Culture is partly blind habit, but it also involves people solving problems. Because so much of social life is flexibly constructed in the light of conscious community needs and objectives, it should come as no surprise that as local environments change, people will be deliberately and insightfully modifying their practices to fulfill their needs as they see them.
It’s time to consider exactly how morally flexible our culturally modern predecessors were likely to have been as they coped with radically changing prehistoric environments that could be inviting but also unpredictable and treacherous. We’ll also be seeing how this flexibility ties in with the structurally ambivalent social nature we’ve evolved, for at times egoism can come into conflict with nepotism, while either egoism or nepotism can come into conflict with tendencies to be generous toward people outside the family. Our subject matter will be the sharing of food in times ranging from adequacy or excess to scarcity or outright famine.
In normal times, when the first wave of meat-sharing takes place with people like the Bushmen or the Netsilik or the forty-eight other LPA groups I’ve surveyed, we’ve already seen that through a variety of customs people behave as though the large carcasses were essentially the property of all—at least until the meat is distributed. This group appropriation of large carcasses is sustained largely by pressure from public opinion, but if necessary, brute physical force can be employed to prevent monopolization that favors individuals or their families.
In combination, social pressure and active sanctioning do quite a good job of keeping the self-aggrandizing tendencies of egoistic or overly nepotistic hunters in check—especially when they are the ones who have proudly brought home the bacon and are feeling their oats. The immediate winners of this zero-sum game are all the other members of the band, and the underlying idea is that the band is one big cooperative team as far as large game is concerned.
This pattern applies to normal times when killing large game is challenging and quite unpredictable in its acquisition, yet plentiful enough to be extremely useful to group subsistence. The result is the efficient, culturally routinized type of meat-sharing system that we’ve discussed at such great length. Not all times are normal, however, and in the Pleistocene Epoch this must have become gruesomely apparent again and again, as environments that sometimes were benevolent often changed drastically for the worse and presented our ancestors with threatening scarcities worthy of the term “dire.”
To begin with, however, we must ask what happens in those rare times when seasonal resources are so ample, and so highly concentrated, that a cooperating population can congregate at a great size such that the usual system of meat-sharing simply becomes unwieldy. In the far north of central Canada, the Netsilik enjoy this possibility every year, and we’ll now take a closer look at their remarkable system for averaging out shares of seal carcasses, which involves a rather fancy, large-scale version of Alexander’s indirect reciprocity. Just in the winter, a sizable number of small bands gather together on the sea ice to live well on seals for several months, and these groupings can exceed sixty to eighty persons. Hunting seals through their multiple breathing holes is accompanied by a high degree of unpredictability, and the Netsilik have created a brilliant system of meat distribution that reduces family meat-intake variance just as we’ve seen in small, normal-sized bands.1
If we imagine a butcher’s chart with a picture of a seal divided into seven major parts, then we’re looking at the main basis for this system. When any participating hunter lands a seal, he’ll have a different permanent partner for each body part; for instance, he’ll always give the flippers to his flipper partner—and that hunter will reciprocate in kind when he’s lucky enough to land a seal.2 With a system like this, everyone’s eating some seal meat all of the time. And seven hunters would be right in the ballpark for the number of meat-procurers and meat-sharers in a normal band of thirty.
It obviously wouldn’t make much sense for sixty people to try to share a single seal. But what would be the alternative if all these Netsilik families simply hunted on their own? With a little bad luck, even an adept hunter and his near kin might kill two seals one month but then none the following month. So this system of “meat insurance” sees to it, in terms of probabilities, that all seven of these sharing partners will eat adequate, if moderate, amounts of meat and blubber quite regularly, thereby achieving variance reduction. All of these partners will be nonkinsmen; within their extended families, Inuit kinsmen share automatically, so they don’t need such a system to regulate their meat intake.3
A very different kind of cultural flexibility obtains in times of truly glorious surfeit. When people are living in normal bands and major windfalls occur, the fair sharing between unrelated families can simply disappear, as when other Inuit groups intercept large caribou herds at narrow river crossings and slaughter scores of animals.4 With so much meat, sharing doesn’t make any sense until the meat supply becomes sporadic again. At that point, the normal variance-reduction system will cut in again to effectively average out family meat intake.
There’s an opposite side to this coin, which arrives when encounters with game become unusually rare. However, before we examine what transpires when foragers are faced with dire scarcity, the matter of motives needs some further clarification. Basic motives that affect patterns of sharing are likely to be complicated because, as we’ve seen, they’re likely to be mixed. There’s motivationally generous sharing, done simply because the need of a socially bonded other is sensed and sympathetically appreciated; this other person may be someone very familiar or merely an acquaintance or at times even simply a member of the same human race. There’s also sharing because of a deeply internalized sense of duty to share. And then there’s sharing to avoid shame and gain reputation, and there’s sharing to be eligible for future benefits. The following discussion will help in clarifying not only this complex motivational division of labor, but also what the limits of hunter-gatherer generosity may be.
