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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 longer. 26
Then for more than a million years people lived in a way that couldn 't have changed much: They inhabited grasslands and woodland savannas, first in Africa, later in Eurasia, and eventually in Australasia and the Americas. They hunted animals for food, gathered fruits and seeds, and were highly social within each tribe but hostile toward 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: a pair bond 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 labor between hunting men and gathering women, something unique to people and a few birds of prey. To this day, among the Ache 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!'
Kim Hill, at the University of New Mexico, argues that there was no consistent EEA, but he nonetheless agrees that there were universal features of human life that are not present today but that 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.
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The Red Queen
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 one another. 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 and dupe and help and teach one another that drove us to be ever more intelligent.
Second, we were designed above all else to be adaptable. We were designed to have all sorts of alternative strategies to achieve our ends. Even today, existing hunter-gatherer societies show enormous ecological and social variation, and they are probably an unrepresentative sample because they mostly occupy deserts and forests, which were not mankind 's primary habitat. Even in the time of Homo trectus, let alone more modern people, there may have been specialized fishing, shore-dwelling, hunting, or plant-gathering cultures. Some of these may well have afforded opportunities for wealth accumulation and polygamy. In recent memory there was a preagricultural culture among the salmon-fishing Indians of the Pacific Northwest of America that was highly polygamous: If the local hunter-gathering economy favored it, men were capable of being polygamous and women were capable of joining harems over the protests of the preceding co-wives: If not, then men were capable of being good fathers and women jealous monopolizers: In other words, mankind has many potential mating systems, one for each circumstance.28
This is supported by the fact that larger, more intelligent and more social animals are generally more flexible in their mating systems than smaller, dumber, or more solitary ones. Chimps go from small feeding bands to big groups depending on the nature of the food supply. Turkeys do the same. Coyotes hunt in packs when their food is deer but hunt alone when their food is mice. These food-induced social patterns themselves induce slightly different mating patterns.
POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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MONEY AND SEX
But if humanity is a flexible species, then the EEA is in a sense still with us: Where people in twentieth-century societies act adaptively or where power raises reproductive success, it could be because adaptations shaped in the EEA (wherever and whenever that was) are still working. The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but th 'e human ones are not. We are still consumed by gossip about people we know or have heard about: Men are still obsessed with power-seeking and building or dominating male-male coalitions: Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics. Modern monogamy may be just one of the many tricks in our mating-system repertoire, like harem polygamy in ancient China or gerontocratic polygamy in modern Australian aborigines, where men wait years to marry and then in their dotage enjoy huge harems:
If so, then the "sex drive " that we all acknowledge within us may be much more specific than we realize. Given the fact that men can always increase their reproductive success by philandering, whereas women cannot, we should suspect that men are apt to be behaviorally designed to take advantage of opportunities for polygamy and that some of the things they do have that end in mind: There is broad agreement among evolutionary biologists that most of our ancestors lived in a condition of only occasional polygamy during the Pleistocene period (the two million years of modern human existence before agriculture): Societies that hunt and gather today are not much different from modern Western society: Most men are monogamous, many are adulterous, and a few manage to be polygamous, sharing perhaps up to five wives in extreme cases: Among the Aka pygmies of the Central African Republic, who hunt for food in the forest using nets, 15 percent of men have more than one wife, a pattern typical of foraging societies. 29
One of the reasons hunting and gathering cannot support much polygamy is that luck, more than skill, plays a large part in
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The Red Queen
hunters' success. Even the best hunter would often return empty-handed and would be reliant on his fellow men to share what they had killed. This equitable sharing of hunted food is characteristic of these people (in most other social hunting species there is a free-for-all) and is the clearest example of a habit of "reciprocal altruism" on which the whole of society sometimes appears to be based. A lucky hunter kills more than he can eat, so he loses little by sharing it with his companions but instead gains a lot because next time, if he is unlucky, the favor will be repaid by those with whom he shared now. Trading favors in this way was the ancient ancestor of the monetary economy. But because meat could not be stored and because luck did not last, hunter-gatherer societies did not allow the accumulation of wealth.'°
With the invention of agriculture, the opportunity for some males to be polygamous arrived with a vengeance. Farming opened the way for one man to grow much more powerful than his peers by accumulating a surplus of food, whether grain or domestic animals, with which to buy the labor of other men. The labor of other men allowed him to increase his surplus still more: For the first time having wealth was the best way to get wealth. Luck does not determine why one farmer reaps more than his neighbor to the same degree that it determines the success of a hunter: Agriculture suddenly allowed the best farmer in the band to have not only the largest hoard of food but the most reliable supply. He had no need to share it freely, for he needed no favor in return. Among the