Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  29. A teacher interviewed by documentary maker Steve Bowman, in the unpublished material he shared with me.

  3 The Rise of Homo puppy

  1. The Oxford Dictionary defines hominins as ‘A primate of a taxonomic tribe (Hominini), which comprises those species regarded as human, directly ancestral to humans, or very closely related to humans.’ The broader family of hominids also includes great apes.

  2. Charles Darwin, ‘To Joseph Dalton Hooker’, Darwin Correspondence Project (11 January 1844).

  3. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 30th Anniversary Edition (2006), p. ix. Originally published in 1976. Dawkins later removed this passage (see the end of this chapter).

  4. Claire Armitstead, ‘Dawkins Sees off Darwin in Vote for Most Influential Science Book’, Guardian (20 July 2017).

  5. Michael J. Edwards, ‘Fascinating, But at Times I Wish I Could Unread It’, review on Amazon.com (7 August 1999). This is one of the highest-rated reviews of the book on Amazon.

  6. Marcus E. Raichle and Debra A. Gusnard, ‘Appraising the Brain’s Energy Budget’, PNAS (6 August 2002).

  7. E. Hermann et al., ‘Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis’, Science (7 September 2007).

  8. Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success. How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, 2016), pp. 16–17.

  9. Ibid., pp. 17–21.

  10. Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game (New York, 2016). See the epilogue for more about Konnikova’s fascinating book.

  11. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York, 1872), p. 309. In 2018 a small study with five blue-and-yellow macaws was published suggesting this type of parrot also has the ability to blush. See Aline Bertin et al., ‘Facial Display and Blushing: Means of Visual Communication in Blue-and-Yellow Macaws (Ara Ararauna)?’, PLoS One (22 August 2019).

  12. Johann Carl Fuhlrott, ‘Menschliche Überreste aus einer Felsengrotte des Düsselthals. Ein Beitrag zur Frage über die Existenz fossiler Menschen’, in Verhandlungen des Naturhistorischen Vereins der preußischen Rheinlande und Westphalens (Part 16, 1859), pp. 131–53.

  13. The society’s name in German was Niederrheinische Gesellschaft für Natur- und Heilkunde.

  14. Paige Madison, ‘The Most Brutal of Human Skulls: Measuring and Knowing the First Neanderthal’, British Journal for the History of Science (No. 3, 2016), p. 427.

  15. This name (Homo stupidus) was proposed by biologist Ernst Haeckel, but failed to catch on because the anatomist William King had already coined Homo neanderthalensis two years earlier.

  16. Quoted in João Zilhão, ‘The Neanderthals: Evolution, Paleoecology, and Extinction’, in Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan and Marek Zvelebil, The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (Oxford, 2014), p. 192.

  17. Thomas D. Berger and Erik Trinkaus, ‘Patterns of Trauma among the Neandertals’, Journal of Archaeological Science (November 1995).

  18. Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, How to Think Like a Neanderthal (Oxford, 2012), p. 19. If you’re still imagining Neanderthals as a barbaric kind of caveman, think again. In 2018, a team of archaeologists compared the number of skull fractures in 295 Neanderthals to Homo sapiens (our direct ancestors) from the same period. What did they find? No difference. Life for a Neanderthal was no more barbaric than it was for us. We, too, seem to have been something of the primeval rodeo buck. See Judith Beier et al., ‘Similar Cranial Trauma Prevalence among Neanderthals and Upper Palaeolithic modern humans’, Nature (14 November 2018).

  19. Paola Villa and Wil Roebroeks, ‘Neandertal Demise: An Archaeological Analysis of the Modern Human Superiority Complex’, PLoS One (30 April 2014).

  20. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (London, 2011), p. 19.

  21. Jared Diamond, ‘A Brand-New Version of Our Origin Story’, New York Times (20 April 2018).

  22. Except where stated otherwise, my main source for this story is Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog). Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution (Chicago, 2017).

  23. Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, ‘How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog’, American Scientist (No. 4, 2017).

  24. Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 58.

