Page 469 - Cultures and Organizations

434 IMPLICATIONS

provided survival value to good collaboration skills. This in turn has driven
the evolution of culture as a mechanism for building and maintaining the
moral circle.

Five Million to One Million Years Ago:
Lonely Planet

For millions of years our ancestors lived in groups of a few dozen as hunt-

ers, gatherers, or both. About five million years ago the lineage of our
ancestors split from that of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, and these
ancestral hominins began leaving forests for savanna habitats. This transi-
tion made walking on two legs a good idea, because it affords a better view
of prey and predators in high grass. Once on two legs, our ancestors could
use their hands to carry things, which was an advantageous evolutionary
step that they did not retrace when ice ages began to occur around 2.6
million years ago. The comparatively stable, well-watered, warm climates
during the earlier part of this period had made it advantageous also for
them to gradually lose their body hair and acquire the capacity for sweat-
ing. Evidence for loss of body hair comes from parasites: humans have head
lice and body lice that are closely related but pubic lice that are thought to
have split around 3.3 million years ago from gorilla lice—so, this may have
been a time at which our ancestors started to kill gorillas, and it must have
been a time at which they had separate head and pubic hair. 4
During this period the total hominin population was always modest in
number, perhaps in the tens of thousands, and everybody lived in Africa,
surrounded by animals that hunted them or that they hunted. Whether any
hunting was done by populations older than Homo erectus 1.8 million years
ago is still being debated, but the fact that today’s chimpanzees can hunt in

groups suggests that early hominins might have done it too. Whatever the
case, all African animals either died out or coevolved with their hunters—
to become hard to catch. Based on analogies with apes and with recent
hunter-gatherer populations, it is thought that our hominin ancestors lived
in territorial bands of no more than a few dozen individuals, because there
never was more food in one place that could have sustained a larger popula-
tion. These groups in all probability exchanged young females, as do goril-
5
las, chimpanzees, and bonobos today. Indeed, in most human societies of
today the wives are “given away,” move to the home of their in-laws, and
take on a new name—not the husbands.