Let’s reconsider what happens after a normal LPA meat distribution has taken place in a thriving band of twenty to thirty. Once it’s shared out, we know the meat amounts to private property. This means that giving to others outside the family becomes optional, whereas sharing within the family is basically automatic even though there may be some jealousy or squabbles. We also know that stinginess is poorly thought of and that generosity is promoted in general. We also know that, optionally, private shares of meat can be shared between unrelated families—even though some of the sharing is likely to be ambivalent because underlying egoistic and nepotistic tendencies are working against competing underlying tendencies that favor extrafamilial generosity.
Rarely, such ambivalences can spawn serious social conflict over meat, for instance, if requests thought to be legitimate are outright denied and expected informal reciprocation is not forthcoming spontaneously. Such problems are recorded for both the Inuit5 and in the Kalahari,6 and Niqi, the woman with the problematically stingy personality in Briggs’s Utku band, found herself being partially ostracized because she held back.7 Surely, such problems can be generalized to LPA foragers in general. But this includes the fact that in this context of informal meat-sharing between families really serious quarrels—ones that threaten to split the band—are very rare.
We’ve already met with the well-known school of thought that likens hunter-gatherer meat-sharing to “tolerated theft” as this has been modeled for chimpanzees, and this somewhat “cynical” model does seem to go nicely with certain facts about human sharing. First, in some but by no means the majority of LPA foraging societies, we’ve seen that the initial, “communalized” wave of sharing can be accompanied by routine and constant demands for more meat.8 These characterizations amount to indirect or direct accusations of unfairness in terms of customary rules, and perhaps the underlying hostility could be seen as threatening enough to motivate sharing. However, even in groups with contentious styles of sharing, large carcasses are always shared so that everyone gets some meat regularly, and even in such bickering groups there is pleasure in eating together and—to repeat—serious quarrels are very rare.
Although these contentious styles of sharing vary greatly in their intensity, I believe they all can be viewed similarly to how we have depicted the universal pronouncements that praise extrafamilial generosity. They amount to culturally routinized ways of “tweaking” other people’s relatively modest tendencies to behave generously outside the family, and the tweakers are merely tweaking; they’re not spoiling for a fight that will, at cost to everyone, split the band.
Such deliberate amplification of extrafamilial generosity is evident not only when nagging is used to spur generosity or when groups issue the explicit calls for generosity that we’ve discussed at length,9 but also less directly when they punish cheating hunters or sneaky thieves who seriously break the rules of sharing. All of these manipulative measures suggest that sharing this precious commodity is accomplished in the face of considerable ambivalence.
One important take-home message is that, even though at the level of genetic dispositions altruism is obviously outranked by egoism and nepotism, the feelings of care and generosity that promote altruism still can reduce the potential for conflict because basically they take some of the edge off of individual competition for food. In effect, I believe that human generosity oils the wheels of cooperation and that people understand this intuitively; that’s why generous tendencies are constantly being tweaked. The result can be good for everyone. In fat or adequate times, this makes it possible for people to cooperate quite efficiently—and take pleasure in doing so in spite of the occasional rough edges we’ve discussed. Thus, today’s various negative and positive pressures to be generous toward nonkin would have been a very important component of the sharing systems that were in effect 45,000 years ago among culturally modern humans, and probably earlier as well.
Today, both the !Kung and the Netsilik share routinely within their families, and in both cultures the people sometimes know hunger. However, the !Kung seem to be one of the world’s more contentious cultures—not only when it comes to initial sharing of communalized meat at the band level, but also afterward when private meat is requested by members of other families. In this connection I should mention that in general the !Kung seem to be unusually loquacious and also perhaps more prone to heated interpersonal conflict—even though they do praise generosity and try hard to reduce conflict just like all other LPA foragers.
I should also say that in spite of a contentious verbal style, the !Kung do seem to share quite effectively, just as Pat Draper told us they do. What may be distinctive of the !Kung and certain Australian Aborigines,10 and a handful of others whose styles of sharing are unusually contentious, is that they don’t try to hide their ambivalences and their worries about fair apportionment of meat, as the Inuit and many other hunter-gatherers seem to. In my view, the more contentious cultures are simply making overt anxieties about fair sharing that are widespread, and they are widespread because egoism and nepotism can so readily trump human altruism.
In thinking about human nature, here’s my thesis. Critically important are the underlying generous feelings that help a system of indirectly reciprocated meat-sharing to be invented and maintained. Yet it’s also true that basically these altruistic tendencies are so moderate that hunter-gatherer sharing institutions need continuous and strong positive cultural support if cooperative benefits are to be reaped without undue conflict. In a sense, then, these innately generous tendencies are not quite up to the job. To finish the job at the cultural level, the serious and continuous threat of group disapproval and active sanctioning does its part in making systems of indirect reciprocity among nonkin work without too much conflict. So does a simple awareness that living in sizable bands pays off and that serious conflict will cause the band to split. And so do all the positive preachings in favor of generosity, and so, sometimes, does hostilely manipulative nagging.