  25. Ibid., p. 124.

  26. Robert L. Cieri et al., ‘Craniofacial Feminization, Social Tolerance, and the Origins of Behavioral Modernity’, Current Anthropology (No. 4, 2014).

  27. Humans are not the direct descendants of Neanderthals (though given that many people have Neanderthal DNA, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis clearly had children together); however, our undomesticated Homo sapien ancestors of fifty thousand years ago much more closely resembled Neanderthals, meaning they looked significantly more masculine. See Brian Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality’, Annual Review of Psychology (2017).

  28. Brian Hare, The Genius of Dogs. Discovering the Unique Intelligence of Man’s Best Friend (London, 2013). p. 40

  29. Ibid., p. 88.

  30. Brian Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest–Brian Hare, Duke Forward in Houston’, YouTube (20 January 2016). Hare says this at 3:56 minutes.

  31. Domestication has an effect on melanin expression in fur, which also explains the white spots on Dmitri’s foxes. Brian Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality’, Annual Review of Psychology (2017).

  32. Ricardo Miguel Godinho, Penny Spikins and Paul O’Higgins, ‘Supraorbital Morphology and Social Dynamics in Human Evolution’, Nature Ecology & Evolution (No. 2, 2018). Also see Matteo Zanella, ‘Dosage analysis of the 7q11.23 Williams region identifies BAZ1B as a major human gene patterning the modern human face and underlying self-domestication’, Science Advances (4 December 2019).

  33. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, p. 214.

  34. James Thomas and Simon Kirby, ‘Self domestication and the evolution of language’, Biology & Philosophy (27 March 2018).

  35. Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety. How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth (Chaplin, 2016), p. 48.

  36. Joris Luyendijk, ‘Parasitair’, NRC Handelsblad (13 December 2012).

  37. Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Uber’s “hustle-oriented” culture becomes a black mark on employees’ résumés’, Guardian (7 March 2017).

  38. Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct. A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (New York, 2017), pp. 94–5.

  39. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, ‘Testimony before the US Senate Aging Committee’, aging.senate.gov (27 April 2017).

  40. Helen Louise Brooks, ‘The Power of Support from Companion Animals for People Living with Mental Health Problems: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis of the Evidence’, BMC Psychiatry (5 February 2018).

  41. In the late 1980s, evolutionary anthropologist David Buss conducted a survey in thirty-seven countries, asking tens of thousands of people what they look for in a mate. Their responses revealed a slight divergence between the sexes. Looks are more important to men, money matters more to women. Naturally, this was splashed all over the media. What got completely ignored was the one characteristic that was the unanimous number one: kindness. See Dacher Keltner, ‘The Compassionate Species’, Greater Good Magazine (31 July 2012).

  4 Colonel Marshall and the Soldiers Who Wouldn’t Shoot

  1. Quoted in Melyssa Allen, ‘Dog Cognition Expert Brian Hare Visits Meredith’, meredith.edu (October 2016).

  2. Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al., ‘The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans’, Science (11 June 2010).

  3. Raymond Dart, ‘The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man’, International Anthropological and Linguistic Review (No. 4, 1953).

  4. Ibid.

  5. Quoted in Rami Tzabar, ‘Do Chimpanzee Wars Prov
e That Violence Is Innate?’ bbc.com (11 August 2015).

  6. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York, 1996), p. 63.

  7. The ‘!’ stands for a clicking sound that is part of the !Kung language.

  8. Richard Lee, The !Kung San (New York, 1979), p. 398.

  9. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why Violence Has Declined (London, 2011), p. 36.

  10. Ibid., p. xxi.

  11. Ibid.

  12. On the Battle of Makin, see Anthony King, The Combat Soldier. Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Oxford, 2013), pp. 46–8.

  13. Bill Davidson, ‘Why Half Our Combat Soldiers Fail to Shoot’, Collier’s Weekly (8 November 1952).

  14. Quoted in King, The Combat Soldier, p. 48.

  15. S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire. The Problem of Battle Command (Oklahoma, 2000), p. 79.

  16. Ibid., p. 78.

  17. Quoted in John Douglas Marshall, Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey (Washington DC, 2000), p. 190.

