Ship of Fools Page 3
When Pagel and Bodmer talk of “clothes” they clearly seem to have in mind some type of woven garment. But people in our society are inclined to take clothes and textiles in general for granted, without realising that woven cloth is an extraordinary achievement, that itself rests on another extraordinary achievement, the ability to spin unlimited quantities of thread. Indeed, the mechanisation of spinning and weaving required all the resources of the industrial revolution. I was myself made vividly aware of the technically difficult and physically arduous process of producing cloth when I lived with the Konso, some of whom were skilled weavers. The thread used was cotton, which first had to be collected from the cotton plants, a tiring process in the fields during the hottest part of the year, and then the seeds had to be removed from the harvested cotton. This involved placing it on a large flat stone and rubbing it vigorously many times with an iron rod, after which the cotton was ready for spinning. The basic tool for producing thread of any kind since the Neolithic has been the spindle, consisting of a rod with a disc, the whorl, of clay or wood at one end to act as a fly-wheel when the spindle is rotated. This was an extremely clever invention which produces an even and compact thread, and before its discovery the basic means of producing thread was by rolling fibres on the thigh, a very inferior technique both in quality and quantity. Konso men, women, and children occupied much of their spare time in spinning, because the production of garments requires an enormous amount of thread, which was sold to the weavers. Their horizontal looms were very complex devices, in which the warp threads were passed through the heddle, operated by the feet, to separate the warp and allow the shuttle to take the weft thread through it. It would take many hours of work to produce a blanket about six feet long and three feet wide. The finished cloth was then sprinkled with chalk and beaten to produce a smooth and even finish.
The Konso Highlands, mostly between 5000 and 6500 feet, have a comfortable temperature somewhere between 65ºF and 85ºF for most of the year so that physically speaking complete nudity would have been perfectly feasible. (Indeed, in Papua New Guinea the Tauade, where the temperature at 7000 feet could be considerably colder, still only wore G-strings as their traditional dress.) So why would the Konso go to all this trouble to weave blankets or even make leather garments? Regardless of climate, one finds that people of most cultures cover the genitals, or at least that the women tend preponderantly to do so, but genital coverings can be made of leaves, or other simple, non-woven materials such as bark-cloth or skins, and do not require any more elaborate form of garment than this. Garments covering large areas of the body, however, are a very different matter, and historically it is clear that the first garments were of sewn skins, and worn by Ice-Age hunters as protection against the cold. On the other hand, hunter-gatherers in tropical latitudes who have been studied in modern times either go completely naked or at most have genital covering. (There are also many reports of people wearing animal skins when sitting in order to keep their backs warm, but beyond this tropical hunter-gatherers do not wear clothes.)
Weaving, as has been pointed out, is a technologically demanding activity quite unsuited to the hunter-gatherer life-style, and even simple forms of finger-weaving on frames, which have been dated as far back as the Gravettian culture of Moldavia at 27,000 BP (from impressions preserved in clay), were still practised in semi-settled conditions, and could only produce simple forms of ornamentation such as sashes and belts, while body garments were made of skins (Soffer et al. 2000). Weaving with looms only appeared with the agricultural revolution in Egypt and similar locations, where it was associated with other crafts such as pottery and metal working, and many different kinds of fibre were used.
It is striking, in view of what we have already established about all the difficulties of producing woven clothes, that highly educated scientists can so casually propose the use of them without even considering what they could have been made of. The suggestion that Homo erectus could have had woven garments is preposterous, and it is equally striking that Pagel and Bodmer do not seem to have noticed that hunter-gatherers in tropical climates, which is where our species evolved, don’t actually wear any clothes because it is far too hot. Our subsequent ability to produce clothes must therefore be entirely irrelevant to the whole question of hairlessness.
A far more plausible explanation for the evolution of human hairlessness has been provided by Jablonski (2010), who argues that the requirements of a very active hunting life on the African savannah (unique to humans among primates) would have made physiological accommodation to overheating the primary adaptive necessity, and that the human sweating mechanism by evaporation through a naked skin has been demonstrated to be a highly efficient means of dissipating excess heat. So wearing clothes in these conditions would obviously nullify the whole advantage of nakedness.
Parasites make another strange appearance in the history of speculation about the earliest clothes, in the following way. It has been discovered (Kittler, Kayser, & Stoneking 2003) that the body louse evolved from the head louse around 72,000 years BP (plus or minus 42,000 years):
[T]he head louse lives and feeds exclusively on the scalp, whereas the body louse feeds on the body but lives in clothing. This ecological differentiation probably arose when humans adopted frequent use of clothing, an important event in human evolution for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. (ibid., 1414)
From this, Nicholas Wade enthusiastically concludes that the ancestral human population that started emigrating out of Africa across the Red Sea around 70,000 years ago must have been wearing tailored clothing: “From the date assigned to the evolution of the human body louse, which lives only in clothing, the ancestral people must have worn clothes that were sewn to fit the contours of the body tightly enough for the lice to feed” (Wade 2007: 72). Neither Stoneking and his colleagues, nor Wade, pay any more attention to what these mythical clothes might have been made from than did Pagel and Bodmer, or how they could have been made without first inventing the spindle-whorl and the loom. They also fail to ask themselves the even more obvious question, “Why would anyone in the vicinity of the Red Sea coast, which has always been one of the hottest places on earth with summer temperatures in excess of 130ºF, even consider laboriously making and then wearing clothes, least of all those that were tightly sewn to their bodies?” They would have been in serious danger of dying from heat-stroke. Tailored clothes of this type are in any case distinctly unusual in pre-modern societies, where garments tend to be made of large pieces of material, like the Konso blanket, the toga, the sari, the kimono, and so on. (Tailored clothes began in Europe, for example, when medieval knights needed padded linen undergarments to wear beneath their chain mail, a distinctly specialised requirement.)
