How long is a generation, you ask?

Short Answer: 25 years, but a generation ago it was 20 years.

Long answer: It depends on what you mean by generation.

In US-biased Western culture there is a Biological Generation, the Dynamic Generation, the somewhat different Familial Generation, what is sometimes called a Cultural Generation but that should really be called a Societal Generation, and then there is the Designated Generation and finally, the Historical-Long Generation. You will find some of these terms identified on genealogical web sites, Teh Wiki and elsewhere, and some of them are introduced here. (References provided below.)

More broadly speaking, humans have identifiable meaningful generation-related terminology and cultural concepts in many but not all societies, and when it does occur, it is more common to find the concept in age-graded societies or societies in which marriage arrangements are fairly strictly enforced (or at least strongly hoped for) by the ascending generation.

A Biological Generation

A Dynamic Generation

Those methods of reckoning generations have to do with the relationship between people. Another reason to reckon generations is either to do demographic (or economic) analysis or to test and analyze genealogies. For this you want to know how long a dynamic generation (or a biological one) usually is. For instance, a genealogist wants to know this: From the point of view of some long-dead relative, is the time span between the birth date of a grandparent and the birth date of a great grand child … thus, the span of time of four complete generations … reasonable? If such a span is 200 years, that means that an average of 50 years time passed from birth of a person to that person giving birth to the person in line. Implausible. If the total span is 40 years, that means ten year olds were having babies (on average). Also implausible. Either way, some part of the hypothetical genealogy is messed up and it’s back to the church records, vital statistics, and Mormon database for you. This is a Familial Generation.

In the “old days” (whenever that was) people often used the value 20 to represent Familial Generations. So, a person born on the first day of a century may well have had a great great great grandparent born around the beginning of the previous century. Today, with lager age at first birth for women being the rule, we tend to see 25 years as the recommended estimate for Familial Generations.

A Cultural or Societal Generation

• Lost 1914
• Greatest 1923
• Silent 1935
• Baby Boom (Boomers) 1955
• Generation X 1968
• Generation Y 1975
• Generation Z or I 1992

(See comments below for people fighting about these names and dates. I accept Teh Wiki as the final word on this, so I take this list as perfectly accurate and complete.)

Several things are noticed in this list. The first three relate to major historical events (World Wars, the Great Depression) while the later ones are vague, stupid, and obviously little more than lame attempts by people who wish they were part of a generation to name themselves. This leads to the X and Y generations to be floating in broader time ranges (see Teh Wiki) and very arguable. The Z generation is clearly an afterthought. I assume everyone was so focused on the Millennium that they forget to be in a generation for a decade or so, and then had to catch up.

Some of the more primitively sexy and exotic tribal cultures of the world of the world have a strict age grading system. This is where individuals are in a specific age-defined stratum, and there are several strata. Often there are different age-grades for males and females, and often there are more age-grades for males than females. Individuals of a particular age grade always X and never Y (fill in cultural prescriptions for X and cultural proscriptions for Y). The Pokot of East Africa are one example. These age grades can be termed Designated Generations and include not only groups like the Pokot but also Americans who have very strongly age-graded designations.

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Among the Pokot males of a certain age wear a certain hairdo. Males of a certain generation get married. All the important things you can do or not do are defined by one’s age grade. As young men age they want to move to the next age grade, and often take serious risks to do so. In one Pokot group, the boys of one age grade would typically wear the hairdos of the Ascending Generation. Males in the Ascending Generation would then beat the crap out of them. When the beatings became too common and severe (sometimes deadly) the Ascending Generation of the Ascending Generation (the “Elders”) would declare that it is time for everyone to move up one generation, and a ceremony would be held.

In that particular group the ceremony applied to many different villages, and representatives from each village had to bring to the major chief’s village one head of cattle. The cattle were all slaughtered and the fresh meat laid out on racks to be guarded from lions and hyenas overnight by the chief, alone. If any of the meat was taken by predators, the chief was fired and a new chief appointed, everyone was sent home and were required to return with a fresh head of cattle, and the ceremony was re-started with the new chief. But I digress.

The Historical-Long Generation is my own invention. This is the period of time that is just short enough for a person to have a conversation with another person about shared memories where those memories are separated in time by the maximum amount possible for our species. Let me explain further:

Just today, the last surviving US veteran of World War I died. When I was a kid, I went to (or marched in) parades in which there were lots of veterans. Most vets in the parade were of World War II. Korea was not ever represented. The Viet Nam Vets were busy in Viet Nam being Viet Nam soldiers, so they were not in the parades. But World War I was represented by the grandpas and there were a lot of them.

And, leading all of the veterans in the parade was this one guy who looked quite dead, eyes closed, not apparently breathing, wearing a 19th century Slouch Hat and covered with a blanket and slumped in wheel chair pushed by members of the VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary, and he was the only remaining veteran in town of the Spanish-American War. I know he was not in fact dead because he was in the parade several years in a row. That war was in 1898, and the parades I remember must have been from the mid 1960s. I assume he was a drummer boy, perhaps 10 or 11 at the time of the war. The last surviving vets from Civil War were similar: Boys who served in the military as aides or drummers. The point is, one could argue that a historical-long generation is about a century, because that old guy and I share involvement in an event … marching in those parades … that link two memories, the parade and the war, which were about 100 years apart.

I have an even better memory. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on Januray 1st, 1863. When that happened, a toddler who’s last name was Alexander and who was born as a slave in the Carolina’s became free. Later, his family moved to Albany, New York. In around 1968 or 1969, my father asked me to accompany our congressman, Representative Samuel A. Stratton (famous for introducing the bill to give us Monday Holidays, I am told) to an old tenement building in “Teh Ghetto” and bring him up to the third floor to meet Mr. Alexander, the now old former infant slave. I did so, and we all chatted for a while. I was about ten, and Mr. Alexander was closer to 110. He had memories of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that were similar to my memories of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Vague, mostly about the aftermath and not the event so much, but seemingly real. We shared memories that were a century apart in time, and in this case, interestingly parallel.

So, the Historical-Long generation is a century. If you meet me and shake my hand, you are shaking a hand that has shaken the hand of a man who was an American slave. Meaningless, yet profound.

Fox, Robin.Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Lutz, Catherine. Reading National Geographic

Teh Wiki. Generation.

Teh Wiki List of generations.