  18. Ibid.

  19. David Lee, Up Close and Personal: The Reality of Close-Quarter Fighting in World War II (London, 2006), p. 19.

  20. Quoted in Max Hastings, ‘Their Wehrmacht Was Better Than Our Army’, Washington Post (5 May 1985).

  21. Richard Holmes, Acts of War. Behaviour of Men in Battle (London, 1985), p. 376.

  22. Dave Grossman, On Killing. The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York, 2009), p. 31.

  23. R. A. Gabriel, No More Heroes. Madness and Psychiatry in War (New York, 1987), p. 31.

  24. Major T. T. S. Laidley, ‘Breech-loading Musket’, in The United States Service Magazine (January 1865), p. 69.

  25. Grossman, On Killing, pp. 23–6.

  26. Ibid., p. 23.

  27. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London, 2000), p. 39. Originally published in 1938.

  28. Randall Collins, Violence. A Micro-sociological Theory (Princeton, 2008), p. 53.

  29. Ibid., p. 11.

  30. Quoted in Craig McGregor, ‘Nice Boy from the Bronx?’, New York Times (30 January 1972).

  31. Lee Berger, ‘Brief Communication: Predatory Bird Damage to the Taung Type-Skull of Australopithecus africanus Dart 1925’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (31 May 2006).

  32. On this debate, see John Horgan, ‘Anthropologist Brian Ferguson Challenges Claim that Chimp Violence is Adaptive’, Scientific American (18 September 2014).

  33. Michael L. Wilson et al., ‘Lethal Aggression in Pan is Better Explained by Adaptive Strategies than Human Impacts’, Nature (18 September 2014).

  34. Brian Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality’, Annual Review of Psychology (2017), pp. 162–3.

  35. Robert Sapolsky, ‘Rousseau with a Tail. Maintaining a Tradition of Peace Among Baboons’, in War, Peace, and Human Nature. The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (Oxford, 2013), p. 421.

  36. John Horgan, ‘The Weird Irony at the Heart of the Napoleon Chagnon Affair’, Scientific American (18 February 2013).

  37. Robert Sapolsky, Behave. The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (London, 2017), p. 314.

  38. R. Brian Ferguson, ‘Born to Live: Challenging Killer Myths’, in Robert W. Sussman and C. Robert Cloninger (eds), Origins of Altruism and Cooperation (New York, 2009), pp. 258–9.

  39. Quoted in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn. How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (New York, 2010), p. 196.

  40. Douglas Fry, ‘War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Challenge of Achieving Scientific Objectivity’, in Douglas Fry (ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature. The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (Oxford, 2013), pp. 18–19.

  41. Ibid., p. 20.

  42. Douglas P. Fry and Patrik Söderberg, ‘Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War’, Science (19 July 2013).

  43. Kim R. Hill et al., ‘Hunter-Gatherer Inter-Band Interaction Rates. Implications for Cumulative Culture’, PLoS One (24 June 2014).

  44. K. R. Hill et al., ‘Co-residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure’, Science (11 March 2011). See also Coren L. Apicella, ‘Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers’, Nature (26 January 2012).

  45. Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli, ‘The Prehistory of Warfare. Misled by Ethnography’, in Douglas Fry (ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature, pp. 178–81.