These objections from technology and climate seem insurmountable, and I suggested to Professor Stoneking that the use of animal skins as capes and as sleeping skins could have provided an alternative pathway for the body louse. He replied (personal communication): “I think it is quite likely that, as you say, clothing began with humans wearing animal skin capes, and that this is a perfectly plausible mechanism for the origin of body lice: head lice were already adapted to human hair, so it wouldn’t have been so difficult to transfer to animal fur/hair, as long as they could continue feeding on the human body.” Capes and sleeping skins are well attested in the ethnographic record for hunter-gatherers, they are used in hot climates, they are technologically very simple, well within the capabilities of early man, and are very likely to be of great antiquity.
(b) The Great Cheating Fiasco
Evolutionary psychologists, in trying to explain the origins of human sociality, have assumed that humans are basically selfish, and are only disposed to behave altruistically to biological kin—“inclusive fitness”. They have therefore spilled gallons of ink in discussing the problem of cheating, whose potential advantages to every individual seem a serious obstacle to the development of co-operation. Cosmides and Tooby (1992) prov
ide a splendid example of evolutionary psychologists in full flow on the subject of cheating in their discussion of game theory and Trivers’ theory of “reciprocal altruism”, in which the exchange of benefits between non-kin can also be selectively advantageous for both parties concerned.
Reciprocal altruism, or social exchange, typically involves two acts: what “you” do for “me” (act 1), and what “I” do for “you” (act 2). For example, you might help me out by baby-sitting my child (act 1), and I might help you out by taking care of your vegetable garden when you are out of town (act 2). Imagine the following the situation: Baby-sitting my child inconveniences you a bit, but this inconvenience is more than compensated for by my watering your garden when you are out of town. Similarly, watering your garden inconveniences me a bit, but this is outweighed by the benefit to me of your baby-sitting my child. (1992: 171)
As they say, one might expect natural selection to favour the emergence of this type of behaviour. But, they continue,
[T]here is a hitch: You can benefit even more by cheating me. If I take care of your garden, but if you do not baby-sit my child … then you benefit more than if we both cooperate.… Moreover, the same set of incentives applies to me. This single fact constitutes a barrier to the evolution of social exchange. (ibid., 172)
While, they admit, it is effectively impossible to cheat if the exchange is simultaneous, as when we give money for the goods that we purchase, “in the absence of a widely accepted medium of exchange, most exchanges are not simultaneous, and therefore do provide opportunities for defection” (ibid., 175) like the baby-sitting/garden-watering defection we first considered. As a consequence they maintain that humans must, during the Pleistocene, have evolved a cognitive “module” of enormous complexity (see ibid. 177, for example) in order to handle the problem of cheating while still being able to engage in social exchange.
Bearing in mind that we are supposed to be discussing the evolution of social exchange among early human beings, the examples of baby-sitting and garden-watering seem remarkably remote from anything our ancestors might plausibly have been doing on the African savannah during the Pleistocene. The whole discussion is utterly disengaged from the actual realities of hunter-gather life, and is, of course, actually centred in our own comfortably familiar WEIRD societies of vast towns full of strangers. Specifically, Cosmides and Tooby are so obsessed with game theory, algorithms, and differential reproduction that they never think for a moment to ask the simple, practical question: “How can people continuously living in very small groups, who have all grown up together and know one another well, who have no money, and who engage in very basic subsistence tasks of foraging and hunting, actually manage to cheat one another without it being quite obvious?” And even if someone did attempt to cheat it would instantly become known and be greatly to the disadvantage of the cheater from the social point of view, regardless of any material benefit.
