Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (29 page)

Kenneth Good, an anthropologist who first went to live with the Yanomami as one of Chagnon’s graduate students and stayed on for twelve years, described Chagnon as “a hit-and-run anthropologist who comes into villages with armloads of machetes to purchase cooperation for his research. Unfortunately,” wrote Good, “he creates conflict and division wherever he goes.”29

Part of Chagnon’s disruptiveness no doubt resulted from his blustery, macho self-conception, but his research goals may have been an even bigger source of problems. He wanted to collect genealogical information from the Yanomami. This is a tricky proposition, to say the least, given that the Yanomami consider it disrespectful to speak names out loud. Naming the dead requires breaking one of the strongest taboos in their culture. Juan Finkers, who lived among them for twenty-five years, says, “To name the dead, among the Yanomami, is a grave insult, a motive of division, fights, and wars.”30

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins described Chagnon’s research as “an absurdist anthropological project,” trying to work out ancestor-based lineages “among a people who by taboo could not know, could not trace and could not name their ancestors—or for that matter, could not bear to hear their own names.”31

Chagnon dealt with his hosts’ taboo by playing one village off against another. In his own account, he: began taking advantage of local arguments and animosities in selecting my informants…. traveling to other villages to check the genealogies, picking villages that were on strained terms with the people about whom I wanted information. I would then return to my base camp and check with local informants the accuracy of the new information. If the informants became angry when I mentioned the new names I acquired from the unfriendly group, I was almost certain that the information was accurate…. I occasionally hit a name that put the informant into a rage, such as that of a dead brother or sister that other informants had not reported.32

To recap:

1. Our hero swashbuckles into Yanomami lands, bringing machetes, axes, and shotguns he presents to a few select groups, thereby creating disruptive power imbalances between groups.

2. He detects and aggravates preexisting tensions between communities by goading them to disrespect each other’s honored ancestors and dead loved ones.

3. Inflaming the situation further, Chagnon reports the offenses he’s provoked, using the resulting rage to confirm the validity of his genealogical data.

4. Having thus inflicted and salted the Yanomami’s wounds, Chagnon sallies forth to seduce the American public with tales of derring-do among the vicious and violent “savages.”

The word
anthro
has entered the vocabulary of the Yanomami. It signifies “a powerful nonhuman with deeply disturbed tendencies and wild eccentricities.”33 Since 1995, Chagnon has been legally barred from returning to the lands of the Yanomami.

When anthropologist Leslie Sponsel lived among the Yanomami in the mid-1970s, he saw no warfare, just one physical fight, and heard a few loud marital disputes. “To my surprise,” writes Sponsel, “people in [my] village and three neighboring villages were simply nothing like ‘the fierce people’ described by Chagnon.” Sponsel had brought along a copy of Chagnon’s book, with its photos of fighting Yanomami warriors, as a way to explain the sort of work he was doing. “Although some of the men were absorbed by the pictures,” he writes, “I was asked not to show them to children as they provided examples of undesirable behavior.

These Yanomami,” Sponsel concluded, “did not value fierceness in any positive way.”34

For his part, in over a decade living among them, Good witnessed a single outbreak of war. He cut his association with Chagnon eventually, having concluded the emphasis on Yanomami violence was “contrived and distorted.” Good later wrote that Chagnon’s book had “blown the subject out of any sane proportion,” arguing that “what he had done was tantamount to saying that New Yorkers are muggers and murderers.”

The Desperate Search for Hippie

Hypocrisy and Bonobo Brutality

For a certain kind of journalist (or evolutionary psychologist), nothing is more satisfying than exposing hippie hypocrisy. A recent headline from Reuters reads, “Hippie Apes Make War as Well as Love, Study Finds.”35 The article states, “Despite their reputation as lovers, not fighters, of the primate world, bonobos actually hunt and kill monkeys….” Another assures us that “Despite ‘Peacenik’ Reputation, Bonobos Hunt and Eat Other Primates Too.” A third, under the headline “Sex Crazed Apes Feast on Killing, Too,” opens with an audible sneer: “As hippies had Altamont [where Hell’s Angels killed a concert-goer], so bonobos have Salonga National Park, where scientists have witnessed the supposedly peace-loving primate hunting and eating monkey children.” “Sex crazed”?

