Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  In this context of nutritional downturn, predictably nepotistic tendencies will tend to decisively trump altruistic tendencies to share with nonrelatives. And when privation turns into famine, a quick glimpse tells us that what can happen next isn’t at all pretty. Within family circles, underlying egoistic tendencies can start to trump nepotistic tendencies, and even within close nuclear families, sharing can be drastically reduced. In extreme situations even intrafamilial cannibalism can take place, with the main examples coming from the Arctic.16 However, our very powerful egoism, our strong nepotism, and our relatively modest altruism predict very much the same behavior elsewhere when hunter-gatherers face an imminent starving-to-death situation.

  What made for privation in Pleistocene Africa wouldn’t have been the absence of plant foods as a fallback, but periodic abrupt and radical onsets of droughts that would have affected plants and animals alike. Hard times surely appeared far more often than recently, and in recurrent cycles, and for humans highly flexible responses to the opportunity to share would have provided major adaptive advantages in dealing with these regional climate swings, which within a half a century or less surely could have moved environments from bountiful to dangerously inadequate or even worse.

  Long ago, an agronomist named Justis von Leibig promulgated his environmental “Law of the Minimum,”17 which suggests that in normal times the effects of natural selection on gene pools may not be nearly as forceful as when certain resources become very scarce and therefore limiting. Thus, in the far north mammals and fish are the limiting factor for humans because snow and ice provide water and plants have little relevancy. On the Kalahari, availability of water could be the main limiting variable.

  Combine this insight, now, with the fact that prehistorically humans seem to have experienced bottlenecks during which the overall number of people in existence became quite small.18 When both plant foods and animals were subject to short-term failure, local-population extinctions were very likely,19 and on at least one prehistoric occasion total species extinction was a real possibility.20 In this context advantages of the very wide kind of flexibility in sharing we have been speaking of could have made a major difference to bands or families or individuals, as they made often very ambivalent decisions about how and when to share.

  It’s heartbreaking to think of how often during the Late Pleistocene culturally modern beings with moral sensibilities like ours were faced with extreme and cruel situations of triage. Over and over again they were obliged to set aside deeply internalized moral values that favored helping others—be this through altruism or nepotism—in the interest of family or even personal survival. When the chips were down, band-level sharing became all but absent, which means that hungry families and individuals were very much the units of selection because the band as a whole had ceased to cooperate. And even family-level cooperation was up for grabs: in some contexts it could have paid off reproductively for parents to share scarce foods with offspring or with each other; in more pressing circumstances it would have made sense in terms of survival not to share, which made individuals the units of selection. The ultimate dilemma, faced historically by the Netsilik in central Canada, was whether to turn cannibal. In one case,21 parents who ate their own children rationalized their actions as follows: had the parents killed themselves for the children to eat, the children still couldn’t have made a living by hunting when the wild game returned. However, if the parents survived by consuming their offspring, they could at least have more children and thereby keep things going.

  This brings us back to the human conscience and the adaptiveness of its flexibility. A too-strong conscience would make such stressful adaptive moves unthinkable. However, a flexible conscience allowed people to adjust their adherence to moral rules to the situations they faced, and when altruistic empathy was trumped by egoism or nepotism, apparently they were able to do what was necessary.

  Let me suggest exactly how as hunger escalated, and variance in meat intake increased, having a flexible, as opposed to a rigid, conscience would have helped to make these facultative responses possible. First, contingent sharing with nonkin in the same band was likely to be too immediately costly and it ceased to make sense because the potential sharer might be dead before possibly very eventual future contingencies came into play. Second, further triage would have phased in when sharing began to break down within the family so that even innately strong, culturally supported nepotistic impulses could be trumped by desperately hungry decisions in favor of egoism. The ultimate victory of egoism took place when cannibalism on nearby dead bodies came into play and even more so when the active killing and eating of others by people too weak to forage probably took place.22

  If we consider this entire range of solutions to the general problem of sharing food, the interplay among egoism, nepotism, and altruism is obvious enough. Also obvious are cultural emphases that strongly promote generosity to both kin and nonkin but that in practice fall short of being absolute. Apparently, cultural values can even condone sheer egoism in the face of famine, or so it seems when practical Inuit individuals known to have resorted to intrafamilial cannibalism appear not to have been socially punished afterward.23

  AMBIVALENT SHARERS

  Let us return to some contemporary foragers who on an everyday basis can’t even live in bands. They live so close to routine scarcity that the usual highly interdependent multifamily band life all but disappears for long stretches of time. This takes place owing to necessity out on certain marginally productive Australian semideserts, where game is scarce and insects and lizards are nutritionally important. Likewise, in the dry Great Basin of northwestern North America, with just a few deer available, Shoshonean family groups have to depend on highly unpredictable pine-nut harvests, and a limited rabbit supply, when it comes to getting some protein and fat.24 In such situations, sharing within families can stay in effect, and the dispersed families will still meet when they can to socialize (and share meat) on a larger scale. If there’s a large pine-nut harvest, they may even be able to form sedentary bands for up to a year.25 But nutrition comes first, and over the years, their much beloved band-level social life could all but disappear for much of the time.