What is Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is a feast. But what is a feast? Anthropology is all about examining ourselves through the lens of other cultures. Or, at least, that’s what we used to do back in the good old days. Let’s have a look at this great American holiday from this perspective and see what we see.

A traditional feast in Venezuela

The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white feathers to indicate a peaceful intent, attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. After crawling though the small opening, he sands and walks into the center of the plaza where he kneels, and is handed a large container of beer which may or may not be poisoned. He drinks the entire amount without stopping, so that if it is poisoned, he will surely die, and if it is not, he will surely cop a buzz.

The visitor drops the container that once held the beer, still squatting on his haunches, and sways back and forth for a moment. He does not feel the poison. He only feels the buzz. He belches, stands up and walks towards the entrance whence he came. On his way, he is stopped by a warrior who places a large package on the visitor’s back, a tumpline across his forehead to help carry it, muttering a few words about how he knows his sister is young and unmarried. The visitor gives the warrior a stern look and crawls, carrying the package of ready-to-eat food, out of the walled village where he will share it with his compatriots as a snack.

An hour later a group of the enemy warriors, shouting a war cry, pushes their way through the tiny village entrance only to find that every single one of your warriors, dressed in the symbols of warfare but also adorned with small white feathers, is taking a nap. The invading warriors, six of them, engage in an aggressive-looking dance shouting “we are strong, we will pierce your skull with a spear.” Half of the six visiting warriors are indeed armed with a spears, and as they approach you and your sleeping compatriots, none of you appear to wake. Perhaps a sleepy eye opens to glare at the bellicose visitors now and then, but for the most part, not a muscle is moved or a nostril twitched as the visitors jab, inches short, at the reclining men, again and again, until each warrior has been mock attacked by the three dancers. By this time you notice that the other three dancers are women, the wives of the warriors making the threats, in drag.

Just as these six retire to a place of their choosing near the center of the plaza, another set of enemy warriors enters through the small hole in the wall. Their dress is that of the warrior, but again, topped with little white down feathers of a certain bird. Their dance is aggressive but this time also sexual in nature, and their chant is very different form the last “Your girls are ready to fuck. Your girls are ready for us to take them away when we slit your throats.”

And again, each of your male compatriots continues to recline and appear to not notice the intrusion, while the children hide behind stores of food and the women sit and watch, quietly amused. Except the young women, who giggle, and some taunt back “You are too old and shriveled” only to be shushed by the older women who know that sometimes these events go very badly, when the visitors practice treachery instead of ritual, killing the men who recline indifferently in their hammocks, and raping and stealing the women.

Again and again groups of visiting enemies enter, sometimes just men, sometimes men and women, dressed outrageously and engaging in a dance and a chant, the combination of which has never been seen before and will never be seen again. They’ve been working on this routine for weeks. Again and again, your village’s warriors ignore the threats as though they were less significant than a bothersome fly, the children continue to hide but peek out from their burrows with increasing boldness, and the women go from sitting quietly to taunting and chanting back to eventually rising up and getting to the most important business they have on this day …

… cooking the feast.

After all the enemy have danced their way into the village, each group retiring to the growing gaggle in the middle of the plaza, your warriors jump from their hammocks and causally pick up war clubs, bows and arrows, spears, or simply rip a pole from their front porch, to use as a weapon. They surround and approach the seated visitors who pay them no mind. As they approach, you notice your distant cousin among the enemy visitors, and just as you see him, one of your own warriors, your brother, walks to him and leads him by the hand back to his section of the circular village, to sit by his hearth or lay in his hammock. The visitor’s elderly wife follows, and that is when you finally recognize her … she is your grandmother’s sister, and was born in the village you live in now. Again and again this happens: Members of your village invite visiting families to their hearth and home, and now and then you recognize a relative among the visitors, or you mark the relationship between one of your own and the enemy family, and very often the women in the group are rather close to your own lineage.

Over the next few hours, after the sorting out of the visitors so that all are resting, their weapons cast to the side, at one hearth or another, you all start to eat. Universally, a buffet can only begin when someone in charge of cooking the food cajoles someone who is visiting to begin to eat. Two older women who have been in charge for the last five days of making the beer, cooking the turtles captured last week by the men on a foraging trip, baking the plantains harvested from the garden, and processing the fruits collected by younger women and children just this morning, drag some of the visiting enemies to the beer trough or to one of the large cauldrons of food and get them started on distributing it. Quite suddenly the activity level rises, and in less time that it takes an old man to choke on his ebene¹, almost everyone is chowing down on the victuals, and most of the conversation has stopped.

Over the next two hours, the food is put aside and the men begin to talk. They talk about previous battles. Strangely, when one man reveals his pride in how quickly he killed the brother of one of the other men at the feast, there seem to be no hard feelings. It was war, and the man who did the killing was brave and is now of high status because of that killing. More important than that event, at the moment, is the fact that these two men each have a younger sister who is unmarried, and a younger brother who is also available. That there is blood spilled between them seems to increase the urgency with which they close a deal whereby they exchange their sisters in a marriage arrangement. In an hour or two, that deal is sealed. Now it only remains to get the girls to go along with it (now and then they do, though usually not).

Other men talk about their weapons, the narcotic drugs a particular person makes, a cache of machete’s recently obtained from the boat of a missionary that went missing (the boat, not the missionary) and two or three young dogs just now past their initial training and ready to hunt. Deals are made, objects are exchanged on the spot, other exchanges promised for later. Even though the women of your village were once renowned for making excellent pottery, today it is claimed that no one in your village, even the older ladies, have a clue as to how to do that. It just so happens that the visiting village, the enemies (or shall we say, at this point, the new allies?) are known to make the best pottery, while your village is known these days, though they never seemed to do this before, for making the best monkey-killing arrows.

Pottery and arrows and promises of more pottery and more arrows are exchanged, as well as two more promises of marriage. And, off to the side, a group of men have planned out the details of a raid on a third village, located to the south, former allies but since the breaking of two marriage contracts and a handful of other untoward events, now freshly minted enemies.

This goes on for three days. Shows of bravado, of expertise, making of alliances through trade and exchange and, ultimately (and we shall see how this goes) marriage arrangements, and perhaps equally ultimately, arrangements to cooperate in raids, waft through the conversation. Men speak in ritualized tones, sometimes softly but with a stage whisper meant to be heard by others, sometimes loudly with a chanting cadence, strongly suggesting that others are stingy, passive-aggressively decrying their own suffering for having gotten the short end of a deal, loudly committing their younger, healthier brothers and cousins to this or that duel to the death (the brother or cousin happens to be out of town at the moment).

