Showing off is the main purpose of unusually high linguistic ability. During human history, males and females needed to show off at very different ages
In regard to the main concept, I would guess that what young girls need to display is not so much linguistic skill but agreeableness. It's notorious that boys are less agreeable than girls ... up until puberty. Post-puberty young girls are notoriously disagreeable. But a post-puberty young girl is no longer "a mouth to feed" but "a valuable commodity on the marriage market".
Yes. I guess females of all ages benefit from higher levels of agreeableness. Also adults. With less fighting ability, females should benefit more from being agreeable.
Agreeableness is good if you need to get things from others but don't have any leverage. If you have lots of value, then disagreeableness becomes a way to extract benefits from others. E.g. powerful kings aren't known for agreeableness.
But it's fascinating the differences noted in the paper you reference. At the least, the game theory of agreeableness must be different across cultures.
The game theory of Ache infanticide sounds complex. E.g. if your nephew/niece is orphaned, you have an interest in keeping him/her alive but don't want to commit to feeding him/her as you've got your children to feed. So you'd prefer that he/she either "becomes a public charge" (apparently in Ache society, begging for food from adults generally) or has some other relative take responsibility. The infanticide custom rules out the first option. The second option suggests that relatives will compete to adopt the child as late as possible before the child is killed.
Very interesting post. I hadn't really considered these kinds of gender dynamics much before, but they do seem like they they probably were a major feature of primitive societies.
One question I have about this theory though is:
I can see why the tribe as a whole might want more males than female children. But since military protection is a public good (i.e. something that's provide by the group as a whole and benefits everyone in the group), and individual families benefit equally from having either male or female children in terms of reproductive success (expected fitness has to balance between males and females, right), isn't their a collective action problem? If a family has already invested resources raising a female child, they're not going to want to waste that investment even if it would be better for the tribe as a whole to invest the resources in male children.
This is a very interesting question and I have thought quite a bit about it. I think it is one indicator that human group evolution really is a thing. Because, as you say, protection is a public good. How are individual parents convinced to invest in it, instead of optimizing their own reproductive success?
For example, social norms that encouraged parents to invest more in boys than in girls led to male-heavy small-scale societies that simply eradicated neighboring cultures that were more female-heavy.
The more complex answer is that some small-scale groups actually seem to have been aware that males were a public good. In Aché Life History, an old man is tells about his experience of child-murder:
"My father died when I was only about twenty-two days old [it is unclear how the informant came up with this precise age, which was given in Spanish]. Then my mother told the Ache to throw my brother Bejyvagi and I in the grave [Bejyvagi was about four years old], to be sacrificed with our father. There was a big fight. Some Ache dragged us to the grave site and others pulled us back out again. There were those who defended me. They were not all relatives, some of them were just my “defenders.” They liked me. They threatened my mother,
“If you don’t take back your sons and care for them we will shoot all your daughters with arrows” [the informant had two sisters aged seventeen and twelve at this time]. They tugged and pulled for a long time. Finally my defenders won. They said to me, wow you must have
been strong. Why didn’t you get torn apart when we were pulling so hard on your arms and legs [some children were literally torn apart this way]. Then my mother took care of me. Later she married Kanjegi. When he died, they sacrificed my little sister [who was about one or two years old]. She didn’t have any defenders. My mother gave her up. My brother Bejyvagi and I held on tight to her but they pulled her away from us [the two boys here are about four and eight years old]. We tried to defend her, but some big men pulled her away [informant states that he can’t recall who these men were]. My brother and I cried a lot. Our sister screamed. They didn’t kill her, they just buried her alive. They put dirt on her real fast and just buried her alive with her father, Kanjegi (translated from an interview with Kuachingi in 1994)." (qoutation from Ache Life History, about 82 percent through the book).
In another passage of the book, a mother is convinced to bury her newborn fatherless child alive.
Clearly, a mother couldn't always decide on her own which children to keep and not. Other members of the group had a say in which children should be raised. Given the limited size of the groups, those people might have had the best of the group right on their minds.
You know, this kind of thing is extremely disturbing, but I think it's too bad more people don't hear about it. Modern Westerners are so concerned that someone might be left without cold water to drink or video games to play, or that they might feel socially invalidated. You probably noticed my blog was shut down yesterday, which was really disappointing, but reading this definitely put things in perspective. I mean, if it were socially acceptable to say, "well at least no one buried your child alive," I think people would cheer up pretty quickly!
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Obviously it's a mistake, and I submitted an appeal, but as I don't have paid subscribers they won't likely look into it for a few days at least. Wait and see, I guess.