  Because of our love of company, the human social preference is to live in bands, not just in families, but we’ve just seen that foragers can adjust. This means that in the Pleistocene periodically marginal but viable subsistence adjustments would have led to dispersed families barely getting through temporary hard times, when staying bunched up in a band would have made staying alive much more uncertain because bands used up the limited food around them so quickly compared to families.

  Over a decade ago, archaeologist Rick Potts took a look at the startling incoming data on Pleistocene climatic instability and decided that adaptive flexibility must have been an important key to human survival, a key so important that our brain’s remarkable advances in size could be attributed largely to frequent and challenging environmental changes and the need to cope with them intelligently.26 Here I’m combining Potts’s hypothesis and Leibig’s Law with hypotheses about our inherently ambivalent human nature, and with our morally flexible ways of dealing with scarcity, to suggest that important, punctuated phases of human genetic evolution must have taken place when people were very hungry—and some of them simply weren’t going to make it.

  In prehistoric hard times the overall mix of biocultural components I’m describing here provided a remarkably flexible way for humans to at least stay alive as small kin groups—or even just as individuals. Thus, these units became highly relevant as units of selection, while multifamily groups became temporarily less relevant unless there was active conflict over defensible resources. At the same time, when resources were adequate, this same behavioral potential provided a way for humans to really flourish in bands as they gradually built up their populations before the next crisis struck.

  Of course, this flexibility’s advantages for adaptation have also been usef
ul more recently in the far more stable—and usually more comfortable and predictable—Holocene Epoch. But under Pleistocene conditions, at frequent junctures such adaptive flexibility surely was far more critical, much more often, as entire regions became “marginalized” and people had to cope with dire hunger and had to curb their culturally reinforced generosity.

  Sometimes I wonder if these once quite frequent environmental shortfalls, and hunter-gatherers’ flexible responses to them past and present, have been adequately exposed to scientific analysis. When anthropologists write their ethnographies, the daunting task of describing a culture holistically usually results in a “normalized” depiction of social life and sharing that doesn’t fully take into account these more unusual emergency contingencies,27 even if they are remembered by older people. In addition, archaeological evidence for temporary dire scarcity, and specifically its social effects, is by its nature rather slim. For these reasons, we must not idealize today’s hunter-gatherers, with their routine sharing of large-game meat as a prized and nutritiously important commodity, by looking only to the good-times accounts that predominate in ethnographic reports.

  Even in good times, perfectly motivated, all-but-automatic generosity is not the name of the sharing game, especially outside the family. I’ve described the underlying ambivalences that can surface actively, and I’ve emphasized that our helpful altruism becomes socially potent only when this potential is culturally boosted through constant calls for generosity, praise for the generous, and criticism and social punishment for the exceptionally stingy. Of course, one way an outsider might read all the prosocial messages is that the people in question are just naturally very generous and cooperative, and golden rule sayings might seem to reflect this. Another, however, is that hunter-gatherer systems of sharing are so fragile that they need very substantial and continual reinforcement.

  This “battle” is not entirely uphill. From an early age these same people have internalized cultural values that promote altruistic generosity and therefore are naturally responsive to these prosocial messages. This must not be overshadowed by the various rough edges I have described, as with all the !Kung complaints about meat-sharing. The latter are simply expectable manifestations of egoism and nepotism at work in cultural traditions that allow their strong expression. The much less contentious-seeming Netsilik are probably closer to the worldwide LPA forager norm,28 but even though they may not use repeated demands to get their share, I can assure you that Netsilik women or men who are saddled with the difficult task of sharing out the meat fairly are watched closely, and resentments over failure to share can be bitter. This would be true anywhere that highly valued and not overly plentiful large game has to be shared, and with respect to the !Kung I have suggested that they provide a good idea of how a system of sharing can be highly efficient in spite of peoples’ worried anticipation of stinginess.

  NISA

  In dealing with this interplay between human genetic nature and these cultural patterns that amplify generosity, I wish to get up close and personal again. As we’ve seen, the !Kung are probably quite near to the complaining extreme among today’s LPA foragers in general.29 In this context, the words of Nisa, the !Kung woman whose autobiography will provide us with further detailed insight into how the !Kung feel about things like sharing, will enable us to vicariously enter one Bushman mind and consider the underlying psychological stress at first hand.

  Nisa comes across as a classically ambivalent sharer, and it started young. Of course, her earliest recollection of a problem in this area came when she was being weaned after her mother became pregnant. It’s usual for hunter-gatherers to continue nursing until a child is several years old, and because lactation tends to suppress ovulation, this provides a long birth interval that is congenial to a nomadic way of life—where carrying two very small children would be a serious burden on all concerned. I shall hazard a guess that in our own culture very few people can remember being weaned, but when maternal warmth and nourishment were abruptly denied to Nisa as a child already several years old, she appears to have suffered a real and well-remembered trauma. This caused her to engage in parentally disapproved behavior both before and after the birth of her younger sibling.

