Page 472 - Cultures and Organizations

The Evolution of Cultures 437

ficult to find than for stone tools. Fire must in turn have allowed them the
freedom to spend time socializing and communicating in relative safety
from predators. Cooking food also allows for extraction of more nutri-

ents, and this benefit helped larger bands survive. While gathered around
the fi re, they may have invented and gradually perfected skills for laugh-
ing, singing, and dancing as ways of increasing group harmony. Finally,

mastering fire is eminently handy when climates change erratically and
cold winters set in every other century. Besides fire, animal skins probably

started being used as elementary clothing during cold spells. Our body
lice are related to our head lice, not to our pubic lice—body lice must have

thrived on animal skins with fine hairs worn inside out, not on coarse body
hair. 9
Actually, not just humans but all mammals that lived through the ice
10
ages developed larger brains, according to fossil fi nds. Apparently, they
had to become clever to avoid dying out. Anatomically modern human skel-
etons occur in the fossil record from about that time. The people of those
times buried their dead but were not conspicuous for creative skills. Simple
hand axes and scrapers are the most advanced technologies recovered from
them. They nevertheless managed to survive in various habitats, some of
them under ice age conditions—so, they must have been respectably clever
and good at collaborating.
Although evidence is scant, paleoanthropologists tend to agree that
during this period our ancestors lived in small primary groups of dozens of
individuals who gathered periodically in larger secondary groups of a few
11
hundred or, in times of plenty, a few thousand. These secondary groups
were the cultural and reproductive unit. The primary groups were small

enough to find food throughout the year, while the secondary groups were
large enough to allow for maintenance of genetic variation and to buffer

fluctuations in birthrate between boys and girls. The secondary group

might also fight other cultural groups or might exchange genetic mate-
rial with them, as can happen through voluntary migration, rape, theft of
females and children, or tolerance of a lone youngster from another band.
As with genes, inventions could travel in this way. Still, such travel would
have been slow, and favorable genetic mutations would have been rare,
since their occurrence is proportional to the total population—and that
total number was in the order of hundreds of thousands.
Modern humans throughout the world have descended from migra-
tions out of Africa that started around seventy thousand years ago and