If all of this tweaking of the better side of human nature is needed, we might ask to what degree such sharing is emotionally “genuine” in that it is based importantly on actual feelings of generosity. This surely varies by the personality of the sharer, by the situational context of sharing, by the degree of bonding between sharers and recipients, and by whether kin are involved. But in normal times people do share and they do so quite efficiently, and this is usually the pattern—in the Holocene. But what about the Late Pleistocene Epoch, when climates were so capricious—and when frequently they could be cruel and even highly dangerous?
When we think about this division of labor among egoism, nepotism, and wider generosity, what takes place when food becomes really scarce is of great interest. Keep in mind that when large game has become very hard to acquire, and is seriously emaciated once found, usually the climatic conditions that have this effect will also be reducing the chances of humans subsisting well on plant foods and small game.
In the Arctic, of course, there simply is no such vegetarian fallback strategy. There, freezing is a major means of storage, but there are obstacles to its use as well; for instance, other carnivores, including well-motivated wolves and powerful bears, can raid these caches even if there are stones available to place over the meat. There’s also the energetic problem of digging through the permafrost if the cache is to be deep. People like the Netsilik do sometimes freeze some surplus meat, but as we’ll see, this won’t be enough to get them through an unusually hard winter.
Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley surveyed forty North American foraging societies for which information on food scarcity was available,11 and a quarter of them were what I’ve been calling LPA bands, mostly Inuit. Thirteen societies commonly experiencing famines with people dying of starvation included Inuit-speakers living in inland areas of Canada, such as the Netsilik, and a number of inland-dwelling boreal-forest Athapascans in the Pacific Northwest, non-LPA foragers who were engaged in the fur trade. Subject to occasional famines were another twelve non-LPA fur-trade groups that foraged in inland subarctic forests. The fifteen societies that were famine free mostly lived in California and were sedentary. Keeley did not include mounted hunters of the Great Plains in his sample.
One bottom-line finding was that some areas make for a steady, dependable living, whereas others present resources that fluctuate so much over time that years with famines are predictable. It’s of interest that the famine-free groups were in California, where resources were ample enough and concentrated enough so that most of the foragers could live in groups larger than the usual nomadic bands, basically stay in permanent settlements, and store their food as families. This would have been a deviation from the basic nomadic pattern before 15,000 years ago, although such outliers probably existed then.
In North America, hunger also struck people living in the dry and erratic Great Basin, an area that can be compared to the Kalahari, and to parts of the desertic interior of Australia, where similar food shortages also are known.12 But it’s no accident that our main accounts of hunter-gatherer famine come from the central and eastern Arctic and from subarctic boreal forests because plant foods (or small game or insects) offer so little backup when the meat supply fails.
Once famine is on its way, sharing appears to break down in two stages. In coming to this conclusion, I’m keeping in mind the rather slim hunter-gatherer data,13 but also the more abundant information we have about agricultural tribesmen who live in similarly small groups and in the context of drought sometimes face starvation14 in spite of their using long-term food storage.15 With respect to bands, as famine approaches, the various families may continue to share any plant foods and small game within the family—just as they do in times of plenty. However, large-game consumption will have been diminishing for three reasons: game becomes scarce, hungry hunters have less energy to hunt, and when killed, emaciated large mammals are providing much less meat. Furthermore, as variance increases, sharing at the band level begins to make less sense for statistical reasons.
In this context of nutritional downturn, predictably nepotistic tendencies will tend to decisively trump altruistic tendencies to share with nonrelatives. And when privation turns into famine, a quick glimpse tells us that what can happen next isn’t at all pretty. Within family circles, underlying egoistic tendencies can start to trump nepotistic tendencies, and even within close nuclear families, sharing can be drastically reduced. In extreme situations even intrafamilial cannibalism can take place, with the main examples coming from the Arctic.16 However, our very powerful egoism, our strong nepotism, and our relatively modest altruism predict very much the same behavior elsewhere when hunter-gatherers face an imminent starving-to-death situation.
What made for privation in Pleistocene Africa wouldn’t have been the absence of plant foods as a fallback, but periodic abrupt and radical onsets of droughts that would have affected plants and animals alike. Hard times surely appeared far more often than recently, and in recurrent cycles, and for humans highly flexible responses to the opportunity to share would have provided major adaptive advantages in dealing with these regional climate swings, which within a half a century or less surely could have moved environments from bountiful to dangerously inadequate or even worse.
Long ago, an agronomist named Justis von Leibig promulgated his environmental “Law of the Minimum,”17 which suggests that in normal times the effects of natural selection on gene pools may not be nearly as forceful as when certain resources become very scarce and therefore limiting. Thus, in the far north mammals and fish are the limiting factor for humans because snow and ice provide water and plants have little relevancy. On the Kalahari, availability of water could be the main limiting variable.
Combine this insight, now, with the fact that prehistorically humans seem to have experienced bottlenecks during which the overall number of people in existence became quite small.18 When both plant foods and animals were subject to short-term failure, local-population extinctions were very likely,19 and on at least one prehistoric occasion total species extinction was a real possibility.20 In this context advantages of the very wide kind of flexibility in sharing we have been speaking of could have made a major difference to bands or families or individuals, as they made often very ambivalent decisions about how and when to share.
