Apes at a Picnic
I would like to ask the reader to think back a moment to the last big barbecue or picnic you really enjoyed. If the memory is anything like mine, a collection of your friends and family are there. There are frisbees and softballs being tossed, and off to one side all the young children and their caretakers have congregated. A few of the slightly older children are eagerly volunteering to help keep the toddlers entertained while their main caretakers confer on blankets and lawn chairs nearby. A few of the other guests seem more than a little pleased with the task of tending the grill and overseeing the cooking preparations. Everyone has contributed all sorts of food and beverages which are laid out on a table in large glass and plastic bowls, as well as chips, salads, condiments, with trays of hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken ready for the grill.
A decidedly casual affair, barbecues are as close to a human universal as any kind of gathering. Something like them occurs in just about every culture, social class, and habitable region on earth, from the Outback of Australia to the far north of Greenland, where even the Inuit have ancient traditions of sharing food outdoors, during the chilly arctic summer. There is something about outdoor cooking and congregating around shared food that is deeply human. As such, we might think of such gatherings as representing a great deal of what we take for granted about successful human interaction.
Now imagine that a few chimpanzees show up to the picnic. At first, you think, this is some elaborate joke by one of the guests — perhaps someone’s wacky uncle hired a circus act, but these chimps are not interested in entertaining you. Let’s suppose they have escaped from a nearby lab, and they are hungry. The first thing they do is go straight for the food table. The chips are first. They rip open the bags and gobble, spilling most. Next, they discover the trays of meat. Never mind the grill. They tear in, eating the raw flesh. People start grabbing the rest of the plates of food to protect them, and a tug of war starts.
Wisely, someone picks up their cell phone and calls the police. Meanwhile, one of the chimps grabs a large glass bowl filled with potato salad. It is something its owner does not want to lose, so she makes the mistake of lunging for it, trying to take it out of the chimp’s hands. He throws down the bowl, shattering it, and angrily grabs her by the head, literally tearing her face off with his bare hand. Screams ensue, children are crying, some of the men have grabbed shovels and baseball bats. In the melee, the entire backyard has been destroyed. Finally, the police arrive. Things do not go well for the chimps after they attack the police and the matter comes to a horrific and bloody ending. An ambulance comes to take the injured, some of them badly, to the hospital.
Social skills and barbecues
The above is not an exaggeration of what would happen if a few adult male chimps were to find their way to a neighborhood picnic. Adult chimpanzees can never be invited to a barbecue because they are unable to embody the rules, that is, the social norms that we take for granted when we congregate with our friends on a sunny day in a backyard or local park. Real-life tragedies, similar to the one described above, have actually happened.[i] In the past, researchers interested in animal behavior have tried to raise chimps like humans, often as part of elaborate experiments to see what our closest relatives are capable of learning.[ii] What we have discovered is that it is extremely dangerous to expect chimpanzees to learn human social norms, and are best kept away from the children and dinner table, at the very least. They simply cannot be trusted to act as humans do, especially around food.
Put simply, humans are unique in our ability to follow rules that are meant to benefit everyone, such as the rules regarding how to behave at a picnic. A chimp has never been domesticated like a dog, though, and a hungry adult would be as dangerous at a barbecue as any escaped convict.
So what is it, exactly, that distinguishes successful picnickers from wild animals for whom we must call the police? There are a few things that come to mind. One of them is Theory of Mind (ToM). This is our ability to understand our behavior in relation to others, to evaluate ourselves according to a mental map in which we can predict with reasonable accuracy the response of others. A great deal has been written about ToM in the past few decades. Other animals have something very much like it, but not to the extent we do. Also, language very much compliments the trait in humans, as we can apply what we know of others’ thoughts and feelings to our symbolic thinking, raising the bar considerably on what we can achieve.
