HUNTING AND THE ALPHA-MALE PROBLEM
The main obstacle to setting up an equitable sharing system for a band of five to six hunters and fifteen to thirty people in all would have been an ancestral type of alpha male, who predictably would act as a dominator prone to appropriate the meat of others and favor his kin and cronies; this prehistoric alpha problem was identified several decades ago by archaeologist Robert Whallon.54 There’s still a great deal of the alpha dominator in our genetic nature today,55 and, if personally uninhibited and socially unrestrained, this would quickly translate into gross inequities in the meat consumption of today’s hunter-gatherers. It also would translate into tendencies to turn meat into political power because the possessors would likely be using their extra meat to favor kin and political allies and mating partners, just as took place ancestrally. Thus, whenever earlier humans went up against whatever preexisting ancestral type of alpha-male system was in place, they would have been playing a zero-sum game as they ganged up to do battle with dominant individuals who loved meat and were used to controlling and hogging it.
In this competitive game there was a great deal at stake for the well-fed dominants, whose nutrition previously had been coming out so far ahead, just as there were high stakes for the previously undernourished subordinates who increasingly would have been motivated to rebel actively as large packages of meat became more important to their well-being. Conflicts most likely would have been inevitable, as a newly equalized, culturally based sharing system was being put in place. And ultimately it surely had to be kept in place by the threat of force, just as takes place in the egalitarian present.
TRYING A SPECIFIC MORAL ORIGINS HYPOTHESIS
Ancestral Pan’s society was hierarchical, with alpha males. We may be quite sure about this. We may also be quite certain that by 45,000 BP humans had created decisively egalitarian orders—something that bonobos and chimpanzees obviously have not managed to carry nearly as far because, in spite of their subordinate rebellions, they still have alpha males, and in the case of bonobos, alpha females. Somehow, at some point, we humans decisively got rid of our alpha males and became egalitarian. It’s logical that such a definitive step in the egalitarian direction was motivated by a rank-and-file envy over the perks of alpha bullies, which related to power, food, and sex. More basically, the issue was personal autonomy, and I’d suggest that Ancestral Pan had a strong distaste for being intimidated and bossed around.
For explaining how the human conscience originated, the initial scenario I’m developing provides what might be called a likely ecological key. The several hypotheses I’ll be dealing with here are necessarily tentative, but of course new archaeological findings—as well as new competing hypotheses—may provide ways of testing them further. Furthermore, future developments in behavioral genetics could eventually enhance such investigations. However, for now we must view them as working hypotheses that are difficult to test aside from assessing their plausibility in contrast to other theories of moral origins, which we’ll be meeting with in Chapter 12.
In its basics, the initial hypothesis isn’t very complicated. It posits that a quarter of a million years ago, when relatively large-brained archaic humans took on large-game hunting as a major and regular occupation,56 they would have needed to share large carcasses, and share them efficiently as described above, so that entire hunting teams could remain well nourished and vigorous. We’ve seen that if alpha-male behavior were flourishing, this would have been a serious obstacle to such sharing, and that the only possible solution to this problem—the only one that I can think of—was for subordinate coalitions to have taken care of this problem forcefully.
Ancestral Pan’s limited but significant subordinate rebellions provided the preadaptation, and this hypothesis assumes that archaic humans could have escalated such behavior to the point that, to definitively control their alpha problems, they would have developed some systematic type of collectivized and potentially lethal social control. The aim would have been to prevent high-ranking bullies from just naturally monopolizing large carcasses killed by band members, and thereby acting as free riders, when it was the undernourished others in the band who were doing much of the hard work in hunting.
As a result of this very likely conflict, those powerful individuals who were better able to restrain their potential aggressions would have had better reproductive success than those who didn’t—and got themselves killed. Thus, the evolution of more effective personal self-control could have been selected strongly. This can be taken as the beginning phase of moral origins, because it would have led to the internalization of rules and the development of a self-judgmental sense of right and wrong.
We may at least consider some further details. As better self-inhibition became individually adaptive, it could have applied not only to bullies but also to others whose antisocial behavior obviously threatened efficient meat-sharing, those disposed to act as meat-cheaters who wanted to hide carcasses they’d killed, or thieves who wanted to stealthily take the shares of others. When these three types of “deviants” started being punished by their groups, the result would have been that those who better inhibited themselves from taking such dangerous free rides were gaining greater fitness. It’s precisely because our consciences often can inhibit seriously deviant behavior, and save us from punishment, that this hypothesis could explain conscience origins.
That’s the first hypothesis. It holds that in theory social selection in the form of concerted group punishment might have begun rather abruptly as active large-game hunting phased in, because the collective punishment of intimidators could have been intensified wholly or mainly as a cultural development. Such a development required no further biological evolution, because in the form of subordinate rebellions substantial preadaptations were already in place 6 million years previously. However, there are several potential wild cards that could modify this hypothesis.