It’s heartbreaking to think of how often during the Late Pleistocene culturally modern beings with moral sensibilities like ours were faced with extreme and cruel situations of triage. Over and over again they were obliged to set aside deeply internalized moral values that favored helping others—be this through altruism or nepotism—in the interest of family or even personal survival. When the chips were down, band-level sharing became all but absent, which means that hungry families and individuals were very much the units of selection because the band as a whole had ceased to cooperate. And even family-level cooperation was up for grabs: in some contexts it could have paid off reproductively for parents to share scarce foods with offspring or with each other; in more pressing circumstances it would have made sense in terms of survival not to share, which made individuals the units of selection. The ultimate dilemma, faced historically by the Netsilik in central Canada, was whether to turn cannibal. In one case,21 parents who ate their own children rationalized their actions as follows: had the parents killed themselves for the children to eat, the children still couldn’t have made a living by hunting when the wild game returned. However, if the parents survived by consuming their offspring, they could at least have more children and thereby keep things going.
This brings us back to the human conscience and the adaptiveness of its flexibility. A too-strong conscience would make such stressful adaptive moves unthinkable. However, a flexible conscience allowed people to adjust their adherence to moral rules to the situations they faced, and when altruistic empathy was trumped by egoism or nepotism, apparently they were able to do what was necessary.
Let me suggest exactly how as hunger escalated, and variance in meat intake increased, having a flexible, as opposed to a rigid, conscience would have helped to make these facultative responses possible. First, contingent sharing with nonkin in the same band was likely to be too immediately costly and it ceased to make sense because the potential sharer might be dead before possibly very eventual future contingencies came into play. Second, further triage would have phased in when sharing began to break down within the family so that even innately strong, culturally supported nepotistic impulses could be trumped by desperately hungry decisions in favor of egoism. The ultimate victory of egoism took place when cannibalism on nearby dead bodies came into play and even more so when the active killing and eating of others by people too weak to forage probably took place.22
If we consider this entire range of solutions to the general problem of sharing food, the interplay among egoism, nepotism, and altruism is obvious enough. Also obvious are cultural emphases that strongly promote generosity to both kin and nonkin but that in practice fall short of being absolute. Apparently, cultural values can even condone sheer egoism in the face of famine, or so it seems when practical Inuit individuals known to have resorted to intrafamilial cannibalism appear not to have been socially punished afterward.23
Let us return to some contemporary foragers who on an everyday basis can’t even live in bands. They live so close to routine scarcity that the usual highly interdependent multifamily band life all but disappears for long stretches of time. This takes place owing to necessity out on certain marginally productive Australian semideserts, where game is scarce and insects and lizards are nutritionally important. Likewise, in the dry Great Basin of northwestern North America, with just a few deer available, Shoshonean family groups have to depend on highly unpredictable pine-nut harvests, and a limited rabbit supply, when it comes to getting some protein and fat.24 In such situations, sharing within families can stay in effect, and the dispersed families will still meet when they can to socialize (and share meat) on a larger scale. If there’s a large pine-nut harvest, they may even be able to form sedentary bands for up to a year.25 But nutrition comes first, and over the years, their much beloved band-level social life could all but disappear for much of the time.
Because of our love of company, the human social preference is to live in bands, not just in families, but we’ve just seen that foragers can adjust. This means that in the Pleistocene periodically marginal but viable subsistence adjustments would have led to dispersed families barely getting through temporary hard times, when staying bunched up in a band would have made staying alive much more uncertain because bands used up the limited food around them so quickly compared to families.
Over a decade ago, archaeologist Rick Potts took a look at the startling incoming data on Pleistocene climatic instability and decided that adaptive flexibility must have been an important key to human survival, a key so important that our brain’s remarkable advances in size could be attributed largely to frequent and challenging environmental changes and the need to cope with them intelligently.26 Here I’m combining Potts’s hypothesis and Leibig’s Law with hypotheses about our inherently ambivalent human nature, and with our morally flexible ways of dealing with scarcity, to suggest that important, punctuated phases of human genetic evolution must have taken place when people were very hungry—and some of them simply weren’t going to make it.
In prehistoric hard times the overall mix of biocultural components I’m describing here provided a remarkably flexible way for humans to at least stay alive as small kin groups—or even just as individuals. Thus, these units became highly relevant as units of selection, while multifamily groups became temporarily less relevant unless there was active conflict over defensible resources. At the same time, when resources were adequate, this same behavioral potential provided a way for humans to really flourish in bands as they gradually built up their populations before the next crisis struck.
Of course, this flexibility’s advantages for adaptation have also been useful more recently in the far more stable—and usually more comfortable and predictable—Holocene Epoch. But under Pleistocene conditions, at frequent junctures such adaptive flexibility surely was far more critical, much more often, as entire regions became “marginalized” and people had to cope with dire hunger and had to curb their culturally reinforced generosity.
Sometimes I wonder if these once quite frequent environmental shortfalls, and hunter-gatherers’ flexible responses to them past and present, have been adequately exposed to scientific analysis. When anthropologists write their ethnographies, the daunting task of describing a culture holistically usually results in a “normalized” depiction of social life and sharing that doesn’t fully take into account these more unusual emergency contingencies,27 even if they are remembered by older people. In addition, archaeological evidence for temporary dire scarcity, and specifically its social effects, is by its nature rather slim. For these reasons, we must not idealize today’s hunter-gatherers, with their routine sharing of large-game meat as a prized and nutritiously important commodity, by looking only to the good-times accounts that predominate in ethnographic reports.