Another skill that is lacking, and the one that this book will focus on, is a closely related set of traits known as the self-conscious emotions (SCE’s). These include shame, pride, guilt and embarrassment. They are thought to complement our ToM, providing important social information about what others think of us, and thereby guide how we see ourselves in relation to others. Someone who possesses ToM and no SCE’s is likely to be a psychopath. One way to think of it is, it is one thing to know someone does not like your behavior, and quite another to care. Our ToM helps us with the first task, our SCE’s with the second.
For example, unlike our uninvited chimps, if I was to drop a large glass salad bowl, breaking it and ruining the salad, I would be horrified, and probably color with a dark red blush. I would look around to gauge the reaction of my friends. Will I be forgiven? What will be required to rectify my mistake? Even if they appeared understanding I would feel deeply embarrassed, but if they appeared angry, I would most likely feel shame, something much worse. Conversely, if a saw my great aunt Agnes lose her balance and drop the salad bowl, and I deftly reached out to grab it just in the nick of time, I would probably feel something like pride in helping to avoid a disaster. In other words, a collective effort to avoid shame, as well as seek pride, can be thought of as a central characteristic of human social gatherings, a feature which helps to insure that a happy picnic, as well as many other shared goals, is had by all.
For the most part, the SCE’s work in the background. For example, most of us are careful not to break things at picnics for the exact reason that we would feel horribly embarrassed, or even ashamed if we were to break something valuable, even if it was not on purpose. In other words, my fear of shame, percolating in the background, is enough to keep me out of trouble the majority of the time, without any need for the stronger stuff. Chimpanzees, however, have no such mechanism. Other than through the fear response exhibited when a larger chimp threatens them physically, chimps cannot be relied upon to control their behavior according to any internal compass, and though some primatologists claim there is some glimmer of what has been called a protoconscience,[iii] it is clear that no other non-domesticated animal has anything close to what it really takes for successful, human-style picnicking.
Dogs, you interject, are known to do much better at picnics than the chimps I have described. There are some people, particularly those who have very close relationships with their pets, who are absolutely convinced that other animals are capable of feeling shame, particularly man’s best friend. These beloved animals have been domesticated. That is, they have been bred over a number of generations for the particular trait of conforming to human values, even if they do not fully comprehend them. Some dog owners like to play a little game with their pets. They will speak their pet’s name in a stern, disciplinarian tone. Invariably, Fido’s head immediately droops, his wagging tail vanishes, his eyes roll up meekly to meet his beloved owner’s. Surely this is shame, you think, even though the rug shows no evidence of a recent transgression.
But imagine for a moment what he is thinking in his prostrate condition. Is it: ‘I am a disgrace to all dogdom, I do not even deserve my kibbles. Really, I should just give up on this whole ‘man’s best friend’ thing, for I am surely not cut out for it’….
I really don’t know what dogs are thinking when they put on this act of contrition, but I am sure that it is not this, for as soon as you lighten your tone and jiggle your keys, Fido immediately snaps out of it, and all the contrition is forgotten in an instant. Comparing this to how guilt or shame courses through the human body, lingering, sometimes for hours or days, one might fairly ask, is this feeling something that is going to bug the dog for the rest of the day? I feel certain it will not. Not for five minutes. It’s gone the instant the keys start to jiggle.
This is not to say that dogs do not respond appropriately when punished. One of the reasons that dogs are so valuable to humans is because they can be taught to faithfully reflect the values of their owner. However, this is different from shame in the human sense, with all its complexities and consequences.
The study of emotions in animals is a fascinating subject, but that is not what this book is about. Other than to orient us on how we differ, and how they emerged from earlier species of homo, beginning perhaps with homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) this book is about how shame and the other self-conscious emotions, such as pride and guilt, evolved in order to distinguish human life from all other species by enabling us to understand and interact with the thoughts and feelings of others and, perhaps more importantly, to use this ability to achieve things that no other animal is capable of.