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Yet another Wood From Eden post that makes me *extremely* grateful to be a 21st century human from a developed country. I feel like there is a trend among learned folk to harshly criticize modern cultural practices (late stage capitalism!) and for some to opine for a return to primitivism (degrowth?). I get the sense that those people have not studied what primitive, premodern life actually looks like, and therefore cannot appreciate what a magical thing "capitalism" is in its ability to break us free from basic scarcity, and of the vast scale of injustice and depravity that would occur otherwise.
Such commonality of ritual killing makes me think of the child murder scene from The Giver. The shock and revulsion that comes from realizing the nature of the crime taking place against another human. I wonder if the Ache and other infanticidal societies knew truly what death means, or if they subscribed heavily to some "true world theory" that made death a less than huge deal.
In general I feel always a bit iffy about human evolutionary claims based on studying more "modern" hunter gatherer tribes. I wonder if there weren't confounding selection or environmental pressures that led to the tribal peoples that we can find today (or in the 1980s) to take on particular societal forms that were less common during our bulk evolution, (the 200k years or so on the savannah/in east africa when we developed our more complex communication and cultural abilities). Do you have any thoughts on this? Do you think that it is fair to make inferences about the "evolutionary setup" for human evolution based on modern-day primitive tribes?
The Ache are only the Ache. Infanticide and filicide were almost certainly more common in prehistory than today, but Anthropologists have been arguing about the commonality of things like this in prehistory for a long time:
I'm open to the idea that hunter gatherers might have had a better quality of life than we do in industrial civilisation, although this blog has moved me further from that view.
One thing to consider when you're reading about these more extreme aspects of HG life, like infanticide and war, is that they weren't everyday occurrences. Any events that lead to people's deaths necessarily need to be fairly uncommon or that society stops persisting.
99% of people' time as HGs has to spent hunting, gathering (obviously), socialising, crafting and other everyday occurrences needed to sustain that kind of life, activities that natural selection has predisposed us to enjoy, precisely because they promote survival. Life in the modern world requires we spent a large fraction of our time on things we just don't naturally enjoy, school, office work etc. even if we're more insulate from extreme misfortunes like violent death and starvation.
It's kind of 99% good + 1% very bad vs 99.99% OKish + 0.001% very bad.
Yes, exactly - although I'd subtract a significant amount from the 99% good because of the lack of medical or surgical relief from pain.
I had a hernia corrected a few years ago; I shoveled too much snow too fast. An insurance provider, surgical counseling, anasthetic, a few stitches, and a little pain killer during recovery. But if that had happened even 1000 years ago I'd have been wincing for the rest of my life.
Wouldn't it be great if we could combine the two? Not killing each other and eating enough, and still doing things we have evolved to enjoy for a larger fraction of our time?
An excellent bringing-together of explanatory factors. I feel that this has enriched my sense of prehistory. Allow me to turn one of the elements slightly -- the linguistic skill may not (and perhaps probably was not) so much outgoing as incoming. "Children should be seen and not heard" is not new, and appears not to have been limited to the bad old 19th century either. But an important, though often forgotten corollary to this now-passe idiom is "little pitchers have big ears" -- children always hear more than you think they do.
Now, in ancestral time, keen observation of skilled adults performing tasks was the primary focus not merely of childhood but human inteliigence itself (see, as always, Henrich's 'Secret of our Success'). If there were similar findings that showed that girls learn skills faster by observation ages 1-8 than boys do, I wouldn't be surprised. But that doesn't address linguistics. Picking up on cues that adults may be even entertaining the distant hint of perhaps becoming upset with her is a trait that we see highly active in neglected and traumatized little girls even today, and at a rate that appears greatly higher than in boys. To what extent understanding language (rather than facial expressions and postures) actually could be protective I could not say, but it seems like it would be helpful. Listening silently and understanding everything is likely a big leg up when it comes to previent helpfulness and agreeableness.
Silent, oppressed girls could have been the case in more civilized societies. But the little I have read about childhood in primitive societies, small children tend not to be firmly disciplined. From the Hadza of Tanzania to the Piranha of Brazil, parents allowed children to roam freely and make their own mistakes (something that included allowing toddlers to play with knives). Also from the Tiwi of Northern Australia such an attitude is reported.
One reason why I stopped reading Jean Brigg's Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family from 1971, was that page after page after page was about an obnoxious little girl and how her parents did nothing to make her less obnoxious. It obviously all seemed very remarkable to a Western observer of that time. In the environmentalist 1970s many people put great emphasis on child rearing, thinking it was of huge significance. But I didn't find those child rearing practices very different from they way many liberal-minded Westerners do it today.
