Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (45 page)

A male can never be totally sure if he is the father of the children borne by his wives. This uncertainty plays itself out in many ways. One of them has to do with nephews and nieces. In many societies, men develop stronger relationships with their sister’s offspring than with the ones that purport to be theirs. He and his sister have the same mother with total certainty. In other words, he is bound to share some genes with his nephews and nieces by his sister. Many societies such as the Romans and Anglo-Saxons worked this out, even if they did not know about genes—they talked about being “blood relations” and sharing “bloodlines.”

All this is not to say that forager fathers ignored children totally. He will happily dandle a small child on his knee for a bit, but the child is part of the women’s world and his role, at this stage, is to be protective of his child’s safety and interests. Only when a boy is approaching his rite of passage to manhood does the father take on a responsibility for his daily instruction—he becomes his buddy. In modern times, do not expect a father to change a diaper with any sense of warm, nurturing love. In contrast, expect him to intervene forcefully if his child is bullied in the park, and he will be right there when it is time to take his son to a ballgame.

Fertility Assessment

Evolutionary psychologists and biologists are painstakingly demolishing the Blank Slate doctrine that beauty is purely a matter of cultural upbringing. Men down through the ages who were not good at selecting fertile women had fewer offspring on average. It follows that today’s men are descended from a long line of men who were good at picking fertile women.

How does a man tell if a woman is fertile? He has no way of directly measuring it, however, his genes have an indirect way—he detects “attractiveness.” Women rated attractive by men consistently have higher levels of reproductive hormones and fertility. On average, a woman who looks young, has a curvy hourglass shape,
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taut and vibrant skin,
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good muscle tone, a pleasing voice,
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and exudes a mysterious aura of sexuality
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is probably fertile. These signals might only be a crude guide, but on average a man would do better to mate with a woman like that than one who did not display these signs.

Child Rearing

We will first look at what happens in our typical hunter-gatherer society, the San Bushmen. It is highly likely that our Pleistocene ancestors practiced their form of child rearing for all of our evolutionary past. It is therefore likely that parents and children are genetically programmed for this child-rearing pattern even today.

In forager populations (typified by the San), on average, women had their first child at 19 years old and the last by the age of 49. The mother usually goes off into the bush alone to give birth.
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Australian Aborigines followed a similar pattern. If the group is on the move, the woman pulls off to the side to give birth, tie the umbilical cord, and wash the baby if there is water nearby. If she is in camp, she will go off into the bush with another woman for companionship.
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It is a human universal value that childbirth is treated as an entirely female and private matter. Men are not invited to, and show no interest in, its mysteries.

Infant mortality is high: 20% die within the first year of life. On occasion, the mother practiced infanticide on the newborn for one or more reasons: if the child is born too soon after an earlier one; if it is physically defective; if twins are born (in which case one is killed); or if the woman feels too old to breastfeed another baby.
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The Aboriginal women gave birth to six to eight children in a lifetime, of which estimates suggest that nearly half were killed at birth.
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There is no suggestion that there is any gender choice in these life-and-death decisions.

Babies and toddlers are breastfed until about three to four years old. The mother then introduces easily chewed, solid foods after the first teeth have broken through. Children tended to be spaced at least four years apart. That is, a new child is not allowed to compete with an older child for the mother’s breast milk.

The San believed that breast milk was for the fetus, so a woman stopped breastfeeding a child as soon as she became pregnant again, not when the new baby was born. At this point, the current child is weaned and has to manage entirely on solid foods. Weaning is never an easy time and children often suffer depression that lasts a long time.

Natural Family Planning

According to Richard Lee, nursing in San women is “vigorous, frequent, given on demand, and spaced throughout the day and night.” It has been known for quite a while that the stimulus of round-the-clock sucking suppresses ovulation. We make a distinction here between sucking and feeding. It is sufficient for there to be 24-hour, on-demand sucking to suppress conception. American mothers who follow this breastfeeding pattern experience a similar effect.
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A decrease in the frequency of sucking/feedings results in the reappearance of menstruation and then ovulation.
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During the day, the mother carries her baby in a light sling on her hip. The baby is facing forward and has unfettered access to the breast. The child suckles at will, even if he is not getting any milk. The sucking reflex appears to be an important aspect of what is called “contact comfort.” Our close cousins, the chimpanzee and gorilla, exhibit the same behavior.

Carried on the hip in this side position, the child is looking at what the mother is seeing and has eye-level contact with other children. He has access to play with the ornaments and beads that are hung around the mother’s neck. The total body contact time is much higher than with Western infants—75% of the time in the first few months, dropping to 40% at two years. Researchers note that boys get less contact time, dropping from 75% to 30% after one year.
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Almost as bad as weaning from mother’s milk is the process of “weaning from the back”—when the mother ceases to carry a child once a new baby is born. From then on, the older child is not carried again. But children love to be carried, they delight in the physical contact with their mothers, and they hate the pressures imposed by toddling to keep up with the mother’s foraging. Weaning from the back gives rise to similar kinds of behavior as breast weaning: temper tantrums, refusals to walk, demands to be carried, and refusal to be left in the village while the mother goes gathering.