While the men have contributed measurable effort to prepare for the feast, the women have done most of the work and continue to do so. But as they alternately prepare food, nurse the children or clean the pots, they catch up. Many of these women are sisters, across the boundary between your village and the former enemy, or in-laws from marriages way back in time, or cousins of some kind. Every married woman is a cousin to her husband, but not of the same clan, but since all the men are of the same clan, many of the women end up being from one clan, but a different one from the men, and are therefore at least nominally related, if not sharing known and fairly recent ancestors. The men eye the women suspiciously as they converse quietly, as to not be heard. If the alliance being formed today goes well, these women may end up all living in the same village, and their friendships, broken for the last several years by war but now renewed, will be important. If the alliance fails, then every one of these women may be considered a spy, because she may be more loyal to her brother or her cousin’s husband than to her own spouse. The women are well aware of this concern, and they remember to allow certain bits and pieces of conversation to be overheard by the occasionally quiet men, bits and pieces that will enhance a sense of uncertainty for some of the men, a sense of security for others, depending.

In truth, and not admitted by the men, the women now conversing in the background are the ones who arranged this feast. On a day to day basis, the men of warring villages avoid each other, only coming into contact when a raid is carried out, and then, that contact is in the form of a fight with arrows or an attack with spears. The women, in the meantime, forage in small groups (of only women) or work in distant fields or some specialized resource gathering area (like a mineral or clay deposit) that may be shared by the women of warring villages. In truth, and not known to the men, many of these women have conversed just weeks before, and see each other with reasonable frequency, as their day to day business simply can not be carried out if they are not allowed to do so, irrespective of the state of alliance or hatred among the men. It was through these conversations between women of the two villages, across the boundary of warfare, that this feast was arranged.

So, what is Thanksgiving again?

The above fictionalized prose is a reasonable description of a typical traditional Yanomamo feast, as documented by several anthropologists during the 20th century. Obviously, we are speaking today of a feast because Thanksgiving is a feast engaged in by Americans on the third Thursday of November, and there may be some connections. The Thanksgiving Feast is thought by modern Americans, especially those who read Wikipeda (which has pretty much ruined any possibility of having a non-trivialized conversation about American Thanksgiving, as per Wikipedia’s usual inability to address matters anthropological or historical) to be just another harvest festival, a gathering to partake in the harvest and to thank the appropriate god or gods for their largess.

That may be at least a little true. Harvest festivals do not need historical continuity to be connected to each other or to be similar in how they work. It need not be the case that Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving and some roughly similar festivals found this time of year elsewhere are all descendants from some original Neolithic ritual. And, in fact, I would argue the opposite. The “first thanksgiving” (in the United States) was an event that happened at Plymouth in 1621. The documentation of this event is reasonably good, and it certainly happened, but much of what we know about it comes from documents that were clearly propaganda tools designed to raise money to fund the adventures of the Plymouth Plantation and other efforts. The event may have gone on for days and may have looked in some ways like the event I describe above, at least in so far as shared displays of bravado and arrangements for trading and overall male bonding are concerned. It was a male-oriented event but it is likely that most of the work was done by women. Both sides, the Wampanoag and the English (consisting of religious Puritans and others) brought the food, and it was held at the village of the English. The English may well have been engaging in something that seemed familiar to them earlier in Europe, and Wikipedia, in an all to typical fit of Western Centered cultural imperialism tells us so. But this ignores the fact that feasting was probably a widespread Native American activity.

One might argue that feasting is a global phenomenon, and that would be more or less true. Not all cultures have feasting, any more than all cultures have any given trait. But many do, and feasting is found in Eurasia, Africa and the New World, as well as Australia. But the nature and purpose of the feasting varies a great deal.

Here in Minnesota, Ojibwa Native Americans occupied most of the woodlands and some of the prairies during the 18th and early 19th century, with Lakota/Dakota/Sioux (I’ll call them Dakota) occupying the prairies of the western and southwestern part of the state, and the Dakotas. They were often at war. Ironically, the Dakota were probably the more war-like, having a culture more invested in bellicosity in comparison to the Algonquin speaking Ojibwa, but the Ojibwa had lucrative fur trapping contracts with the French and the English and, related to these contracts, were armed with guns. That made the Ojibwa more powerful than the Dakota, though the latter had certain advantages. As a result, it was clear to various leaders of the day that a continued war between them would result in strife and loss of income. Rather than fight all the time, they fought seasonally, selectively, and avoided fighting altogether when it interfered with the efficient exploitation of the numerous beaver of the region.

And, from all accounts, the maintenance of alliances between Ojibwa and Dakota was facilitated, in part, by feasting not entirely different (but perhaps less ritualized) than that described above. It seems most likely that the English at Plymouth, in the 1620s, were being brought into a Native practice by the Wampanoag, which was possibly done a few times then dropped (as other developments beyond our scope here occurred). By the time the “first Thanksgiving” was revived, about a century and a half later (eventually codified as an official holiday) the real meaning and purpose of it would have been forgotten. The first American Thanksgiving was probably a ritualized gathering meant to forge alliances, at which it is possible that a raid or two was planed, but at which there is no record of intermarriages between English and Native being arranged.

The First American Thanksgiving

Of the first Thanksgiving we have exactly two contemporary descriptions, and it isn’t much. In fact, there is so little, you can read it all in a few minutes. First, by Edward Winslow, from a letter of 12 December 1621, published for wider audiences within a year of its writing:

Our corn [i.e. wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

The second description was contemporary and from a good source (William Bradford) but was not known to anyone else until the middle of the 19th century. It was the event of this description becoming widely known that caused the revival in the US of the idea of a “First Thanksgiving” and this is the reason we celebrate the holiday today.

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

The true meaning of Thanksgiving

In the end, I think we all know what the true meaning of Thanksgiving is. Gravy, with stuffing a close second. Enjoy your feast and remember to treat your suaboya² well.

Sources

Bradford, William. 1908.Of Plymouth Plantation (Dover Value Editions). (Written ca. 1650)

Chagnon, Napolean A. 1996. Yanomamo: The Fierce People (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). Harcourt Brace; 5th edition (November 15, 1996)

Heath, Dwight B. 1963: Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Corinth Books: New York

Winslow, Edward. 1621. Letter. In “Mourt’s Relation,” Heath 1963.

