National Museulll of Natural History Bulletin for Teachers
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o es National Museulll of Natural History Bulletin for Teachers Vol. 19 No.3 Fall 1997 EXPLORING OUR BASIC HUMAN NATURE ARE HUMANS INHERENTLY VIOLENT? by Robert W. Sussman Are human beings forever doomed to be violent? Is based on new primate research that they assert aggression fixed within our genetic code, an inborn demonstrates the continuity of aggression from our action pattern that threatens to destroy us? Or, as great ape ancestors. The authors argue that 20-25 asked by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in years ago most scholars believed human aggression their recent book, Demonic Males: Apes and the was unique. Research at that time had shown great Origins ofHuman Violence, can we get beyond our apes to be basically non-aggressive gentle creatures. genes, beyond our essential "human nature"? Furthermore, the separation of humans from our ape ancestors was thought to have occurred 15-20 Wrangham and Peterson's belief in the importance million years ago (Mya) . Although Raymond Dart, ofviolence in the evolution and nature ofhumans is Sherwood Washburn, Robert Ardrey, E.G. Wilson Inside: "Kennewick Man"; Think Tank Exhibit; Race Relations; Laotian Refugee Women ; New Resources Page 2 Antlll"o Notes and others had argued through much of the 20th intense, male initiated territorial aggression, century that hunting, killing, and extreme aggressive including lethal raiding into neighboring behaviors were biological traits inherited from our com munities in search of vulnerable enemies to earliest hominid hunting ancestors, many anthro attack and kill." Wrangham asks: pologists still believed that patterns of aggression were environmentally determined and culturally Does this mean chimpanzees are naturally learned behaviors, not inherited characteristics. violent? Ten years ago it wasn't clear....In this cultural species, it may turn out that one Demonic Males discusses new evidence that killer of the least variable of all chimpanzee instincts are not unique to humans, but rather shared behaviors is the intense competition between with our nearest relative, the common chimpanzee. males, the violent aggression they use The authors argue that it is this inherited propensity against strangers, and their willingness to for killing that allows hominids and chimps to be maim and kill those that frustrate their such good hunters. goals....As the picture ofchimpanzee society settles into focus, it now includes According to Wrangham and Peterson, the split infanticide, rape and regular battering of between humans and the common chimpanzee was females by males (1997:108). only 6-8 Mya. Furthermore, humans may have split from the chimpanzee-bonobo line after gorillas, with Since humans and chimpanzees share these violent bonobos (pygmy chimps) separati ng from chimps urges, the implication is that human violence has only 2.5 Mya. Because chimpanzees may be the long evolutionary roots. "We are apes of nature, modern ancestor of all these forms, and because the cursed over six million years or more with a rare earliest australopithecines were quite chimpanzee inheritance, a Dostoyevskyan demon ...The like, Wrangham speculates (in a separate article) coincidence of demonic aggression in ourselves and that "chimpanzees are a conservative species and an our closest kin bespeaks its antiquity" (1997: 108 amazingly good model for the ancestor of hominids" 109). (1995, reprinted in Sussman 1997:106). If modern chimpanzees and modem humans share certain Intellectu al Antecedents behavioral traits, these traits have "long evolutionary roots" and are likely to be fixed, From the beginning of Western thought, the theme biologically inherited parts of our basic human ofhuman depravity runs deep, related to the idea of nature and not culturally determined. humankind's fall from grace and the emergence of original sin. This view continues to pervade modern Wrangham argues that chimpanzees are almost on "scientific" interpretations ofthe evolution ofhuman the brink of humanness: behavior. Recognition of the close evolutionary relationship between humans and apes, from the Nut-smashing, root-eating, savannah-using time of Darwin's Descent of Man (1874) on, has chimpanzees, resembling our ancestors, and encouraged theories that look to modern apes for capable by the way of extensive bipedalism. evidence of parallel behaviors reflecting this Using ant-wands, and sandals, and bowls, relation ship. meat-sharing, hunting cooperatively. Strange paradox...a species trembling on the By the early 1950s, large numbers of verge of hominization, but so conservative australopithecine fossils and the discovery that the that it has stayed on that edge.... large-brained "fossil" ancestor from Piltdown, in (1997: 107). England, was a fraud, led to the realization that our earliest ancestors were more like apes than like Wrangham and Peterson (1996:24) claim that only modern humans. Accordingly, our earliest ancestors two animal species, chimpanzees and humans, live must have behaved much like