What this book is about
I started this book with a view of Apes at a Picnic as a counterpoint to another book about human emotional modernity. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother and Others begins with a first chapter entitled Apes on a Plane, in which she imagines a similar outcome if chimpanzees were allowed to ride with us in coach on a routine domestic flight. A similar pandemonium would likely ensue with similar injuries. The reason chimpanzees cannot ride in planes or go to picnics with us is because they lack the social skills, which I have distinguished as ToM and SCE’s. Empathy is one way of arriving at a very similar idea. we express empathy for many of the same reasons we avoid shame and seek pride: because we care about those around us.
Complex social goals
I wanted to take Hrdy’s thought one step further, though. While on a plane, all we typically ask of the other occupants is some common courtesy, and at most some forbearance for a minor inconvenience, such as a crying baby in the next aisle. At a picnic, there is something else going on. Cooking food on an open fire and sharing it in a cooperative manner is likely to be among the first early-human achievements under the category of what has since become known as complex social goals. Complex social goals are collective achievements in which it is necessary for all participants to evaluate their own behavior in relation to others within the context of a shared objective. Often such shared objectives require particular skills, knowledge, and customs such as a division of labor. People with Autism Spectrum Disorders, for instance, often have a tough time at picnics and other social gatherings because they are not capable of picking up on the social cues needed to act appropriately.Studies show that they have deficits in both ToM and the SCE’s.
Our self-conscious emotions are central in helping humans achieve complex social goals, like cooking and sharing food in such a manner that, not only do we avoid harming others, but with any luck we leave the barbecue with our reputations intact enough so that we are welcomed back again for next year’s picnic. In contrast, our chimps will never, ever be invited back. Even if the police did not have to euthanize them in self-defense, it is safe to say that the chimps would be permanently ostracized from any future get-togethers. Had they been capable of feeling something like shame (for bad behavior) and pride (for good behavior) it is likely that they would have done much better.
How did shame get started?
In a book entitled Moral Origins, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm focuses on the hunting and sharing of meat as the industry that made us “culturally modern”. It has long been held that the ability to hunt, transport, cook and share food, and otherwise behave appropriately around a fire in which food is cooked and shared is a defining element of what makes us human[iv]. The evidence is compelling. Some of the earliest evidence we have of human cooperation involves hunting large game with lethal weapons, and then eating together at a home base around a fire.[v]
While we have no time capsule to capture the event, we have convincing archaeological evidence that, beginning around 400,000 years ago, and perhaps much earlier[vi], early humans began eating shared meals, consisting of meat from very large animals, cooked around a communal fire, much like a modern barbecue. It is not difficult to imagine in our distant past that some individuals simply could not handle everything that was required, behaviorally and emotionally, to be a successful participant in a shared meal. There are a surprising number of rules needed for sharing food that most of us take for granted: wait for the food to be cooked; help collect wood and tend the fire; wait your turn; don’t grab. If one or more participants cannot handle the rules, it is likely to become a disaster.
Putting this all together, in order to be successful in a group that cooperated this way would require not only concern for others, but the ability to repress impulses,[vii] to work together on a shared project with a very specific outcome. In the case of hunting for enough meat to feed everyone at a sitting, this shared project would also be a very difficult goal, physically. All of these abilities point to the need for at least a protoconscience, that is, while not necessarily full-blown human morality, a means by which humans could connect with each other, emotionally as well as cognitively, in a manner that other animals cannot. Like our unfortunate chimps at the picnic, those who were not able to cooperate would have to be dealt with harshly.
As we will see later, the complex social goal of human-style food sharing was likely to have had a very dramatic effect on both our body and mind, eventually becoming “baked in”[viii] to our physiology over evolutionary time in the form of altered internal organs, after we became accustomed to cooked food that could be easily digested, and therefore required a much shorter digestive tract than our great ape relatives. Known as the expensive tissue hypothesis, the energy surplus could be used to grow larger brains.