See also this About.com page on feasting by archaeologist Kris Hirst.

Notes

¹Ebene is a narcotic substance ingested via the nose that results in vomiting and severe illness along with a hallucinogenic state.

²Suaboya is your appropriate aged unmarried paternal cross cousin (father’s sister’s offspring) and thus your preferred marriage partner.

1) confuse life expectancy with lifespan;

2) underestimate the life expectancy of many past populations; and

3) think of the past compared to the present as a dichotomy, the present being one way, the past being the other way, failing to recognize diversity and variation in life history variables across our species and across time … life expectancy is seen as a measure of quality of life (which it may well be) that has tracked the one way progress of the human condition from a widespread past condition of short-lived misery to the present and much improved condition of living long and prospering.

As is the case with other bio-cultural variables such as stature, we often see the past as a particular (and often fairly immediate) past, which actually represents perhaps a few centuries at most and a few percent of the landscape across which our ancestors lived. And, in some of the most commonly conceived of ‘pasts’ … the English Middle Ages, Urban factory towns in the 19th century, some cave in France, etc. … it may well be true that short people experienced a life nasty brutish and short-lived. But in the meantime, in Australia, or South Africa, or the Amazon, or Mongolia, or Nebraska, or Kiribati, one thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago, entirely different things were happening.

Life expectancy is usually phrased as death expectancy, because it is often thought of as the average age of death of individuals of a certain age, estimated for a particular population and using empirical data. Technically, it is actually the number of years of life you have left, expressed as an estimated average for the individuals in your cohort and context. There are two commonly used frameworks for life expectancy: At birth and some later age, often 12 years old. In many populations, death is so common among infants and very young children that life expectancy from birth is a poor representative of what is really being considered, so life expectancy from a later (non-zero) age is more meaningful.

Life span is how long you live. Life expectancy and life span really are, in an informal sense, the same thing (or at least are often treated that way), but life span is usually conceived of by the human on the street as how old the old people are, or how long an individual person (or thing) potentially lives, as opposed to an average. In fact, sometimes life span is thought of as a maximum (the human life span is something like 120 years, because that’s about how long the oldest person ever lived). If you think of life span in any of these ways, then it is very different from life expectancy. Say the life expectancy (from birth or some older age) is 40 years. If you went to a place like this you might find plenty of old people over 70 or so, because 40 is the average age of death, not the actual age of death.

The statement “I’m 40 years old. If this was the Paleolithic I’d be dead by now” belies the confusion between lifespan and life expectancy, but it also, along with other statements of fact about “The Paleolithic” demonstrates widespread misconceptions about the past. (Another clue here is the use of the word “the” … the definite article signifying a lack of variation or diversity in that to which it refers … the “Paleolithic.”)

Consider the following estimates of female life expectancy in the US from Age 10:

1850: 47.2
1920: 55.17
1990: 70.1
2004: 71.3

These data (source)indicate a dramatic change over time, and might be used as the basis for a statement like “If this was antebellum US, and I was 50, I’d be dead by now.” Also, we see what might be a steady increase in life expectancy from the “old days” (1850) to modern times, with not a lot of change after that. Perhaps the Paleolithic ened around 1940 or so.

One reasonable estimate for life expectancy during the “Paleolithic” might be derived from estimating life expectancy for modern day foragers. It would be more convincing if life expectancy estimates did not vary a lot among modern foragers living in a diversity of environments (suggesting that the estimate is robust). This is in fact the case. Life expectancy of forager females at age of 15 in four different groups living in the New World and Old World, and arid vs rain forest conditions, range from about 52 to 58 years¹. So now we see that the “Past” (1850) for US females was perhaps more brutal than the “Past” for our species in general, the former having a much shorter life expectancy prior to the Civil War. (I know: I’m comparing 15 years to 10 years of age, but if we switched from 10 to 20 for the US data the situation would become much more gruesome, and I don’t have data for age 15.)

Human forager females, according to the same data, tend to experience their last reproductive event between 37 and 42 years of age, leaving several years, on average, between having the last child and being unable to care for that child because of one’s own death. Early anthropologists assumed that this made sense because one would want to stop reproducing in time to increase the likelihood of being able to care for offspring for a few years, but in more recent years, evolutionary biologists pointed out that mammals in general don’t do this… they just keep reproducing up until they die, which makes more sense, because it is impossible to say that a certain offspring or litter will be left motherless. So why not give it a try.

Menopause is a biological phenomenon in which women literally shut down their reproductive functioning. The idea that female mammals should keep reproduction up until a death uncertain in its timing may make a lot of sense, but if so, menopause makes no sense. Menopause is not a common phenomenon among mammals: Only a few species have been shown to have a post-reproductive life stage in females. The total number of species in which it has been observed is probably fewer than a dozen. The total number of species in which it has been observed in the wild, and can’t be explained as a function of captivity, is probably two or three (humans included).

The average age of menopause is about 42-58 years of age. If among foragers the average age of death is about 55, and the average age of last reproduction is about 40, and the average age of menopause is between these to dates, than it is possible that menopause is actually an evolved loss of reproductive function. This has been proposed and explained as older females shifting their efforts from reproduction to foraging on behalf of their offspring (and their offspring’s offspring)¹ and in particular, foraging for plant underground storage organs, which are believed to be fallback foods very important in human evolutionary history²

What does all this have to do with falsehoods and lifespans? This: If menopause really is an adaptation facilitating the use of plant underground storage organs by humans, and it happens late in the life of human females, say around the age of forty-something, then this means that there is an entire life-history stage (infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, MENOPAUSE, death) that happens AFTER you falsely assume you would be dead had you lived in the “Palaeolithic.” The Palaeolithic … when this adaptation emerged. So now you know why I cringe when I hear people say that.

So, yeah, sure, life expectancy has gone up, both because the babies don’t die as much and because we have amazing pharmaceuticals and other medical things to reduce death rates all along a person’s life history and to extend death of the elderly well beyond what would happen either in a Paleolithic setting where everyone would have been eaten by a sabertooth cat on their 40th birthday or a post-Palaeolithic setting where everyone would die of hardening of the arteries much later in life. But much of that modern medical-caused variation in life expectancy is post-menopause onset.