Even in good times, perfectly motivated, all-but-automatic generosity is not the name of the sharing game, especially outside the family. I’ve described the underlying ambivalences that can surface actively, and I’ve emphasized that our helpful altruism becomes socially potent only when this potential is culturally boosted through constant calls for generosity, praise for the generous, and criticism and social punishment for the exceptionally stingy. Of course, one way an outsider might read all the prosocial messages is that the people in question are just naturally very generous and cooperative, and golden rule sayings might seem to reflect this. Another, however, is that hunter-gatherer systems of sharing are so fragile that they need very substantial and continual reinforcement.
This “battle” is not entirely uphill. From an early age these same people have internalized cultural values that promote altruistic generosity and therefore are naturally responsive to these prosocial messages. This must not be overshadowed by the various rough edges I have described, as with all the !Kung complaints about meat-sharing. The latter are simply expectable manifestations of egoism and nepotism at work in cultural traditions that allow their strong expression. The much less contentious-seeming Netsilik are probably closer to the worldwide LPA forager norm,28 but even though they may not use repeated demands to get their share, I can assure you that Netsilik women or men who are saddled with the difficult task of sharing out the meat fairly are watched closely, and resentments over failure to share can be bitter. This would be true anywhere that highly valued and not overly plentiful large game has to be shared, and with respect to the !Kung I have suggested that they provide a good idea of how a system of sharing can be highly efficient in spite of peoples’ worried anticipation of stinginess.
In dealing with this interplay between human genetic nature and these cultural patterns that amplify generosity, I wish to get up close and personal again. As we’ve seen, the !Kung are probably quite near to the complaining extreme among today’s LPA foragers in general.29 In this context, the words of Nisa, the !Kung woman whose autobiography will provide us with further detailed insight into how the !Kung feel about things like sharing, will enable us to vicariously enter one Bushman mind and consider the underlying psychological stress at first hand.
Nisa comes across as a classically ambivalent sharer, and it started young. Of course, her earliest recollection of a problem in this area came when she was being weaned after her mother became pregnant. It’s usual for hunter-gatherers to continue nursing until a child is several years old, and because lactation tends to suppress ovulation, this provides a long birth interval that is congenial to a nomadic way of life—where carrying two very small children would be a serious burden on all concerned. I shall hazard a guess that in our own culture very few people can remember being weaned, but when maternal warmth and nourishment were abruptly denied to Nisa as a child already several years old, she appears to have suffered a real and well-remembered trauma. This caused her to engage in parentally disapproved behavior both before and after the birth of her younger sibling.
Marjorie Shostak’s remarkable account is replete with both childhood and adult remembrances of being angry with others for being stingy—with Nisa tearfully or angrily wanting to retaliate in kind. In fact, save for one episode that involved her being unduly generous, if we were to generalize just Nisa’s personally remembered behavior patterns to all Bushmen, we would have to wonder how they managed to share at all.
This is an occupational hazard when working with a single autobiography, and there are also our own ethnocentric reactions to deal with. I probably could not rely on such an account were it not for the accompanying insights of the ethnographer. Indeed, Shostak tells us that other Bushman children have similar problems: “The !Kung economy is based on sharing, and children are encouraged to share things from their infancy. Among the first words a child learns are na (‘give it to me’) and ihn (‘take this’). But sharing is hard for children to learn, especially when they are expected to share with someone they resent or dislike. And giving or withholding food or possessions may be a powerful way to express anger, jealousy, and resentment, as well as love.”30
Although Nisa’s actual food jealousies may well fall within the normal range, it does appear that her memory seems to work quite well when she’s recalling past deprivations and conflicts. Shostak continues, “It is also hard to learn not simply to take what you want, when you want it. !Kung children rarely go hungry; even in the occasional times when food is scarce, they get preferential treatment. Food is sometimes withheld as a form of punishment for wasting or destroying it, but such punishment is always short-lived. Nevertheless, many adults recall ‘stealing’ food as children. These episodes reflect the general !Kung anxiety about their food supply, as well as the pleasure they take in food—both emotions already present in childhood.”31
Nisa’s autobiography is replete with stories involving food:32
When mother was pregnant with Kumsa, I was always crying, wasn’t I? I would cry for a while, then be quiet and sit around, eating regular food: sweet nin berries and starchy chon and klaru bulbs, foods of the rainy season. One day, after I had eaten and was full, I said, “Mommy, won’t you let me have just a little milk? Please, let me nurse.” She cried, “Mother! My breasts are things of shit! Shit! Yes, the milk is like vomit and smells terrible. You can’t drink it. If you do, you’ll go, ‘Whaagh . . . Whaagh . . . ’ and throw up.” I said, “No, I won’t throw up, I’ll just nurse.” But she refused and said, “Tomorrow, Daddy will trap a springhare, just for you to eat.” When I heard that, my heart was happy again.
