Human Nature - Red in Tooth and Claw?

Eggshell Beads Made by Hunter-Gatherers 33,000 Years Ago Used as a Social Network

Ashley Strickland

CNN

March 10, 2020

Above is a link to a good report on recent archaeological evidence about human prehistory. Below are excerpts of key conclusions from that report. These findings are the results of only one of many excavations over many years and at many places around the world.

“Modern hunter-gatherer societies, like those in southern Africa's Kalahari Desert, use ostrich eggshell beads to begin and maintain a relationship with other groups. The process is called hxaro, ‘kindling and cementing bonds within and between communities,’ according to a new study. The word hxaro has become synonymous with ‘beadwork’ and ‘gifts.’“So it stands to reason that the network exchanging them has a time-honored foundation.”

...

“‘Humans are just outlandishly social animals, and that goes back to [sharing this] information that would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago and earlier,’ said Stewart. ‘Was Ostrich eggshell beads and the jewelry made from them basically acted like Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter 'likes,' simultaneously affirming connections to exchange partners while alerting others to the status of those relationships.’”

...

“Stewart also believes the beads were exchanged during a time of climate shifts, between 25,000 and 59,000 years ago. This way, they could turn to each other when the weather worsened, sharing and pooling resources. Not only were the beads shared and exchanged over large distances, but also long periods of time. It hints at why modern humans survived.”

...

“‘These exchange networks could be used for information on resources, the condition of landscapes, of animals, plant foods, other people and perhaps marriage partners.’"

Archaeological artifact extrapolation and inference, and ethnographic present analogy are not direct evidence of prehistoric behavior. However, they do provide insight into how human groups related to each other before the beginning of sedentary agriculture and urbanism.

We in the West like to think of human nature as “red in tooth and claw,”* as the 19th Century Social Darwinistic saying goes. That is, this thinking goes, we were brutes until we settled down and became civilized. Before that, many of us like to think, we were dirty, tribalistic, cutthroat competitors.

Something I natter on often is my firm belief that our true human nature is cultural not biological - one of learned beliefs and behaviors supporting cooperation, and conflict avoidance and amelioration. This is who we are at bottom and were for the vast majority of the 200,000 years of human existence. We changed relatively recently, beginning between 10-15,000 years ago.

We turned away from a face-to-face cooperative way of relating to each other when we started growing food, amassing surpluses, living in increasingly dense settlements, and succumbing to authoritarian rulers and high gods.

No, I’m neither suffering from noble savage delusion nor claiming that hunter-gatherer life was peace, love and brother-sisterhood all the time.

Our prehistoric preference for cooperation over conflict was sometimes challenged by selfish, violent deviations from the norm, within and between groups. But these deviations were the exception, not the rule. Had they been the norm, our true nature, we would have become extinct long before now.

The origin of notions of our red in tooth and claw nature is not to be found in human prehistory or in our neurons and genes. It’s to be found in our history in the emergent exalted beliefs, values and visions of our greatness, and how much greater we could become through violence.

Look for it in the history of our becoming civilized in the Middle East and after that modern in Europe. Red in tooth in claw has since spread to the rest of the world. The present global surge of uber-nationalism, populism, and autocracy is its current expression. Its origin is not in our prehistory, bodies or the faux prehistoric ‘moral foundations’ of our imaginings. 

My latest book coming out in a couple of weeks covers  what went wrong, what it has led to, and what we are going to be forced to do after Social Darwinistic capitalism fails, from a number of angles.  



Sooner or later it will be time to go local and cooperative, again. This will be difficult and ugly. Salvaging or turning our modernity Titanic, laden with both the good and insane ideological baggage and energy of our greatness, for the survival of great numbers of humankind, may or may not be possible.

We variously dig or lean in to do what we can, and wait.

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* “Red in tooth and claw” comes from Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850. The quotation comes in Canto 56 (it is a very long poem) and refers to man:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

'Tooth and claw' was already in use as a phrase denoting wild nature by Tennyson's day; for example, this piece from The Hagerstown Mail, March 1837:

"Hereupon, the beasts, enraged at the humbug, fell upon him tooth and claw."

A.H.H. was Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam and the poet used the elegy to pose questions about the apparent conflict between love as the basis of the Christian religion and the callousness of nature. If nature is purposeless and heartless, how can we believe in creation's final law? But, as a Christian, how could he not?

The wide-ranging poem didn't attempt to provide an answer, but did become part of the debate over the major scientific and theological concern of Victorian thinkers - Charles Darwin's theories on natural selection, as expressed in The Origin of Species, 1859. On into the 20th century, the enthusiastic Darwinist Richard Dawkins used 'red in tooth and claw' in The Selfish Gene, to summarize the behaviour of all living things which arise out of the survival of the fittest doctrine. – Phrase Finder, www.phrases.org.uk