The human lineage history goes back somewhere between two hundred thousand and eight million years.1 For 95 to 99.9% of this history, depending on how far you believe it goes back, we lived in small band hunter gatherer groups. Kin groups. Tribes, if you will.
Take a moment and consider the human infant. Think about one of us at three or four months of age, hairless little monkeys that we are, and consider how hard it is to keep us alive. Or, said conversely, how profoundly vulnerable we are. Modern parents, of which I am one, spend considerable energy and resources keeping our infants alive, and we have refrigerators, climate control, and vaccines. We have Whole Foods and department stores. We can order diapers. We don’t have to burn fires to keep our caves warm, or find all the calories required to keep us alive each day. We can close the door at night and the other apex predators stay outside the door. We can buy baby food in a can if we want to: we don’t have to pre-chew it and feed it to them unless we want to. If you wanted to design a species for easy survival, you would not design a human. We are, at birth, not even fully cooked. We are born when we are because our heads are so large that if pregnancy lasted longer, we would not be able to pass through the birth canal. Human infants aren’t fully cooked until about 18 months after they are born. As evidence for this, I submit to you that a baby’s skull doesn’t fully close until that point.2 You have windows in the top of your head until you are a year-and-a-half old. Ancestrally, we spent the first 9 to 18 months in a sort of external womb, what Dr. Ashley Montagu calls ‘a womb with a view.’3 We were held, skin-to-skin, on the body of a caregiver, often the mother. Keeping us alive was not easy. It is somewhat miraculous that we are here at all. We lived in kin groups because we needed to. It was necessary for our survival.
Although our ancestors in deep time experienced extreme physical stress, and most of us could probably not endure the amount of physical effort that this ancestral life required (our ancestors were basically all extreme endurance athletes), they experienced almost none of the social stress that is a defining feature of modernity. Rather their lives were intensely social and collaborative. Watch a troop of bonobos moving through a forest, and you have a sense from our simian cousins of what our ancestral pattern was probably like. Our ancestral origins are of deep sociality. In deep time we did not experience the social stresses of loneliness, isolation, or disconnection.
I have no way of knowing this, but doesn't it look for all the world like they are going to study the beauty of that waterlily?
Why are we modern people experiencing this level of social stress? Why has this tribal/ collaborative lifestyle broken down so completely? Why are we so defended? So ill? So alone?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Neurobiology of Connection to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.