"
Glyptodon
old drawing" by
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The Wonderful Paleo Art of Heinrich Harder. Licensed under
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Study shows that modern hunter-gatherer tribes operate on
egalitarian basis, suggesting that inequality was an aberration that
came with the advent of agriculture
A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes,
men and women tend to have equal influence on where their groups
lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that
sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been
the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history.
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University
College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that
hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was
only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to
accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
Dyble says the latest findings suggest that equality between the
sexes may have been a survival advantage and played an important
role in shaping human society and evolution. “Sexual equality is one
of a important suite of changes to social organisation, including
things like pair-bonding, our big, social brains, and language, that
distinguishes humans,” he said. “It’s an important one that hasn’t
really been highlighted before.”
Related:
How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals
The study, published in the journal
Science , set out to investigate the apparent paradox that while
people in hunter-gatherer societies show strong preferences for
living with family members, in practice the groups they live in tend
to comprise few closely related individuals.
The scientists collected genealogical data from two
hunter-gatherer populations, one in the Congo and one in the
Philippines, including kinship relations, movement between camps and
residence patterns, through hundreds of interviews. In both cases,
people tend to live in groups of around 20, moving roughly every 10
days and subsisting on hunted game, fish and gathered fruit,
vegetables and honey.
The scientists constructed a computer model to simulate the
process of camp assortment, based on the assumption that people
would chose to populate an empty camp with their close kin:
siblings, parents and children.
When only one sex had influence over the process, as is typically
the case in male-dominated pastoral or horticultural societies,
tight hubs of related individuals emerged. However, the average
number of related individuals is predicted to be much lower when men
and women have an equal influence – closely matching what was seen
in the populations that were studied.
“When only men have influence over who they are living with, the
core of any community is a dense network of closely related men with
the spouses on the periphery,” said Dyble. “If men and women decide,
you don’t get groups of four or five brothers living together.”
Sexual equality is one of a important suite of changes to
social organisation, including things like pair-bonding, our
big, social brains, and language, that distinguishes humans.
It’s an important one that hasn’t really been highlighted before
The authors argue that sexual equality may have proved an
evolutionary advantage for early human societies, as it would have
fostered wider-ranging social networks and closer cooperation
between unrelated individuals. “It gives you a far more expansive
social network with a wider choice of mates, so inbreeding would be
less of an issue,” said Dyble. “And you come into contact with more
people and you can share innovations, which is something that humans
do par excellence.”
Dr Tamas David-Barratt, a behavioural scientist at the University
of Oxford, agreed: “This is a very neat result,” he said. “If you’re
able to track your kin further away, you’d be able to have a much
broader network. All you’d need to do is get together every now and
then for some kind of feast.”
The study suggests that it was only with the dawn of agriculture,
when people were able to accumulate resources for the first time,
that an imbalance emerged. “Men can start to have several wives and
they can have more children than women,” said Dyble. “It pays more
for men to start accumulating resources and becomes favourable to
form alliances with male kin.”
Dyble said that egalitarianism may even have been one of the
important factors that distinguished our ancestors from our primate
cousins. “Chimpanzees live in quite aggressive, male-dominated
societies with clear hierarchies,” he said. “As a result, they just
don’t see enough adults in their lifetime for technologies to be
sustained.”
The findings appear to be supported by qualitative observations
of the hunter-gatherer groups in the study. In the Philippines
population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and
while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women
contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups,
monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare.
Andrea Migliano, of University College London and the paper’s
senior author, said: “Sex equality suggests a scenario where unique
human traits, such as cooperation with unrelated individuals, could
have emerged in our evolutionary past.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/early-men-and-women-were-equal-say-scientists/