By the 1970s the Netsilik Eskimo definitely didn't practice infanticide. The family in question had no sons and five daughters, if I remember it right. They were also staunchly Christian. But in a rather recent past, inuit populations upheld very male-skewed sex ratios. Since then, no one had taught them to act indulgently toward their toddlers. Still, it seems like they did. It's all anecdotal, but I still haven't read any explicit reports from any primitive societies about toddlers being silent and disciplined.
I wasn't talking about discipline or oppression. The claim that human beings in general and children in particular haven't been becoming more and more talkative all throughout recorded history is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence. The 70s is very late and Eskimo were contacted long before. Even at time of first contact, they were psychologically misshapen by the standards of other non agricultural peoples - and no wonder, they lived in a terrifying harsh environment. As for the permissive parenting in various tropical hunter gatherer societies, I certainly agree, but I've never heard it reported that their children were obnoxious chatterboxes.
>>The claim that human beings in general and children in particular haven't been becoming more and more talkative all throughout recorded history is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence.
Agreed. And they probably have, at least during the last century or so. Especially as encouraging talking is seen as the pillar of good toddler parenting according to today's standards. Not even the obnoxious Eskimo child was accused of talking a lot. Frequent tantrums were more of the thing there.
>>As for the permissive parenting in various tropical hunter gatherer societies, I certainly agree, but I've never heard it reported that their children were obnoxious chatterboxes.
Ha ha, no, since the children of tropical hunter-gatherers had a lot of freedom compared to modern Western children, their opportunity to chat on their parents was probably lower.
Possibly the Aché is something of an exception here. They lived in a very dangerous environment where small children couldn't be left alone on the forest floor because of nasty insects (which I guess might have contributed to the low degree of female contribution to subsistence.) But one of the great things with Ache Life History is that it doesn't focus on details like child rearing practices.
In summary, I don't think you are wrong at all. I only have a vague sense that there have been degrees in spontaneity/cautiousness among children throughout human history, and that cautiousness peaked rather late. Thinking about it, I think that is a general tendency: As civilization progresses, brutality seems to give some way to oppression.
I went looking for a discussion I'd seen about the myth of the changeling but cannot now find it. (It wouldn't have surprised me if you guys here had written that article.) The point had been that places that developed a sense of guilt early enough that its effects would show up in ancient myths had changelings, for instance Western Europe. Places that retained a culture based more on shame and honor up into a post mythic and more modern time period did not for instance most of the rest of the world. A place where having a sickly or deformed or supernumerary female child is shameful does not need to play head games about changelings. A place where a sickly or deformed or supernumerary female child is deeply inconvenient, but you would feel guilty about putting such a one to death does require such myths. In writing this comment, I get a sudden chill remembering that one of the classic signs of the changeling is lack of linguistic development.
I didn't find the article but I found this quote, which is apposite: “We now take for granted the 'need' to stimulate the infant through physical contact, motherese, and playing games like peek-a-boo to accelerate physical and intellectual development. Contrast these assumptions with the pre-modern objective of keeping babies quiescent so they’d make fewer demands on caretakers and not injure themselves (LeVine et al. 1994).”
I have read a lot about infanticide in Sarah Hrdy's Mother Nature, and I think there lies a lot in the theory that changelings only appear in cultures where they need to appear. Well, I don't know that they didn't have any belief in changelings in China and Japan, but they seem to have been completely casual about infanticide until the 19th or 20th century. For example, Sarah Hrdy writes that in Japan, 19th century couples used infanticide as a completely accepted form of family planning. The ideal family was to have two children, first a daughter and then a son, so the older sister could take care of the younger brother. Young couples sometimes decided to kill a firstborn son to make place for a female caretaker instead. As I understood it, that was entirely socially accepted behavior.
I still think that the ideal of quiscent babies and toddlers is more a feature of heavily Malthusian, rather late pre-modern societies than of all pre-modern societies. For example, Napoleon Chagnon wrote that the Yanomamö believe that evil spirits can enter the mouth of babies when they cry, so mothers try to appease their babies before they even start crying. The relationship between parents, especially mothers and children probably becomes very different when mothers carry around one child at a time in three or four-year intervals, compared to in societies where parents need to work very hard to feed any children at all. In pre-Malthusian societies without livestock, human milk is a critical resource that forces women into birth-spacing, if they want any children to survive. In general, it seems like milk is more expensive than attention and affection, so mothers can afford to be very attentive to their children.
