Both of these developments were possible because ancestrally preadapted coalitions enabled our human ancestors to act as large groups in order to solve social problems. At first it was simply political majorities that did this, but once a conscience was in place, these majorities became moral.
LIFE UNDER A MORAL MAJORITY
In the minds of band members, social sanctioning comes from “the group,” and it doesn’t matter whether the entire group has reached a true consensus or whether a few people—often a deviant’s kin—are staying neutrally to one side while the moral majority exerts its will. Nor does it matter very much whether one or just a few individuals are stepping forward to act on behalf of the group; what counts is that they know they have the group—a moral majority—behind them. If they don’t, an attempt to sanction can turn into simply a factional dispute, which degrades everybody’s quality of social life and, as we’ve seen, likely splits the group.
Being able to arrive at a reasonably well-unified moral majority is critical to the continuing viability of any egalitarian band’s social life, precisely because individual peacemakers are allowed too little authority to take on the tougher conflicts, and because some deviants are simply too awesome to be taken on without help or backing. These dynamics are understood by people in tiny bands that lack policemen, judges, and juries and often don’t even recognize a single permanent headman.
A deviant who seriously irritates or threatens the majority of the band while at the same time violating a norm that has strong moral backing is definitely asking for trouble. The impending group reactions are easy enough to predict by an adult who has previously experienced such sanctioning—be it as a deviant or as a sanctioner. And simply participating in gossip is a constant reminder that group public opinion is, in general, coiled to strike. Such judgmental communities make the fabric of human social life moral, and they do so in predictable ways that have been in place for thousands of generations.
PLEISTOCENE UPS,
DOWNS, AND CRASHES
10
HUMAN NATURE AND HUMAN FLEXIBILITY
Culture is partly blind habit, but it also involves people solving problems. Because so much of social life is flexibly constructed in the light of conscious community needs and objectives, it should come as no surprise that as local environments change, people will be deliberately and insightfully modifying their practices to fulfill their needs as they see them.
It’s time to consider exactly how morally flexible our culturally modern predecessors were likely to have been as they coped with radically changing prehistoric environments that could be inviting but also unpredictable and treacherous. We’ll also be seeing how this flexibility ties in with the structurally ambivalent social nature we’ve evolved, for at times egoism can come into conflict with nepotism, while either egoism or nepotism can come into conflict with tendencies to be generous toward people outside the family. Our subject matter will be the sharing of food in times ranging from adequacy or excess to scarcity or outright famine.
HOW SHARING VARIES
In normal times, when the first wave of meat-sharing takes place with people like the Bushmen or the Netsilik or the forty-eight other LPA groups I’ve surveyed, we’ve already seen that through a variety of customs people behave as though the large carcasses were essentially the property of all—at least until the meat is distributed. This group appropriation of large carcasses is sustained largely by pressure from public opinion, but if necessary, brute physical force can be employed to prevent monopolization that favors individuals or their families.
In combination, social pressure and active sanctioning do quite a good job of keeping the self-aggrandizing tendencies of egoistic or overly nepotistic hunters in check—especially when they are the ones who have proudly brought home the bacon and are feeling their oats. The immediate winners of this zero-sum game are all the other members of the band, and the underlying idea is that the band is one big cooperative team as far as large game is concerned.
This pattern applies to normal times when killing large game is challenging and quite unpredictable in its acquisition, yet plentiful enough to be extremely useful to group subsistence. The result is the efficient, culturally routinized type of meat-sharing system that we’ve discussed at such great length. Not all times are normal, however, and in the Pleistocene Epoch this must have become gruesomely apparent again and again, as environments that sometimes were benevolent often changed drastically for the worse and presented our ancestors with threatening scarcities worthy of the term “dire.”
VARIETIES OF SHARING IN GOOD TIMES
To begin with, however, we must ask what happens in those rare times when seasonal resources are so ample, and so highly concentrated, that a cooperating population can congregate at a great size such that the usual system of meat-sharing simply becomes unwieldy. In the far north of central Canada, the Netsilik enjoy this possibility every year, and we’ll now take a closer look at their remarkable system for averaging out shares of seal carcasses, which involves a rather fancy, large-scale version of Alexander’s indirect reciprocity. Just in the winter, a sizable number of small bands gather together on the sea ice to live well on seals for several months, and these groupings can exceed sixty to eighty persons. Hunting seals through their multiple breathing holes is accompanied by a high degree of unpredictability, and the Netsilik have created a brilliant system of meat distribution that reduces family meat-intake variance just as we’ve seen in small, normal-sized bands.1
If we imagine a butcher’s chart with a picture of a seal divided into seven major parts, then we’re looking at the main basis for this system. When any participating hunter lands a seal, he’ll have a different permanent partner for each body part; for instance, he’ll always give the flippers to his flipper partner—and that hunter will reciprocate in kind when he’s lucky enough to land a seal.2 With a system like this, everyone’s eating some seal meat all of the time. And seven hunters would be right in the ballpark for the number of meat-procurers and meat-sharers in a normal band of thirty.