  Marjorie Shostak’s remarkable account is replete with both childhood and adult remembrances of being angry with others for being stingy—with Nisa tearfully or angrily wanting to retaliate in kind. In fact, save for one episode that involved her being unduly generous, if we were to generalize just Nisa’s personally remembered behavior patterns to all Bushmen, we would have to wonder how they managed to share at all.

  This is an occupational hazard when working with a single autobiography, and there are also our own ethnocentric reactions to deal with. I probably could not rely on such an account were it not for the accompanying insights of the ethnographer. Indeed, Shostak tells us that other Bushman children have similar problems: “The !Kung economy is based on sharing, and children are encouraged to share things from their infancy. Among the first words a child learns are na (‘give it to me’) and ihn (‘take this’). But sharing is hard for children to learn, especially when they are expected to share with someone they resent or dislike. And giving or withholding food or possessions may be a powerful way to express anger, jealousy, and resentment, as well as love.”30

  Although Nisa’s actual food jealousies may well fall within the normal range, it does appear that her memory seems to work quite well when she’s recalling past deprivations and conflicts. Shostak continues, “It is also hard to learn not simply to take what you want, when you want it. !Kung children rarely go hungry; even in the occasional times when food is scarce, they get preferential treatment. Food is sometimes withheld as a form of punishment for wasting or destroying it, but such punishment is always short-lived. Nevertheless, many adults recall ‘stealing’ food as children. These episodes reflect the general !Kung anxiety about their food supply, as well as the pleasure they take in food—both emotions already present in childhood.”31

  Nisa’s autobiography is replete with stories involving food:32

  When mother was pregnant with Kumsa, I was always crying, wasn’t I? I would cry for a while, then be quiet and sit around, eating regular food: sweet nin berries and starchy chon and klaru bulbs, foods of the rainy season. One day, after I had eaten and was full, I said, “Mommy, won’t you let me have just a little milk? Please, let me nurse.” She cried, “Mother! My breasts are things of shit! Shit! Yes, the milk is like vomit and smells terrible. You can’t drink it. If you do, you’ll go, ‘Whaagh . . . Whaagh . . . ’ and throw up.” I said, “No, I won’t throw up, I’ll just nurse.” But she refused and said, “Tomorrow, Daddy will trap a springhare, just for you to eat.” When I heard that, my heart was happy again.

  The next day, my father killed a springhare. When I saw him coming home with it, I shouted, “Ho, ho, Daddy! Ho, ho, Daddy’s come! Daddy killed a springhare; Daddy’s bringing home meat! Now I will eat and won’t give any to her.” My father cooked the meat and when it was done, I ate and ate and ate. I told her, “You stinged your milk, so I’ll stinge this meat. You think your breasts are such wonderful things? They’re not, they’re terrible things.” She said, “Nisa, please listen to me—my milk is not good for you anymore.” I said, “Grandmother! I don’t want it anymore! I’ll eat meat instead. I’ll never have anything to do with your breasts again. I’ll just eat the meat Daddy and Dau kill for me.”

  On one occasion, Nisa refuses to share with her mother some duiker meat that was acquired by her older brother, Dau:

  After he skinned it, he gave me the feet. I put them in the coals to roast. Then he gave me some meat from the calf and I put that in the coals, too. When it was ready, I ate and ate and ate. Mother told me to give her some, but I refused, “Didn’t you stinge your breasts? Didn’t I say I wanted to nurse? I’m the only one who’s going to eat this meat. I won’t give any of it to you!” She said, “The milk you want belongs to your brother
. What’s making you still want to nurse?” I said, “My big brother killed this duiker. You won’t have any of it. Not you. He’ll cut the rest into strips and hang it to dry for me to eat. You refused to let me nurse so your son could. Now you say I should give you meat?”

  The following passages tie a jealous Nisa to stealing her mother’s milk through deceit, and in the end it is her father who lays down the law with threats of corporal punishment:

  Another day, my mother was lying down asleep with Kumsa, and I quietly sneaked up on them. I took Kumsa away from her, put him down on the other side of the hut, and came back and lay down beside her. While she slept, I took her nipple, put it in my mouth and began to nurse. I nursed and nursed and nursed. Maybe she thought it was my little brother. But he was still lying where I left him, while I stole her milk. I had already begun to feel wonderfully full when she woke up. She saw me and cried, “Where . . . tell me . . . what did you do with Kumsa? Where is he?” At that moment, he started to cry. I said, “He’s over there.”

  She grabbed me and pushed me, hard, away from her. I lay there and cried. She went to Kumsa, picked him up, and laid him down beside her. She insulted me, cursing my genitals, “Have you gone crazy? Nisa-Big-Genitals, what’s the matter with you? What craziness grabbed you that you took Kumsa, put him somewhere else, then lay down and nursed? Nisa-Big-Genitals! You must be crazy! I thought it was Kumsa nursing!” I lay there, crying. Then I said, “I’ve already nursed. I’m full. Let your baby nurse now. Go, feed him. I’m going to play.” I got up and went and played. . . .