“Supposedly
peace-loving”? “Eating monkey children”? Do monkeys have “children”?

If both chimps
and
bonobos make war, maybe we
are
“dazed survivors”of a “5-million-year habit of lethal aggression” after all. But a closer look reveals that it’s the journalists who are a bit dazed. Researchers witnessed ten attempts to hunt monkeys over five years of observing the bonobos in question. The bonobos were successful three times, sharing the monkey meat among the hunters—mixed groups of males and females.

A brief reality check for science journalists:

• Researchers have long known and reported that bonobos regularly hunt and eat meat, generally small jungle antelopes known as duikers—as well as squirrels, insects, and grubs.

• The evolutionary line leading to humans, chimps, and bonobos split from that leading to monkeys about thirty million years ago. Chimps and bonobos, in other words, are as closely related to monkeys as we are.

• Young monkeys are not “children.”

• Monkey meat is on the menu at fancy Chinese restaurants and jungle barbecues in many parts of the world.

• Tens of thousands of monkeys, young and old, are sacrificed in research laboratories throughout the world annually.

So, are humans also “at war” with monkeys?

Nothing sells newspapers like headlines of “WAR!,” and no doubt “CANNIBALISTIC HIPPIE ORGY WAR!” sells even more, but one species hunting and eating another species is hardly “war”; it’s lunch. That bonobos and monkeys may look similar to untrained eyes is irrelevant. When a pack of wolves or coyotes attacks a stray dog, is that “war”? We’ve seen hawks pluck pigeons out of the sky. War?

Asking whether our species is
naturally
peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is
naturally
a solid, liquid, or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends. On a nearly empty planet, with food and shelter distributed widely, avoiding conflict would have been an easy, attractive option.

Under the conditions typical of ancestral environments, human beings would have had much more to lose than to gain from warring against one another. The evidence—both physical and circumstantial—points to a human prehistory in which our ancestors made far more love than war.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Longevity Lie (Short?)

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by
reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their
strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly
away.

PSALMS 90:10

Strange but true: The average height expectancy of prehistoric humans was about three feet, so a four-foot tall man was considered a giant.

Does that fact alter your image of prehistory? Are you picturing a diminutive race of bonsai people living in mini-caves, chasing rabbits into holes, cowering in fear of foxes, being carried off by hawks? Does this cause you to rethink what a challenge a mammoth hunt must have been for our half-pint ancestors? Does it make you feel even luckier to be living today, when our superior diet and sanitation have doubled the average person’s height expectancy?

Well, don’t get carried away. While it is
technically
true that the average “height expectancy” of prehistoric men was about three feet, it’s a misleading sort of truth. Like overconfident declarations about the universality of marriage, poverty, and war, it’s the sort of assertion that sows confusion and results in a harvest of misleading data.

Take the average height of a full-grown man living in prehistoric times (using skeletal remains as a guide): about six feet tall (72 inches). Then take the average size of a prehistoric infant’s skeleton (let’s say about 20 inches). Then extrapolate from the ratio of infant-to-adult skeletons at known archaeological burial sites and presume that in general, for every three people who lived to adulthood, seven died as infants. Thus, owing to the high rate of infant mortality, average human height in prehistory was (3
×
72) +

(7
×
20) ÷ 10 = 35.6 inches. Roughly three feet.1

Absurd? Yes. Misleading? Yup. Statistically accurate? Well, kinda.

This
height
expectancy “truth” is no more absurd or misleading than what most people are led to believe about human
life
expectancy in prehistory.

