Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Caregiving is all the more pressing an adaptation in hominids, thanks to shifts in the composition of our predecessors’ social groups. Studies of our predecessors’ bones reveal that for the first time in primate history, our predecessors were often living into old age, up to the age of sixty. These first older primates, wise with information about food sources, how to care for offspring, and climate patterns, likely required care from younger members of the group.

Even a more pervasive and pressing fount of caregiving was the radical dependence of our hominid predecessors’ offspring. Our hominid predecessors evolved bigger brains: Homo erectus had brains about 1,000 cc, which is 50 percent bigger than those of their immediate predecessors, Homo habilis. The females evolved narrower pelvises, which emerged to support upright walking as our predecessors descended from arboreal life to become bipedal omnivores on the African savannah. As a result, early hominids were born premature, to squeeze through the narrower pelvis region. They entered the world with big brains but few physical survival skills. They had a longer period of dependency than those of their primate predecessors, and required more care, so much so that our hominid social organization had to shift radically, as did our nervous systems.

In his review of hunter-gatherer social life in The Tangled Wing, Melvin Konner notes the pervasiveness of intensive infant care. This care was typically provided by mothers, but also by engaging fathers, younger female relatives (aunts, sisters), and younger children. Such care might seem indulgent to our modern, Benjamin Spock-trained sensitivities, but in hunter-gatherer culture, it was a given. Thus, Konner observes that the !Kung infant is

carried in a sling at the mother’s side, held vertically in continuous skin-to-skin contact. Reflexes such as crawling movements in the legs, the use of the arms to move and free the head, and grasping responses in the hands allow the infant to adjust to the mother’s movements and avoid smothering in her skin and clothing. These movements also signal the infant’s changes of state, teaching the mother to anticipate its waking, hunger, or defecation. The hip position lets infants see the mother’s social world, the objects hung around the neck, any work in her hands, and the breast. Mutual gaze with the mother is easy, and when she is standing the infant’s face is just at the eye level of keenly interested ten-to twelve-year olds, who frequently initiate brief, intense, face-to-face interactions. When not in the sling, infants are passed from hand to hand around a fire for similar interactions with adults and children. They are kissed on their faces, bellies, and genitals, sung to, bounced, entertained, encouraged, and addressed at length in conversational tones before they can understand words.

The mother indulges the infant’s dependency completely in the first year and the second year resists it only slightly. Nursing is continual, four times an hour throughout the day on average, triggered by any slightly fretful signs. Close contact for the first two years allows for a much more fine-grained responsiveness by the mother than can be attained in a culture where mother and infant are often apart.

 

Caregiving is a way of life in humans, and has been wired into our nervous system in the forms of emotions, such as sympathy and filial love.

FACE TO FACE

 

A second feature of early humans’ social EEA is that it was almost continually face-to-face. Don’t be misled by the hours you spend alone, commuting, on the Internet, on your cell phone, or fingering your BlackBerry while eating in your car. The amount of time we spend alone is a radical aberration for our species (and a source of many contemporary social and physical ills). Early humans required one another to accomplish the basic tasks of survival and reproduction. They did so in highly coordinated, face-to-face interactions. Cooperative child rearing, where relatives and friends traded off duties, was central to quotidian life, as hinted at in Konner’s quotation above.

Studies of archaeological sites reveal consistent evidence of cooperative hunting for meat—a critical part of early hominid diet. Relative to many of the animals early humans hunted—bison, elephants, rhinoceroses—our predecessors were weak and slow of foot, and lacking in the fangs, claws, speed, and strength seen in other predators. Early hominid strength was found in coordination and cooperation. For example, at Mauran, in the French Pyrénées, a massive accumulation of bison bones near a river, thought to be 50,000 years old, suggests that teams of Neanderthals banded together to force herds of bison off cliff edges, to fall to their deaths.