We are a profoundly social animal. Though sex created the social element for all animals, nurture proved to be the way of opening up the social world. Intimacy expanded and developed aided by new and altered life models and biological registers. The ability to retain and model experience grew, both individually and socially, as life on earth expanded the range of possible encounters.
The animal (us)that broke through to full intimacy did not inhabit the richest environment, tropical forest. It broke through when tropical forest became unreliable and unpredictable. This was due to ‘rapid’ changes brought about by the power of the earth processes in the East African Rift Valley interacting with the effect of the Ice Ages. From among the hominids, social intimacy and remarkable episodic memory, both assisted by language, secured the survival of human beings - but only after in parallel, solving the challenge of how to include sex/reproduction. The answer was to include it within ‘nurture’ intimacy and make it subject to both biological and social requirements.
Biological survival requires variation, so much so that interbreeding leads to biological breakdown. At the same time, successful complex animals are bundles of registers whose interplay, including conflict and attention, keep them alive and breeding; this bundle, or at least key elements of it, must also be passed on. This becomes acute in animals as complex as humans. In addition human babies are born helpless with models for intimacy and language among the most active. Much of their brain/body modeling emerges in a biologically determined pattern but at the same time is open to, and anticipates experience (actual register activity). Human development and social maturity is a long and complex journey requiring years of extensive support from others in the group.
The biological need for dispersed partnering across a species necessarily breaks down social intimacy. It breaks up groups and families. How can the successful integrated bundles and other variants be passed on without biological degradation when they are trapped within social groups? Social mammals have various ways around this challenge. Many of them look like groups but at their centre have only one breeding pair. Males and females who could mate do not. Transferring to the next breeding pair leads to stressful changes and, commonly, the breakdown of the group. In many species males and females, when they have a dominant register for sex, leave as lone individuals to join other groups. This is highly dangerous for a social animal and mortality is high. In other groups the breeding females will sometimes ignore the breeding male within the group and seek out the individual male opportunists discreetly hanging around. Some groups, elephants for example, are made up of only females and young males with various sexually active males as visitors. If the group is large enough, and welcomes in new animals and allows others to leave, such as in baboons then the mating aspect returns to individuals choosing one another.
How did humans deal with the challenge? We can often find interesting insights from our cousins the Chimpanzees but our broad sexual and social life is one area where it does not work. Chimpanzees are forest animals and we are not. They live in much smaller groups. It is now appreciated that very different animals can evolve similar registers when subject to similar environments. Living on the Savannah is highly dangerous. Group size is a good defense especially when the group can turn as one and address the threat. Our natural life on the Savannah compares better with baboons. They can move around in relatively large groups anywhere between fifty and a couple of hundred, and break into smaller groups when food is scarce. There is no dominant male. Other baboons join and leave. In order to join, baboons need to go through a process of ‘becoming familiar’ (hanging about and minimising conflict) followed by mutual grooming with some of the wider group. They groom some others and one fine day a member of the group grooms back. The group is a mixture of females, young animals, babies and males. The mature males have large canine teeth which they display as a threat. A call identifies a threat and everyone stops and looks in the same direction as the animal that made the call. This is itself a highly evolved ability, i.e. a complex model bringing together disparate registers. In humans it is called eye pointing. At a particular developmental stage human babies present with this ability. Following gaze is crucial to learning to stick words onto experience.
The last thing a leopard or pair of hyenas would want would be the attention of six or more male baboons displaying their teeth backed up by the rest of the group. The stand-off would be about the predators defending themselves with threats while they worked out how to get away. Nothing takes on a large enough, group of baboons. Everyone involved is, of course, trying to avoid injury as generally injury leads to death. Predation is about picking individuals off from small groups and from the edges of large groups particularly at night. Finding a ‘safe’ place for the group to sleep at night is the biggest challenge facing baboons. They are ingenious in doing this and will return to a good place every night.
Mutual grooming, the basic intimacy model, keeps the group together and helps to repair social conflict. The males are more geared up to fight (modeling to testosterone) and this spills over into ‘aggression’ (see the emotion topic). The amount of grooming between individuals is a measure of the closeness of their relationship. Female baboons do not choose males to mate with on the basis of how big, strong and aggressive they are. They choose those who show most interest in holding the babies and looking after the young. Interestingly these males also take more risks when confronting predators. This does not mean that a female will always mate with the same male but it makes it more likely.
Increasingly, studies are finding out more about the relationships possible between animals. The story of the actions of uncles and male cousins in long tailed tits is recent. We have presented a view here that it is very difficult to ‘see’ the social world and that we can expect to uncover more surprises about what intimacy leads to in other animals.
