Sex at Dawn

Books like this one, concerning human nature, are beacons for trouble. On one hand, everybody’s an expert. Being human, we all have opinions about human nature. Such an understanding seems to require little more than a modicum of common sense and some attention to our own incessant cravings and aversions. Simple enough.

But making sense of human nature is anything but simple. Human nature has been landscaped, replanted, weeded, fertilized, fenced off, seeded, and irrigated as intensively as any garden or seaside golf course. Human beings have been under cultivation longer than we’ve been cultivating anything else. Our cultures domesticate us for obscure purposes, nurturing and encouraging certain aspects of our behavior and tendencies while seeking to eliminate those that might be disruptive. Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal.²

Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled—though as we’ll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past. Pull them if you want, but they’ll just keep coming back again and again.

What gets cultivated—in soil and minds—is not necessarily beneficial to the individuals in a given society. Something may benefit a culture overall, while being disastrous to the majority of the individual members of that society. Individuals suffer and die in wars from which a society may benefit greatly. Industrial poisons in the air and water, globalized trade accords, genetically modified crops ... all are accepted by individuals likely to end up losing in the deal.

This disconnect between individual and group interests helps explain why the shift to agriculture is normally spun as a great leap forward, despite the fact that it was actually a disaster for most of the individuals who endured it. Skeletal remains taken from various regions of the world dating to the transition from foraging to farming all tell the same story: increased famine, vitamin deficiency, stunted growth, radical reduction in life span, increased violence . little cause for celebration. For most people, we’ll see that the shift from foraging to farming was less a giant leap forward than a dizzying fall from grace.

On Getting Funky and Rockin’ Round the Clock

If you ever doubt that human beings are, beyond everything, social animals, consider that short of outright execution or physical torture, the worst punishment in any society’s arsenal has always been exile. Having run short of empty places to exile our worst prisoners, we’ve turned to internal exile as our harshest punishment: solitary confinement. Sartre got it backwards when he proclaimed, “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is other people). It’s the absence of other people that is hellish for our species. Human beings are so desperate for social contact that prisoners almost universally choose the company of murderous lunatics over extended isolation. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” said journalist Terry Anderson, recalling

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his seven-year ordeal as a hostage in Lebanon.

Evolutionary theorists love to seek explanations for species’ most outstanding features: the elk’s antlers, the giraffe’s neck, the cheetah’s breakaway speed. These features reflect the environment in which the species evolved and the particular niche it occupies in this environment.

What’s our species’s outstanding feature? Other than our supersized male genitalia (see Part IV), we’re not very impressive from a physical perspective. With less than half our body weight, the average chimp has the strength of any four or five mustachioed firefighters. Plenty of animals can run faster, dive deeper, fight better, see farther, detect fainter smells, and hear tonal subtleties in what sounds like silence to us. So what do we bring to the party? What’s so special about human beings?

Our endlessly complex interactions with each other.

We know what you’re thinking: big brains. True, but our unique brains result from our chatty sociability. Though debate rages concerning precisely why the human brain grew so large so quickly, most would agree with anthropologist Terrence W. Deacon when he writes, “The human brain has been shaped by evolutionary processes that elaborated the capacities needed for language, and not just by a general demand for greater intelligence.”⁴

In a classic feedback loop, our big brains both serve our need for complex, subtle communication and result from it. Language, in turn, enables our deepest, most human feature: the ability to form and maintain a flexible, multidimensional, adaptive social network. Before and beyond anything else, Human beings are the most social of all creatures.