Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (41 page)

Population Density

Pleistocene humans had a very low population density. While 50 persons comprising a band of foragers lived in close proximity to each other, the nearest neighboring band would be 20 to 30 miles away. At various times of the year, groups would meet up for a festival. It was the occasion to find mates, trade artifacts, overeat, and have a good time. Even so, those humans did not meet more than a few hundred different people in a lifetime. There is no doubt that, in the wandering band of 50 or so people, life could seem dull compared to the excitement of the festival. Today, the excitement, anonymity, and opportunities of living in crowded cities operates on our minds like a recreational drug. Is there a downside to living in such crowding?

Researcher John Calhoun published a pioneering animal study 40 years ago and found that crowded female rats had low fertility rates and high rates of miscarriage and death in childbirth; they also had poor nesting and poor parenting behaviors. Male rats had high rates of sexual deviation, homosexuality, aggression, violence, cannibalism, pathological depression, and withdrawal. There were high rates of social disorientation, infanticide, and infant mortality. Calhoun finished his report with the observation that we might advance our understanding “about analogous problems confronting the human species.”
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Does this have the ring of truth to it? Today’s high population densities have put us on a treadmill requiring industrialized, intensive forms of society. Many of us are worn down by congestion, crowds, and lack of time to even think. We dream of lives in closer contact with natural surroundings. There is no doubt that our mentalities are best adapted to much lower population densities.

TERRITORIALITY

Human beings have evolved, over a very long time, to live in bands of 40 to 50 people. All band members are close relatives by marriage or birth—in other words, each band forms one extended family. This was the pattern for millions of years of human evolutionary history, with the extended family as the basic survival unit. It is only in the last few thousand years that we have broken with this deeply programmed existence.

Each band had its vital space or territory of some 200 square miles. We use the term
vital space
deliberately: this territory provided everything vital for survival, especially food. But it was also the land where their gods, heroes, and spirits dwelt, where their dearest dead were laid. Even though they were nomadic within this territory, every nook and cranny of it was familiar to them—it was “theirs” and the feeling of ownership is desperately important. In contrast, should they venture onto adjacent territory, they would feel uncomfortable and out of place because they were trespassers. The band had to hang together for survival and to protect their vital space from adjacent bands. This pattern of existence has molded deep characteristics into the human psyche.

In particular, band members strongly identify with, and give their loyalty to, their own band. In other words, humans have a strong genetic predisposition to identify with their own “in-group” and to be suspicious of “out-groups.” The need to have a feeling of “belonging” to a group is a human universal value.

In-Group, Out-Group

A stranger (by definition, from an “out-group”) is a threat. If a stranger is on your territory, he is probably up to no good. He might be out to capture a mate, steal honey, or take murderous revenge in a long-running vendetta. Primal societies around the world demonstrate a similar mistrust of strangers. Jared Diamond describes in
Guns, Germs, and Steel
how when New Guinea tribesmen meet, they strive to discover “some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.”
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In Polynesia, two strangers recited their memorized genealogies in order to find a common ancestor.
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The San Bushmen would stop 40 feet from a stranger, both sides would lay down their arms, and then they would approach each other with caution to find common purpose.
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Of course, often the stranger was not well-intentioned and a battle would ensue.

Genes, Relationships, and Conflict

The biologist Robert Trivers derived an elegant explanation of the way human relationships operate. It explains how we feel toward our parents and children, siblings, lovers and friends, and in-group and out-groups.
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The answer lies in our genes.

We all possess genes that work to help copies of themselves lying in other bodies. Of course, we cannot know precisely which bodies contain copies of our genes. Trivers insight was to see that creatures help other members of their species in proportion to their degree of relatedness. In this way, a child gets 50% of his or her genes from the mother and 50% from the father. A mother has 50% of her genes in each child, and 25% with each grandchild. By the same token, a child shares 50% of his or her genes with siblings and 25% with maternal aunts and uncles.

In the forager society, everyone was related to one another in some way, so there would be “gene pressure” to help and cooperate with each other and to refrain from feuding with and killing each other.
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Even in modern societies, the more closely people are genetically related, the more likely they are to come to one another’s aid, especially in life-or-death situations—“blood is thicker than water.” Genetic relatedness feeds directly into in-group/out-group conflict: such conflicts are really battles between gene groups manipulating their host bodies for supremacy in the struggle for life.

Humans are not the only creatures to be hostile to out-group members. Male chimpanzees patrol the borders of their territory, and if they find a strange male, they kill him.
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According to Frans de Waal, a leading authority on the social intelligence of apes, “Sometimes a small group of chimpanzee males stealthily enters a neighboring territory to overwhelm a single male that they viciously beat and leave to die.”
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Likewise, if a lone chimpanzee becomes aware of out-group males intruding on his territory, he becomes worried and his hair stands on end.
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Buried in these accounts is the assumption that out-group hostility is a male phenomenon. However, females had every reason to fear strangers too: they could be raped, abducted, or murdered, and the same fate could happen to their children. Women who allowed that to happen did not pass on their genes to the next generation. Women who survived are therefore those programmed with successful survival responses.

A landmark study led by Shelley Taylor shows that women respond to extreme danger with a cascade of brain chemicals, including one called oxytocin. These hormones drive women to tend children and gather with other women. Dr. Taylor dubs this the “tend and befriend” response.
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This is in opposition to the men’s “fight-or-flight” response. It is interesting to reflect that, in an emergency on the African savanna, the women were programmed to round up the kids and get everyone into a huddle, while the men, pumped up on testosterone and adrenaline, battled off the danger.

