Recently two aspects of our understanding of humanity appear to be converging. One is the study of human reproductive – especially “sexual” – behaviour, which has resulted in lively research focus in the field of Evolutionary Psychology, as well as Anthropology. Meanwhile, geneticists and ecological anthropologists have been working out the implications of discovering that modern humans all have traces of “introgression” or interbreeding with archaic humans, known and unknown.
Most human reproduction, in every culture, occurs within social institutions that partner a man and a woman. Even in societies where polygamy occurs, it is permitted, not mandated. I have interviewed men and women in such extended marital arrangements in both southern and western Africa, and among societies organized into corporate groups (lineages based on patrilineal or matrilineal descent), the most common back-story was the widowing or abandonment, of a women contracted in marriage, being reassigned to the household of her her husband’s brother, father, or even son.
A less frequent reason was that a woman found she was unable to have children, or had too many to cope with, arranging to bring another woman of her own lineage into the household to bear children, or to help her cope with the expanding household tasks of caring for numerous youngsters.
Men in these situations were not generally happy: mostly they bemoaned the extra burden of work in providing for what amounted to a second household. In one case, a man was miserable in recounting how his childless but nonetheless beloved first wife kept kicking him out of her bed to go “lie with” her co-wife (a younger cousin of the wife, as it happens) to get her pregnant. His first wife, when interviewed, was adamant – “…his father paid my brideprice and I have failed the lineage, so I saved for two years to advance the price of my cousin for the sake of both my own and my husband’s future!”
Over ninety percent of all hunter-gatherer households, and over eighty percent of all households within subsistence farming and pastoral households, that I documented in Africa, were monogamous. It was unheard of that any infant be without a household to look after it, and I knew of none raised without at least one household deeply committed to their care; most had numerous older children and adult relatives and honourable relatives investing considerable efforts in keeping them fed, safe, and nurtured. I discussed this during an email exchange with the late George Silberbauer, and he responded with an essay that I will append below.
Recently, I was delighted to see this observations confirmed by Robert Martin’s take on this same issue from another angle, both in his blog, discussing “Is Monogamy Anchored in Our Genes”, and in reviewing the recent publication by Ryan Schacht and Karen Kramer:
A thoughtful, well-documented paper by Ryan Schacht and Karen Kramer reviews attempts to infer a human-typical mating system. The task is not easy, given the great variety of relationships evident in human societies around the world… Schacht and Kramer conclude that the pair-bond is a universal feature of human mating relationships, typically expressed in the form of serial monogamy. But that does make us rather different from gibbons, doesn’t it?
Schacht and Kramer write that most marriages are monogamous “at any one point in time”, and that remarriage is common following death or divorce, across all cultural economies. Sexual fidelity, within a “pair bond”, is a common ideal, both because of the intense pain and anger cause by emotional betrayal and because of the investment implied among the relatives newly minted as “in laws”, especially with respect to their obligations and rights to any children produced. Indeed, they write that “levels of extra pair paternity are relatively low compared to other socially monogamous species”.
Robert Martin has a delightful blog entry on this topic as well. He includes a cartoon drawn by his talented daughter, which tends to illustrate perfectly the testimony of the men I interviewed on the subject…
So what about the context of this “introgression” that between our ancestors? I worded that deliberately, since if there are traces of unknown or known, and presumed all “archaic” human varieties in our genome, then even they do qualify as ancestral to ourselves, even if only making minor contributions. Were these furtive “matings” behind some bush or rapes? Or were they cases of two people falling in love and forming a reproductive and economic partnership recognized by relatives and friends on both sides?
I would opt for the recognized and supported loving partnership option here, primarily because I think very few children would have stood any chance of survival outside such supportive arrangements. The very “disappearance” of anatomically archaic human variants takes on a very different flavour in the light of this probable context, doesn’t it? Let me add another thought: it seems that anatomically modern humans, as they expanded their population exponentially during the last 70,000 years, both throughout Africa and also the rest of the planet, were literally able to swamp – and absorb – all the remaining archaic populations they found in this process. And they did it during an ice age.
So we can entertain this idea: rather than bringing about their extinction by means of hostility and competition, we rescued our more anatomically archaic cousins wherever we went; we fell in love with each other, enfolded them into our own families and communities, and their legacy lives on in us.
George Silberbauer’s essay on a case of polyandry among the G/wi:
The idea of fair trade implies all that is positive in the concept of compmise. It requires that the participants in the transaction are content that the benefit they obtain fromit matches or outweighs its cost to them. This is the tale of a compromise arrived at by my Bushman hosts during my ten-year stay among them.
After a long and arduous search covering the seemingly infinite and empty central Kalahari desert I came on a group of four Bushmen, Elephant Knees, his mother-in-law, Shining Head, his newly married daughter, Laughing Steenbok, her husband, Oh Boy. I would later learn that it was a most unusual combination. The kinship system of these people, the G/wi, imposes and avoidance relationship between a man and his mother-in-law. At the same time, it requires that newlyweds live in the household of the bride’s parents until a couple of years after the birth of their first child. They marry at what we consider to be a very early age: a girl is seen as marriageable at between seven and twelve years of age and a boy some between fifteen and eighteen. Their years with her parents are an apprenticeship in which her mother teaches her housekeeping, food gathering, husband husbandry and all that a woman needs to know during the rest of her life. Her father instructs her husband in hunting, all that a man needs to know including, as far as may be possible for anybody, the mysteries of understanding women. He also conducts her through her puberty rites, an important process to ensure the future well-being of the couple and their future family.