Then there is the issue of variation in the past (and present). Simply put, it is not the case that there was A Palaeolithic and A Now. There was a lot of variation in the past, and there is a lot of variation in the present. Many things thought of as having trends in one direction did not. For instance, in many areas, when agriculture was introduced the overall health of the population with this new technology and diet seems to have gone down. Life expectancy probably went down, rate of infections disease may have gone up, various diet-related problems like anemia may have become common, and periods of starvation that often accompany lack of food diversity linked to seasonally rigid high-labor agricultural efforts may have occurred. In some areas where this has been archaeologically documented, things later improved, presumably as a combination of both genetic and cultural adaptations to a new kind of food stress.

The reason this is important is that simplifications of the past (or for that matter, the present) is often associated with a false belief in certain causalities. We live in a “modern” world with certain features, including agriculture, industrial production of goods, lots of time spent on education, and Smart Phones. We have a longer life expectancy. Therefore, Smart Phones, our industrialized world, agriculture, etc. gave us our longer life spans. It’s all good.

The problem is that it isn’t all so simple and it isn’t all so good. Adding agriculture caused disease and death and suffering and other bad stuff. More recently, adding industry does the same thing but worse. Of course, you realize that your Smart Phone and your running shoes and your other cool stuff probably do not affect your life expectancy much, but you must also know that it does affect other people’s life expectancy, and usually negatively. Those people working in the sweat shops in China and Indonesia making your stuff don’t just get underpaid for their hard work. They die younger. The US based women with the lowish life expectancy mentioned above included women working very hard on farms and cranking out unusually large number of babies (and that will kill you) and women working in industrial sweatshops (that can kill you too). The Industrial revolution in the US was not an improvement, overall, for anybody or anything except those who got rich off it.

Humans do not live on a one-way street with two addresses: “Then” (not so good) and “Now” (improved in all ways) and life expectancy is not a variable that maps our movement from a nasty brutish and short-lived past to an all round better present with no stops or turns along the way. The big recent increase in life expectancy notwithstanding, various different populations of humans have experienced numerous shifts in health and well being, some tracked by expected age of death for various cohorts.

¹Kaplan, H, K. Hill, J. Lancaster, A. M. Hurtado. 2000. A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology 9:156-185, 2000.

²Laden, G. and R. Wrangham. The rise of hominids as an adaptive shift in fallback foods. Journal of Human Evolution. (pdf

Confused? Great, then we’re half way there! Here’s the details. (This is part of the Skeptically Speaking broadcast.) Please post your questions and tune in on Friday.

There have been many studies of what impresses us about members of the opposite sex, but to my knowledge these studies are largely centered on Western societies, and never of foragers. There has been consideration of this issue, but no large scale surveys. One of the reasons for this is that you can’t do large scale surveys in so-called “small scale” societies, because there are just not enough people.

But I can provide a few insights on what might be impressive to the ladies (things about men) in forager societies. Keep in mind, however, that this is strictly speculation, though informed speculation.

I had previously talked about sharing, and here I’d like to expand on one aspect of sharing, the so called “distribution and redistribution system,” and it’s meaning in relation to courting.

There is a pattern that has been observed in virtually all forager groups, whereby men divide up the spoils of the hunt in a certain, largely ritualized, way, then pass these packages of meat over to the women, who then redistribute the meat in a manner commensurate with the needs of members of the group. I’d like to describe how this works specifically with the Efe Pygmies as an exemplar for foragers in general. Many aspects of what I’m describing here are nearly universal among foragers. Moreover, I’m going to specifically talk about “group hunting” when several men are involved in one cooperative hunting episode. However, the principles involved here actually apply to other forms of hunting as well, to varying degrees.

The most common Efe group hunt is called “mota.” In this method of hunting, a number of men spread out in the forest to surround an area, with one man (the “beater”) going to the center of this area with one or more dogs. The dogs are released by the beater, sent out into this area and called back again and again. Game that is roused by the dogs are then subject to being shot at with arrows by the archers who had previously spread out. If an animal is hit, help from other hunters or from the dogs may be solicited, and the animal run to ground and dispatched.

The animals are usually carried back to near the camp (these animals are small and can be carried whole by one person) where two people (not the hunter himself) butcher the animal. The animal is cut into standard pieces: The head, each front limb and body quarter, each hind limb and body quarter, and an area of the middle of the animal including the last few ribs (this is considered to be the “special” part, possibly because it contains the backstrap/loin meat).

Sometimes the head is left with one of the forelimbs. Sometimes the back two quarters are kept together.

Each of these parts is then given to a different man depending on a set of rules that specify a link between a man’s role in obtaining this meat and a particular body part. The rules vary from place to place and presumably time to time in Pygmydom, but it may be, for instance, that the man who called and organized the hunt, usually the beater, gets the front left limb, the guy who trained/owned the dog that ran down the animal a back quarter, etc. The only really consistent thing across the different rule sets is that there is usually a key hunter (the person who first shot the animal, for instance) who gets this middle back piece.

One striking aspect of this is that efforts are made and culturally determined to ensure that a lot of people were involved in the kill of any animal, even by a lone hunter. Here are some of the rules that ensure this:

1) No man carries his own arrows. The metal tipped arrows the Pygmies use for hunting ground animals are each made by someone else. Therefore, if you shoot an animal, another man besides yourself was “involved.”

2) The dog is owned by a particular person.

3) A ritual fire is burned before the hunt by a particular person.

4) The beater is a particular person. These three — dog owner, fire burner, and beater, may be the same person, two people, or three people.

5) The animal is supposed to be butchered by individuals other than the prime hunter.

6) The animal is supposed to be butchered OUTSIDE OF CAMP (even it it runs into camp and dies there … it would be dragged outside of the camp for butchery) by TWO people. (Not one, even though that would be possible.)

7) Oh, then there is the guy who shot the animal!

All of this ensures that even if you hunt alone, multiple people will be involved.

Now, we are guessing that the ladies are concerned with the hunting, and the meat, and thus with the quality of hunters, in some way. So the first approximation is that the women measure the hunting ability of the men and take this into account during courtship. Previous studies have not supported this idea.

One idea that may work is that the ladies pay attention to the man’s package. What I mean by this, is they notice what package of meat he comes in to the camp with, which would give the woman an idea of his role in the hunt, and thus information to assess his hunting ability.

However, there is a catch to this: I have observed that the men hardly ever walk into camp with the pieces of meat that actually represents what they actually did for the hunt. If this is a signal, the men are being dishonest.