We all, therefore, are deeply programmed to mistrust strangers. However, with the rise of farming and the concentration of multitudes of humans into cities, how is this mistrust managed? In the words of Jared Diamond, “People had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.”
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Every person in the world has to learn how to manage relationships with strangers. This is a process of indoctrination designed to paper a veneer of “civilized” behavior over innate, mistrustful insecurities. Society manages this at two levels: as individuals, we are taught to suppress our natural tendencies and become self-effacing. We avoid eye contact, we stoop our shoulders, we look at the ground, we scurry along with small steps, we avoid confrontation, we are taught “courtesy” and polite manners. At the level of the state—through institutions such as the police, military, and the legal system—it alone enacts laws and it is the final arbiter in the settlement of disputes. Social idealists add a third pressure: the theory that humans ought to want to live in “diverse” communities.

Here we see a number of divergences from our naturally adapted instincts. Our human natures are telling us that we are most comfortable when we are living and working with people “like us”; that we need to “belong” to a group, give it our loyalty, and reject outsiders; that we should take personal responsibility for protecting our in-group, and its territory, from out-groups; and that males have different reactions to females when danger threatens. However, all these deep instincts are frustrated by modern living arrangements.

From these insights, we can predict that multicultural societies are likely to be more neurotic and stressful. By suppressing, even denigrating, normal roles for male aggression, societies will suffer increased levels of unorthodox activity: violence, hooliganism, gang warfare, and criminality. The frontier defenses of Western countries, protected with razor wire, harsh deserts, and armed patrols, are an open invitation to a Third-World youth to test his mettle. It is normal for the defenders to feel viscerally opposed to the invasion of their in-group territory by such outsiders.

We have given the impression that each forager band operates in hostile isolation from its neighbors, but this is not entirely true. Neighboring bands also needed to cooperate at many levels. Wives would almost always be brought in from an out-group. Potential husbands from one group had to visit the other group to find mates and negotiate terms. There would be exchanges of gifts and other obligations. Everyone thus had uncles, aunts, cousins, and other family members in nearby bands whom they would visit on occasion. In extreme situations, such as those of the San who live in a particularly hostile natural environment, bands contracted understandings for emergency access to resources, notably water, in times of distress.

The “natural” size of an in-group is therefore the extended family as denoted by the forager band. With the rise of agriculture and the concentration of populations into larger units such as towns and cities, the size of the in-group had to increase. This was not always easy—somehow people had to sink their differences and invest their loyalty into a grouping that included other extended families. The rise of a charismatic leader who inspired everyone’s loyalty was part of the answer. Another part of the answer is provided by the need to cooperate to fight off an external threat.

As George Washington said to his fractious and jealous state-loyal armies, “Either we hang together or we shall surely hang apart.” The Normans welded together the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England by deploying another, long-term strategy—that of instilling a sense of national patriotism. They used the tools of pageantry, flags and foreign wars. In this way, one of the earliest nation-states was born. It grouped together peoples who had the same language, culture, and religion and gave them a national identity. This, it seems, is about as good as it gets.

Political entities that group together peoples of different languages, religions, or sharp cultural differences are inherently unstable. We see this all over the modern world. Yugoslavia and Somalia broke up in bloody conflict. Rwanda, Congo, and Sudan suffered genocidal massacres of one ethnic community by another. In yet others, low-level conflict continues like a running sore: India (religious conflict), Sri Lanka (out-group Tamil settlers against indigenous peoples), Chechnya (indigenous peoples against out-group Russian occupiers), Northern Ireland (indigenous Irish against out-group occupiers), Spain (Indigenous Basques against out-group occupiers), and Palestine/Israel (indigenous people against out-group occupiers). We draw the uncomfortable conclusion that the notion of a multicultural society is a contradiction in terms.

Warfare

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The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”
—Winston Churchill

At the time Churchill wrote that (1925), the world was still reeling from the carnage of World War I. It had been so traumatic that politicians (but not Churchill) billed it as “the war to end all wars.” Churchill had a layman’s pragmatic and unromantic opinion of human nature. Meanwhile, the experts—social anthropologists—were turning their misty eyes to the ideal of the Noble Savage. They thought that warfare was the result of bad upbringing.

So, is there any truth in the idea that humans are naturally warlike? We have the archaeological remains of Stone Age battlefields and everywhere we look are signs of humans killing humans in murderous conflicts. The American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon extensively studied the Yanomamo, a tribe of the Amazon rainforest, for over 30 years and he estimated that 30% of males died violent deaths from warfare.

Our model forager tribe, the San, frequently warred with neighboring groups: they had a murder rate greater than America’s inner cities. In one account, one band avenged a killing by sneaking into the killer’s camp and murdering every man, woman, and child as they slept.
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The Australian Aborigines had a similar pattern—jealousies, vendettas, and revenge killings were frequent features of aboriginal life. Neighboring camps would be raided and bitter fights would be fought to the death. American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner lived among the Aborigines of Arnhem Land from 1909 to 1929. He estimated that 200 men died in organized warfare during that period.
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The total population was only 3,000, so this was a colossal rate of casualties.