Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (42 page)

Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has summarized the proportion of male deaths caused by war, even today, in a number of primal societies.
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The proudly independent Jivaro tribe in Peru is notorious for their use of poison-dart blow-pipes and head-hunting. Keeley estimates that some 60% of Jivaro males die in battle. Half a world away, the Mae Enga of the New Guinea highlands lose 35% of males in murderous conflicts. In contrast, European and American male battlefield deaths in the 20th century (which included two world wars) averaged less than 1% per year.

It seems, then, that for most of human evolutionary history, human males have been involved in bloody conflict. There are a few other species that also do this—chimpanzees, gorillas, and wolves are examples. A common thread is this: the killing is of “them,” the out-group. The fact that there are indeed other species that seek to exterminate their own kind, albeit from an out-group, forces us to recognize the possibility that this trait is, in some way, evolutionarily advantageous. Richard Wrangham, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, says that evolution favored humans and chimps who warred because “this makes grisly sense in terms of natural selection.” Successful males, the ones that survive, enjoy high status among other males. High-status males are strongly attractive to females and have more matings, so they generate more offspring. The genes sitting in successful warriors become more common, while the genes in wimps don’t get into the next generation in the same numbers. We are all descended, on average, from males who were better-than-average murderous warriors.

A second consequence of early male death in battle is highly important yet little remarked: adult males were in a minority. Females sometimes outnumbered them by two to one. Most men had at least one “wife” and many had two or more. There was competition among women to “get a man.” Warfare, then, was a way for males to get rid of some of the competition. Genes in males who promoted warfare and who were successful warriors spread throughout the population.

We cannot hope to deal with modern conflict if we do not recognize the hardwiring in young males that drives them to risky activities and violence. Of course, the violence is only a means to an end. It leads to high status, which is an important staging post on the way to the end. However, the only end that counts is getting the genes into the next generation.

WORKING PATTERNS

In chapter 1, we talked about “women’s work” and “men’s work.” The women would go off in a group with the small children on their backs and forage for food. For safety, they stayed within “hailing distance.” To do this, they kept up a steady chatter. If they sensed silence, they got uneasy and tried to reestablish verbal contact. The women were foraging in a largely cooperative way; they would be giving constant advice to each other. They would call each other over if they found a particularly rich resource. They had a fine eye for the little signs of food and a delicacy in harvesting it. The women moved in a group, slowly and along familiar paths. They decided where to go and knew the way back.

The men, meanwhile, would go off in ones and twos on their hunting trips. Stealth was of the essence and so talking was kept to a strict minimum, just enough to convey facts about their quarry. Often, communication was simple signs. The men would follow prey along all kinds of unpredictable paths. The prey decided “where to go” and the men had to somehow keep track of where they were.

Laurens van der Post describes how he followed a band of Bushmen while they chased an eland for several days: “The trail twisted and turned so much that I had no idea where we were or in which direction our camp lay. But Nxou [chief hunter] and his companions had no doubt. That was one of the many impressive things about them. They were always centered. They knew, without conscious effort, where their home was, as we have seen proved on many other more than baffling occasions.”
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He should not have been so surprised. Many studies have shown that men today still have remarkable powers of “way-finding” compared to women.
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The men had a fine eye for the signs of suitable quarry—they were expert trackers. When they hunted down a quarry, the result was brutal: it was bludgeoned or stabbed to death. The spoils were hacked up as necessary and carried back to the camp. The men’s occupation was largely competitive and their status with other males depended on their success.

When there was the chance of a really big kill, like a one-ton eland or a giraffe, all the men would go off in a hunting party. They might even team up with men from an adjacent band, especially if the quarry was roaming over both territories. In this case, the men would temporarily settle their differences in the interests of the wider objective. In either case, there were complex rules about who got credit for a kill and who received what portion of it afterwards.

On return to the camp, each hunter would distribute the spoils in a particular way: his wives and children received the largest part and other portions were distributed to more remote relatives and people who were owed debts. The actual details might vary with circumstance and from tribe to tribe. However, there is one aspect that is a human universal value and of fundamental importance: wives, and sometimes other recipients, would receive more than they could consume, so they would have a surplus they could use to endow gifts and return favors. The wives and the rest of the man’s entourage would therefore derive status from the exploits of “their” man.

The women could easily collect enough food to feed the whole family. However, a woman is vulnerable to someone stealing that food. Higher-status women and other men were lying in wait to bully and browbeat that woman out of her hard-won resources. The reason that this rarely happened is simple: she had “her man” who would protect her against any aggression. In chapter 1, we asked “Why would a woman need a man?” Here, we have most of the answer: without a man committed to her physical protection, the chances that she and her children would survive were reduced. On average, women who were not driven to seek a male bodyguard were less likely to get their genes into the next generation.

So, the women went out foraging every day and they took their babes-in-arms (up to 4 years old) with them. Men were not invited to, and did not volunteer for, the working party. The total working day was 4–5 hours and a woman could find enough food to feed the family. What pointers are there for us today? We might tentatively suggest that it is normal for a woman to go out to work, but that she has her small children with her. It would be normal for a woman to work with other women and not with men. It is probable that women have different inborn talents and ways of working compared to men. They probably find comfort if their working environment allows them to talk freely.

