The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [94]
The other line, however, embarked on an entirely different path. The animals known as Homo took to a diet of meat. By 1.6 million years ago, when Homo erectus, the first truly recognized human being, was living in Africa, he was without question the most carnivorous monkey or ape the world had ever known. That much is known from the bones he left at his camp sites. He may have scavenged them from lion kills, or perhaps begun to use tools to kill game himself. But increasingly, in lean seasons, he could rely on a supply of meat. As Foley and Phyllis Lee put it, ‘While the causes of meat-eating are ecological, the consequences would be distributional and social.’ To hunt, or even more to seek lion kills, required a man to range further from home, and to rely on his companions for co-ordinated help. Whether as a result of this, or coincidentally, his body was embarked on a series of co-ordinated gradual changes. The shape of the skull began to retain more juvenile shape into adulthood: with a bigger brain and a smaller jaw. Maturity was gradually delayed so that children grew slowly into adulthood and depended on their parents for longer.26
Then for more than a million years, people lived in a way that cannot have changed much. They inhabited grasslands and woodland savannahs, first in Africa, later in Eurasia and eventually in Australasia and the Americas. They hunted animals for food, gathered fruits and seeds, were highly social within each tribe but hostile towards members of other tribes. Don Symons refers to this combination of time and place as the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ or EEA, and he believes it is central to human psychology. People cannot be adapted to the present, or the future; they can only be adapted to the past. But he readily admits that it is hard to be precise about exactly what lives people lived in the EEA. They probably lived in small bands; they were perhaps nomadic; they ate both meat and vegetable matter; they presumably shared the features that are universal among modern humans of all cultures: marriage as an institution in which to rear children, romantic love, jealousy and sexually induced male–male violence, a female preference for men of high status, a male preference for young females, warfare between bands, and so on. There was almost certainly a sexual division of labour between hunting men and gathering women, something unique to people and a few birds of prey. Among the Aché people of Paraguay, men specialize in acquiring those foods that a woman encumbered with a baby could not manage to: meat and honey, for example.27
Kim Hill, at the University of New Mexico, argues that there was no consistent EEA, but he agrees none the less that there were universal features of human life that are not present today but which have hangover effects. Everybody knew or had heard of nearly all the people they were likely to meet in their lives: there were no strangers, a fact that had enormous importance for the history of trade and crime prevention, among other things. The lack of anonymity meant that charlatans and tricksters could rarely get away with their deceptions for long.
Another group of biologists at Michigan rejects these EEA arguments altogether with two arguments. First, the most critical feature of the EEA is still with us. It is other people. Our brains grew so big not to make tools but to psychologize each other. The lesson of socioecology is that our mating system is determined not by ecology but by other people – by members of the same gender and by members of the other gender. It is the need to outwit, dupe, help and teach each other that drove us to be ever more intelligent.