Let’s follow the logic: if, in the distant past, cooked meat was anything like the delight it is today to modern hunter gatherers (not to mention western picnickers) it would have quickly developed into a deeply-desired expectation. Meat, particularly the smell of cooked meat, has a hypnotic effect on many of us today, particularly when we are hungry — and when we are very hungry, it can be overpowering. We can assume this is not a new phenomenon. After its introduction, it is safe to assume that large meals of cooked meat would have soon developed into a powerful communal desire, creating one of the first “economic” demands in early human communities, and placing great social pressure, with the possibility of substantial rewards, on those who were capable of working together to obtain it.
As we all know, expectations can be met or not met. If people meet the expectations of their community, it is likely that they will feel something like pride. If they do not meet expectations, disappointing others, it is likely they will feel the opposite, towards the shame end of the spectrum. Assuming that our prehistoric hunters were guided by something striving towards modern human emotions, it is difficult to imagine a group of hunters making so much effort if they did not care very much what others, back at their home base, thought of them. It is for this reason that most researchers interested in the distant past agree that a strong sense of intersubjectivity, requiring not only ToM but also a strong emotional sense of self-evaluation was essential for individuals within a community to make such an enormous effort to hunt and share meat from large game animals. While many of the details can be left to the imagination, that seems clear: there was an emotional connection involving something like empathy, accompanied by something like the SCE’s, that governed the behavior of hunters as well as the people they hunted for.
Why did we hunt large game?
Undoubtedly, one reason that hunting, cooking and sharing food is seen as foundational in human intersubjectivity is because we have physical evidence of such behavior. Indeed, much of the oldest evidence we have of early human existence revolves around hunting, in the form of ancient weaponry, cooking in the form of long abandoned hearths, and sharing which can be inferred from a number of physical clues. And yet, not all human interactions fossilize as well. For example, childcare.
Humans raise children communally. That is, one thing that distinguishes us from most other primates is that it is impossible for human mothers to raise their children alone. It takes an estimated 13,000,000 calories to raise a human child from birth to adult independence.[ix] Dividing this figure by the number of days we can expect a human child to be dependent on others for food yields a figure that is much too large for a single person to consistently provide. Further, compared to our great ape cousins and other primates, human females have shorter nursing cycles, meaning they have the ability to become pregnant again and have more children before the oldest are ready to fend for themselves. This creates even greater pressure for assistance.
In addition, the number of calories estimated for humans from birth to independence is not like the food most other primates eat. Chimpanzees, for example, eat mostly plant food. One reason that chimps do not require as much time and effort is because a young chimp must be taught to eat leaves, and thereby becomes self-sufficient in a few years because leaf eating is not a very difficult skill. Meanwhile they have a mother they can cling to for many months, and who will not have more offspring until they are self-sufficient.
This process is called “life history” and humans have a much different life history than other primates. We need not only lots of calories but they need to be high quality calories. Humans no longer possess the digestive tract necessary to eat leaves all day, as many primates do. The study of the kind of food we need is known as human energetics, and the numbers simply do not add up for humans unless they be accounted for by concerted communal effort, acting in an organized fashion, over long periods of time, to achieve a very complex social goal: raising a human to adulthood.
Shame and Childcare
First of all, let us develop some sense of priority: If we cannot act appropriately at a picnic, with all of its deeply embedded cultural norms, then we are likely to have a lot of trouble in providing human childcare. We need our ToM and, because raising human children is labor intensive and lasts much, much longer than a neighborhood get-together, we need the self-conscious emotions to help keep us honest, lest we should wander from our long-term goals.
And one other thing. Raising children is no picnic. It usually involves men and women, though not necessarily mothers and fathers, working together in a manner unlike any other human relationship, or for that matter any other kind of relationship found in the animal kingdom. Human childcare is unique in its length, intensity of labor, and its emotional commitment — an element which is clearly beyond the capabilities of any other animal.
