Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (44 page)

Marriage

Just about every tribal society on Earth practices an arrangement where a man and a woman become contractually bound to each other. The fundamental terms of the contract are straightforward: the woman provides sex for the husband; food for herself, her husband, and their children; and nurturing for the offspring. The man provides commitment, protection, status, security, and hunted status-food for gift-giving and sharing; he accepts any offspring of the woman’s previous marriages. San women enjoyed the “sweetness” of the sexual dimension just as women do today.
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The contract is cemented by rituals and oaths made in front of witnesses, notably close relatives.

Female Puberty and Fertility

In forager populations, a girl’s first period (known as menarche), on average, occurs between the ages of 15 and 17. This is followed by two or three years of “adolescent sterility” before she begins ovulating and can therefore conceive. Thus, a woman does not bear her first child until she is between 18 and 22 years of age. The first pregnancy is followed by four to eight others spaced 3–5 years apart, until menopause occurs sometime after age 40. In today’s Western society, girls reach menarche three years earlier and have only 12 to 18 months of adolescent sterility.
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Seemingly, this is not how nature intended. A number of factors contribute to this abnormality, including lack of hard physical work, lack of feeling hungry, and too much body fat.

How do the man and woman find each other? The woman’s first marriage is usually when she is very young. In San society, a girl’s first marriage is between 13 and 15 years of age, before she has reached puberty.
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The parents will negotiate a marriage with a carefully selected man. They try for the best status they can find—someone who will bring security, reflected glory, and some meat-sharing for the parents too. In the words of developmental psychology professor David Geary, “Culturally successful men have more reproductive potential than other men, and women’s mating and marriage preferences suggest that they are motivated to capture and use this potential for their own reproductive ends.”
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The husband will usually be much older, by 7 to 15 years. Often the daughter’s preferences, feelings of attraction, and affection might be taken into account. First marriages in the San are unstable and many break up within a short period.
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In forager societies, women get married several times in a lifetime. By the time she is a little older, and maybe already a mother, parental influences diminish and emotional preferences play a greater role. Often, it is the woman who puts an end to an unsatisfactory marriage. Even though women outnumber men, there is still fierce male competition for access to females, so she is unlikely to remain without a protector.

Almost always, the man stays in his own band and seeks a bride in an out-group, a nearby band. In this respect, the human species is what anthropologists call “patrilocal”—that is, the woman marries into the husband’s family. This is a strong source of asymmetry in the relationship. The man is on home territory, among his close family and allies. In contrast, the bride is entering a world of people with whom she has little prior affinity and she is ignorant of “their ways.” The successful wife is one who learns quickly how to assimilate into this culture. She must be skillful at detecting the dynamics in relationships, be good at adapting her behavior to “fit in,” and transfer her loyalty to the new group.

Over the eons of evolution, we might expect that genes would evolve to make such skills instinctive, and indeed this is the case. We find that women (compared to men) have greater ability to sense atmospheres, to feel undercurrents, to detect ulterior motives, to conduct intrigue, to ingratiate themselves, and to manipulate their new environment. They will be especially sensitive to rejection by the new family and group. They are good with words and know how to use them to trigger powerful reactions. Women more easily move their allegiance to different groups, often several times in a lifetime.

Polygamy

Earlier, we saw how women outnumbered men and that some men were attractive partners and some were not. It all adds up to some men having several wives and some getting only one or even none. This was a source of strife. Mate-less males would be constantly on the prowl: they might be “losers,” but they still had the mating drive. That is why the mated males had to be both powerful and vigilant. They had to protect their women from rape by out-group males or from the discreet attentions of an in-group male.
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In our discussion so far, we have avoided stating the obvious: that human societies are by nature polygamous, or more precisely “polygynous.” That is, they are societies where males (but not females) have more than one mate at a time. In other words, polygyny is a human universal value. Most populations of the world today practice it—the only major exception is Western culture, where monogamy is the socially imposed rule.

This was not always the case. The doctrines associated with monogamy were adopted by the Christian church in the early Middle Ages. Up until that time, even popes and priests had wives and concubines. Then, an ancient Greek mind-virus known as “asceticism” took hold. Asceticism takes the view that true spirituality can only be obtained through abstinence of earthly needs, including sex. According to the ascetic doctrine, celibacy is the ideal that we should all strive for. However, being practical, the church recognized that humans need to reproduce. It adopted a compromise doctrine that allowed ordinary folk to make babies but kept the sexuality to a minimum. A man could marry just one woman, provided he entered an indissoluble contract to stay with her for life. The Christian sect was determined to regulate the marital and sex lives of its adherents. By various means, it got kings and parliaments to adopt monogamy into law and make it virtually impossible to divorce.

However, the instituting of monogamy has some interesting consequences. It intervenes massively in a delicate balance, the one where men strive for several mates and women strive for an exclusive deal. This intervention hands women the exclusive deal. To make sure that there is no back-sliding, the marriage contract is shored up with legally enforced sanctions. In practical terms, the male’s evolutionary drive is subordinated to the satisfaction of the female’s evolutionary drive.

Secondly, it has the effect of distributing the females almost equally among the men. This is good for low-status males, for even they will find someone to pair up with. It is even more important in modern societies, where the proportion of males is equal to females. The limits to this were illustrated in the aftermath of World War I. During that time, the major combatants, France, England, and Germany, lost young men at the same rate as in hunter-gatherer times. As a result, there was a dearth of young men after the war. With the rigidities of monogamy, many young women stayed in spinsterhood for the rest of their lives.