I encountered them in the depths of winter when the food resources of the Kalahari are at their lowest ebb. The G/wi adapt to this by lowering the human populating density, each household goes off to an agreed location where they must find sustenance and, in their isolation, confront all the challenges that their harsh and dangerous environment presents. It is a demanding apprenticeship.
Our meeting was fortuitous. Elephant Knees and Oh Boy had just killed a gemsbok, a large antelope that would give them ample meat in the cool, dry time when meat could be sun dried and not rot. They had heard the rumble of my two trucks grinding their slow and painful way through the heavy sand. Never having heard such sounds before, their curiosity had stayed their flight. When they caught sight of them they tried to flee and hide but Elephant Knees got caught up in a Wait-a-bit thicket. Something else I would also learn later was that he was accident-prone; he had been delicately trapped in the same manner as was Abraham’s ram (vide Genesis 22:13). He was terrified. My truck moved and was, therefore, animate. Being so large it would surely kill and eat him. I eventually reassured him, cementing our pact with a gift of tobacco, a highly valued and scarce commodity obtained only via long chains of trade that is not in the least fair to Bushmen.
I remained with them until early summer brought them back into the shared life of the whole band, some 25 men, women and children. It had been rather unproductive as Elephant Knees found the extent of my ignorance difficult to believe, and even more challenging to remedy. The mammoth task of learning the language was virtually at a standstill. However, I did learn a lot from simply watching him. He was an expert hunter and competent practitioner of all the men’s handcrafts. Oh Boy was much more intelligent but, being the junior, was very diffident. Shining Head was an old sourpuss and Laughing Steenbok a naughty little minx who would surely have taught me words that had no place in a scholarly study, pretending they were the names of all the common objects around us. I didn’t need her help. I was quite adept enough at making my own faux pas. The words for ‘house/hut’ and ‘vagina’ are distinguished only by the pitch at which they are pronounced. The courteous way, to ask where the people are, is to enquire where the huts are. For a long time there was a universal, immensely enjoyed conspiracy not to correct my wrong choice of tone. The discovery came when I was being given a lesson in the anatomy and physiology of an antelope that had been hunted. The rotten little buggers; every man, woman and child, knowing what was sure to come, had gathered to witness the penny drop.
The band of 25 was the economic, political and social world of its members. Living in close proximity with only the privacy afforded by the walls of their small and flimsy grass huts for much of their lives, everybody’s was everybody else’s business. Uncontained disharmony could become a virus threatening the welfare of all. They had several elegant and ingenious means of resolving conflicts but intractable problems arose from time to time. Elephant Knees was becoming one. His wife, Straight Woman had left him for his closest friend, Guineafowl, leaving Laughing Steenbok with him. Not only did he miss both his wife and friend deeply but the daughter was becoming a handful and needed the sharp edge of a mother’s tongue to curb her. Elephant Knees’ self-confidence, never the strongest, had been wounded. He was becoming erratic and irascible, potentially very destructive tendencies in the highly interdependent group that exacerbated his rather dim-witted accident proneness.
What could be done? Reasoning, kindly tolerance and the fairly charitable criticism permitted certain of his kinfolk got nowhere. The people talked and talked and talked.
Their style of close-knit, intimately shared life gives them a very perceptive understanding of psychology. They concluded that his underlying problem was Straight Woman and Guineafowl. How, then, could that problem be resolved?
Their whole survival strategy is based on opportunistic adaptation. Having no technology to influence the violent fluctuations of the ecology of their environment they have little choice but to grasp what is good in any situation and try to exploit it to meet their needs. The trick is to discern that good, work out the most efficient and rewarding way of using it to advantage while being wary on unforeseen consequences. Not for them the laws of the Persians and the Medes; very little in their culture is sacred and immutable.
Polygyny is fairly common; several men had two wives and one even had four. It is not, I was fervently assured by their husbands, what spotty louts with brains numbed by testosterone may dream of. Feeding, and in other ways providing for the requirements of a multiplicity of women and their children is unremitting hard work. They dreamed of a long holiday away from women.
Somebody saw the parallel; why not more than one husband? If the three will agree to it and be able to live more or less happily ever after, why not persuade StraightWoman and Guineafowl to return to the band to be united with Elephant Knees, Laughing Steenbok and Oh Boy? It might bring an end to Elephant Knees’ tantrums; Straight Woman was a wise and very knowledgeable asset to the band and Guineafowl was an even better hunter than Elephant Knees ¬and the best dancer any of them had ever seen, a vital skill as the trance dances clear the band of the invisible little arrows that the Devil shoots into people to sow discord.
What could go wrong? Straight Woman would not have any more children who might cause tension between the two men. They were devoted friends who had experienced the pain of separation. If they agreed to a ménage a trios they would honour the compact. In any case, if she agreed to the arrangement, most were confident that she would run it her way and keep the two under her thumb.
And so it came to pass. Elephant Knees reverted to his old, cheerfully bumbling self, Guineafowl was delighted to be back among his own people and to dance with and for them. LaughingSteenbok was sorted out in short order and became a pleasant, sensible young woman and Straight Woman was quietly smug, ruling the roost and having the band’s two best hunters providing for her.
Everybody agreed that one household for two had been a very fair trade.
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