It is my belief that priority must be given to childcare as the overarching “complex social goal” which governed all others. Despite the immense power and influence that hunting, cooking and sharing food was likely to have, I do not believe that the desire for meat was the original catalyst for the revolution we might think of as emotional modernity, as Hrdy calls it, or cultural modernity, as Boehm and many other anthropologists have postulated. From what can be gathered from the archaeological record, it appears that very early on, in the first glimmers of what we identify as human behavior, food sharing was present, but not just any food. It was large game that drew people together to eat and share food together in a form of cooperation unseen in any other animal.
That it should be large game is important for at least two reasons. First, it is very difficult to catch. All other animals who hunt eat their kill where they killed it, leaving the leftovers for scavengers. Humans are the only hunters who, hungry and tired, divide the carcass and transport it back to their kin at a home base. If hunters were acting on purely selfish intentions, it is unlikely that they would bother with the enormous amount of time and effort it takes to bring down a large, hoofed animal. Hunters who had the strength, stamina and skill needed for such a venture could find a much easier way to feed themselves on smaller animals that were easier to catch, closer to home, and did not require such a coordinated production.
Second, large game animals have a great amount of fat that was extremely valuable to lactating women who, in time periods coinciding with the advent of shared food, began having much greater energy needs that such large, fat-rich game animals would provide. This food was ideal for women with large energy requirements and hungry children. In other words, there was a huge public demand by others besides young men for this particular type of food. This again leads to the idea that men were heavily influenced by social factors to perform this important service for the community.
Third, looking beyond young mothers, the energetic needs of humans more generally were skyrocketing during the time that has been identified most strongly with sharing food from large game.[x] This means that there was a huge demand for this kind of highly nutritious food.
If we look at the demands for food that needed to be met, there are two possible scenarios. The first is that the demand would not be met and the species would either die out or adapt with a physiology that was not as resource demanding. The second scenario is that the demand would be met, in which case we need to ask ourselves how. It seems likely that this demand was met by creating a sort of pressure upon some members of the community to behave in a manner heretofore unseen in the animal kingdom: that is, to begin provisioning others with large amounts of highly-nutritious food in a highly-organized manner.
There is a great amount of evidence that this is precisely what happened. There is also evidence that the individuals whom this pressure was placed upon were men. This do not mean that only men hunt. Women can and do hunt and it is it likely that they have been doing so for hundreds of thousands of years. The issue here, though, is one of volume. The amount of meat that a nursing mother can be expected to produce as opposed to a male with greater stamina, upper body strength, natural acuity with weapons such as spears, leads, us to the likelihood that male contribution was essential in meeting human dietary requirements.
The next question is, what compelled these early hunters to act in the way they did? Altruism, or some proto-version of it is likely. Ultimately, we can deduce that a form of intersubjectivity approaching what humans now refer to as the social emotions, such as pride and shame, must have been involved. Pride and shame are absolutely unique in the animal kingdom. When scientists look at traits in any species, they ask themselves, what environmental or social pressures weighed down on the genotype in order to select this trait so strongly that it became a part of the species’ DNA; a permanent aspect of the species biological makeup.
As I have indicated, Boehm and other anthropologists focus on hunting and humans universal love of meat as providing this pressure. I diverge from this hypothesis. When scientists look for environmental or social pressures that cause adaptations, they look for what is most likely to propel a certain phenotype into future generations, while other individuals are passed over. Diet can play a role in the sense that a better nourished individual has a much greater chance than an ill-noursihed one. And yet, there is one area that is even more important and that is sexual access. Good diet may provide favorable mating opportunities but it is still a means to that end.
In the words of the Yanomamo, a tribe of hunter gatherers with ancient roots in the south American rainforests “We love meat, but we love women more.”