More advanced agriculture makes it possible to raise children at closer intervals. Many more children than there is any future for. I suspect those conditions encourages the casual attitude to children they for example had in France some hundred years ago, when people who could afford it left their children to be fed and raised in poor families during their first few years. A general excess of children compared to resources probably leads to a culture where children are encouraged to be as undisturbing as possible so their parents and siblings can work for everyone's survival.
Before reading your previous remarks about child murder I would have thought most infanticide would occur early on, before any chance of talking would show up. I've read that Amerindian tribes would often leave crying papooses in the wild to cry themselves out; these are going to be very young children exposed to carnivores and the cold. But in the curves you gave, plenty of deaths occur from the ages of 1 and 10, particularly for girls, and those children are talking.
I've also frequently heard people assert that boys are harder as young children, and girls are harder as teenagers. If obnoxious girls were killed - partly just for being obnoxious - while boys were valued and less likely to be killed for being obnoxious, well, what is the inevitable outcome?
So everything does fit, at least with the Ache data you are relying on. The problem is that Ache patterns are not typical of all societies. In modern matrilineal societies of India, there is actually a *daughter* preference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3702350/
Limited data definitely is a problem here. Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado made a great study. Asking people who have been recently civilized, and are thereby not very dangerous to anthropologists, about their memories of an uncivilized past is an ingenious idea. Unfortunately, to my knowledge few anthropologists have done anything similar. So except for the Aché, I simply don't know the proportion between infantice and death at higher ages. I think the studies from India indicates something: That neglect doesn't have to be very visible to affect mortality rates.
In Mother Nature Sarah Hrdy writes a lot about son or daughter preference. Her main point is that in certain systems, lower classes tend to provide daughters and higher classes tend to prefer sons. Especially in India where hypergamy was institutionalized, but also in Kenya there is a people called the Mukogodo ("poor scum" in the local language) who are former foragers. They claim to prefer sons just as the richer pastoralist Masai they emulate, but in fact they raised 67 sons for every 100 daughters (information found at page 342 of Mother Nature). Daughters often marry up into Masai households while sons often achieve to small herds to marry at all.
So daughter preference definitely is a thing. The question is just whether son preference has been the main rule for long enough time to cause higher selective pressures on girls and, in that case, to what degree such selection took place after the infant stage.
Yet another educational post! Being from a part of India that traced matrilineal descent, and raising a boy and a girl, this post really resonated.
Female infanticide in the son preference regions of India usually happens before birth, thanks to sonograms facilitating abortions. Yes, this is outlawed but the state doesn't always want to or is in a position to enforce these laws. Especially in distant rural areas. In urban areas, this usually manifests as families that would be smaller, keep having kids till they have a boy. Third children are almost exclusively male, especially when they have two older sisters. This is stark because most urban families have just the one child, having two is uncommon and 3 children are vanishingly rare.
In female preference regions, which are overwhelmingly urban, TFR is well below replacement levels and is concerningly close to 1. Using my extended family as a dataset, there are 4 girls for every boy. Families want girls and stop at 1, unless the first is male; then they'll try again for a daughter. But if they have 2 girls, there's strong social stigma against trying for a third. Anecdotal, but I know zero families with 2 sons and plenty with 2 girls. I could be wrong but I'm fairly certain they aren't killing the male children through infanticide or neglect.
Matrilineal family structures are designed for females to inherit and sons get little beyond an education and recommendations to jobs / careers through family networks.
My guess is that when sex-selective abortion is available, people don't kill or neglect children because of their sex. I found it remarkable that in William Divale's study, sex ratios actually bounced back to normal 26 years after primitive societies get pacified. I think that indicates that people really don't like to kill or neglect their children. As soon as it doesn't appear necessary and they get one or another reason not to, they just stop. I guess that in India, one of the reasons to just stop it was sex-selective abortion.
In regard to the main concept, I would guess that what young girls need to display is not so much linguistic skill but agreeableness. It's notorious that boys are less agreeable than girls ... up until puberty. Post-puberty young girls are notoriously disagreeable. But a post-puberty young girl is no longer "a mouth to feed" but "a valuable commodity on the marriage market".
Yes. I guess females of all ages benefit from higher levels of agreeableness. Also adults. With less fighting ability, females should benefit more from being agreeable.
But agreeableness is also culturally tricky. There are big sex differences in agreeableness i Western culture, but none among East Asians, for example. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Why-cant-a-man-be-more-like-a-woman-Sex-differences-in-Big-Five-personality-traits-across-55-cultures.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjcsqOmgoaAAxVPQPEDHTPCCUAQFnoECCcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2txLjIgqQOqttOoKAsL1zd
Direct link: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Why-cant-a-man-be-more-like-a-woman-Sex-differences-in-Big-Five-personality-traits-across-55-cultures.pdf
Agreeableness is good if you need to get things from others but don't have any leverage. If you have lots of value, then disagreeableness becomes a way to extract benefits from others. E.g. powerful kings aren't known for agreeableness.
