No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality by Judith Rich Harris

Author:Judith Rich Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-02-03T14:00:00+00:00

Nowadays parenting is a job that lasts at least eighteen years and parents are held responsible for every aspect of their children’s development. In the old days, parents had more worries about keeping their children nourished and healthy, but almost everything else was seen as the child’s job. Children were expected to acquire the skills they would need in adulthood by observing adults or older children and eventually performing the tasks themselves. They were admonished for minor mistakes and beaten for major ones, but no explanations were given. Parents in traditional societies do not, as a rule, give long-winded lectures to their offspring. The adult’s conversational partners are other adults; the child’s are other children.27

But some things haven’t changed. Modern children can’t count on their families’ remaining intact until they have made it through childhood and it was no better in the old days. An anthropologist who studied the Yanomamö (Amazonian Indians who live in the rainforests of Venezuela and Brazil) reported there was only a one-in-three chance that a child of ten would still be living with both parents. Though the rate of marital breakup was low compared to ours—about 20 percent—the death rate was considerably higher.28 The Yanomamö get their meat from hunting but they also plant some crops; they lead a less precarious existence than people who rely entirely on foraging. In the Paleolithic, the chances that a child would still have both parents by the age of ten was probably less than one in three.

Children couldn’t rely on their parents for companionship, teaching, or conversation, and they couldn’t count on them to stick around for long. But the loss of one or both parents, though it lowered a child’s chances of surviving, wasn’t a death warrant because he was a member of a group. He was surrounded by other relatives who might be willing to look after him. Only if he lost his entire group did his chances plummet to zero. The survival of a small, peripatetic band of humans couldn’t have been anything close to a sure thing in the Paleolithic, but it was a better bet than the survival of any particular individual.

Though the world held many dangers—predators, starvation, disease—the greatest threat to the survival of a hunter-gatherer group was probably the group next door. Group warfare is not a human invention; we share the willingness to engage in it with a variety of other creatures, including ants. That doesn’t mean we inherited this propensity from ants; it evolved independently in the social insects. But we did inherit a taste for warfare from our primate ancestors. As Jane Goodall discovered, chimpanzees can be just as bloodthirsty as humans: they, too, engage in systematic efforts to wipe out other groups of their own species.29 The main difference is that chimpanzees have to pick off their enemies one by one, whereas humans, with the aid of technology or cunning, can do it in one fell swoop.

According to the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, human hunter-gatherer and tribal

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