It is quite remarkable that the whole discussion of cheating by evolutionary psychologists is entirely dominated by the assumptions of the game theorists and economists, completely rooted as they are in the world-view of modern liberal individualistic capitalism, and who think purely in terms of the material benefits of cheating. What is completely missing is the view of a small society as a long-term working entity, a co-operative endeavour with every individual dependent on his kin and neighbours. As a result the exaggerated importance of cheating in the society of early hunter-gatherers held by evolutionary psychologists gets the whole issue back to front. Many years ago I pointed out that in primitive society generally,
[T]he surest method of ensuring social failure and, presumably, some corresponding decrease in inclusive fitness, is to follow simple strategies of “selfishness” or “cheating”. But human society provides at least two basic means by which some individuals can enrich themselves and their relatives at the expense of other members of the group. The successful person may gain control over some crucial resource such as land or cattle, or some crucial process, such as political leadership, and use this as a basis of exploitative relations with dependent individuals, who are induced to confer more benefits on the dominant individual than the costs to him of maintaining control over them. Or, the successful person may have some ability, such as specialized knowledge, that is valued by the group [e.g., shamanism] but is in short supply, and thereby extract more benefits from the group than the cost of supplying such services. (Hallpike 1984: 135)
Social success in primitive society, therefore, is achieved by those who are perceived to help the group, not by those who cheat and sponge from it, and cheating as a successful strategy can only work when a number of basic social changes have taken place. These are: much larger societies with a high percentage of people who are strangers; the growth of trade and commerce, particularly through the medium of money; the accumulation of material wealth; and the growth of complex bureaucratic systems of redistribution. So it should be obvious that it is not the hunter-gatherer band but modern industrial society that provides by far the most advantageous environment for freeloaders to flourish, such as bogus welfare claimants, tax evaders, and confidence-tricksters of every kind, but evolution has sadly neglected to provide us with any “cheater-detection” module to cope with this.
(c) Dialect differences and the threat of strangers
One of the most obvious features of language is how easily dialect differences develop, and unsurprisingly, evolutionary psychologists have an explanation all ready for this:
This variability is extremely puzzling given that a universal, unchanging language would seem to be the most useful form of communication. That language has evolved to be parochial, not universal, is surely no accident. Security would have been far more important to early human societies than ease of communication with outsiders. Given the incessant warfare between early human groups, a highly variable language would have served to exclude outsiders and to identify strangers the moment they opened their mouths. Dialects, writes the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar [2003: 231], are “particularly well designed to act as badges of group membership that allow everyone to identify members of their exchange group, dialects are difficult to learn well, generally have to be learned young, and change sufficiently rapidly that it is possible to identify an individual not just within a locality but also within a generation within that locality.” (Wade 2007: 204)
One might first of all ask just why a universal, unchanging language would be particularly useful since, as was historically the case, we only need to speak to the narrow range of people we are likely to meet in real life. Of what conceivable value would it have been, for example, for Aborigines on the east coast of Australia to have been able to converse with those on the west coast, whom they could never have met in the course of many millennia? Secondly, in small-scale primitive societies of hunter-gatherers and early farmers, people know who their neighbours are by sight, and if not can easily establish who they are by asking what clan they belong to and where they live. From the point of view of recognising strangers in primitive society, dialect differences are therefore quite superfluous. In the vastly larger societies we inhabit, of many millions, dialect differences are obviously much more significant as social identifiers, but their existence is not puzzling in the least, because they are obviously nothing more than the result of different frequencies of social interaction between people who live in different places. People with Yorkshire accents have simply acquired them by growing up in Yorkshire, as distinct from Scotland or Wales.
Dunbar recognises that “drift”, “the gradual accumulation of accidental mutations (mispronunciations, unintended slippages of meaning) over long periods of time” (2003: 230) is basically responsible, but cannot accept that this is all there is because it would allegedly be too slow: “If the process is not accidental, then it must be deliberate, and deliberate in this context means ‘under the influence of selection’. What selection processes could promote such high rates of language change? Th
e most plausible selection pressure is likely to be the need to differentiate communities.” And why would this be so important? “The key problem [my emphasis] faced by all intensely social organisms that depend on co-operation for successful survival and reproduction is the free-rider—the individual who takes the benefits of co-operation and does not pay the costs.” In order for communities to defend themselves against the menace of the freeloader, Dunbar claims to have demonstrated that “a rate of dialect change approaching 50 per cent per generation was required to ensure that individuals who had to exchange resources with each other in order to reproduce were not exploited by free-riders” (ibid., 231).
In the first place, as we saw earlier, the menace of the free-rider that permeates evolutionary psychology is a fantasy. In the simple subsistence economies of hunter-gatherers and early farmers failure to reciprocate in exchange relations, or to participate in communal activities cannot be concealed and got away with. Nor in any case does survival and reproduction have any relation to the exchange of resources. The Tauade, who were typical slash-and-burn cultivators of Papua New Guinea, engaged in elaborate exchanges of resources, but this was in fact purely ceremonial and had nothing whatsoever to do with survival or reproduction, since everyone received as much as they gave. Everyone knew in detail who everyone else was in these exchanges, back for several generations, because communities were small enough to permit this, and those who failed to meet community standards of generosity in these exchanges were well-known as the “rubbish men” of society, unmarried and certainly with a low rate of reproductive success.
Secondly, if a group’s lexicon had a rate of change of 50% per generation this would be obvious in the vocabularies of informants of different age groups, but I never observed any such thing either among the Tauade or the Konso, where my informants ranged from teenage boys to old men. (Modern English is not changing at anything like this rate, of course.) The suggestion that a group would have to produce this rate of linguistic change in order to protect itself from the depredations of freeloaders is frankly preposterous. Nor, for that matter, could natural selection play any part in this. Linguistic change is a social phenomenon, like the rate of inflation, not an individual phenomenon, so it cannot in principle be under genetic control, and cannot therefore be selected for.