But it's fascinating the differences noted in the paper you reference. At the least, the game theory of agreeableness must be different across cultures.
The game theory of Ache infanticide sounds complex. E.g. if your nephew/niece is orphaned, you have an interest in keeping him/her alive but don't want to commit to feeding him/her as you've got your children to feed. So you'd prefer that he/she either "becomes a public charge" (apparently in Ache society, begging for food from adults generally) or has some other relative take responsibility. The infanticide custom rules out the first option. The second option suggests that relatives will compete to adopt the child as late as possible before the child is killed.
Very interesting post. I hadn't really considered these kinds of gender dynamics much before, but they do seem like they they probably were a major feature of primitive societies.
One question I have about this theory though is:
I can see why the tribe as a whole might want more males than female children. But since military protection is a public good (i.e. something that's provide by the group as a whole and benefits everyone in the group), and individual families benefit equally from having either male or female children in terms of reproductive success (expected fitness has to balance between males and females, right), isn't their a collective action problem? If a family has already invested resources raising a female child, they're not going to want to waste that investment even if it would be better for the tribe as a whole to invest the resources in male children.
This is a very interesting question and I have thought quite a bit about it. I think it is one indicator that human group evolution really is a thing. Because, as you say, protection is a public good. How are individual parents convinced to invest in it, instead of optimizing their own reproductive success?
The simple answer is: Social norms. Social norms that value males more than females made groups win wars. I wrote about that here: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-patriarchy
For example, social norms that encouraged parents to invest more in boys than in girls led to male-heavy small-scale societies that simply eradicated neighboring cultures that were more female-heavy.
The more complex answer is that some small-scale groups actually seem to have been aware that males were a public good. In Aché Life History, an old man is tells about his experience of child-murder:
"My father died when I was only about twenty-two days old [it is unclear how the informant came up with this precise age, which was given in Spanish]. Then my mother told the Ache to throw my brother Bejyvagi and I in the grave [Bejyvagi was about four years old], to be sacrificed with our father. There was a big fight. Some Ache dragged us to the grave site and others pulled us back out again. There were those who defended me. They were not all relatives, some of them were just my “defenders.” They liked me. They threatened my mother,
“If you don’t take back your sons and care for them we will shoot all your daughters with arrows” [the informant had two sisters aged seventeen and twelve at this time]. They tugged and pulled for a long time. Finally my defenders won. They said to me, wow you must have
been strong. Why didn’t you get torn apart when we were pulling so hard on your arms and legs [some children were literally torn apart this way]. Then my mother took care of me. Later she married Kanjegi. When he died, they sacrificed my little sister [who was about one or two years old]. She didn’t have any defenders. My mother gave her up. My brother Bejyvagi and I held on tight to her but they pulled her away from us [the two boys here are about four and eight years old]. We tried to defend her, but some big men pulled her away [informant states that he can’t recall who these men were]. My brother and I cried a lot. Our sister screamed. They didn’t kill her, they just buried her alive. They put dirt on her real fast and just buried her alive with her father, Kanjegi (translated from an interview with Kuachingi in 1994)." (qoutation from Ache Life History, about 82 percent through the book).
In another passage of the book, a mother is convinced to bury her newborn fatherless child alive.
Clearly, a mother couldn't always decide on her own which children to keep and not. Other members of the group had a say in which children should be raised. Given the limited size of the groups, those people might have had the best of the group right on their minds.
You know, this kind of thing is extremely disturbing, but I think it's too bad more people don't hear about it. Modern Westerners are so concerned that someone might be left without cold water to drink or video games to play, or that they might feel socially invalidated. You probably noticed my blog was shut down yesterday, which was really disappointing, but reading this definitely put things in perspective. I mean, if it were socially acceptable to say, "well at least no one buried your child alive," I think people would cheer up pretty quickly!
No, I've been too busy, what happened? What can anyone possibly have against your blog?
No idea; they gave me this message:
"We've removed your publication from public view due a violation of Substack's Spam & Phishing policy. If you believe this was a mistake, you can submit an appeal to our Trust & Safety team here."
Obviously it's a mistake, and I submitted an appeal, but as I don't have paid subscribers they won't likely look into it for a few days at least. Wait and see, I guess.