First, it’s possible that earlier on alpha-male systems had already been subject to some substantial attrition at the level of the genetic dispositions that support them, simply because we know that in all likelihood Ancestral Pan—and also its direct descendants in the human line—was so averse to being dominated. Long before the regular hunting of sizable ungulates began, these increasingly large-brained humans might have slowly become better able to use subordinate coalitions to reduce the power of resented alpha-male dominators, not only because ever since Ancestral Pan they had always strongly preferred personal autonomy over domination, but also, quite possibly, because subordinate males wanted a greater share of mating opportunities.
Thus, punishment sufficient to accomplish some evolution of better self-control could have begun much earlier. However, the basic moral origins hypothesis I’m developing here could stay the same, for when hunting arrived, more decisive group power moves still would have been needed to take out whichever would-be dominators were still impelled to act on their ability to intimidate—while favoring those with better self-control. Similar social selection would have applied to serious cheaters and thieves, who also threatened a reasonably equalized, nutritionally efficient apportionment of meat.
With this second scenario the evolution of egalitarianism could have begun quite gradually, through an interaction of genetic and cultural factors. We may speculate that the earliest likely major escalation of egalitarian behaviors would have been with Homo erectus, for this would have involved some complex political challenges, and this first really certain human had a significantly larger brain than its probable apelike predecessors. Would the sharing of sizable meat kills have been part of the picture? With this earlier human there was an archaeologically visible interest in very large game, but this may have been actively scavenged only once in a while, when opportunities arose.57 Otherwise, the exact role of meat in that early diet is more difficult to determine, aside from the fact that Ancestral Pan’s pattern of taking small game all but surely was continuing in the direct human line.58 If in fact som
e medium-sized large game also was being hunted actively and regularly by Homo erectus, then a systematic and aggressive approach to better equalized meat-sharing might have been invented as early as around 1.8 MYA. I say this because unlike very large mammals, such as elephants, game like antelope-sized ungulates do not provide a surfeit of meat. As a result, efficient sharing becomes useful.
It’s difficult to project such speculations further back in time, for it seems likely that the earlier terrestrial apes in the human line would have had more limited social brains, while overall the archaeological evidence is quite scarce. In this connection, the more ancient the field site, the more likely it becomes that fossilized bones of less enormous butchered prey might have decomposed to the point that cut marks made by human tools might not be discernible.
Such a very early meat-sharing hypothesis cannot be absolutely ruled out, but as we’ve seen the solid evidence we have today does point to 250,000 BP for the beginning of active and regular hunting of sizable but not enormous game. And even if for some reason antihierarchical subordinate coalitions had begun to significantly whittle away at alpha power as early as with Homo erectus, the later advent of intensive large-game hunting could have greatly accelerated this political process.
What we may say, with a high degree of certainty, is that Ancestral Pan was hierarchical—and that at some point along the way, and surely by 45,000 years ago when cultural modernity had phased in fully, humans had become decisively egalitarian. We can also say that this was because alpha types were being put down, or executed, if they failed to control themselves and restrain their own power moves. This takes place today, and it is difficult to imagine any other way that it could have been accomplished yesterday.
When large-game hunting did phase in, if it were to succeed—and if decisive egalitarianism were not already in place—some really severe sanctioning would have been necessary as the inadequately inhibited self-aggrandizing alphas—along with greedy thieves and cheaters—were attacked by forceful coalitions of group members who ganged up to control the meat as a highly valuable form of “community property.”59 It’s logical that merely doing the job halfway would have resulted in very high levels of conflict over meat, and that therefore, after 250,000 BP, the only viable course for efficient meat distribution would have been to suppress alpha behavior definitively.
This evolutionary hypothesis attempts to base a theory of moral origins in human behavioral ecology and also in an assessment of earlier humans’ social behavioral potential. It awaits the creation of plausible alternatives by other scholars—and further archaeological evidence—as the only likely means of scientific testing in the very near future. In a different sphere, it’s difficult to predict how long it will be before behavioral genetics may provide further key information that could be useful in making behavioral and chronological assessments.
At this point, we’re left with really three alternatives. One is that archaic humans had not progressed very far beyond ancestral behaviors in the matter of keeping down alphas and that large-game hunting led to radical political change and also to some severe initial conflict in putting down the poorly inhibited alphas. Another would be that before that, with earlier humans their coalitions would have partially reduced alpha power—in order to improve personal autonomy and probably also to increase the breeding opportunities of lower-ranking males—and that this would have made the transition to relying upon large game much easier. The third would be that decisive egalitarianism was already in place when such hunting began and that in fact this might actually have been a prerequisite for large-game hunting to succeed.
