Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  At first scientists didn’t understand this one bit. How could dogs be intelligent enough to pass the object choice test? They certainly hadn’t inherited their brains from their wolf ancestors, because wolves score just as poorly on Brian’s test as orangutans and chimpanzees. And they didn’t pick it up from their owners, because puppies can pass the test at nine weeks old.

  Brian’s colleague and adviser, the primatologist Richard Wrangham, suggested that canine intelligence might arise on its own, as a chance by-product, like corkscrew tails and drop ears. But Brian didn’t buy that; how could a trait as instrumental as social intelligence be an accident? Rather, the young biologist suspected that our ancestors had selectively bred the smartest dogs.

  There was only one way Brian could test his suspicion. It was time for a trip to Siberia. Years earlier, Brian had read about an obscure study by a Russian geneticist who purportedly had turned foxes into dogs. By the time Brian stepped off the Trans-Siberian Express, in 2003, Lyudmila and her team had already bred forty-five generations. Brian would be the first foreign scientist to study the silver foxes, and he started with the object choice test.

  If his hypothesis was correct, the friendly foxes and the ferocious foxes would flunk the test in equal measure, since Dmitri and Lyudmila had bred them on the basis of friendliness, not intelligence. If Brian’s adviser Richard was right, and intelligence was a coincidental by-product of friendliness, then the selectively bred foxes would pass the test with flying colours.

  Long story short: the results supported the by-product theory and proved Brian wrong. The latest generation of friendly foxes was not only remarkably astute, but also much smarter than their aggressive counterparts. As Brian put it, ‘The foxes totally rocked my world.’29

  Up until then the assumption had always been that domestication diminishes brainpower, literally reducing grey matter and in the process sacrificing skills needed to survive in the wild. We all know the clichés. Sly as a fox. Dumb as an ox. But Brian came to a completely different conclusion. ‘If you want a clever fox,’ he says, ‘you don’t select for cleverness. You select for friendliness.’30

  5

  This brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter. What makes human beings unique? Why do we build museums, while the Neanderthals are stuck in the displays?

  Let’s take another look at the results of those thirty-eight tests done with primates and toddlers. What I neglected to mention earlier is that subjects were also assessed on a fourth skill: social learning. That is, the ability to learn from others. And the results of this last test reveal something interesting.

  This figure perfectly illustrates the skill that sets humans apart. Chimpanzees and orangutans score on a par with human two-year-olds on almost every cognitive test. But when it comes to learning, the toddlers win hands down. Most kids score 100 per cent, most apes 0.

  Human beings, it turns out, are ultrasocial learning machines. We’re born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it’s not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that’s uniquely human. Blushing, after all, is quintessentially social–it’s people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.

  Something similar happens when we look one another in the eye, because humans have another weird feature: we have whites in our eyes. This unique trait lets us follow the direction of other people’s gazes. Every other primate, more than two hundred species in all, produces melanin that tints their eyes. Like poker players wearing shades, this obscures the direction of their gaze.

  But not humans. We’re open books; the object of our attention plain for all to see. Imagine how different human friendships and romance would be if we couldn’t look each other in the eye. How would we feel able to trust one another? Brian Hare suspects our unusual eyes are another product of human domestication. As we evolved to become more social, we also began revealing more about our inner thoughts and emotions.31

  Add to this the smoothing of our large brow ridge, the torus supraorbitalis seen in Neanderthal skulls and in living chimpanzees and orangutans. Scientists think the protruding ridge may have impeded communication, because we now use our eyebrows in all kinds of subtle ways.32 Just try expressing surprise, sympathy or disgust and notice how much your eyebrows do.

  Humans, in short, are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us. But far from being a handicap, this is our true superpower, because sociable people aren’t only more fun to be around, in the end they’re smarter, too.