Ouch! Being called "spam" is indeed very hard for a blogger.
They got it within three days:
"It appears that one of our platform safety detection mechanisms erroneously flagged your publication as spam. I've reactivated your account... I apologize for the inconvenience."
Yet another Wood From Eden post that makes me *extremely* grateful to be a 21st century human from a developed country. I feel like there is a trend among learned folk to harshly criticize modern cultural practices (late stage capitalism!) and for some to opine for a return to primitivism (degrowth?). I get the sense that those people have not studied what primitive, premodern life actually looks like, and therefore cannot appreciate what a magical thing "capitalism" is in its ability to break us free from basic scarcity, and of the vast scale of injustice and depravity that would occur otherwise.
Such commonality of ritual killing makes me think of the child murder scene from The Giver. The shock and revulsion that comes from realizing the nature of the crime taking place against another human. I wonder if the Ache and other infanticidal societies knew truly what death means, or if they subscribed heavily to some "true world theory" that made death a less than huge deal.
In general I feel always a bit iffy about human evolutionary claims based on studying more "modern" hunter gatherer tribes. I wonder if there weren't confounding selection or environmental pressures that led to the tribal peoples that we can find today (or in the 1980s) to take on particular societal forms that were less common during our bulk evolution, (the 200k years or so on the savannah/in east africa when we developed our more complex communication and cultural abilities). Do you have any thoughts on this? Do you think that it is fair to make inferences about the "evolutionary setup" for human evolution based on modern-day primitive tribes?
The Ache are only the Ache. Infanticide and filicide were almost certainly more common in prehistory than today, but Anthropologists have been arguing about the commonality of things like this in prehistory for a long time:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Woodrow-Denham/publication/297649230_Population_Structure_Infant_Transport_and_Infanticide_among_Pleistocene_and_Modern_Hunter-Gatherers/links/5e690d8292851c240890a271/Population-Structure-Infant-Transport-and-Infanticide-among-Pleistocene-and-Modern-Hunter-Gatherers.pdf
I'm open to the idea that hunter gatherers might have had a better quality of life than we do in industrial civilisation, although this blog has moved me further from that view.
One thing to consider when you're reading about these more extreme aspects of HG life, like infanticide and war, is that they weren't everyday occurrences. Any events that lead to people's deaths necessarily need to be fairly uncommon or that society stops persisting.
99% of people' time as HGs has to spent hunting, gathering (obviously), socialising, crafting and other everyday occurrences needed to sustain that kind of life, activities that natural selection has predisposed us to enjoy, precisely because they promote survival. Life in the modern world requires we spent a large fraction of our time on things we just don't naturally enjoy, school, office work etc. even if we're more insulate from extreme misfortunes like violent death and starvation.
It's kind of 99% good + 1% very bad vs 99.99% OKish + 0.001% very bad.
Yes, exactly - although I'd subtract a significant amount from the 99% good because of the lack of medical or surgical relief from pain.
I had a hernia corrected a few years ago; I shoveled too much snow too fast. An insurance provider, surgical counseling, anasthetic, a few stitches, and a little pain killer during recovery. But if that had happened even 1000 years ago I'd have been wincing for the rest of my life.
Wouldn't it be great if we could combine the two? Not killing each other and eating enough, and still doing things we have evolved to enjoy for a larger fraction of our time?
The lure ofAI
https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/the-paleolithic-ancestor-model-pageant?r=kmvxf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
An excellent bringing-together of explanatory factors. I feel that this has enriched my sense of prehistory. Allow me to turn one of the elements slightly -- the linguistic skill may not (and perhaps probably was not) so much outgoing as incoming. "Children should be seen and not heard" is not new, and appears not to have been limited to the bad old 19th century either. But an important, though often forgotten corollary to this now-passe idiom is "little pitchers have big ears" -- children always hear more than you think they do.
Now, in ancestral time, keen observation of skilled adults performing tasks was the primary focus not merely of childhood but human inteliigence itself (see, as always, Henrich's 'Secret of our Success'). If there were similar findings that showed that girls learn skills faster by observation ages 1-8 than boys do, I wouldn't be surprised. But that doesn't address linguistics. Picking up on cues that adults may be even entertaining the distant hint of perhaps becoming upset with her is a trait that we see highly active in neglected and traumatized little girls even today, and at a rate that appears greatly higher than in boys. To what extent understanding language (rather than facial expressions and postures) actually could be protective I could not say, but it seems like it would be helpful. Listening silently and understanding everything is likely a big leg up when it comes to previent helpfulness and agreeableness.