Squabbles between siblings have been a trial since the dawn of time. When the first child is born, he has the parents to himself. He has undisputed access to all his mother’s resources. When the second child is born, he finds a rival already in place. This older sibling is bigger, smarter, and well-established. In the younger ones, being weaker genetically switches them to a subtle, indirect mode of operation. They tend to be better at provoking the older one into trouble and in playing one parent off against the other. The eldest child is bamboozled by this newcomer’s magical ability to manipulate his parents against him. He is bigger, and the only weapon he knows about is violence. But violence, unlike needling, is readily visible to his parents. As he brings their reprimand down on his head, he feels the injustice keenly.

At another level, genes sitting in a child will try to improve his survival chances by restricting competition from newcomers. For a baby suckling at his mother’s breast, the worst thing that can happen to his genes is if the mother gets pregnant too early. She will stop breastfeeding him, thus increasing his chances of dying. Hardwiring makes small babies ultra-sensitive to their mother becoming intimate with a man. If there is the slightest suspicion, the baby becomes demanding, tries to divert attention, cries, and bawls. The distraught mother drops any amorous intentions and seeks to find out what can be ailing the child. There is nothing wrong with him, but she is not to know that. This is one reason why young children want to climb into their parents’ bed. Their chief, pre-programmed drive is to keep their parents apart. In other words, we are all descended from a succession of infants who were successful at slowing down the arrival of new, competing siblings.

Parent-Child Conflict

In a similar way, we can look at how mother genes and child genes have different agendas. At weaning, a child at the breast is leading a healthy, trouble-free, comforting existence. Quite reasonably, it could go on for a long while yet. The 3-year-old’s genes are saying, “Survival is better assured by staying with breastfeeding.” But the mother’s genes are saying, “Wean the 3-year-old and start another baby.” That is why weaning is always a battle. The San suffer from it just as much as Westerners. The important point to register is this: it is natural for there to be this conflict. The child is programmed for it: the mother must play her part properly and resist the child’s demands. It is perhaps easier for a San woman, because she lives at a subsistence level and does not have the luxury of trying out trendy child-rearing theories.

Childhood

With the San, infants and children found themselves in an environment where they are rarely out of contact with adults and older children. They moved easily from one group of adults to another. They were all related in some way and the adults were fond of indulging the infants. Adults rarely reprimanded the children and they are only corrected when necessary to teach them to avoid danger. Infants are encouraged to sit up, and then stand up, as early as possible, and they develop motor coordination early. They are also advanced in cognitive development thanks to the high intensity of social contact and stimulating play opportunities.

Although a forager child circulates freely, he nevertheless has an acute sense of his place in the family tree. From an early age, he knows his mother and then identifies his father, brothers, sisters, and other relatives. He seems to have an instinct that immediately fixes the degree of genetic relatedness and therefore the degree of genetic investment that can be expected.

Children, once weaned from the woman’s back, stay behind in the campsite with the older women and the men who were not hunting that day. The children were mostly left to play among themselves, but the grandmothers kept a watchful eye on them. Not many species have lifespans that cover three generations, so there must be an evolutionary reason why this should be—something about having grandparents around that promotes survival of their genes in their grandchildren. Researchers believe that grandparents, and in particular grandmothers, played a vital role in the survival of humanity.
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Grandmothers are strongly programmed to nurture their grandchildren.

Both boys and girls would sometimes accompany the women on their foraging expeditions and thereby learn some foraging skills. However, they were not expected to forage on behalf of the family. From the age of about 11, boys were inducted into hunting with the men; girls never went on the hunt.
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There were not many children in the typical band, perhaps 20 or so from infancy to 14 years old.
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Unlike in modern societies, where children of the same age are put together, each forager child found himself with only one or two others in a similar age group. Older children helped younger children and taught them what they knew, and younger children were dragged upwards in games by having to compete with older children.

Researcher Marjorie Shostak recorded the life histories of eight San women.
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According to her account, older children were involved in sex play, including sexual intercourse. The adults regarded this as unexceptional, but scolded the children if they were not discreet. There is an innate prudery at all levels and no one likes to be observed. This may explain why daughters were married off before puberty—that is, before they get pregnant without a man to take responsibility. In this regard, it is interesting to consider the question of incest avoidance. Normally, children grow up with an aversion to having sexual relations with their close kin. This is a product of childhood “imprinting,” the phenomenon we mentioned earlier in the section on taboo. Our brains are hardwired with an instruction that says: “If you have grown up with this person in your family, don’t even think about being intimate with him.” On the other hand, if a child is separated from his or her close kin at birth, there is no such imprinting.

An Indulgent Upbringing

With the San, a child is in intimate contact with the mother during the working day. Back at the camp, the child was never more than a few yards from its mother and other close relatives. At night, the child slept next to its parents around the family hearth. The same pattern is found in just about all forager societies. Is there any significance to all this close mother/child contact? Indeed, there is: the worst fate that can befall a small child is to be lost, overlooked, or abandoned. Children who allowed that to happen were less likely to survive into adulthood. On average, every child today is good at detecting being left alone and has a noisy panic attack about it. Looked at in this light, some modern ideas about leaving a child to cry himself to sleep in a nearby room seem misguided.