The next day, my father killed a springhare. When I saw him coming home with it, I shouted, “Ho, ho, Daddy! Ho, ho, Daddy’s come! Daddy killed a springhare; Daddy’s bringing home meat! Now I will eat and won’t give any to her.” My father cooked the meat and when it was done, I ate and ate and ate. I told her, “You stinged your milk, so I’ll stinge this meat. You think your breasts are such wonderful things? They’re not, they’re terrible things.” She said, “Nisa, please listen to me—my milk is not good for you anymore.” I said, “Grandmother! I don’t want it anymore! I’ll eat meat instead. I’ll never have anything to do with your breasts again. I’ll just eat the meat Daddy and Dau kill for me.”
On one occasion, Nisa refuses to share with her mother some duiker meat that was acquired by her older brother, Dau:
After he skinned it, he gave me the feet. I put them in the coals to roast. Then he gave me some meat from the calf and I put that in the coals, too. When it was ready, I ate and ate and ate. Mother told me to give her some, but I refused, “Didn’t you stinge your breasts? Didn’t I say I wanted to nurse? I’m the only one who’s going to eat this meat. I won’t give any of it to you!” She said, “The milk you want belongs to your brother. What’s making you still want to nurse?” I said, “My big brother killed this duiker. You won’t have any of it. Not you. He’ll cut the rest into strips and hang it to dry for me to eat. You refused to let me nurse so your son could. Now you say I should give you meat?”
The following passages tie a jealous Nisa to stealing her mother’s milk through deceit, and in the end it is her father who lays down the law with threats of corporal punishment:
Another day, my mother was lying down asleep with Kumsa, and I quietly sneaked up on them. I took Kumsa away from her, put him down on the other side of the hut, and came back and lay down beside her. While she slept, I took her nipple, put it in my mouth and began to nurse. I nursed and nursed and nursed. Maybe she thought it was my little brother. But he was still lying where I left him, while I stole her milk. I had already begun to feel wonderfully full when she woke up. She saw me and cried, “Where . . . tell me . . . what did you do with Kumsa? Where is he?” At that moment, he started to cry. I said, “He’s over there.”
She grabbed me and pushed me, hard, away from her. I lay there and cried. She went to Kumsa, picked him up, and laid him down beside her. She insulted me, cursing my genitals, “Have you gone crazy? Nisa-Big-Genitals, what’s the matter with you? What craziness grabbed you that you took Kumsa, put him somewhere else, then lay down and nursed? Nisa-Big-Genitals! You must be crazy! I thought it was Kumsa nursing!” I lay there, crying. Then I said, “I’ve already nursed. I’m full. Let your baby nurse now. Go, feed him. I’m going to play.” I got up and went and played. . . .
Later, when my father came back from the bush, she said, “Do you see what kind of mind your daughter has? Go, hit her! Hit her after you hear what she’s done. Your daughter almost killed Kumsa! This tiny little baby, this tiny little thing, she took from beside me and dropped somewhere else. I was lying down, holding him, and fell asleep. That’s when she took him from me and left him by himself. She came back, lay down, and started to nurse. Now, hit your daughter!”
I lied, “What? She’s lying! Me . . . Daddy, I didn’t nurse. I didn’t take Kumsa and leave him by himself. Truly, I didn’t. She’s tricking you. She’s lying. I didn’t nurse. I don’t even want her milk anymore.” My father said, “If I ever hear of this again, I’ll beat you! Don’t ever do something like that again!” I said, “Yes, he’s my little brother, isn’t he? My brother, my little baby brother, and I love him. I won’t do that again. He can nurse all by himself. Daddy, even if you’re not here, I won’t steal mommy’s breasts. They belong to my brother.” He said, “Yes, daughter. But if you ever try to nurse your mother’s breasts again, I’ll hit you so that it really hurts.” I said, “Eh, from now on, I’m going to go wherever you go. When you go to the bush, I’ll go with you. The two of us will kill springhare together and you’ll trap guinea fowl and you’ll give them all to me.”
Subsequently, Nisa turns into a childish thief whose anxious orientation to feeding continues to get her in trouble in terms of a local sharing ethic that, as my survey showed, emphasizes being generous both within the family and without. And within the family, her own childishly “deviant” patterns are treated sternly by her mother in particular:
This was also when I used to steal food, although it only happened once in a while. Some days I wouldn’t steal anything and would just stay around playing, without doing any mischief. But other times, when they left me in the village, I’d steal and ruin their things. That’s what they said when they yelled at me and hit me. They said I had no sense.
It happened over all types of food: sweet nin berries or klaru bulbs, other times it was mongongo nuts. I’d think, “Uhn, uhn, they won’t give me any of that. But if I steal it, they’ll hit me.” Sometimes, before my mother went gathering, she’d leave food inside a leather pouch and hang it high on one of the branches inside the hut. If it was klaru, she’d peel off the skins before putting them inside.