Let us ask an obvious question. What happens when a large group of baboons, somewhere between fifty and over a hundred, has to split up as there is not enough food in the area to feed them all? Who goes with whom and what do they register about each other?
Elsewhere we speculated that pheromones would allow our small animal to identify his daughter. Baboons have this and a lot more to go on. If long tailed tits can recognise family voices then it is a racing certainty that baboons can. Let us also assume that individual animal voices and appearances can also be registered by baboons. Humans can recognise familiars by how they move; probably so can baboons. At primary school my best friends were identical twins. I could easily tell the difference because my brain had exaggerated small differences in the visual recognition models I used to identify them. We build visual/movement/voice/plus ID’s for the people that we meet. Baboons will have a similar ability. They also have episodic memories full of other baboons set in various situations. We massively overestimate the role verbal memory and inner dialogues play in registering our experience. This in turn leads us to underestimate what it is that animals like baboons are going to be able to do.
When baboons split into smaller groups they will try and keep group size as high as possible. At very arid times of year they will be reluctant to go lower than ten. We have forced habitat degradation on baboons and their group sizes are now usually unnaturally low particularly for large group gatherings. Having at least one mature male with the impressive teeth is going to be important. It is also likely that this male will try and accompany the female(s) that he had intercourse with in the recent large group gathering. We know that he was chosen because he helped with the babies and young and therefore it would be odd if he did not have modeling that continued to connect him with the female(s) he had recently mated with. The immature baboons hanging around the female(s) are likely to include his children and nephews and nieces. There is also a high probability that he registers them as kin. He is more likely to act to protect them and to pay more attention to their location. How many of the members of the group are his relatives? Are cousins among them? Is the other big male with the teeth his brother, father or uncle? It would be easy to get to ten animals. This would mean that small baboon groups are likely to have a large element of kinship. Given the open process of establishing intimacy it would be impossible to predict the actual make up of a small baboon group.
What size group do you have when you include all your uncles, aunties and cousins on both sides? How many do you have when you all include your partners? As you age and lose older generations you can add in children, their partners and then grandchildren. At each step you can add in partners family relations. I can easily get to forty eight living despite being subject to the two children restriction in all but two cases. I also stopped counting. My wife and I need only include two couples of our age that have totally separate kinship groups, to reach the hundred and fifty number that is thought to be the comfortable, large group size for humans. Baboons and natural humans have the same small and large group ranges. Kinship is going to be a strong factor in group make up for both animals.
In wider mammal nature, sex can be followed by partnering for nurture. Animal parents do not have sex while nurturing. Once the young reach a certain age, related to the end of suckling, the female ovulates and then in some cases, such as with wolves and chimpanzees, mates with the same male. Mating with the same male is most likely with those social mammals where there is a dominant couple or a dominant male that tries to prevent other males from mating with the females. How, are nurturing and sex combined in humans and how is this beneficial?
We start with baboons where we can see the beginnings of our approach. We have already linked the fact that female baboons choose to mate with those males that hold the babies and look after the young with the likelihood that they will mate with the same male again. We suspect that this choice is set into a strong picture of shared experience; through episodic memory; and a grasp of the kinship group. Humans had the same open large group when there was plenty of food and water. They also broke up into the same sized smaller groups according to the food available. As we will find out later, the protection from a mature human male can be very effective. The greater the pressure on the female human to keep the babies and toddlers alive, the greater becomes the need to include a mature male in the small group.
Pregnancy and suckling stop ovulation but do they need to stop sex? Male and female humans are biologically able to have sex throughout a relationship with only minimal breaks. Pregnancy and suckling then become natural contraception – assuming only basic nutrition in the case of suckling. Nurture touch can also be tweaked so that it joins sexual touch in a very powerful register combination. Nurture touches, and other modeling used for raising the babies and young children can be used between the adult male and female to frame and ‘inform’ sexual touch; the involvement of the female breasts for example. Indeed switching between gentle nurture touch and more physically strong sexual touch is part of a good sex life. Intimacy is evident in the fact that we predominantly and uniquely in the animal kingdom, mate face to face. This also makes it possible for mouth kissing to be part of the sexual act.
Partnering between adult human males and females clearly has a strong biological base before we add pheromone detected temperament contrast, shared attention life models, episodic memories and cultural features. The regular sex, set within the patchwork of strong registers that make up each unique adult female-male partnering and in the grip of the intimacy model from nurture, also creates another characteristic that we share with no other social animals. The sexual act between a pair of humans is completely private, even excluding children. This creates a social space where other features of their intimacy can also become private.
The most dangerous time for both baboons and humans is night therefore the most important time for the parent female human to have the partner male around is night. They sleep together. We still use the phrase ‘sleeping together’ as a way of referring to a sexual partnership. Ancient texts use ‘lying with’ to refer to the sexual act.