Exhibit A: In an interview with
NBC Nightly News,2
UCSF

bio-physicist Jeff Lotz was discussing the prevalence of chronic back pain in the United States. The millions of people watching that night heard him explain,
“It wasn’t until two or
three hundred years ago that we lived past age forty-five,
so our spines really haven’t evolved to the point where they can maintain this upright posture with these large gravity loads for the duration of our lives [emphasis added].” Exhibit B: In an otherwise solid book about women in prehistory (The
Invisible Sex),
an archaeologist, an anthropologist, and an editor of one of the world’s leading science magazines team up to imagine the life of a typical woman they call Ursula, living in Europe 45,000 years ago.

“Life was hard,” they write, “and many, especially the young and the old, died of starvation in winter and accidents of one sort or another, as well as disease…. Ursula [having had her first daughter at age fifteen] lived long enough to see her first granddaughter, dying at the
ripe old age of 37
[emphasis added].”3

Exhibit C: In a
New York Times
article,4 James Vaupel, director of the laboratory of survival and longevity at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, explains, “There is no fixed life span.” Dr. Vaupel points to the increase in life expectancy from 1840 to today in countries where the figure is rising quickest and notes that this increase is “linear, absolutely linear, with no evidence of any decline or tapering off.” From this, he concludes, “There’s no reason that life expectancy can’t continue to go up two to three years per decade.”

Except that there is. At some point, all the babies who can survive to adulthood, do. Further advances will be slight.

When Does Life Begin? When Does It

End?

The preceding numbers are just as fantastical as the ones we came up with for our
average height expectancy
estimate.

They are, in fact, based upon the same erroneous calculation distorted by high infant mortality rates. When this factor is eliminated, we see that prehistoric humans who survived beyond childhood typically lived from sixty-six to ninety-one years, with higher levels of overall health and mobility than we find in most Western societies today.

It’s a game of averages, you see. While it’s true that many infants and small children died in prehistoric populations—as indicated by the larger numbers of infant skeletons in most burial sites—these skeletons tell us nothing about what constituted a “ripe old age.”
Life expectancy at birth,
which is the measure generally cited, is far from an accurate measure of the
typical life span.
When you read, “At the beginning of the 20th century, life expectancy at birth was around 45 years.

It has risen to about 75 thanks to the advent of antibiotics and public health measures that allow people to survive or avoid infectious diseases,”5 keep in mind that this dramatic increase is much more a reflection of increased infant survival than of adults living longer.

In Mozambique, where one of us was born and raised, the average life expectancy at birth for a man is currently, tragically, about forty-two years. But Cacilda’s father was ninety-three when he died, riding his bicycle right to the end of the road.
He
was old. A forty-year-old is not. Not even in Mozambique.

No doubt, many prehistoric infants died from disease or harsh conditions, as do the infants of other primates, human foragers,

and

modern

Mozambiqueans.

But

many

anthropologists agree it’s likely that a large portion of infant mortality once attributed to starvation and disease probably resulted from infanticide. They argue that foraging societies limited the number of infants so they wouldn’t become a burden to the group or allow overly rapid population growth to strain food supplies.

Horrific as it may be for us to contemplate, infanticide is anything but a rarity, even today. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes studied contemporary infant deaths in northeast Brazil, where about 20 percent of infants die in their first year. She found that women consider the deaths of some children a “blessing” if the babies were lethargic and passive.

Mothers told Scheper-Hughes they were “children who wanted to die, whose will to live was not sufficiently strong or developed.” Scheper-Hughes found that these children received less food and medical attention than their more vigorous siblings.6

Joseph Birdsell, one of the world’s greatest scholars of Australian Aboriginal culture, estimated that as many as half of all infants were intentionally destroyed. Various surveys of contemporary pre-industrial societies conclude that anywhere from half to three-quarters of them practice some form of direct infanticide.

Lest we start feeling too smug in our compassion and superiority, recall the foundling hospitals of Europe. The number of babies delivered to near-certain death in France rose from 40,000 in 1784 to almost 140,000 by 1822. By 1830, there were 270 revolving boxes in French foundling hospital doors specially designed to protect the anonymity of those depositing unwanted infants. Eighty to 90 percent of these children are estimated to have died within a year of arrival.