One idea that may work to get past this problem is that the men are being dishonest but the women can’t figure this out. If the men came into camp and verbally claimed a certain role in the hunt, the women (and others) could easily detect the lie. But by simply carrying this package of meat into camp and not saying anything, and handing this meat over to a particular woman (someone they are trying to impress) they are not as easily caught in the lie.

However, I don’t believe this for a second. I think the women would still be able to tell who is being honest, or at the very least, the women would understand that the whole exercise is a charade, and simply not use this as information in choosing a mate.

So this brings us to one more idea that may help understand this, and I think the explanation for what is going on.

Suppose a young man is a typical hunter, and is courting a prospective mate who is hanging around in camp (visiting her sister, perhaps). As a typical hunter, there really is not much he can do to increase his role in the hunt, other than simply showing up and doing his job. Most of the hunters are excellent shots, and although older guys do better than younger guys, how you do over a series of a few hunts is also very largely a matter of luck.

But suppose this young guy comes into camp each day for two or three days in a row with a real nice package, something that would indicate an important role in the hunt. But he did not earn this package by what he did during the hunt. Instead, his male relatives and friends give him the package, knowing that he’s interested in the woman likely to be in camp on their return.

This indicates nothing about his hunting ability to the woman. But it does indicate something much more important: It indicates that he is not a complete jerk. It indicates that he has friends, that they will give him a break, and that he is part of a coalition of cooperative foragers. That is what makes a good mate.

Indeed, if women made choices among men based hunting ability, then they would be making poor choices. First, hunting ability might be important, but many other things are important as well. Second, as noted above, most forager men are pretty good at hunting. How well someone does is more a matter of luck than ability. So, hunting is not a trait that varies meaningfully or that can be assessed accurately.

Having said that, among the Efe, there is a form of hunting that is done by only some men, and that produces on its own about the same amount of meat as all the other hunting efforts combined, on an annual basis. This is the killing of an elephant. It is hard to do, far more dangerous than other forms of hunting, and highly productive. I suspect a lot of women would not be interested in such a mate. The guy must be crazy, after all. But some are. It is very rare to find Efe men with more than one wife (it is allowed but very uncommon). An Efe man does not usually have more than one wife, but when he does, it is often because he is an elephant hunter.

An Evolutionary View of Humans 1: Introduction
An Evolutionary View of Humans 2: Sleep
An Evolutionary View of Humans 3: Remembering Names
An Evolutionary View of Humans 4: Sharing
An Evolutionary View of Humans 5: The Opposite Sex

One of the biggest differences between our nearest living relatives (The common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes) and humans is our unique sense of the importance of a social contract. We have a concept of ownership, possession, exclusivity of access, etc. when it comes to material goods such as tools or resources, and of course, sexual relationships. It has been argued that this is a feature that can be found in primates. In a classic series of experiments done by Kummer with baboons, he showed that one male baboon perceived an ongoing sexual liaison between another male and a particular female. As long as the paired male was in sight, the focal baboon would not make sexual advances towards the paired female even though she was in a state of sexual receptivity. This was the case even when the focal male and the paired female were enclosed in a cage together, with the paired female enclosed in a different cage a safe distance away. Similar observations have been made in other primates including chimpanzees in captivity and in the wild.

However the presence of a vague ability to perceive danger — that you will likely be severely attacked by a large male under certain circumstances — is expected in social primates. What Kummer’s experiment may really demonstrate is that baboons don’t “get” cages.

The evolution of a sophisticated mechanism or set of mechanisms in hominids (humans and their upright ancestors) that elaborates on this capacity is what we would expect from an evolutionary perspective. We are upright using our hind limbs mainly for locomotion, and thus different from other apes, but at the same time the nature of our uprightedness (that we can also use overhead bars and straps on a bus or subway for stability, for instance) is a feature of our positional behavior that relates directly to the fact that apes tend to suspend below branches rather than walk atop them (as to Old World monkeys).

In other words, I don’t think that a trait observed in one species is not unique and not the result of adaptive evolution just because a mild form of the trait is observed in other closely related form. Such a situation — total uniqueness — is simply not expected most of the time.

Tropical and subtropical human forager groups all exhibit what we call a “sharing ethic.” Typically, this is manifest as social rules whereby if one person asks another for a particular thing, it is simply given. Both stinginess and gloating (over possession of something) are culturally proscribed. A person is judged by others on the basis of many things, but near the top of the list is a strong sharing ethic. It is even likely that people show off by trying to be the better sharer, and in some cases, the better not-shower-offer.

From a biological perspective it is thought that sharing is necessary in foraging societies because the nature of foraging is such that no one individual can maintain a sufficiently consistent food supply over medium to long term on the basis of their own efforts. Only by division of labor (often by sex) and sharing, whereby one person with a surplus distributes that surplus one day, and in return benefits from the largess of others on other days, can an individual avoid periods of starvation that would sometimes last days or weeks (and thus possibly be fatal).

This argument, however, is weak on its own, because most (all?) tropical and subtropical foragers do have access most of the time to resources that are consistent over long periods. In most of these groups, females are able to obtain in a given day sufficient food for their immediate needs and the needs of their offspring. Males, on the other hand, tend to forage for resources that result in occasional abundance dispersed among days of an inadequate supply. Were humans to stop sharing in these groups, this could work out as long as everybody (males included) foraged in the female style.

However, the resources that males tend to obtain from the wild (mainly meat from hunting), despite their irregularity, may serve a critically important role – or more than one role. For example, basic cellular function, especially as related to growth and the immune system, require the synthesis of many proteins that are built from amino acids. Some of these amino acids are synthesized in one’s own cells, others are not and must be ingested … typically in the form of proteins in a variety of plant foods as well as animal foods. The amino acids are not interchangeable. Almost all proteins are made from a list of 20 amino acids that occur in varying degrees of abundance in various plant foods. If you eat only plant foods, there will always be one amino acid that is the rarest of those needed, so you must ingest a larger than optimal quantity of foods. But if you eat meat, you are ingesting a perfectly balanced set of amino acids. In other words, a very efficient way of growing and in certain ways maintaining your body is to eat other animal bodies.

So, it may turn out that the highly variable sources of “balanced” proteins … mainly meat from hunting … are a critical resource for this (and other) reasons. So while day to day energy needs cannot be met among these forager groups from hunting (that comes mainly from the plant foods), the needs of growth and immune system function and general cellular processes can be met with this variable food supply. But only if it is shared.