  The best way to conceptualise this is to imagine a planet inhabited by two tribes: the Geniuses and the Copycats. The Geniuses are brilliant, and one in ten of them invents something truly amazing (say, a fishing rod) at some point in their lives. The Copycats are less cognitively endowed, so only one out of every thousand eventually teaches him or herself to fish. That makes the Geniuses a hundred times smarter than the Copycats.

  But the Geniuses have a problem. They’re not all that social. On average, the Genius who invents a fishing rod has only one friend they can teach to fish. The Copycats have on average ten friends, making them ten times as social.

  Now let’s assume that teaching someone else to fish is tricky and only succeeds half the time. The question is: which group profits from the invention most? The answer, calculates anthropologist Joseph Henrich, is that only one in five Geniuses will ever learn to fish, half having figured it out on their own and the other half learning it from somebody else. By contrast, although a mere 0.1 per cent of the Copycats will work out the technique on their own, 99.9 per cent of them will end up able to fish, because they’ll pick it up from other Copycats.33

  Neanderthals were a little like the Geniuses. Their brains were bigger individually, but collectively they weren’t as bright. On his own, a Homo neanderthalensis may have been smarter than any one Homo sapiens, but the sapiens cohabited in larger groups, migrated from one group to another more frequently and may also have been better imitators. If Neanderthals were a super-fast computer, we were an old-fashioned PC–with wi-fi. We were slower, but better connected.

  Some scientists theorise that the development of human language, too, is a product of our sociability.34 Language is an excellent example of a system that Copycats might not think up themselves but can learn from one another, over time giving rise to talking humans in much the same way that Lyudmila’s foxes began to bark.

  So what happened to the Neanderthals? Did Homo puppy wipe them out after all?

  This notion may make for a thrilling read or documentary, but there’s not a shred of archaeology to support it. The more plausible theory is that we humans were better able to cope with the harsh climatic conditions of the last ice age (115,000–15,000 years ago) because we’d developed the ability to work together.

  And that depressing book The Selfish Gene? It fit right in with 1970s-era thinking–a time hailed as the ‘Me Decade’ by the New York magazine. In the late 1990s, an avid Richard Dawkins fan decided to put his take on Dawkins ideas into practice. Rather than making him feel pessimistic, the book inspired CEO Jeffrey Skilling to run an entire corporation–the energy giant Enron–on the mechanism of greed.

  Skilling set up a ‘Rank & Yank’ system for performance reviews at Enron. A score of 1 placed you among the company’s top performers and gave you a fat bonus. A score of 5 put you at the bottom, a group ‘sent to Siberia’–besides being humiliated, if you couldn’t find another position within two weeks you were fired. The result was a Hobbesian business culture with cut-throat competition between employees. In late 2001 the news broke that Enron had been engaging in massive accounting fraud. When the dust finally settled, Skilling was in prison.

  These days, 60 per cent of the largest US corporations still employ some variation of the Rank & Yank system.35 ‘It is a Hobbesian universe,’ journalist Joris Luyendijk said of London’s financial services sector in the aftermath of th
e 2008 credit crisis, ‘of all against all, with relationships that are characteristically nasty, brutish and short.’36 The same goes for organisations like Amazon and Uber, which systematically pit their workers against each other. Uber, in the words of one anonymous employee, is a ‘Hobbesian jungle’ where ‘you can never get ahead unless someone else dies’.37

  Science has advanced considerably since the 1970s. In subsequent editions of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins scrapped his assertions about humans’ innate selfishness, and the theory has lost credence with biologists. Although struggle and competition clearly factor into the evolution of life, every first-year biology student now learns that cooperation is much more critical.

  This is a truth as old as the hills. Our distant ancestors knew the importance of the collective and rarely idolised individuals. Hunter-gatherers the world over, from the coldest tundras to the hottest deserts, believed that everything is connected. They saw themselves as a part of something much bigger, linked to all other animals, plants and Mother Earth. Perhaps they understood the human condition better than we do today.38

  Is it any wonder, then, that loneliness can quite literally make us sick? That a lack of human contact is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day?39 That having a pet lowers our risk of depression?40 Human beings crave togetherness and interaction.41 Our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food. It’s that longing, more than anything else, that enabled Homo puppy to shoot for the moon.