It obviously wouldn’t make much sense for sixty people to try to share a single seal. But what would be the alternative if all these Netsilik families simply hunted on their own? With a little bad luck, even an adept hunter and his near kin might kill two seals one month but then none the following month. So this system of “meat insurance” sees to it, in terms of probabilities, that all seven of these sharing partners will eat adequate, if moderate, amounts of meat and blubber quite regularly, thereby achieving variance reduction. All of these partners will be nonkinsmen; within their extended families, Inuit kinsmen share automatically, so they don’t need such a system to regulate their meat intake.3
A very different kind of cultural flexibility obtains in times of truly glorious surfeit. When people are living in normal bands and major windfalls occur, the fair sharing between unrelated families can simply disappear, as when other Inuit groups intercept large caribou herds at narrow river crossings and slaughter scores of animals.4 With so much meat, sharing doesn’t make any sense until the meat supply becomes sporadic again. At that point, the normal variance-reduction system will cut in again to effectively average out family meat intake.
THE CONTENTIOUS SIDE OF SHARING
There’s an opposite side to this coin, which arrives when encounters with game become unusually rare. However, before we examine what transpires when foragers are faced with dire scarcity, the matter of motives needs some further clarification. Basic motives that affect patterns of sharing are likely to be complicated because, as we’ve seen, they’re likely to be mixed. There’s motivationally generous sharing, done simply because the need of a socially bonded other is sensed and sympathetically appreciated; this other person may be someone very familiar or merely an acquaintance or at times even simply a member of the same human race. There’s also sharing because of a deeply internalized sense of duty to share. And then there’s sharing to avoid shame and gain reputatio
n, and there’s sharing to be eligible for future benefits. The following discussion will help in clarifying not only this complex motivational division of labor, but also what the limits of hunter-gatherer generosity may be.
Let’s reconsider what happens after a normal LPA meat distribution has taken place in a thriving band of twenty to thirty. Once it’s shared out, we know the meat amounts to private property. This means that giving to others outside the family becomes optional, whereas sharing within the family is basically automatic even though there may be some jealousy or squabbles. We also know that stinginess is poorly thought of and that generosity is promoted in general. We also know that, optionally, private shares of meat can be shared between unrelated families—even though some of the sharing is likely to be ambivalent because underlying egoistic and nepotistic tendencies are working against competing underlying tendencies that favor extrafamilial generosity.
Rarely, such ambivalences can spawn serious social conflict over meat, for instance, if requests thought to be legitimate are outright denied and expected informal reciprocation is not forthcoming spontaneously. Such problems are recorded for both the Inuit5 and in the Kalahari,6 and Niqi, the woman with the problematically stingy personality in Briggs’s Utku band, found herself being partially ostracized because she held back.7 Surely, such problems can be generalized to LPA foragers in general. But this includes the fact that in this context of informal meat-sharing between families really serious quarrels—ones that threaten to split the band—are very rare.
We’ve already met with the well-known school of thought that likens hunter-gatherer meat-sharing to “tolerated theft” as this has been modeled for chimpanzees, and this somewhat “cynical” model does seem to go nicely with certain facts about human sharing. First, in some but by no means the majority of LPA foraging societies, we’ve seen that the initial, “communalized” wave of sharing can be accompanied by routine and constant demands for more meat.8 These characterizations amount to indirect or direct accusations of unfairness in terms of customary rules, and perhaps the underlying hostility could be seen as threatening enough to motivate sharing. However, even in groups with contentious styles of sharing, large carcasses are always shared so that everyone gets some meat regularly, and even in such bickering groups there is pleasure in eating together and—to repeat—serious quarrels are very rare.
Although these contentious styles of sharing vary greatly in their intensity, I believe they all can be viewed similarly to how we have depicted the universal pronouncements that praise extrafamilial generosity. They amount to culturally routinized ways of “tweaking” other people’s relatively modest tendencies to behave generously outside the family, and the tweakers are merely tweaking; they’re not spoiling for a fight that will, at cost to everyone, split the band.
Such deliberate amplification of extrafamilial generosity is evident not only when nagging is used to spur generosity or when groups issue the explicit calls for generosity that we’ve discussed at length,9 but also less directly when they punish cheating hunters or sneaky thieves who seriously break the rules of sharing. All of these manipulative measures suggest that sharing this precious commodity is accomplished in the face of considerable ambivalence.
One important take-home message is that, even though at the level of genetic dispositions altruism is obviously outranked by egoism and nepotism, the feelings of care and generosity that promote altruism still can reduce the potential for conflict because basically they take some of the edge off of individual competition for food. In effect, I believe that human generosity oils the wheels of cooperation and that people understand this intuitively; that’s why generous tendencies are constantly being tweaked. The result can be good for everyone. In fat or adequate times, this makes it possible for people to cooperate quite efficiently—and take pleasure in doing so in spite of the occasional rough edges we’ve discussed. Thus, today’s various negative and positive pressures to be generous toward nonkin would have been a very important component of the sharing systems that were in effect 45,000 years ago among culturally modern humans, and probably earlier as well.