We saw earlier that in Pleistocene times, high-status men would have many offspring and low-status men few or none. The kinds of genes that make for high status in Pleistocene times included those for risk-taking, bravery, strength, aggressivity, heroism, female protection, ingenuity, and hunting skills. In the Western world, for over 1,000 years now, genes in low-status men have been spread at the same rate as those for high-status men. No one knows what this means for the future.

Mating Games

We mentioned earlier that women could rightfully fear a husband’s involvement with another woman. But why would a woman be interested in taking a lover? After all, she only needs one man at a time: a second man contributes nothing to the number of children she can have or the protection that the husband provides. The main answer, unsurprisingly, lies in the genes. A woman might be attracted to another man if her genes sense that he will give her offspring a better start in life. A woman may well have a husband, but does he have the best genes in the barnyard? If she has a low-status husband, her current genes will do better if she can mate with a man whose genes are better than her husband’s. She will be attracted to mate discreetly with high-status males. Whence the excessive insecurity of a low-status male when a high-status male is hovering around his wife.

Conformity of individual members to the norms of the group is shored up by social emotions such as moral outrage, revenge, remorse, and guilt. The emotions themselves are human universal values, but the norms to which they are applied are not. In the West, we are conditioned to the idea that monogamy is the social norm. It is interesting to notice how the social emotions are expressed when confronted with norm-breakers, particularly males. The full weight of moral outrage is unleashed against them: they are called “cheats,” “two-timers,” “home-breakers,” and “cads.”

The husband has only given his commitment to the raising of his own genes. One of the worst things that can happen to a gene is that it finds itself in a body which, instead of promoting further copies of itself, is promoting someone else’s copies. Such a case can occur if the wife has been sexually active with some other male. The husband could find himself raising another male’s genes. Males are therefore descended from a line of males who did a better than average job of ensuring that they were raising their own genes. How did they do this? There are several gene strategies and the most powerful is that the gene is coded to provoke feelings of sexual jealousy. The male, once he has made a commitment to the female, will be jealous, almost insanely so. He will get violent if he senses that his woman is attracted to another man and if higher-status men are interested in her. Jealous violence also has a preemptive role in deterring infidelity. These effects are strongest if the woman is in her prime for childbearing and if the male is low status.
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Even so, no man is exempt from these emotions—they are part of the hardwiring.

This brings us to one of the fundamental worries for a woman, an emotion deeply programmed from our Pleistocene past—fear of neglect and abandonment. On average, the genes of women who allowed themselves to be neglected or abandoned did not survive so well. She will be constantly seeking reassurance that her man is not planning any changes. She has sensitive antennae trying to second-guess his thoughts. A woman will be jealous of a rival mainly because she fears dilution of his commitment, resources, and status, even abandonment.

So far, we have been talking rather mechanistically, but what about love and affection? These are powerful emotions, a kind of madness even. Nevertheless, it is a human universal value that, in the matter of marriage, they take a secondary role. The vast majority of societies (outside the Western middle class) see marriage as a contract, best arranged by those who have a cool understanding of the issues. They see the addled states of lust and romantic love as an unreliable basis for such an important commitment.

In forager societies, women are more focused on keeping their children alive than on developing intimacy with their husbands.
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Love is the icing on the cake: all other things being equal, women still prefer men with whom they can develop an intimate and emotionally satisfying relationship,
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although this appears to be more of a luxury than a necessity.
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Women also prefer men with whom they feel physically safe and who are physically capable of protecting them should the need arise.
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Sexual jealousy is not the only reason why domestic situations turn to violence. We have seen that there is asymmetry in the way women and men handle problems. Women are good at using words and they use this ability to pursue their argument by indirect means with elaborate emotional verbal tactics. Men, on average, are not good at handling emotional verbal cut-and-thrust. The female ability to exquisitely torment their dignity and self-esteem maddens them. They feel impotent, frustrated, and outmaneuvered, faced with the seeming irrational, unjust, and slippery nature of the argument. In contrast, men are made to pursue their arguments by simple, direct means: physically. In other words, men are best at physical warfare, while women are best at psychological warfare.

There are several reasons why domestic conflict in forager societies was low. First, women and men were thrown together less—they simply did not interact in areas where they were psychologically unsuited. Also, in modern society, both women and men have heightened expectations of the other, expectations that are unrealistic and frustratingly unrealizable. Finally, should a dispute arise in a forager society, the man had no hesitation parrying the woman’s psychological aggression with some low-level physical aggression. In the modern world, the use of physical aggression is thoroughly condemned, which has the interesting consequence of disarming men in domestic disputes, leaving the female verbal and psychological weaponry intact. Many men can cope with this, but all have to suppress their natural inclinations.

PARENTING

In 95% to 97% of mammal species, the males take no part whatsoever in parenting.
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This includes our closest cousins, the chimpanzee and gorilla. (Chimpanzees never even know who their father is: the female mates with all males in the group.) In the remaining 3% to 5% of mammal species, male parenting exists but in a weak form. Seemingly, the human species falls into this second category. In forager societies, direct male involvement with their small offspring is minor. Indirect involvement has to do with the “social” context, for example, meat-sharing to enhance status and forceful protection from bullying and aggression.