Sex at Dawn полностью

If both chimps and bonobos make war, maybe we are “dazed survivors”of a “5-million-year habit of lethal aggression” after all. But a closer look reveals that it’s the journalists who are a bit dazed. Researchers witnessed ten attempts to hunt monkeys over five years of observing the bonobos in question. The bonobos were successful three times, sharing the monkey meat among the hunters—mixed groups of males and females.

A brief reality check for science journalists:

• Researchers have long known and reported that bonobos regularly hunt and eat meat, generally small

jungle antelopes known as duikers—as well as squirrels, insects, and grubs.

• The evolutionary line leading to humans, chimps, and bonobos split from that leading to monkeys about thirty million years ago. Chimps and bonobos, in other words, are as closely related to monkeys as we are.

• Young monkeys are not “children.”

• Monkey meat is on the menu at fancy Chinese restaurants and jungle barbecues in many parts of the world.

• Tens of thousands of monkeys, young and old, are sacrificed in research laboratories throughout the world annually.

So, are humans also “at war” with monkeys?

Nothing sells newspapers like headlines of “WAR!,” and no doubt “CANNIBALISTIC HIPPIE ORGY WAR!” sells even more, but one species hunting and eating another species is hardly “war”; it’s lunch. That bonobos and monkeys may look similar to untrained eyes is irrelevant. When a pack of wolves or coyotes attacks a stray dog, is that “war”? We’ve seen hawks pluck pigeons out of the sky. War?

Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid, or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends. On a nearly empty planet, with food and shelter distributed widely, avoiding conflict would have been an easy, attractive option. Under the conditions typical of ancestral environments, human beings would have had much more to lose than to gain from warring against one another. The evidence—both physical and circumstantial—points to a human prehistory in which our ancestors made far more love than war.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

PSALMS 90:10

Strange but true: The average height expectancy of prehistoric humans was about three feet, so a four-foot tall man was considered a giant.

Does that fact alter your image of prehistory? Are you picturing a diminutive race of bonsai people living in mini-caves, chasing rabbits into holes, cowering in fear of foxes, being carried off by hawks? Does this cause you to rethink what a challenge a mammoth hunt must have been for our half-pint ancestors? Does it make you feel even luckier to be living today, when our superior diet and sanitation have doubled the average person’s height expectancy?

Well, don’t get carried away. While it is technically true that the average “height expectancy” of prehistoric men was about three feet, it’s a misleading sort of truth. Like overconfident declarations about the universality of marriage, poverty, and war, it’s the sort of assertion that sows confusion and results in a harvest of misleading data.

Take the average height of a full-grown man living in prehistoric times (using skeletal remains as a guide): about six feet tall (72 inches). Then take the average size of a prehistoric infant’s skeleton (let’s say about 20 inches). Then extrapolate from the ratio of infant-to-adult skeletons at known archaeological burial sites and presume that in general, for every three people who lived to adulthood, seven died as infants. Thus, owing to the high rate of infant mortality, average human height in prehistory was (3 x 72) + (7 x 20) ^ 10 = 35.6 inches. Roughly three feet.¹

Absurd? Yes. Misleading? Yup. Statistically accurate? Well, kinda.