Today, both the !Kung and the Netsilik share routinely within their families, and in both cultures the people sometimes know hunger. However, the !Kung seem to be one of the world’s more contentious cultures—not only when it comes to initial sharing of communalized meat at the band level, but also afterward when private meat is requested by members of other families. In this connection I should mention that in general the !Kung seem to be unusually loquacious and also perhaps more prone to heated interpersonal conflict—even though they do praise generosity and try hard to reduce conflict just like all other LPA foragers.
I should also say that in spite of a contentious verbal style, the !Kung do seem to share quite effectively, just as Pat Draper told us they do. What may be distinctive of the !Kung and certain Australian Aborigines,10 and a handful of others whose styles of sharing are unusually contentious, is that they don’t try to hide their ambivalences and their worries about fair apportionment of meat, as the Inuit and many other hunter-gatherers seem to. In my view, the more contentious cultures are simply making overt anxieties about fair sharing that are widespread, and they are widespread because egoism and nepotism can so readily trump human altruism.
HOW GENEROUS FEELINGS SUPPORT COOPERATION
In thinking about human nature, here’s my thesis. Critically important are the underlying generous feelings that help a system of indirectly reciprocated meat-sharing to be invented and maintained. Yet it’s also true that basically these altruistic tendencies are so moderate that hunter-gatherer sharing institutions need continuous and strong positive cultural support if cooperative benefits are to be reaped without undue conflict. In a sense, then, these innately generous tendencies are not quite up to the job. To finish the job at the cultural level, the serious and continuous threat of group disapproval and active sanctioning does its part in making systems of indirect reciprocity among nonkin work without too much conflict. So does a simple awareness that living in sizable bands pays off and that serious conflict will cause the band to split. And so do all the positive preachings in favor of generosity, and so, sometimes, does hostilely manipulative nagging.
If all of this tweaking of the better side of human nature is needed, we might ask to what degree such sharing is emotionally “genuine” in that it is based importantly on actual feelings of generosity. This surely varies by the personality of the sharer, by the situational context of sharing, by the degree of bonding between sharers and recipients, and by whether kin are involved. But in normal times people do share and they do so quite efficiently, and this is usually the pattern—in the Holocene. But what about the Late Pleistocene Epoch, when climates were so capricious—and when frequently they could be cruel and even highly dangerous?
DIRE SCARCITY BRINGS THE END OF SHARING
When we think about this division of labor among egoism, nepotism, and wider generosity, what takes place when food becomes really scarce is of great interest. Keep in mind that when large game has become very hard to acquire, and is seriously emaciated once found, usually the climatic conditions that have this effect will also be reducing the chances of humans subsisting well on plant foods and small game.
In the Arctic, of course, there simply is no such vegetarian fallback strategy. There, freezing is a major means of storage, but there are obstacles to its use as well; for instance, other carnivores, including well-motivated wolves and powerful bears, can raid these caches even if there are stones available to place over the meat. There’s also the energetic problem of digging through the permafrost if the cache is to be deep. People like the Netsilik do sometimes freeze some surplus meat, but as we’ll see, this won’t be enough to get them through an unusually hard winter.
Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley surveyed forty North American foraging societies for which information on food scarcity was available,11 and a quarter of them were what I’ve been calli
ng LPA bands, mostly Inuit. Thirteen societies commonly experiencing famines with people dying of starvation included Inuit-speakers living in inland areas of Canada, such as the Netsilik, and a number of inland-dwelling boreal-forest Athapascans in the Pacific Northwest, non-LPA foragers who were engaged in the fur trade. Subject to occasional famines were another twelve non-LPA fur-trade groups that foraged in inland subarctic forests. The fifteen societies that were famine free mostly lived in California and were sedentary. Keeley did not include mounted hunters of the Great Plains in his sample.
One bottom-line finding was that some areas make for a steady, dependable living, whereas others present resources that fluctuate so much over time that years with famines are predictable. It’s of interest that the famine-free groups were in California, where resources were ample enough and concentrated enough so that most of the foragers could live in groups larger than the usual nomadic bands, basically stay in permanent settlements, and store their food as families. This would have been a deviation from the basic nomadic pattern before 15,000 years ago, although such outliers probably existed then.
In North America, hunger also struck people living in the dry and erratic Great Basin, an area that can be compared to the Kalahari, and to parts of the desertic interior of Australia, where similar food shortages also are known.12 But it’s no accident that our main accounts of hunter-gatherer famine come from the central and eastern Arctic and from subarctic boreal forests because plant foods (or small game or insects) offer so little backup when the meat supply fails.
Once famine is on its way, sharing appears to break down in two stages. In coming to this conclusion, I’m keeping in mind the rather slim hunter-gatherer data,13 but also the more abundant information we have about agricultural tribesmen who live in similarly small groups and in the context of drought sometimes face starvation14 in spite of their using long-term food storage.15 With respect to bands, as famine approaches, the various families may continue to share any plant foods and small game within the family—just as they do in times of plenty. However, large-game consumption will have been diminishing for three reasons: game becomes scarce, hungry hunters have less energy to hunt, and when killed, emaciated large mammals are providing much less meat. Furthermore, as variance increases, sharing at the band level begins to make less sense for statistical reasons.
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