Silent, oppressed girls could have been the case in more civilized societies. But the little I have read about childhood in primitive societies, small children tend not to be firmly disciplined. From the Hadza of Tanzania to the Piranha of Brazil, parents allowed children to roam freely and make their own mistakes (something that included allowing toddlers to play with knives). Also from the Tiwi of Northern Australia such an attitude is reported.
One reason why I stopped reading Jean Brigg's Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family from 1971, was that page after page after page was about an obnoxious little girl and how her parents did nothing to make her less obnoxious. It obviously all seemed very remarkable to a Western observer of that time. In the environmentalist 1970s many people put great emphasis on child rearing, thinking it was of huge significance. But I didn't find those child rearing practices very different from they way many liberal-minded Westerners do it today.
By the 1970s the Netsilik Eskimo definitely didn't practice infanticide. The family in question had no sons and five daughters, if I remember it right. They were also staunchly Christian. But in a rather recent past, inuit populations upheld very male-skewed sex ratios. Since then, no one had taught them to act indulgently toward their toddlers. Still, it seems like they did. It's all anecdotal, but I still haven't read any explicit reports from any primitive societies about toddlers being silent and disciplined.
I wasn't talking about discipline or oppression. The claim that human beings in general and children in particular haven't been becoming more and more talkative all throughout recorded history is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence. The 70s is very late and Eskimo were contacted long before. Even at time of first contact, they were psychologically misshapen by the standards of other non agricultural peoples - and no wonder, they lived in a terrifying harsh environment. As for the permissive parenting in various tropical hunter gatherer societies, I certainly agree, but I've never heard it reported that their children were obnoxious chatterboxes.
>>The claim that human beings in general and children in particular haven't been becoming more and more talkative all throughout recorded history is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence.
Agreed. And they probably have, at least during the last century or so. Especially as encouraging talking is seen as the pillar of good toddler parenting according to today's standards. Not even the obnoxious Eskimo child was accused of talking a lot. Frequent tantrums were more of the thing there.
>>As for the permissive parenting in various tropical hunter gatherer societies, I certainly agree, but I've never heard it reported that their children were obnoxious chatterboxes.
Ha ha, no, since the children of tropical hunter-gatherers had a lot of freedom compared to modern Western children, their opportunity to chat on their parents was probably lower.
Possibly the Aché is something of an exception here. They lived in a very dangerous environment where small children couldn't be left alone on the forest floor because of nasty insects (which I guess might have contributed to the low degree of female contribution to subsistence.) But one of the great things with Ache Life History is that it doesn't focus on details like child rearing practices.
In summary, I don't think you are wrong at all. I only have a vague sense that there have been degrees in spontaneity/cautiousness among children throughout human history, and that cautiousness peaked rather late. Thinking about it, I think that is a general tendency: As civilization progresses, brutality seems to give some way to oppression.
I went looking for a discussion I'd seen about the myth of the changeling but cannot now find it. (It wouldn't have surprised me if you guys here had written that article.) The point had been that places that developed a sense of guilt early enough that its effects would show up in ancient myths had changelings, for instance Western Europe. Places that retained a culture based more on shame and honor up into a post mythic and more modern time period did not for instance most of the rest of the world. A place where having a sickly or deformed or supernumerary female child is shameful does not need to play head games about changelings. A place where a sickly or deformed or supernumerary female child is deeply inconvenient, but you would feel guilty about putting such a one to death does require such myths. In writing this comment, I get a sudden chill remembering that one of the classic signs of the changeling is lack of linguistic development.
I didn't find the article but I found this quote, which is apposite: “We now take for granted the 'need' to stimulate the infant through physical contact, motherese, and playing games like peek-a-boo to accelerate physical and intellectual development. Contrast these assumptions with the pre-modern objective of keeping babies quiescent so they’d make fewer demands on caretakers and not injure themselves (LeVine et al. 1994).”
Rob Henderson recently wrote about changelings, but I don't remember those details. https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/tony-soprano-and-the-jungian-death?utm_medium=reader2
I have read a lot about infanticide in Sarah Hrdy's Mother Nature, and I think there lies a lot in the theory that changelings only appear in cultures where they need to appear. Well, I don't know that they didn't have any belief in changelings in China and Japan, but they seem to have been completely casual about infanticide until the 19th or 20th century. For example, Sarah Hrdy writes that in Japan, 19th century couples used infanticide as a completely accepted form of family planning. The ideal family was to have two children, first a daughter and then a son, so the older sister could take care of the younger brother. Young couples sometimes decided to kill a firstborn son to make place for a female caretaker instead. As I understood it, that was entirely socially accepted behavior.