While Boehm seems to suggest meat sharing as an end in itself, evolving because everyone liked the taste of meat, I believe that there was an underlying reason which Boehm, for whatever reason, did not explore. Our style of hunting large game and sharing started because women had enormous energy needs that they could not meet by themselves. They needed not only an abundance of calories but these calories needed to be rich in protein, fat and iron. Nutrients that would assist them in feeding their young, who also were being raised in a manner in which the same style of cooperation was emerging.
In other words, what I am suggesting is that the radical improvements in human diet had an influence on human sexuality in a way that accounts for our new style of childrearing but also suggests a much higher degree of cooperation between males and females of a species than had ever been known before. If we accept from modern hunter gatherers and other small-scale societies with cultures that are believed to have elements that stretch back thousands of years, it is not difficult to find a great deal of evidence that women are quite capable of using shame as a strong motivator, and that they have had this ability for as long as symbolic thinking has been available to them.
Direct evidence of pride and shame being used within established rituals with ancient roots to coax men to hunt, with direct effects on their social standing perceived virility and hence their mating opportunities and therefore their adaptive fitness, can be found within the ethnological records of the !Kung, the Mbuti, the Mbendjele, the Hadza, and many other small-scale societies that hunt and share food in a manner believed to be hundreds of thousands of years old.
Elements of my hypothesis are strongly supported by previous research. For example, Christopher Knight’s seminal Blood Relations, provides evidence of changes in the relationship of early human men and women as tied to symbolic thinking which would have profoundly affected the power dynamics. Joseph Henrich has offered an account of how culture and biology began to intermingle at the dates that large game hunting came about in a way that I believe also supports my hypothesis. Boehm, while focusing on hunting, and clearly accentuates male behavior, offers a hypothesis that can clearly be expanded to incorporate “intersexual” behavior rather than the behavior he describes – presumably male for the most part, but simply not addressing how men and women interacted.
Perhaps the most important support comes from the biological anthropologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Hrdy has provided the most comprehensive account in the field of anthropology and evolutionary psychology on the topic of how “emotional modernity” was achieved, not by hunting and sharing food, but through the mechanism of childcare. Hrdy offers evidence from the neurosciences that at a very young age, human infants are able to make eye contact, precociously interacting with potential caregivers (“allomothers”) in a manner unlike other primates. For Hrdy, human sociality begins close to birth, with infants recruiting potential caregivers by signaling their ability to foster an emotional bond, indicating that they are worthy of care and commitment.
Completing the picture is the human grandmother, guarding her second generation of offspring and thereby ensuring the continuation of her own DNA. It is the trio comprised of this babbling Machavelli, his mother, shrewdly negotiating alliances by hook or by crook, and a herculean grandmother figure that forms her basis of emotional modernity.
And where are the men in Hrdy’s account? Just as in Boehm, though I imagine for completely different reasons, the early conjugal relationship is absent. In Hrdy, we have the mirror image of Boehm — with women underrepresented in his account of emotional modernity, and the men virtually absent in hers.
“No one argues that men, or the meat they provide, are unimportant in traditional societies,” Hrdy writes. However, “The big challenge confronting mothers who give birth to costly young…is not that goods and services provided by men are unimportant but rather that women have no reliable way to guarantee paternal support.”[xi] The unreliability of the human father, it must be noted, is a recurring theme throughout Hrdy’s long career. She rarely has much more to say about him, other than to repeatedly emphasize his inability to stick around for long.