  46. Ibid., pp. 181–3.

  47. Two digs are consistently cited as offering the first ‘proof’ of prehistoric warfare. The first is Jebel Sahaba in northern Sudan, where in 1964 archaeologists found sixty-one skeletons dating back approximately thirteen thousand years, of which twenty-one bore traces of a violent death. More recent analysis reduces this number to four. See Robert Jurmain, ‘Paleoepidemiolgical Patterns of Trauma in a Prehistoric Population from Central California’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (12 April 2001). The people of Jebel Sahaba lived on the fertile banks of the Nile and built a necropolis for their dead, making it probable that they were already living in settlements. The second frequently mentioned site is Naturuk, near Lake Turkana in Kenya, where twenty-seven skeletons (bearing traces of violence) were found, estimated to be ten thousand years old. When archaeologists published this discovery in Nature in 2016, global media seized on it as the definitive ‘proof’ that humans are innately warlike creatures. But the significance of the Naturuk find is still contested. Numerous archaeologists have pointed out that the banks of Lake Turkana were a fertile location where hunter-gatherers converged, making it quite plausible that they had already consolidated their belongings and given up their nomadic lifestyle. A few months after this article appeared, Nature published a reaction from another team of archaeologists who questioned the validity of the conclusion that these ‘victims’ had met a violent end at all. This latter article went ignored by most media. See Christopher M. Stojanowski et al., ‘Contesting the Massacre at Nataruk’, Nature (24 November 2016). Even without these controversies, it is important to realise that–apart from Jebel Sahaba and Naturuk–there is no evidence for any prehistoric war, in stark contrast to the surfeit of uncontroversial archaeological evidence (in the form of cave paintings and mass graves) for war in the period after humans began living in permanent settlements and farming.

  48. R. Brian Ferguson, ‘Pinker’s List. Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality’, in Douglas Fry (ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature, pp. 126. See also Hisashi Nakao et al., ‘Violence in the Prehistoric Period of Japan: The Spatio-Temporal Pattern of Skeletal Evidence for Violence in the Jomon Period’, Biology Letters (1 March 2016).

  5 The Curse of Civilisation

  1. Quoted in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others. The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (2009), p. 27.

  2. Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll & Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988).

  3. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest. The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, 1999), p. 68. Also see Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins. The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame (New York, 2012), pp. 78–82.

  4. The ‘!’ stands for a clicking sound that is part of the !Kung language.

  5. Robert Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge, 1979), p. 244.

  6. Ibid., p. 246.

  7. Quoted in Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 27.

  8. Lee, The !Kung San, pp. 394–5.

  9. It probably wouldn’t have been possible to rein in overconfident chieftains without the simple yet effective innovation of projectile weapons, which is to say we learned to throw stones, hurl spears and shoot arrows. Comparison of excavated Homo skeletons shows that, over time, our shoulders and wrists evolved, making us better pitchers. Whereas humans have very good aim, chimpa
nzees and orangutans do not (an angry chimp might occasionally throw things, but usually misses). Archaeologists think our projectile weapons were probably quite a bit more refined than anything Neanderthals had. According to evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin, this should be considered the pivotal invention in the history of humankind, even outranking fire, farming and the wheel. Without projectile weapons, more aggressive members of our species would have had significantly more offspring and Homo puppy could never have domesticated itself.

  10. Individually, foragers prefer the company of their own kin. If men have sole authority, they favour their own families. If men and women share authority, however, they have to compromise. They’ll want to live with both sides of the family, resulting in a more complex social network. This is exactly what we see among nomadic hunter-gatherers. See M. Dyble et al., ‘Sex Equality Can Explain the Unique Social Structure of Hunter-Gatherer Bands’, Science, Vol. 348, Issue 6236 (15 May 2015). Also see Hannah Devlin, ‘Early Men and Women Were Equal, Say Scientists’, Guardian (14 May 2015).

  11. Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 128.

  12. Ibid., p. 134.

  13. Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint. The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (New York, 2019), pp. 141–3.

  14. Carel van Schaik and Kai Michel, The Good Book of Human Nature. An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible (New York, 2016), p. 51.

  15. Which is not to say that 1960s-era hippies were right in thinking humans were made for free love. Marriage dovetails perfectly with our nature, Homo puppy being one of the few mammals to engage in ‘pair binding’–aka romantic love. Granted, we’re not all heroes at staying faithful till death do us part, but the science says that a loving relationship is a universal human desire. See Christakis, Blueprint, p. 168.

  16. Quoted in E. Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance. Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally (New York, 1981), p. 50.

  17. Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday. What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (London, 2013), p. 11.