cost of such punishment escalated, this created a selection pressure that favored individuals with better personal self-control. The instrument of this better social navigation and more effective self-restraint was the evolving conscience, and in trying to make this theory as specific as possible—and to try to place conscience origins in time—I will have to create some rather speculative arguments. These will concern how and why punishment in earlier human groups could have escalated to become a major force that shaped gene pools.

  In the natural Garden of Eden scenario we are going to consider, I shall propose that when humans embarked on a new kind of subsistence pattern that was based heavily on hunting, this could have raised predictable social challenges, challenges that could have been met only by groups cracking down on individuals whose behavior threatened the efficient sharing of a very special type of food. The only way to test a specific theory like this one is in terms of its relative plausibility,53 and fortunately there are some key facts that can be marshaled to give it support.