The problem this presents is actually psychological (or maybe I should just say neurological … brain based). Apes don’t share much. When chimpanzees forage — and they typically forage for relatively rare, high quality foods — they benefit by foraging alone because this reduces competition with other chimpanzees. They do not bring the food they find to any other place than where they found it in order to consume it.

In contrast, human foragers do two critically important things. First, they bring much of the food they forage to a central place — the forager “camp” as we call it. Since all the foragers in a given group (by definition) live in the same camp, they are therefore bringing this food into direct competition with other foragers. If they were chimps, the dominant chimps would just take the food from the lower ranked chimps, or small coalitions of cooperating individuals (usually males) would take any of the food they wanted from any of the other chimps.

The second thing foragers do is to process much of this food. This processing is often essential to make these food items edible. In other words, human foragers are finding items (plant parts) that are not edible by humans, and thus constitute a kind of VERY low quality food (zero or near zero caloric value) and by processing — including cooking with fire — turn this stuff into medium or high quality food.

The only way to do this second thing (turning the inedible into the edible) is to do the first thing, to have a central place foraging style. And the only way to do this is to have a social ethic that manages the concepts of possession, ownership, sharing, and so on.

How does this ethic emerge in an individual? A little introspection and reference to experience can help answer that question. Sharing, being fair (the opposite of “cheating”), a capacity to learn and live by certain social ethics and so on, emerge over several years in children with the continuous, time consuming, and energetically costly efforts of adults.

What are the social mechanisms that are at work in this aspect of childrearing?

Are there ways in which adults, who are at a stage in their lives when they are looking for possible mates, evaluate each other with respect to these behavioral qualities? Are there aspects of the human dating/mating/marriage rituals and patterns that demonstrate this?

Are there ways in which adults demonstrate these qualities, and if so, how do others ascertain if these demonstrations are false vs. honest indicators of a sharing ethic?

How does this play out in social relationships other than mating/marriage?

Are there conditions in which sharing is the inappropriate behavior? If so, how do individuals or subsets of society balance a sharing ethic and what might be called a selfish ethic?

Do the manifestation of these behaviors vary across age and gender, or social class?

Humans are different from chimps in these critical aspects of behavior, and these differences are manifest in both ecological and reproductive aspects of human culture and society. Modern foragers demonstrate the human condition, and the way in which these problems have been solved through adaptive behaviors. What kinds of problems emerge in other kinds of human societies that have emerged only recently in human prehistory, such as agricultural societies where the value of land on which food is grown, or the efforts put into crop tending, create a new kind of resource — immobile, big, and vulnerable? What kinds of problems emerge in pastoral (i.e., cattle-keeping societies) in which the key resource is potentially VERY mobile, but still big and vulnerable? What are the resources that Western Industrial societies rely on and how is that managed? In other words, what would a list of evolutionary discordances — differences between the normal foraging way of life and other ways of life — look like?

An Evolutionary View of Humans 1: Introduction
An Evolutionary View of Humans 2: Sleep
An Evolutionary View of Humans 3: Remembering Names
An Evolutionary View of Humans 4: Sharing
An Evolutionary View of Humans 5: The Opposite Sex

There has been much recent discussion on sleep in the blogosphere, and everyone, especially those who sometimes have trouble sleeping, is interested in so called sleep disorders.

My understanding of modern sleep disorder theory is the following (very oversimplified): Each person has a “normal” amount of sleep that they seem to need each night. “Better” sleep is uninterrupted. You will feel lousy if you don’t get your sleep. However, if you miss the “normal” amount of sleep several nights in a row, you only need one “good night’s sleep” to totally readjust and get back to feeling normal again. (You don’t have to make up all the hours you missed … heavens, there IS a free lunch!)

Most tropical or subtropical foragers live in flimsy dwellings (or no dwelling on some nights) clustered tightly together, so, for instance if one person snores everybody hears it (though snoring is rare among foragers in my experience). My point is simply that everyone is physically close.

Even in warm areas, it gets cold at night, so there are fires. Fires have the upside of making you warm, but a couple of downsides as well. First, they need to be tended frequently. Second, adults and especially children can fall or roll into them and get badly burned.

A typical night with the Efe is, I strongly suspect, typical of any night with any tropical or subtropical forager group. At any given moment in time, somebody is asleep and somebody is awake. Those who are awake are often talking. Sometimes they are talking to each other, but often they are just talking. Telling a story that someone may or may not be interested in. I suspect that part of the constant noise making (and what may make Africa different from Australia, by the way, if you know about Australian forager ethnography) is that you don’t want to be too quiet for too long else wandering dangerous animals …. a leopard, a suid, an elephant … may stumble into your camp and cause trouble.

The person or persons who is/are awake shifts throughout then night. It is not systematic … people are not really keeping watch … it just seems to happen. Individuals sleep when they are comfortable, and become uncomfortable as the fire cools, wake up, adjust the fire, and either stay up for a while or fall back to sleep. If one child is keeping his or her family awake, this affects the entire group. And so on.

Naps during the day (as you might expect since everybody gets a poor night’s sleep by Western standards every night) are common.

Here it is in a nutshell. The Efe, and I again suspect this is typical for foragers, spend the entire 24 hour cycle sometimes awake and sometimes asleep. During the night, “asleep” is more common than “awake” and during the day “awake” is more common than “asleep.” To foragers, it’s all napping.

One could criticize this description by pointing out how it conflicts with modern medical views of sleep. But you would be wrong. It is the case that modern medical views of sleep need to be adjusted to take into account the realties of what humans have probably always done for hundreds of thousands of years (since the first control of fire, perhaps).

An Evolutionary View of Humans 1: Introduction
An Evolutionary View of Humans 2: Sleep
An Evolutionary View of Humans 3: Remembering Names
An Evolutionary View of Humans 4: Sharing
An Evolutionary View of Humans 5: The Opposite Sex

Humans have been indistinguishable as far as the fossil record shows from today’s Homo sapiens for a minimum of about 120,000 years. Bones of Homo sapiens from back this far fit into the range of modern humans. But the archaeological record suggests that our species – just as it is today – goes back farther. The kind of material culture that the 120,000 year old humans (in Africa) had goes back to 250,000 years. But some of the key aspects of that material culture … mainly in the way stone tools are made … go back even farther, perhaps between 350,000 and 500,000 years, in southern Africa.

(Interesting aside: People often wonder if Neanderthals evolved into modern humans. That questions seems a little dumb when we consider that the earliest modern humans predate the earliest Neanderthals.)