other non-human in patrilineal, male-bonded communities "with primates. This, in tum, led to a great interest in Page 3 Anthro Notes using primate behavior to understand human Man the Hunter evolution and the evolutionary basis of human nature . The subdiscipline of primatology was born. In the 1968 volume Man the Hunter, Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster presented a theory of Raymond Dart, discoverer of the first "The evolution of hunting," emphasizing that it is australopithecine fossil some thirty years earlier, was this behavior that shaped human nature and also developing a different view of our earliest separated early humans from their primate relatives. ancestors. At first Dart believed that australopithecines were scavengers barely eking out To assert the biological unity of mankind is to an existence in the harsh savanna environment. But affirm the importance of the hunting way of from the fragmented and damaged bones found with life....However much conditions and customs the australopithecines, together with dents and holes may have varied locally, the main selection in these early hominid skulls, Dart eventually pressures that forged the species were the same. concluded that this species had used bone, tooth and The biology, psychology and customs that antler tools to kill, butcher and eat their prey, as separate us from the apes .. we owe to the well as to kill one another. This hunting hypothesis hunters of time past .. for those who would (Cartmill 1997:511) "was linked from the beginning understand the origins and nature of human with a bleak, pessimistic view of human beings and behavior there is no choice but to try to their ancestors as instinctively bloodthirsty and understand "Man the Hunter" (1968 :303). savage." To Dart, the australopithecines were: Rather than amassing evidence from modern hunters confirmed killers : carnivorous creatures that and gatherers to prove their theory, Washburn and seized living quarries by violence, battered them Lancaster (1968:299) use the 19th-century concept to death, tore apart their broken bodies, of cultural "survivals": behaviors that persist as dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their evidence of an earlier time but are no longer useful ravenous thirst with the hot blood ofvictims and in society. greedily devouring livid writhing flesh (1953 :209). Men enjoy hunting and killing, and these activities are continued in sports even when they Cartmill, in a recent book (1993), shows that this are no longer economically necessary. If a interpretation ofearly human morality is reminiscent behavior is important to the survival of a of earlier Greek and Christian views. Dart's (1953) species...then it must be both easily learned and own treatise begins with a 17th century quote from pleasurable (Washburn & Lancaster, p. 299). the Calvinist R. Baxter: "of all the beasts, the man beast is the worst! to others and himself the cruellest Man the Dancer foe." Using a similar logic for the survival of ancient Between 1961-1976, Dart's view was picked up and "learned and pleasurable" behaviors, perhaps it extensively popularized by the playwright Robert could easily have been our propensity for dancing Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative, African rather than our desire to hunt that can explain much Genesis). Ardrey believed it was the human ofhuman behavior. After all, men and women love competitive and killer instinct, acted out in warfare, to dance; it is a behavior found in all cultures but that made humans what they are today. ''It is war has even less obvious function today than hunting. and the instinct for territory that has led to the great Our love ofmovement and dance might explain, for accomplishments of Western Man . Dreams may example, our propensity for face-to-face sex, and have inspired our love offreedom, but only war and even the evolution of bipedalism and the movement weapons have made it ours" (1961: 324). ofhumans out oftrees and onto the ground. I . Page 4 Anthro Note8 Could the first tool have been a stick to beat a dance responses have been fashioned through this life drum, and the ancient Laetoli footprints evidence of style. With caution, we can compare the most two individuals going out to dance the "Afarensis widespread hunter-gatherer qualities with similar shuffie"? Although it takes only two to tango, a behavior displayed by some of the non-human variety of social interactions and systems might have primates that are closely related to Man. Where the been encouraged by the complex social dances same pattern oftraits occurs in...most or all ofthose known in human societies around the globe. primates--we can conclude that it has been subject to little evolution. (Wilson 1976, in Sussman 1997: 65-66). I To sociobiologists, evolutionary morality is ~p,,- ~1 based on an unconscious need to multiply our own genes, to build group cohesion in order to win wars. We should not look down on our warlike, cruel nature but rather understand its success when coupled with "making Sociobiology and E.O. Wilson nice" with some other individuals or groups.