I am working on a presentation for the New England Seminar conference, on relationship to the land and to each other. I chose to read Richard Lee’s work as an anthropologist in the early 1960s of the !Kung San in Southern Africa. I recently found a 2018 article by him in which he refutes Pinker’s view of hunter gatherer as warlike.
Lee suggests that hunter gatherer groups had more to do with cooperating in raising children and cooperating overall in economics and social life. He quotes Sarah Hrdy on cooperative child raising and her belief that human intelligence emerged from the highly cooperative nature of hunter gatherer society, where humans lived between 90 and 99 percent of our time on earth.
I still recall a NOVA program from years ago that commented on the difference between chimps and people, the idea that humans learned to manage our emotional reactivity in order to learn from one another, cooperate, and build things together that require a high degree of cooperation.
This fits with Bob Noone’s thinking that human intelligence and complexity of thought co-evolved with the family.
Perhaps it was the constant daily struggle to cooperate in order to survive and reproduce over the past 2 million years in hunter gatherer groups, and 200,000 as Homo sapiens in those bands, that led to the creation of who we are.
Bowen presented the problem of variation in differentiation of self. Certainly the tendency toward lack of cooperation even to the point of violence, can be seen especially in low DoS. I would suggest, however, that this system of variation, created through evolution, allowed for the higher levels of DoS.
thanks,
Laurie
How might sociopathy have evolved? I can’t come up with a good speculation.
On the other hand, Hrdy and others guess that extremely hazardous environments might require cooperation and working together for any individual to survive, or any family group. One hazard might be groups of sociopath tending individuals and their attacks.
If you write up your presentation, I would like to read it.
Jim Edd
Good question, Jim Edd,
I keep coming back to the way the human evolved to have large variation in differentiation of self. It benefited the group to have some who had capacity for good judgment and leadership, but the group has had to deal with the sociopathy of low levels. I read in !Kung San in past years that sometimes an aggressive male would emerge in the group. The entire group would meet and decide to kill him. Bowen was brilliant in his idea of increasing DoS in a way that did not rely on the lower DoS in others. The human has to deal with the way Nature made us, but Bowen believed that we might think our way to a new way of being. It takes time, many generations and maybe centuries, but I believe it will happen– it is such a good and needed idea! Laurie
Good answer, Laurie. I like it.
Laurie,
What you write about the hunter-gatherers is also what I understand.
Melvin Konner and his wife Marjorie Shostak lived with a community of
!Kung San for 2 years from 1969-71 and 1975, He writes in Women After All that grandmothers and fathers and many others contribute to care of children. He extend the idea of cooperative breeding to communal breeding, and sees this as what make humans the most cooperative of species. I have also read about humans being different from most primates in the level of paternal care. I am enjoying Sarah Hrdy’s new book, Father Time, about how recent studies show that men who care for infants show the same hormonal and brain changes as women. Good news is that Dr. Hrdy has accepted Center for Family Consultation invitation to be the guest scientist at the Midwest Symposium for May 2026.
I think some of the literature on hunter-gatherers idealizes them as being nonviolent. I think there is evidence that a significant number died from violent attacks, but I think their conflicts were mostly interpersonal. Konner says they did not have organized violence… not because they weren’t violent but because they weren’t organized.
I like your point about differentiation of self. I think it is really helps us understand the variation in human ability to cooperate across all of the eras of our evolution. Thanks for an interesting post. Stephanie
Reply to Stephanie,
I enjoyed these comments and the results of your wide reading of good sources. good news about Hrdy at the Midwest Symposium next year. Something to look forward to, definitely.
Laurie