Page 480 - Cultures and Organizations

The Evolution of Cultures 445

exploit less favored areas by herding stock while moving around. The pres-
sures on herders were different from those on sedentary farmers. Herds
could easily be stolen. The cattle could walk away with the thief to his
home territory and be kept alive for later use. One would expect that in
order to avoid widespread theft, herders had to be both entirely trustwor-
thy within their own groups—involving heavy sanctions against offend-
ers—and considerably less trusting toward outsiders than hunters. Here
again, path dependency is crucial: there are large variations among groups.

Trust or distrust in a group is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy. A cycle
of stealing and revenge, once begun, is hard to interrupt. Children learn
basic patterns of whom to trust and who can be stolen from when they
are quite young. So, uncertainty- avoiding cultures would be likely among
herders. Regular theft between or among tribes would be accompanied
by strong prohibitions against misbehaving within the in-group and by a
culture of armed vigilance. Herders guard; they do not sweat and toil to the
degree that farmers do. Guarding could be associated with a proud, monu-
mentalist culture. Today, in pastoralist areas of Africa, mutual cattle raids
and violence between tribes are still endemic. They are an understandable
response to resource scarcity in a world of strong in-group loyalty and
out-group suspicion. 21

Agriculture also had genetic influences. Early herders only ate their
cattle. Eventually, they found out how to feed themselves by drawing blood
from the cattle without killing them, which was more effective because
the cattle could go on converting grass into blood. Around 8,500 years
ago they started to drink milk. This practice enabled them to get still

more energy from their animals. At first very few adults tolerated milk.
This is because lactose intolerance has evolved among almost all mammals,
probably as a way to ensure that older offspring do not compete with new

babies for milk. By now, though, genetic variants for lactose tolerance have
become common, an example of how behavioral and genetic evolution can
go hand in hand. Small genetic differences in only a few alleles (an allele

is a variant of a gene) can have large influences. Mutations in the gene
that allows us to produce lactase, the enzyme that digests milk, have been
selected for since about 8,500 years ago, when our ancestors started to
keep cattle, as just explained. Apparently, milk-tolerant individuals have
produced more offspring, thus spreading the trait. Today close to 100 per-

cent of northern Europeans are lactose tolerant, which testifies to a long
history of drinking cattle milk.