But as soon as she left, I’d steal whatever was left in the bag. I’d find the biggest bulbs and take them. I’d hang the bag back on the branch and go sit somewhere to eat. When my mother came back, she’d say, “Oh! Nisa was in here and stole all the bulbs!” She’d hit me and yell, “Don’t steal! What’s the matter with you that inside you there is so much stealing? Stop taking things! Why are you so full of something like that?”
One day, right after they left, I climbed the tree where she had hung the pouch, took out some bulbs, put the pouch back, and mashed them with water in a mortar. I put the paste in a pot and cooked it. When it was ready, I ate and finished everything I had stolen.
Another time, I took some klaru and kept the bulbs beside me, eating them very slowly. That’s when mother came back and caught me. She grabbed me and hit me, “Nisa, stop stealing! Are you the only one who wants to eat klaru? Now, let me take what’s left and cook them for all of us to eat. Did you really think you were the only one who was going to eat them all?” I didn’t answer and started to cry. She roasted the rest of the klaru and the whole family ate. I sat there, crying. She said, “Oh, this one has no sense, finishing all those klaru like that. Those are the ones I had peeled and had left in the pouch. Has she no sense at all?” I cried, “Mommy, don’t talk like that.” She wanted to hit me, but my father wouldn’t let her.
Another time, I was out gathering with my mother, my father, and my older brother. After a while, I said, “Mommy, give me some klaru.” She said, “I still have to peel these. As soon as I do, we’ll go back to the village and eat them.” I had also been digging klaru to take back to the village, but I ate all I could dig. . . . Later, I sat down in the shade of a tree while they gathered nearby. As soon as they had moved far enough away, I climbed the tree where they had left a pouch hanging, full of klaru, and stole the bulbs.
This childishly antisocial eating spree brings on physical punishment:
“Nisa, you ate the klaru! What do you have to say for yourself?” I said, “Uhn, uhn, I didn’t take them.” My mother said, “So, you’re afraid of your skin hurting, afraid of being hit?” I said, “Uhn, uhn, I didn’t eat those klaru.” She said, “You ate them. You certainly did. Now, don’t do that again! What’s making you keep on stealing?”
My older brother said, “Mother, don’t punish her today. You’ve already hit her too many times. Just leave her alone.”
“We can see. She says she didn’t steal the klaru. Well then, what did eat them? Who else was here?”
I started to cry. Mother broke off a branch and hit me, “Don’t steal! Can’t you understand! I tell you, but you don’t listen. Don’t your ears hear when I talk to you?” I said, “Uhn, uhn. Mommy’s been making me feel bad for too long now. I’m going to go stay with Grandma. . . . I’m going to go stay with Grandma. I’ll go where she goes and sleep beside her wherever she sleeps. And when she goes out digging klaru, I’ll eat what she brings back.”
Nisa proves to be too much for her grandmother, who is too old to do much gathering. And her obviously intense problems with food envy or delay of gratification seem to have persisted into adulthood a bit more, perhaps, than is typical of her !Kung Bushman peers. But to the large extent that she seems to be typical, her behavior reflects quite nicely the underlying food anxieties of the Bushmen and the expressive manner in which mature Bushmen, who in fact do encounter periodic food scarcity, vociferously resent any anticipated lack of sharing on the parts of others.
Curiously, in the interviews Nisa never chooses to emphasize her own generosity. As an adult, Nisa’s style of narration suggests that these childish patterns continued, but it’s difficult to determine the degree to which her constant complaints, voiced in these very private recorded sessions with Shostak, fairly represent what was really going on in Nisa’s social life. For instance, we have the adult Nisa actually receiving complaints from her husband that she herself is much too generous. This generous side appears in passing, almost like the tip of an iceberg, while Marjorie and Nisa are discussing Bo, Nisa’s husband. Marjorie starts things off:
I asked, “And your hearts, do they go out toward each other?” She said, “Yes, our hearts love each other and go out toward each other.” What about fights? “We rarely fight. When we do, it’s usually about food, when I serve too many people. That’s when he asks, ‘What are you doing, serving everyone? When do others ever serve us? When we have food, we should be the only ones to eat.’ But I say, ‘You just like to yell about things.’ Then he says, ‘It’s because you are bad, a bad one that sees a person and gives him food, then sees another and gives him food. Don’t you know that when you have food, it is for you and your child, that she can eat and be full? You’ll wind up just like a woman with nothing this way.’” Was this an important fight? “No, it’s very small. We fight a little, then leave it and love each other again.”33
Can a somewhat idiosyncratic indigenous autobiography be useful to evolutionary analysis? A flattering presentation of self would be one predictable distortion, but in fact Nisa doesn’t seem to be doing much of this, perhaps because Marjorie is her trusted confidante. It would be useful to have dozens of these personal accounts so that central tendencies in Bushman personality patterns would be easy to identify, and it would be very interesting to have for comparison another dozen from an LPA society where people are seldom hungry or are less prone to nag others about meat-sharing. But we’re lucky that Marjorie Shostak went to the trouble of eliciting and transcribing Nisa’s personal account, for the hints it provides are important.
