"It takes a village to raise a child" is an African proverb that means that an entire community of people must interact with children for those children to experience and grow in a safe and healthy environment.
Reproduction is right at the centre of evolution and therefore our family structure (reproductive mode) says a lot about our evolutionary origins. In our ancestral tribes we can see some contrasting patterns:
Hadza hunter-gatherers | Datoga pastoralists |
Egalitarian family organization | Hierarchical family organization, uneven distribution of wealth |
Women are treated as equals | Women are subordinate and often beaten |
Children are free to play and learn | Child labour, children sometimes beaten |
Alloparenting (the whole band is involved) | Close kin take care |
Low reproductive rate (every four years) | High reproductive rate (every two years) |
Monogamy (mostly) | Polygamy |
exogamy | endogamy |
shifted towards reciprocal altruism | Shifted towards kin-selected altruism |
Occasionally Hadza women get married to a Datoga man, however they frequently return to their own tribe after some time. Datogas as Hadzabe are simply on too different wavelengths.
If the above table seems vaguely familiar, it is for a good reason. It reflects democratic liberal vs conservative social values when it comes to family. The left-right spectrum is very much divided by different values and attitudes when it comes to family.
Liberals (hunter-gatherer types) | Conservatives (farmer-herder types) |
egalitarian | hierarchical |
Mother is the centre of the family | Father is the head of the family (patriarchal) |
Pro-choice | Pro-life |
Upset when violence is shown to kids | Upset when sexuality is shown to kids |
No preference for progeny’s gender | preference for male progeny |
Children are more likely to be talked into complying, physical punishment of children seen as inhumane | Children get punished when disobedient, physical punishment of children often welcome |
Goal of education is independence | Goal of education is integration |
With the shift from foraging to food production (farming and herding) gender inequality arose due the inequality in provisioning, which had been roughly equal among hutner(male)-gatherers(female - even though these roles weren’t always clear-cut among foragers).
Farmer-herder altruism was shifted more to the kin-selected side than forager altruism, which is shifted somewhat towards reciprocal altruism. What followed was a cascade of hierarchical relationships:
Men were valued more than women
- Sons were valued more than daughters
- First-borns were valued more than later-borns (primogeniture)
- Close family were more valued than distant family
This inegalitarian shift opened up the possibility of a hierarchical society with people assuming their position in a hierarchy and following rules without questioning them too much.
“[…] when the Spanish began their conquest of South America, one of their earliest settlements was at the site of modern Buenos Aires. The settlement was a colonial failure and soon abandoned because the local hunter-gatherers refused to work for the Spanish, even under extreme duress. When the Spanish ventured farther inland and encountered agriculturalists in Paraguay, they easily subjugated the local people by conquering and replacing the aristocracy […]” (from: William von Hippel The Social Leap)
Of course, the agriculturalist would initially resist, but once being defeated it was easier for them to live in a non-egalitarian society.
We are all to some extent kin-selected. A phenomenon that can be seen in people’s wills: close kin gets the lion’s share, more distant kin are left much less. However, the transition to food production increased the effect of kin selection as power and property were inherited together with genes. Power and property can be seen as “extended phenotype” (cf. Richard Dawkins). This inheritance pattern created nepotism (close kin) and tribalism (extended kin) as well as endogamy. Endogamy is biologically somewhat disadvantageous due to the higher risk of inheriting two deleterious alleles. However, this disadvantage is more than compensated for by the inheritance of power and possession, which increases the male’s reproductive potential.
In Our Political Nature (2013) Avi Tuschman writes
Gender inequality is also much higher among herders than among farmers. This increase likely occurs because pastoralists tend to live in more barren regions. These resource-poor environments make children even more reliant on inheritance or dowries from their parents.
The probability of second cousin marriage is highest in countries with historically high pastoralist economies as well as Islamic religion (which originated among pastoralists).
Inequality and higher endogamy are only two effects of early food-producing economies. Another effect is male control over female fertility.
Extremely high fertility is not simply a matter of birth-control technology not existing, but rather a consequence of gender inequality. After all, abortifacient plants, abstinence, lactational contraception, and infanticide had existed from the days of more egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, which had lower birth rates. Gender inequality, then, is why Afghanistan—where one cannot easily see the faces of women in public—has one of the highest fertility rates in the world.
Since greater gender inequality reproduces an ethnic group more quickly, ethnocentrists favor relatively more of it. Within groups, conservatives and liberals argue over this topic. Between nations, the liberal developed countries seek to promote gender equality in more conservative agro-pastoral countries with higher birth rates.
Pro-life is another way of controlling female fertility. Pro-choice has always been a forager mindset. Infanticide isn’t uncommon among foragers. As cruel as it may sound, it’s the optimal choice from an evolutionary point of view:
If a baby among the !Kung hunter-gatherers of southern Africa receives a younger sibling at the age of four, then the older child has a 90 percent chance of surviving childhood. However, if a !Kung mother has an additional child when she already has a two-year-old baby, then the likelihood that the two-year-old will die during childhood is over 70 percent.
Channeling more resources to first-born sons in agrarian societies reduces the risk of mortality as well as diluting resources (power and possessions). These inborn tendencies for the preference of sons is responsible for the extremely high female infanticide rates among Chinese (high percentage of farmer types) after the introduction of the one-child policy.
In conclusion, the transition from foraging to farming lead to
- Social inequalities that had their origin in familial inequalities
- Higher control of female reproduction by men and higher reproductive rates
Western societies often seem “progressive” when it comes to family structure and values. However, What we see in western societies is a regression to hunter-gatherer values. Foragers types (“progressives”) within western societies have been working ceaselessly to foragerize the farmer societies in which they lived. Among these “revolutions” when it comes to families are
- More egalitarian status for women
- Legalization of abortion
- Abolition of child labour
- Abolition of corporal punishment for children
- More liberal values and practices in education
- More exogamy, interethnic marriages
One thing forager types haven’t been able to restore is alloparenting. Nowadays women bear the brunt of parenting more than ever in nuclear and single-parent families. These kinds of families hurt both farmer and forager types, which can be seen in below replacement level fertility rates. But it hurts forager types even more. With little support in child-rearing, a lot of forager types women do not want to have children. And when they do they are more likely to suffer from postpartum depression.
Read more in my book Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists : How three tribes have been shaping civilization since the Neolithic
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