How well does the above picture fit the humans with the nearest match to our original condition? Australian Aborigines who live in semi-arid areas have been hunter gatherers in historical time and their traditional lives have been documented. They have not had predators for tens of thousands of years and yet when a mature male sleeps with a mature female they are considered by the wider group to be sexual partners even though, due to privacy, there is likely to be no evidence of sex. When the female gives birth they are considered to be married. The word ‘married’ refers to the expectation that her babies will all be fathered by her current male partner until he dies. All males and females are expected to marry. As human females survive, even from birth, better than males, some males have to have sex with more than one female i.e. they have more than one wife. There is no ritual marker of ‘marriage’ but there are social and cultural life models that parallel the biologically driven process. The kinship network and the wider group, with its rich stories and shared experience, talks of likely marriages between children, should they reach the appropriate ages. They can feel and refer to the issue of biological ‘distance’. The phrase ‘fresh blood’ comes to mind. Indeed marrying between ‘family groups’ is seen as good for strong children and good for strengthening intimacy ties between groups. At this level we find a ritual-plus life model for the gathered families to share food before the couple sleep together. The growing intimacy between a female and a male, and their commitment to one another, is usually set within the kinship framework of marriage. When you sleep out in the open the group knows exactly who is sleeping with whom. If a couple are aware that there would be difficulties and tensions, as well as the possibility of being marginalised by the wider group, they leave (elope) together and join a different group. One or both of them will be known by this group. They then go through the baboon thing of keeping their head down and being helpful until they are accepted, with talk replacing grooming. Within human groups touch retains its power. In the form of the hug/embrace it is used subject to subtle and varying social rules but is uniformly present to express high levels of intimacy.
You probably have in mind that sleeping together is not much of a relationship. Human beings evolved close to the equator. Here, all year, the night comes quickly and lasts for twelve hours, give or take about half an hour. Just before the dark period the group would find a safe area and the male and female partners would settle down with their children. The children could sleep for most of the dark time. The average amount of sleep that adult humans need is still debated but it certainly is not twelve hours. It is also very likely that there were breaks from sleep as well as time at each end; for example going to sleep after an hour, sleeping for four hours, staying awake for two or three hours, sleeping again for two hours followed by naps and wakefulness until the rapid sunrise. There are records of medieval folk, regardless of the time of year, having a meal and visiting neighbours in the middle of the night. ‘Sleeping together’ covers a lot more than sleep.
What evidence is there that despite mating privacy the aboriginal culture we are examining recognises that parents continue to have sex? The expectation of breast feeding is that it will continue for two or three years. When the couple decide that they have had enough children the last child that they plan to have is breast fed until it is five or six. This is clear evidence of contraception used so that sexual acts can continue to be part of the intimate relationship.
We know that kinship is a strong feature for Aboriginal groups but even more revealing is the language males use to refer to all mature females who are not their wife/wives; they are ‘mothers in law’. This captures their unavailability. Would you make love to your mother/father in law? You might be attracted and it is common to share high intimacy, particularly around grandchildren, but dialogues between you, and your own inner dialogues as well as subtleties of action and movement are likely to be hosed clean from deep within.
Like baboons, our target Aborigine groups have no leaders, there is no dominate male. Age and experience and a long process of initiation make some males more influential than others.
The initiation includes skills and stories, shared in different places and in different seasons and hence combines episodic experience and speech and language in a way we elsewhere describe in detail, i.e. ‘story’ is everywhere. The initiation of males takes them from the first signs of puberty to a final ritual by the male group which would occur when they are in their late teens and early twenties. This is the actual age when human males begin the peak of their biological maturity which tops out in the mid-twenties. As far as the wider group is concerned only initiated males can sleep with a mature female. Females remain with their mothers and the female group until puberty. The boys begin to wander away from this group at about seven but do not join the male group until close to puberty. This is a dangerous time for them and has parallels in many human cultures. The girls also learn skills set within a differing set of stories. Two or three years after puberty they sleep with a mature male. This is generally around fifteen, when human females begin the peak of their biological maturity. We have here natural social life modeling integrated with clear and evident biological registers and their related modeling. Any secondary school teacher and any fifteen year old girl will tell you how immature fifteen year old boys are. Given the five year delay in their biological maturity it is clear where the ‘blame’ lies. The ability and desire to have sex is not enough and it is not enough right across the animal kingdom where mating requires males to develop physically. For humans especially, many other biological registers pace themselves with this.