Humans invented agriculture (domestic plants and animals) only about 10,000 years ago or so, and at that time some groups started to live in permanent settlements. But even so, many humans continued to practice hunting and gathering as their only, or at least primary, means of subsistence. A mere 4 or 5 thousand years ago, half of the human species probably lived this way.

In other words, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and have mostly been hunter-gatherers for for more than 90% of our existence as a species.

For this reason, an evolutionary view of what we are … what human beings are all about … is best framed in the context of a hunting and gathering way of life. And this way of life has certain features that seem to be common to almost all foraging peoples. There is a large number of observations of foragers, living today or from recent times, that are helpful, given this premise, in understanding ourselves. These include, but are not limited to:

• The way our social groups are organized.
• The role of kinship and family in society and the nature of families.
• What we are anxious about.
• Our sleep patterns.
• Pride, cooperation, competition.
• What impresses us about specific members of the opposite sex.
• How our diet relates to health.
• How exercise relates to health.
• And much, much more.

It is amazing that humans today and in the recent past live in so many different kinds of societies. When we look only at hunter gatherers, it is hard to understand how certain social systems that exist today could emerge. This is probably best understood by realizing that the way we are as adults, and the way our societies are organized, is the product of extensive learning and enculturation. The fact that a typical grown-up human does not act in a way that is deeply determined by genetic programming, but rather is a result of extended childhood (a unique human trait) and social conditioning means that all sorts of humans, and all sorts of human societies can emerge.

In graduate school, I studied the forager way of life intensively. One of my advisors was Irv DeVore, who pioneered modern forager studies during the Kalahari Project in Botswana during the 1960s. I spent a total of about three years over four forays living with the Efe Pygmies, hunter-gatherers living in the Ituri Forest of what was then Zaire. A handful of other anthropologists have also spent considerable time with various forager groups. From this collective study, we can learn a great deal about what makes us tick as a species and as individuals. In many ways, we learn much more from understanding the foraging way of life than from all the psychological studies done on undergraduate volunteers and all the social science studies done on masses of data and all of the recent anthropological ethnography and philosophical naval gazing that happens in and near ivory towers around the world.

This is the first in a series of posts that will address some of these topics. The order of topics will be more or less random, as is the selection of which topics to cover. But if anyone would like to see a particular issue addressed let me know and I’ll see if it is possible.

An Evolutionary View of Humans 1: Introduction
An Evolutionary View of Humans 2: Sleep
An Evolutionary View of Humans 3: Remembering Names
An Evolutionary View of Humans 4: Sharing
An Evolutionary View of Humans 5: The Opposite Sex

In homage to an inspiration of this post, I provide this link to the secret, generally unseen obituary of Professor Irven Boyd DeVore.

Hunting and Human Evolution

Why is hunting thought to be a key factor in human evolution? Partly because it was once widely believed that among the primates, only humans ate a fair amount of meat (not counting insects). If human hunting and meat consumption was unique among primates, then the evolution and effects of this behavior could easily be understood as vitally important. Moreover, a lot of fieldwork and thinking about human evolution centered on Europe, where cave paintings of animals were common, with some hunting themes seemingly represented in these paintings.

Of course, the uniqueness of human hunting behavior is now understood to be a gross overstatement. There is hunting of mammals and the like by several primates, and in particular, chimpanzee hunting (mainly of monkeys) is fairly common.

We now know that almost all of the important events that have happened in human evolution (since the chimp-human split) happened in Africa, and that the European record, while interesting, is not the primary record for these events. Therefore, one would think that the European bias would be somewhat reduced in current thinking (the fact that it is not is of great interest, but I’ll not go into that here!).

But I think the most important reason for hunting taking center stage in the study of human evolution, to what appears to be an unjustified level, has to do with the nature of “Man” and the nature of “Hunting.”

Have you ever been hunting, or been along with others while they did so? I’ve accompanied both North American game hunters (armed with firearms) and Efe foragers (armed with arrows and spears). Most of my time has been in the latter pursuit, and in a few instances, I joined the hunt not just as an observer but as a participant/observer.

I don’t think hunting is a normal human activity in the same way that hunting is a normal lion activity, or a normal wolf activity. Humans seem to react to hunting in a very powerful way, similar to how humans react to violence in general (and hunting seems to be fairly violent) or to certain kinds of sporting events (as observer or as participant). A lot of yelling and screaming and jumping around can ensue under certain conditions. Yes, most forager groups disdain bragging and avoid giving too much credit to any individual for being a great hunter, but the visceral reaction to, say, a near miss or to those moments when the hunted animal turns on the hunter (usually only briefly and to the animal’s final chagrin), is powerful and can’t be covered up or put into the background by cultural norms of modesty.

The Real Reason We Hunt?

Is this the case in humans? There is no way to know this at this time. There certainly are groups of human foragers (in the ethnographic present) who rely so much on meat that hunting is basically a form of subsistence, no matter what other function it may have. Even when plant foods are abundant, meat is still important to almost every group of forager (and non-forager, likely) as a source of “complete proteins.” All traditional human hunting is imbued with ritual and ceremony that exceeds that generally linked with gathering. So in the end, there is evidence that hunting can be and often is an ecologically important activity for human foragers. There is also evidence that hunting is (probably) always an important social activity, mainly among men.

[Ask me later: Why a photograph of the Afrikaans Language Monument in this particular place, at this particular time…]

“Man The Hunter”

When a 19th or 20th century guy archaeologist holds a beautifully made, often phallic-shaped obsidian spearhead in his hands, feeling it’s heft and running his fingers along the still sharp, elongated, stone-hard edge, he is bonding with another guy, of a much earlier time period, who could probably have killed his quarry just as effectively with a sharp stick, but opted instead to produce, carry around, display, and use this really cool piece of gear. So it’s a guy thing, and it’s a gear thing. It’s sort of a guys-with-gear thing.

Hunting isn’t likely the driving force in human evolutionary change, but it can certainly be an important human activity that is related to human evolutionary change.

One final brief note on something to be addressed at another time: The assumption that hunting by men is central to human evolution has led many to assume that hunting drove the evolution of tool use, and thus, tool use is a male thing. This contradicts the best evidence we have about technology in primates, which suggests that females, not males, are the tool makers, tool users, and the teachers (or at least facilitaters) who pass this ability on to subsequent generations. So, gear, it turns out, may be more of a girl thing after all.