We Don't Need No Domestication

I have been reading Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594200793//102-5709153-3956937

Wade gives a fascinating account of developments in the study of the evolution of “behaviorally modern humans” in the last 50,000 years. It seems that “anatomically modern humans” did not make the transition to “behaviorally modern” until about 50,000 years before the present, and this change coincided with human’s migration out of Africa. Much of the book is devoted to genetics and inferences from genetic diversity in living populations, and this has added an interesting new dimension to paleoanthropology.

I’m an amateur anthropologist myself. I have a BA, an MA, and a good deal of work toward a doctorate in that field, and even though I don’t work in anthropology I am nonetheless an enthusiastic hobbyist. One aspect of Wade’s book and recent revelations from the genetic record that captures my imagination is its rather thoroughgoing debunking of anthropology’s mythos of the peaceful savage. In point of fact, our foraging ancestors were a bloodthirsty lot who experienced high rates of mortality due to homicide, estimated to be as much as 30% of all fatalities. One of the principal narrative lines of modern human evolution over the last fifty millennia has been the gracilization and domestication of humanity. We have been becoming less physically robust and more socially cooperative during this period and are now murdered by our conspecifics at a greatly reduced rate.

I have long been skeptical of claims about the pacific nature of foragers and even sedentary peoples, mainly because this flies in the face of the ethnographic record of nearly perpetual warfare among such people. The Cherokee, for example, made frequent murderous raids on their neighbors and were raided in turn in a cycle of retribution. Tribesmen of New Guinea warred frequently with their neighbors. The dawn raid has always been a favorite murdering technique, and Wade speculates that dogs were tamed mainly because of their bark and vigilance.

Although Wade does not cite him, being preoccupied with physical anthropologists and geneticists, the sociologist Norbert Elias decades ago proposed his theory of the “civilizing process”. He noted that rates of homicide had been falling over the last millennium and that this coincided with states’ monopolization of violence. He credited states and elites within societies with “civilizing” their conspecifics, or as Wade would put it “domesticating” them. Recent work in genetics and paleontology seem to bear out Elias’s ideas.

Another interesting point is that our genes suggest that cannibalism was once widespread. Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom didn’t kill as many people as expected because so many Britons have genes which protect them from the prions that cause the disease. These genes would have been selected for in an environment in which cannibalism was widely practiced. Nowadays, aside from the occasional Jeffrey Dahmer or Andean plane crash, we eat our conspecifics very rarely.

It seems to me that states and domestication developed hand in hand in a kind of feedback loop. As men became more governable, they got more government, and so on. We were once wolves; now we are Labrador retrievers, eager to please our masters and get along with the pack. But I reckon it is our very governability that makes the government obsolete. We are now sufficiently pacific and cooperative that we no longer need overlords to keep us from murdering one another willy nilly. We are, however, gullible and can be made to believe that our conspecifics would be at our throats if it weren’t for the “thin blue line”.

Indeed, we govern ourselves quite well most of the time and really want nothing in the way of supervision in this regard from the state. I don’t mind being a dog instead of a wolf, but I would rather be feral all the same.