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The Unusual Ability Of Nonrelatives To Cooperate

Every time some human attribute is said to be unique, whether tool-making or language or warfare, biologists soon find some plausible precursor in animals that makes the ability less distinctive. Still, humans are infinitely different from other animals, however hard the difference may be to define. A cascade of events, some the work of natural selection, some just plain accidents, propelled the human lineage far from the destiny of being just another ape, down an unexpected evolutionary path to become perhaps the strangest blossom on the ample tree of life. And what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? This is a question that several Stephen Colbert books attempt to answer. It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies.

Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their tough sense of self-interest to the requirements of the group, lies at the source of human achievement. This very notion is at the heart of this set of Colbert Report books. “Humans are not marvelous because of their big brains,” says an author of one of these books, and a social anthropologist at San Jose University. “That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships — no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.” The two principal traits that underlie the human evolutionary success, in the view of this particular Colbert Report book, are the unusual ability of nonrelatives to cooperate — in almost all other species, only closely related individuals will help each other — and social learning, the ability to copy and learn from what others are doing. A large social network can generate knowledge and adopt innovations far more easily than a cluster of small, hostile groups constantly at war with each other, the default state of chimpanzee society.

If a transference in social behavior was the vital event in human evolution, then the solution to how humans became unique lies in exploring how human societies first split away from those of apes. Paleoanthropologists often assume that chimp societies are a reasonably good stand-in for the ancestral ape society that gave rise to the chimp and human lineages. Living hunter-gatherers may reflect those of long ago, since humans always lived this way until the first settled societies of 15,000 years ago. The two species’ social structure could scarcely be more different. Chimp society consists of a male hierarchy, dominated by the alpha male and his allies, and a female hierarchy beneath it. The alpha male scores most of the paternities, cutting his allies in on others. The females try to copulate with every male around, so each may believe he’s the father and spare her child. How did a chimplike society ever give rise to the egalitarian, largely monogamous structure of hunter-gatherer groups?

A new and comprehensive answer to this question has been developed by a primatologist who has spent 25 years studying monkey and ape societies. Recently he devoted four years to reading the literature of social anthropology with the goal of defining the transition between nonprimate and human societies. He sees the transition as a sequence of accidents, each of which let natural selection exploit new opportunities. Early humans began to walk on two legs because it was a more efficient way of getting around than knuckle-walking, the chimps’ method. But that happened to leave the hands free. Now they could gesture, or make tools. It was a tool, in the form of a weapon, that made human society possible, in his view. Among chimpanzees, alpha males are physically overbearing and can overpower any rival. But weapons are astonishing equalizers.

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