Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Alex Rosenberg / Stefan Linquist. Analyse & Kritik 27/2005

There are well-known arguments among biological anthropologists which suggest that cooperation emerged first not among male hunters, but among female gatherers, not as a strategy for gathering, but for child-rearing, for protection against males, and most importantly across generations

But are these models really without testable implications for the record of human prehistory? Quite to the contrary, we suggest that there is much evidence which bears on them, and not all of it favorable. The next section of this paper describes considerable indirect evidence supplied by archeology, anthropology and primatology which renders some accounts of human prehistory more plausible than others. Furthermore, as we argue in the two subsequent sections, even more detailed data about the origins of cooperative behavior among our hominid ancestors might be extractable from the one place we have only begun to be able to explore: the human genome.
…

However the forty year long consensus on the role of big-game hunting as the driver of human evolution, and the consequent selective pressure for cooperation has been called into question over the last decade. Two sources of non-archeological data are especially important: ethological observations of nonhuman primates (particularly chimpanzees) and foraging studies on isolated contemporary human societies still living as hunter gatherers (O’Connell et al. 2002). Conclusions drawn from these findings allow meat-provisioning several of the selective effects Washburn et al accord it, but not selection for cooperation. In fact, these studies accord big-game hunting an ecological role which does not select for cooperation or even needed caloric/protein provisioning at all, but something quite different, and incompatible with cooperation.
…

No less significantly, male chimpanzees will sometimes offer bits of meat to sexually receptive females in exchange for mating opportunities (Stanford 1999). Thus, evidence from our closest living relatives suggests that hunting has a competitive, not a cooperative function: as a venue for reinforcing dominance relationships and, ultimately, as a strategy for evaluating and obtaining mates.

A similar argument has recently been put forward to challenge the traditional Washburn hypothesis that big game hunting was the driving evolutionary force behind human cooperation. There is substantial evidence from the Hadza (of South Africa) and from other hunter-gatherer groups that successful hunting’s evolutionary pay-off is by and large reproductive opportunities with females bearing fitter genes-much as seems to be the case in chimpanzees. If so, then not only is there no scope for reciprocal altruism with or without punishment, or other forms of cooperation in hunting. Rather there will have been some selection against cooperative hunting since it reduces the signaling clarity of successful hunting.
…

There are well-known arguments among biological anthropologists which suggest that cooperation emerged first not among male hunters, but among female gatherers, not as a strategy for gathering, but for child-rearing, for protection against males, and most importantly across generations (cf. Hill/Kaplan 1999; Hawkes et al. 1998). The evolution of this sort of cooperation is less problematic than that among males owing to the scope for kin-selection to generate reciprocity.
…

The date of the lice-lineage separation matches the best date we have for the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo erectus:
1.8 million years ago. Had Homo sapiens and Homo erectus occupied the same environment for any length of time, there would have been much more gene flow between two lice lineages than has been detected. The inference drawn by those who have studied this data is that Homo sapiens completely disposed of Homo erectus wherever they found them, and did so in such a way as to allow the lineage of louse which evolved on the latter to switch hosts (Reed et al. 2004).

The extirpation of Homo erectus has thus left some evidence behind after all.
…

Moreover, the molecular clock tells us that the time of splitting between the head and body lice species was approximately 72,000 before the present. As the authors of this study report, these “results suggest that clothing was a surprisingly recent innovation in human evolution” (Kittler et al. 2003).

Download: [Analyse amp Kritik] On the Original Contract Evolutionary Game Theory and Human Evolution