Further research findings will be needed if we are to choose scientifically among these three hypotheses, but all three of them deal with basic variables that are pertinent to the emergence of an evolutionary conscience. With respect to such conscience evolution, this could have been quite gradual or heavily punctuated, depending on the hypothesis and on how powerful social selection, in conjunction with group selection, would have been.
OFFING THE ALPHAS
When Whallon pointed out that alpha hegemony would have interfered with the egalitarian sharing process that goes so strongly with hunting and gathering today,60 he did not present a hypothesis for how an equality-based political order could have supplanted the old hierarchical one. However, in Chapter 4 we looked rather carefully at contemporary egalitarian foragers and found one drastic answer—in the form of capital punishment. There we saw that quite often this serves as a means of eliminating free-riding problems connected with overly dominant behavior. Once serious hunting began, and large amounts of meat were arriving in camp on a sporadic basis, very likely meat thieves and meat-cheaters would have been lesser targets, while greedy alpha bullies would have received the brunt of serious social sanctioning, just as takes place today. I emphasize that more than half the executions visible in today’s LPA ethnographic record for fifty societies were likely to substantially improve the chances that everyone could share equitably in the distribution and eating of large carcasses, and as we’ve seen in Table I, among LPA foragers it was definitely the bullies, far more than the two sneakier types of deviant, who were singled out as the main targets.
When archaic humans began to hunt, let’s assume for a moment that they were not yet fully egalitarian. Because the necessarily forceful imposition of new, more effective meat-sharing customs on alphas who were used to getting their own way was likely to have been bloody, this would have driven up the rate of social selection in favor of better personal self-restraint. On the other hand, if subordinate rebellions had already become more frequent and more effective, and if the power positions of tyrannical alphas had already been partly undermined, an equitable and efficient sharing of meat would seem to have been easier to set in motion and, as I just suggested, the rate of social selection would have been more gradual.
To summarize here, we cannot rule out the possibility that earlier archaics might even have already become fully egalitarian before 250,000 BP, which could have paved the way for large-game hunting to flourish quickly and with far less conflict because efficiently equalized meat-sharing rules could have been so much easier to impose. In this case, conscience evolution and moral origins would have begun earlier, and social selection might have been motivated more in rank-and-file desires for more personal autonomy, or in rank-and-file males wanting more breeding opportunities, than in needs to widely share large-game carcasses. However, whenever it was that a serious reliance on large game began, this new development still could have raised the rates at which alphas were being gang-attacked, wounded, or killed by subordinates who wanted assured shares of a highly precious food that arrived so rarely and in such large packages. And this could have accelerated the rate of conscience evolution.
This theory is basically political in that I have tied this strong selection force closely to the advent of egalitarian social orders. These hypotheses provide a very large window during which punitive social selection could have operated to make us moral, and these social orders could have begun to develop at any time in the course of human evolution, really. However, for today’s definitive kind of egalitarianism to have flourished, it would have been necessary for human social and political intelligence to become powerful enough for subordinates to decisively curb the alphas in their bands.
It was when such punishment really took off that I think the older, ancestral, fear-based mechanisms of self-control could have been supplemented by newly evolved traits that added up to moral origins. These included more sophisticated perspective taking, the internalization of rules that made for more efficient adjustments of individuals to the perils of living in a group that was prepared to kill serious deviants, a sense of shame, moralistic judgment of oneself and others, and a special type of symbolic communication in the form of gossip.
This may seem a rather banal explanation for something as exalted as moral origins, but I offer it until a better theory comes along.
&nbs
p; MORE ON PREHISTORIC CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Presently, I will offer some archaeological evidence about butchering methodologies, which at least suggests that at 400,000 BP human foragers were not yet fully egalitarian. First, however, let’s look to the more recent past and return to the issue of capital punishment as an antihierarchical measure. In this connection, consider three examples of more recent Magdalenian cave art from Spain,61 which probably date back to the time when these culturally modern foragers were adjusting to the arrival of the Holocene Epoch, with its more stable climates. What we see in one is a cluster of ten male archers who seem to be rejoicing in something they have just done as they expressively wave their bows in the air. Lying on the ground some yards away is an inert human male figure who looks almost like a porcupine,62 with exactly ten arrows sticking in him. That’s all we know for sure, but some speculation is possible.
First, ten archers suggests a band of perhaps forty, which would be a bit larger than average today, but well within the central tendencies already discussed. Elsewhere in Spain, two similar depictions show three and six archers, respectively, so the overall average would be about six, which seems to be right at the average for contemporary foragers—even though with such a small sample size, this is merely suggestive. Second, with the killings done unanimously and at short range, this would appear to be an instance of execution within the band, rather than a very lopsided act of killing between bands. We can’t be sure, but the appearance of this event three times suggests that it could have been an execution scene similar to the “communal” one described by Richard Lee for the Bushmen, where a serial killer was “porcupined” by his group.63 We’ll meet with the vivid details in a later chapter.
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