  When I understood this, the notion of evolution didn’t feel like such a downer any more. Maybe there’s no creator and no cosmic plan. Maybe our existence is just a fluke, after millions of years of blind fumbling. But at least we’re not alone. We have each other.

  4

  Colonel Marshall and the Soldiers Who Wouldn’t Shoot

  1

  And now for the elephant in the room.

  We humans also have a dark side. Sometimes, Homo puppy does horrific things unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Canaries don’t run prison camps. Crocodiles don’t build gas chambers. Never in all of history has a koala felt impelled to count, lock up and wipe out a whole race of fellow creatures. These crimes are singularly human. So besides being exceptionally prosocial, Homo puppy can also be shockingly cruel. Why?

  It seems we have to face a painful fact. ‘The mechanism that makes us the kindest species,’ says Brian Hare, puppy expert, ‘also makes us the cruelest species on the planet.’1 People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.

  This instinct seems to be encoded in our DNA. Take the hormone oxytocin, which biologists have long known plays a key role in childbirth and breastfeeding. When they first discovered that the hormone is also instrumental in romance, there was a flurry of excitement. Spray a little oxytocin up your noses, some conjectured, and have the best date ever.

  In fact, why not have crop dusters mist the masses? Oxytocin–which Lyudmila Trut’s cute Siberian foxes showed high levels of–makes us kinder, gentler, more laid-back and serene. It transforms even the biggest jerk into a friendly puppy. That’s why it’s often touted in mushy terms such as the ‘milk of human kindness’ and the ‘hug hormone’.

  But then came another newsflash. In 2010, researchers at the University of Amsterdam found that the effects of oxytocin seem limited to one’s own group.2 The hormone not only enhances affection for friends, it can also intensify aversion to strangers. Turns out oxytocin doesn’t fuel universal fraternity. It powers feelings of ‘my people first’.

  2

  Maybe Thomas Hobbes was right after all.

  Maybe our prehistory was ‘a war of all against all’. Not among friends, but between enemies. Not with those we knew, but with strangers we didn’t. If that’s true, then by now archaeologists should have found innumerable artefacts of our aggression, and their excavations surely would have uncovered evidence that we’re hardwired for war.

  I’m afraid they have. The first such clues were unearthed in 1924, when a miner dislodged the skull of a small, apelike individual in north-western South Africa, outside the village of Taung. This skull wound up in the hands of anatomist Raymond Dart. He identified it as Australopithecus africanus, one of the first hominins to walk the earth–two, possibly three million years ago.

  From the beginning, Dart was disturbed by his discovery. Studying this skull and the bones of our other ancestors, he saw numerous injuries. What had caused them? His conclusion wasn’t pretty. These early hominins must have used stones, tusks and horns to kill their prey, said Dart, and by the looks of the remains, animals weren’t their only victims. They also murdered each other.

  Raymond Dart became one of the first scientists to characterise human beings as innately bloodthirsty cannibals, and his ‘killer ape theory’ made headlines around the world. It was only with the advent of farming a mere 10,000 years ago, he said, that we switched to a more compassionate diet. The very incipience of our civilisation could be the reason for our ‘widespread reluctance’ to acknowledge what, deep down, we truly are.3

  Dart himself had no such qualms. Our earliest ancestors were, he wrote, ‘confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh’.4

  Now that Dart had laid the groundwork, it was open season for science, and ranks of researchers followed in his footsteps. First up was Jane Goodall, who studied our chimp cousins in Tanzania. Given that chimps were long regarded as peaceable plant eaters, it came as a massive shock to Goodall when in 1974 she arrived in the middle of an all-out ape war.