I still think that the ideal of quiscent babies and toddlers is more a feature of heavily Malthusian, rather late pre-modern societies than of all pre-modern societies. For example, Napoleon Chagnon wrote that the Yanomamö believe that evil spirits can enter the mouth of babies when they cry, so mothers try to appease their babies before they even start crying. The relationship between parents, especially mothers and children probably becomes very different when mothers carry around one child at a time in three or four-year intervals, compared to in societies where parents need to work very hard to feed any children at all. In pre-Malthusian societies without livestock, human milk is a critical resource that forces women into birth-spacing, if they want any children to survive. In general, it seems like milk is more expensive than attention and affection, so mothers can afford to be very attentive to their children.
More advanced agriculture makes it possible to raise children at closer intervals. Many more children than there is any future for. I suspect those conditions encourages the casual attitude to children they for example had in France some hundred years ago, when people who could afford it left their children to be fed and raised in poor families during their first few years. A general excess of children compared to resources probably leads to a culture where children are encouraged to be as undisturbing as possible so their parents and siblings can work for everyone's survival.
Before reading your previous remarks about child murder I would have thought most infanticide would occur early on, before any chance of talking would show up. I've read that Amerindian tribes would often leave crying papooses in the wild to cry themselves out; these are going to be very young children exposed to carnivores and the cold. But in the curves you gave, plenty of deaths occur from the ages of 1 and 10, particularly for girls, and those children are talking.
I've also frequently heard people assert that boys are harder as young children, and girls are harder as teenagers. If obnoxious girls were killed - partly just for being obnoxious - while boys were valued and less likely to be killed for being obnoxious, well, what is the inevitable outcome?
So everything does fit, at least with the Ache data you are relying on. The problem is that Ache patterns are not typical of all societies. In modern matrilineal societies of India, there is actually a *daughter* preference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3702350/
Limited data definitely is a problem here. Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado made a great study. Asking people who have been recently civilized, and are thereby not very dangerous to anthropologists, about their memories of an uncivilized past is an ingenious idea. Unfortunately, to my knowledge few anthropologists have done anything similar. So except for the Aché, I simply don't know the proportion between infantice and death at higher ages. I think the studies from India indicates something: That neglect doesn't have to be very visible to affect mortality rates.
In Mother Nature Sarah Hrdy writes a lot about son or daughter preference. Her main point is that in certain systems, lower classes tend to provide daughters and higher classes tend to prefer sons. Especially in India where hypergamy was institutionalized, but also in Kenya there is a people called the Mukogodo ("poor scum" in the local language) who are former foragers. They claim to prefer sons just as the richer pastoralist Masai they emulate, but in fact they raised 67 sons for every 100 daughters (information found at page 342 of Mother Nature). Daughters often marry up into Masai households while sons often achieve to small herds to marry at all.
So daughter preference definitely is a thing. The question is just whether son preference has been the main rule for long enough time to cause higher selective pressures on girls and, in that case, to what degree such selection took place after the infant stage.
Yet another educational post! Being from a part of India that traced matrilineal descent, and raising a boy and a girl, this post really resonated.
Female infanticide in the son preference regions of India usually happens before birth, thanks to sonograms facilitating abortions. Yes, this is outlawed but the state doesn't always want to or is in a position to enforce these laws. Especially in distant rural areas. In urban areas, this usually manifests as families that would be smaller, keep having kids till they have a boy. Third children are almost exclusively male, especially when they have two older sisters. This is stark because most urban families have just the one child, having two is uncommon and 3 children are vanishingly rare.
In female preference regions, which are overwhelmingly urban, TFR is well below replacement levels and is concerningly close to 1. Using my extended family as a dataset, there are 4 girls for every boy. Families want girls and stop at 1, unless the first is male; then they'll try again for a daughter. But if they have 2 girls, there's strong social stigma against trying for a third. Anecdotal, but I know zero families with 2 sons and plenty with 2 girls. I could be wrong but I'm fairly certain they aren't killing the male children through infanticide or neglect.
Matrilineal family structures are designed for females to inherit and sons get little beyond an education and recommendations to jobs / careers through family networks.
Very interesting!
My guess is that when sex-selective abortion is available, people don't kill or neglect children because of their sex. I found it remarkable that in William Divale's study, sex ratios actually bounced back to normal 26 years after primitive societies get pacified. I think that indicates that people really don't like to kill or neglect their children. As soon as it doesn't appear necessary and they get one or another reason not to, they just stop. I guess that in India, one of the reasons to just stop it was sex-selective abortion.