In contrast, the men went hunting at irregular but frequent intervals. Their activity was often dangerous, required strength, violence, subtle reading of animal tracks, and ingenuity. They were excited by the challenge and tended to underrate the risks. Mostly, they worked alone and in silence and often their efforts were unsuccessful. Sometimes, they formed teams that worked closely together to achieve a kill. It was work that women could not do. The results of a man’s work would decide his status with other men. If done well, it would buy him gift-giving power and bring admiration and appreciation from his womenfolk. What lessons might there be for us today? Again, this is sensitive territory. However, we might tentatively suggest that men have innate talents different from women’s talents. They prefer to work alone or in a project-focused team with other men. Their way of working would clash with women’s way of working if they had to work together. A man needs to feel that his work is important and something women could not do. He works hard for success, proudly anticipating the admiration of his womenfolk.

Until recent times, working patterns often fit quite closely to this specification. Even in the upheaval of industrialization, most occupations were segregated. The women worked in large groups in factories, concentrating on the finer work such as cotton and lace-making. The men did the perilous and dirty jobs such as those in coal mines, shipbuilding, or blast furnaces. The men took pride in their daily wrestle with danger; they had a sense of fulfillment, of purpose, and of camaraderie.

Male Hierarchy

The concepts of status and status-seeking are human universal values. For men, and particularly the genes they carry, status is of prime importance. In our Pleistocene past, genes that found themselves trapped in a low-status body were condemned to oblivion. Hence, the gene-driven competition to make “their” body the dominant male. By a mixture of strength, hunting skills, and force of personality, one male would emerge in the forager band as “chieftain,” “headman,” or “honcho.” Whether it is humans or some other species, biologists refer to this individual as the “alpha male.” All the other males are lower status.

By the very nature of things, very few men make it to the top. A few others are candidates on the way up, others are on the way down. In the forager tribe, many men are none of the above: they are “low status.” Modern “Blank Slate” policy directs that there should be more women in top positions, but it does not admit that there is no genetic, status-seeking drive to be there. The irony is that while males do indeed predominate in boardrooms, politics, and so forth, the vast majority of men are not in top positions. In today’s society, most men are nobodies.

The Modern Workplace for Men and Women

For several generations now, the “Blank Slate” philosophy has permeated policy-making in the workplace. The attack has been on at least three fronts. The first is the theory that any work that men can do, women should do too. The second is the drive for women to get the same pay as a man for the same work. The third is that women should be educated to the same level as men. All these proposals seem reasonable on the face of it. However, they cut across some fundamental, genetically programmed, gender drives and needs. As we saw earlier, women have different personalities and work in a different way. When both genders are expected to work together, the result is rather like a badly coordinated pair in a three-legged race. Each has much to contribute, but each is frustrated by the stumbling induced by being out of sorts with the other.

There is, however, a deeper and more potent source of distress. A man’s work (hunting) was where he went to get his sense of identity, where he found prestige and a sense of self-worth. A woman did not go to work (foraging) to find her identity—she got that by being a mother to her children. Modern ideas of work destabilize this major asymmetry. We can expect a man to feel diminished if a woman does the same job; at the least, he will not feel special or important. Here, we lose an important prop to self-esteem, especially for a male of low status. The situation gets even worse if, in the hierarchy, he is subordinate to a woman. In these circumstances, the man’s workplace, instead of being his main source of self-respect and status-enhancement, will be the opposite—an unhappy place that reminds him daily of his mediocrity. An unplanned consequence is that such men will seek their identity, status, and prestige outside the workplace. Some might do it in innocent ways, through pastimes, hobbies, and sports. Many others will find it in street gangs, violence, and organized crime.

A similar problem arises with equal pay. Until recent times, men and women mostly worked in different occupations, so there was nothing to compare. It gave a sense of responsibility and purpose for the man to be the “breadwinner”—he took pride in it. He brought home more pay than his wife and this gave him status. He was important to the prestige of the family and the sharing out of his wages had direct parallels with his forebears’ sharing out of meat. In recent years, the workplace has become feminized. Coal miners, steelworkers, and ship’s stokers have had to learn how to stack supermarket shelves and flip hamburgers. Most occupations have women doing the same work as men and they expect the same pay. This has an unexpected consequence: men’s pay trended down to the level of women’s pay. The man’s salary is no longer special. Indeed, in many situations, the woman can support herself and her children on her own.

As a hunter, a man would take pride in being quick-witted, ingenious, and a master of solving the clues left by his quarry. A man would feel his self-esteem swell as he recounted his exploits to the other men. These exploits deployed a combination of hardwired talent and intelligence. It was the kind of smartness that had no parallel in the world of women. In our modern society, this aspect of human endeavor has morphed into the process called “education.” Authorities have made an immense effort to promote female scholarship: they bias teaching methods to favor the way girls learn best. Boisterous boys are treated as behavior problems and, under pressure from the schools, their parents dope them with Ritalin to make them docile.
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The policy has worked. By the year 2003, 60% of American college graduates were women. This sounds good, but it means that, for every four women with a degree, there are only three men. One man in four will find himself paired with a woman who is more educated than he is. This is a third area where a low status male will be reminded daily of his inadequacies.
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The “natural” order of things in the workplace has been upset by social engineering. The irony is that most women will not see any problem. If they earn more than their man, they will say, “I don’t mind. What I earn is for both of us and I am happy to share it.” If they are more educated than their man, it is a similar reaction. Women in this situation are puzzled that their man is not consoled by such generosity. For women, these matters are not central to their identity and they cannot imagine the devastating feelings of inadequacy that a man experiences.