  For four years, two groups of chimpanzees fought a brutal battle. Appalled, Goodall long kept her discovery under wraps, and when she did finally share her findings with the world, many people didn’t believe her. She described scenes of chimps ‘cupping the victim’s head as he lay bleeding with blood pouring from his nose and drinking the blood, twisting a limb, tearing pieces of skin with their teeth’.5

  One of Goodall’s students, a primatologist by the name of Richard Wrangham (and advisor to puppy expert Brian Hare from Chapter 3), speculated in the 1990s that our ancestors must have been a kind of chimpanzee. Tracing a direct line from those predatory primates to the battlegrounds of the twentieth century, Wrangham surmised that war was simply in our blood, making ‘modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression’.6

  What led him to this verdict? Simple: the killers survive, the softies die. Chimpanzees have a penchant for ganging up and ambushing solitary peers, much as bullies take out their baser instincts on school playgrounds.

  You may be thinking: that’s all well and good, but these scientists were talking about chimps and other apes. Isn’t Homo puppy unique? Didn’t we conquer the world precisely because we’re so affable? What does the record actually show about the days when we were still hunting and gathering?

  Early studies seemed to put us in the clear. In 1959, the anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas published a book about the !Kung people, who still live in the Kalahari Desert today.7 Title? The Harmless People. Its message dovetailed with the spirit of the 1960s, when a new generation of left-leaning scientists came on the anthropological scene, keen to give our ancestors a Rousseauian makeover. Anyone wanting to know how we lived in the past, they asserted, need only look at nomads still foraging in the present.

  Thomas and her colleagues showed that although there was the occasional rumble in the jungle or on the savanna, these tribal ‘wars’ amounted to little more than name-calling. Sometimes, someone let fly an arrow, but if one or two warriors got injured the tribes usually called it a day. See? said the progressive academics, Rousseau was right; cavemen really were noble savages.

  Sadly for the hippies, however, counter-evidence swiftly began piling up. />
  More focused research by later anthropologists determined that the killer-ape theory held true for hunter-gatherers, too. Their ritual battles may look innocent enough, but the bloody attacks under cover of night and the massacres of men, women and children aren’t so easily explained away. Even the !Kung, on closer inspection, proved to be fairly bloodthirsty, if you observed them long enough. (And the murder rate plummeted after !Kung territory came under state control in the 1960s. That is, when Hobbes’s Leviathan arrived to impose the rule of law.)8

  And this was just the beginning. In 1968, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon came along with a study on the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil that really shook things up. Title? The Fierce People. It described a society ‘in a chronic state of war’. Worse still, it revealed that men who were killers also had more wives and children–makes sense then that violence is in our blood.

  But the argument wasn’t truly settled until 2011, with the publication of Steven Pinker’s monumental book The Better Angels of Our Nature. It’s the magnum opus of a psychologist who was already ranked among the world’s most influential intellectuals: a massive doorstop of a book with 802 pages in extra-small font and packed with graphs and tables. Perfect for knocking your enemies out cold.

  ‘Today,’ writes Pinker, ‘we can switch from narratives to numbers.’9 And those numbers speak for themselves. Average share of skeletons from twenty-one archaeological sites that show signs of a violent death? Fifteen per cent. Average share of deaths caused by violence in eight tribes still foraging today? Fourteen per cent. Average over the whole twentieth century, including two world wars? Three per cent. Same average now?

  One per cent.

  ‘We started off nasty,’ Pinker concurs with Hobbes.10 Biology, anthropology and archaeology all point in the same direction: humans may be nice to their friends, we’re cold-blooded when it comes to outsiders. In fact, we’re the most warmongering creatures on the planet. Fortunately, Pinker reassures his readers, we’ve been ennobled by the ‘artifices of civilization’.11 The invention of farming, writing and the state have served to rein in our aggressive instincts, applying a thick coat of civilisation over our nasty, brutish nature.