The fact is, males of most species must use a different strategy than females of the same species. “Paternal certainty” cannot always be determined, and therefore males have a different equation to solve in order to have their DNA safely deposited into future generations, meaning that behaviorally, they will differ, and this includes the amount and circumstances under which they will contribute to childcare. What goes unsaid is that human fathers contribute exponentially more to childcare than the rest of the animal kingdom. Hrdy nevertheless conflates men, including fathers and possible fathers, into the category of “allomothers” a term that implies anyone who gives assistance to mothers in the raising of children. In a footnote she explains why. “An alloparent”, she writes, refers to any group member other than the parents who helps them rear their young. Since it is often impossible to assign paternity, I often opt for “allomother,” a term which might or might not include the father.[xii]
So for Hrdy, it is automatically “allomothers” who are responsible for pursuing larg,e dangerous ungulates, barefoot, for hours or days over difficult terrain, bringing them down sometimes many miles from their home bases, and then dividing the carcasses and bringing this magnificent boon back to their community, hungry and tired, instead of helping themselves with the meat along the way. In these “allomothers”, no distinction is made from the grandmothers who dig tirelessly with their digging sticks for tubers, roots found deep under the ground, to feed the community, should the other “allomothers” be unsuccessful at providing more substantial food with the hunt.
To understand this perspective it is helpful to remember the tradition she inherited. For several generations, “Man the Hunter” was the predominant theory. This theory ignored women.
So why both Boehm and Hrdy’s different accounts of shame and “emotional modernity” are worthy, well-researched and essential to anyone interested in the subject, a large gap remains. No one has written a comprehensive account of shame and the self-conscious emotions in prehistory from the perspective of the conjugal relationship — that is, males and females struggling to get along well enough to collaborate on the daunting task of raising human children, better known as human cooperative breeding. Boehm’s account is preoccupied with hunters, bullies and freeriders with scarcely a paragraph of how women and cooperative breeding fit into the picture. Hrdy on the other hand, with her babbling Machiavelli and fanatically productive grandmother, prodigiously stuffing tubers into the mouths of anyone who comes near her, also ignores the primary, conjugal relationship.
Oddly, neither Boehm nor Hrdy deny that sexual selection was the main driver of shame or what Hrdy refers to as “emotional modernity”, they simply sidestep it. I suspect there may be politics involved that have prevented an account of conjugality and the self conscious emotions. Much of what I will have to say may draw the ire of some.
Hrdy identifies the primacy of childcare, identifying the movement towards “emotional modernity” as being central to the achievement of human-style childcare. In introducing her theme of how cooperative breeding got started, she wrote:
There emerged in Africa…a line of apes that began to be interested in the mental and subjective lives—the thoughts and feelings—of others, interested in understanding them. These apes were markedly different from the common ancestors they shared with chimpanzees, and in this respect they were already emotionally modern.[xiii]
I agree, and yet in Hrdy, the figures of emotional modernity she portrays are invariably women: The intrepid grandmothers, compulsively digging tubers deep out the ground, the mothers whose identity Hrdy has wrested away from earlier formations, the “coy” and “passive” prehistoric female has been replaced by the “ruthless” and “cunning” figure Hrdy offers. As for males, including biological fathers they have been demoted from the “Man the Hunter” figure that troubled Hrdy so much earlier in her career, and now are portrayed consistently as “allomothers”, that is mother’s helpers, be they uncle, father or otherwise. She continues:
It takes on the order of 13 million calories to rear a modern human from birth to maturity, and the young of these early hominins would also have been very costly. Unlike other ape youngsters, they would have depended on nutritional subsidies from caregivers long after they were weaned.84
13 million calories[xiv] is an enormous amount of food to provide, and yet in terms of the enormous commitment and personal sacrifice that men must have made to assist in meeting these requirements is consistently glossed over.
[ii] Charla Nash
[iii] DeWaal, story of bonobo biting finger off.
[iv] Adler, Jerry. “Why fire makes us human.” Smithsonian Magazine (2013).
[v] Stiner, Qesem
[vi] Wrangham
[vii] Twomey
[viii] Henrich
[ix] See Hillard Kaplan (1994) from where she derived this figure, as noted in “Comes the Child before the Man
[x] 400KYA, see Key and Aiello.
[xi] M&O P.
[xii] M&O P. 6.
[xiii] M & O P. 30.
[xiv] See Hillard Kaplan (1994) from where she derived this figure, as noted in “Comes the Child before the Man
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