In fact, Nisa’s ambivalences seem to reflect generalized Bushman ambivalences that are quite predictable. First, consider the fact that these people often experience extensive routine privation in the lengthy dry season and that sometimes because of localized minidroughts they must travel long distances to keep from starving.34 Then consider the fundamental underlying conflicts discussed previously, which stem from having a genetic nature that is only moderately altruistic and a conscience that is morally flexible. The social solutions that these and other LPA foragers like the Netsilik have come up with tell us a great deal about how culturally modern humans made it through the Late Pleistocene, with its radical ups and downs, and into a Holocene land of plenty, where even many “marginalized” environments were at least fairly steady.
We may assume that even after childhood learning experiences are complete, the internalization of nepotistic values that favor generosity within the family will not begin to wholly neutralize strong egoistic drives when they combine with extreme hunger. The biological dispositions that help people learn to be generous to nonkin are weaker still, which is why when famine begins to approach, and in spite of the band-wide sharing system’s being well reinforced by moral beliefs when times are normal, this system as a whole will begin to fall apart.
Another way of saying this is flexibility. These foragers have built social edifices that are influenced by a hierarchy of competing motivations and also by a range of different environmental conditions. And institutions like meat-sharing reflect practical concerns about when profit is to be had in engaging in a system of band level indirect reciprocity and when such participation should be set aside. Given the relatively limited motivations that natural selection has given us to work with for being generous outside of the family, it sometimes strikes me as remarkable that we share as well as we do. The cultural amplification of these modest but very important altruistic tendencies provides much of the answer to the question as to how such institutions can be maintained, and we must give credit to the socially sophisticated minds that helped these language-assisted systems of cultural reinforcement to develop in the first place.
On a day-to-day basis these same minds understand established indigenous sharing systems, and when they are profitable, people strive to make them work well on a continuing basis because in normal times this significantly raises their standard of living. Of course, the same minds shape quite different adaptive responses in times of unusual abundance, when band-level systems of sharing simply become superfluous. Finally, when dire scarcity strikes, people’s decisions can become downright cruel, as opposed to generous, even though they may still experience pangs of sympathy and acutely feel the moral compromises they must make.
This chapter has explored the day-to-day expression of cooperative generosity between families and the potentially formidable obstacles to it that exist in the form of egoism and nepotism. In the Late Pleistocene, it was being moral that enabled relatively weak dispositions to altruism to make humans as cooperative as they often were able to be. Conscience-based internalization was important—the same internalization of values that made the adult Nisa a person who apparently was capable of overgenerosity even though in a situation of privacy and trust she resentfully complained all the time to Marjorie Shostak. Also important was the deliberate social reinforcement of extrafamilial generosity that I’ve mentioned so often. This type of giving was praised by moralistic band members who looked down on stinginess—and were prepared to punish bullies or cheaters, if these really serious free riders sought outsized shares of scarce desirables when the usual system of indirect reciprocity was operative.
Cognitive capacity was important, for our culturally modern forbears were likely to have known exactly what they were doing socially when they reinforced people’s generosity and curtailed major free riders. In coping with the special exigencies they faced in partially pursuing a social carnivore’s subsistence strategy, this culturally based capacity for “social engineering” enabled them to develop efficient systems of meat-sharing that worked extremely well in times of adequacy, and also, I believe, worked reasonably well when they faced times of marginal but not dire dietary inadequacy.
This same capacity to make strategic decisions also enabled people like the hungry Netsilik to reject their own customary sharing practices when food became so scarce that trusting in a long-term system of indirect reciprocity became life threatening. At that point, the group social control that kept such systems going would simply fade away, while cooperation within the family became still more important—unless a really dire famine presented itself. In that case, social acts that otherwise would have been punishably monstrous were apparently “understood” by fellow moralists.
Our “parliament” of competing instincts35 was being mediated by an evolutionary conscience, which did permit a total cessation of sharing when this made sense. Like individual consciences, group moral beliefs also were flexible: for instance, they did not call for the punishment of unfortunate cannibals who in dire straits were obliged to either eat their fellows—or die. Thus, for Late Pleistocene humans, doing unto unrelated others worked quite well when times were decent for subsistence, as they have been in so many places during most of the Holocene. But over and over again in the capricious Pleistocene, a profound degree of flexibility was needed as culturally modern humans like ourselves scrambled to survive as they faced critical shortages of meat, plant foods, or water.
Today, the scope of human generosity is still highly adjustable—precisely because if we had not been able to evolve in that direction, we might well not have survived earlier on. To Americans who go to supermarkets for their food, Nisa’s gastronomic anxieties may seem obsessive. But they are a manifestation of a culture that has become responsive to periodic privation.
In the Pleistocene, people everywhere faced far worse and surely quite frequent crises as their capricious environments changed for the better and then for the worse and often became outright untenable. Today’s LPA foragers rarely have to cope with repeatedly abrupt and lasting ups and downs like those faced by foragers who had to cope with the Pleistocene Epoch, but the mix of human capabilities that enabled those earlier human beings to stay in business was evolved by them, not by us. The adjustable capabilities we still have for being generous to, respectively, ourselves, our kin, and socially bonded nonkin provided a mix that got those earlier humans through the Late Pleistocene, and because of continuity in gene pools, we experience very much the same mix of motivations today.