There is another viewpoint that throws more light on our original natural condition. It is quite obvious that a large male baboon with impressive canine teeth can offer good protection from predators but it is not clear what a slightly larger and more muscular bloke can offer female humans beyond helping to carry the baby, clasp the three year old or keep the youngsters near. We can’t see the reason why the male is a good protector because it is a specific ability, only observed in action and movement. It is also supported by other characteristics more common in male humans.
Elsewhere we have commented that if you take humans as a group and ask them to do something and then look for gender differences you can frequently find them. Arguably, the largest differences are found within two movement models.
The first model makes it possible for the human to throw objects at a target. Males in general are significantly better at this even when they have no history of skill learning or practice.
Accuracy is everything when you are about to throw a stone at a leopard. The leopard needs to register that you are looking at it. It also needs to have an episodic memory ‘story’ (summary model) that if a large human throws a stone under these circumstances the chances of being hit are very high. Chimpanzees left us fourteen million years ago (current figure) but when caught on the ground the group will throw anything they can get their hands on. Thrown objects coming from different directions is dangerous enough for most predators to make a retreat. All hominids that remained in Savannah must have thrown objects as their main way of defending themselves and would have done this more accurately than chimpanzees. It is likely that before we evolved our ancestors were carrying around a few, table-tennis ball size, stones. If you tie a small stone to a straight stick you can throw more accurately and further. We would have carried three or four of these around with us. We have seen that Chimpanzees have a range of tools but carrying them around with you is a big step in evolution. The female carried the baby and the male carried the spears.
Hominid evolution picked up throwing as the main way to deal with predation and refined it. Males evolved to have the skill to throw accurately. Being looked at by a mature male human, even when not carrying a weapon, would be the equivalent of facing a mature male baboon, even when not showing his teeth. On the Savannah, the vulnerability of the babies and young made the protection of the human group a massively high priority. In the small group situation the mature males would have been constantly looking out for the location of members of their group and for possible predators. They would often have little time to find food. Here we come to the second movement model. This is a model that co-ordinates the rapid movements of the fingers particularly when they are working together. Generally, females are significantly better at this even when they have no history of skill learning and practice. Take some wild grass and use your fingers to separate the grass seeds from the husks. Do enough to make a meal for a family.
While being protected the female humans had to gather enough food for themselves, the children and often the protecting male. The males would also use their spears to try and kill other animals, usually small ones. These would bring important elements into the human diet and would be shared with other members of the group. Young females would be developing gathering skills while the boys would be increasingly practicing throwing.
How does this picture match the Australian Aborigines living in semi-arid areas? Though they have had no predators for tens of thousands of years hunting other animals to eat is a male activity. They are culturally obliged to share this food with the whole group thereby paralleling the protection which was once needed for the whole group. They largely gather their own food but are often given food collected by the females. Over three quarters of the food eaten by the group is gathered by the females.
There is another pair of gender differences that also supports our picture of natural humans. There is a lot of evidence that overall females are better than males at one to one interpersonal skills from a very young age. But less well known is the evidence that from an equally early age males are better at group maintenance skills. They are more aware and flexible around grouping, make more attempts to include and are less likely to exclude. Between the ages of seven and ten, when children have not entered puberty, girls moving between schools are more likely to be first included and accepted by the boys. The male ability to feel and register the nature of human groups is helpful to modern females. The mental health of females in their early twenties correlates with their fathering not their mothering. Somewhere in our current understanding of ourselves we have to find a way of valuing the male biological registers that play out as group maintenance and protection. The challenge for males is how to live, and refer to, the resolution of the conflicts generated within and between inclusion and protection. Inclusion can lead to group conflict and protection to control.
Is the Savannah still in us?
The densest population areas for Australian aborigines were originally wooded. They used fire to bring in the grasses and other Savannah plants. These did very well. The attraction of the American east coast to European settlers was the extent of open woodland with underbrush largely replaced by grass. They did not realise that the humans already living there used fire to keep it like that. Cook did however recognise that the landscape that he encountered was managed by the aborigines using burning. As with annual rains, fire renews. Young grasses give more seeds and plants produce fresh new leaves. Youngish bushes often give more fruit and young plants have their tender roots and tubers nearer the surface. It is easier to see animals in open habitat and easier to use the ancient hominid ability to throw, in order to scare, injure and kill them.
We still have the Savannah in so much of our biological modeling that we remake it whenever we can and use it to relax and ‘hang out’ in. Many free and open social assemblies take place in our local Savannah. Parks are modeled on the Savannah, copses and scattered trees around streams and water sources with open grassland nearby. We maintain this environment wherever we can. When out walking and there is a choice between going through a wood and walking on the edge of the wood overlooking grassland, we will generally use the edge path. We prefer to see distance but with the safety of a thicket.