The morality of our inner hunter-gatherer, farmer and citizen
Our morality is layered: every phase of human history has left its mark. Culturally, we still have layers of hunter-gatherer, farmer, and citizen in our morality.
In this series we study human morality to understand our moral judgments: how do we distinguish right from wrong in human behaviour. Toleration is about allowing things we disapprove of. Only when we understand why we find some things wrong can we understand why we can sometimes allow them.
Philosophers, in particular, are concerned with the study of morality. But other disciplines can also inform us. Before we let the philosophers speak in the following articles, it is the turn of those other disciplines: historians, anthropologists, biologists, et cetera. In this article, we are going to look at how human morality has evolved over the past tens of thousands of years. We will also apply knowledge that we have gained in the previous two newsletters: about our genetic morality, and about moral evolutionary game theory.
A very short timeline of history
First, let's take a bird’s eye view of human history.
The last common ancestors of great apes and humans lived about 6 million years ago. From an evolutionary point of view, the distance between humans and their closest relatives is therefore millions of years old. 300,000 years ago the homo sapiens saw the light of life, and a little later also the Neanderthaler.
Our ancestors were still wandering hunter-gatherers on the savannas of Africa until about 50,000 years ago, when gradually the population began to spread all over the Earth. Homo sapiens encountered other species here and there on Earth. Those largely lost out, but on average we still carry a few percent of the DNA of Neanderthals and other species with us. So there was also some mixing.
Humans started farming about 10,000 years ago. The effects of agriculture were drastic. Settlements sprang up. Ownership started to play a greater role: ownership of the land, but also, for example, of the products of the land and of the surrounding living space and the instruments for the harvest. The food yield of a piece of land became much greater, so that more people lived in a smaller area. As a result, the group size increased. Wars between tribes also became more violent. If small itinerant hunter-gatherer groups came into each other's way, it led to fighting, but there was little else to lose; the loser could simply move on to another area. But in the case of ownership of land, cattle and supplies, the struggle could be much more fierce; simply packing your bags wasn’t easy. Agricultural products also became tradable, creating closer contact with neighbouring communities.
The first cities soon emerged, but the phenomenon of the city began to become a normal form of life in several civilisations about 5,000 years ago. Writing came into existence at about the same time.
We end the historical overview in this article with the Axial age, mid first millennium BCE. That term was coined by the German historian Karl Jaspers in 1949. He had noticed that Kǒngzǐ (Confucius) in China, Buddha in India, Sokrates in Greece, and the Jewish monotheism of the Babylonian captivity all left their mark in the same era. Jaspers saw this as a crucial transition from tribal and archaic societies to societies in which intellectual movements questioned political authority. Thinkers went in search of purity, justice and more universal explanations. Several factors had an influence: widespread use of writing, the expansion of city-states, better educated citizens, the use of iron in warfare, the development of long trade routes. In these more advanced societies, philosophy began to leave its mark on human morality. That seems to me to be an appropriate end of this review. In the articles that follow, the philosophers will have their say.
Innate human morality
In the first episode of this series, we got an idea of moral modules that we are born with:
I call them modules, because they are, as it were, themes that can be combined in all kinds of ways. For example, an ownership module doesn't mean you want to have as much ownership as possible, or that you don't want to share anything. The modules also come into contact with each other: the distribution module and the ownership module together can lead to all kinds of arrangements of sharing property.
There are also all kinds of other factors that help determine how the modules are being applied. For example, there are differences in personality: for example, one person is more dominant than the other, or more inclined to compassion. And of course there are major cultural differences worldwide. To some extent, animals can also develop culture. But human culture is immensely more complex, more transferable, and has a major influence on our behaviour.
You see that specific human moral modules have not been filled in. That was on purpose. Simply because we don't know if they exist. Of course we do have all kinds of biological differences with great apes. But does that mean that we also have more innate modules than, say, the great apes? The answer is speculative.
Compared to great apes, our brains have gradually increased in size. There is a theory that children were born earlier than before due to our heads getting bigger and bigger. If the mother gave birth to the child later, the head would no longer have fit properly through the birth canal. Because children were born earlier, they needed protection from the mother for longer, as well as additional protection from the group. Feelings of responsibility and empathy are said to be more strongly developed as a result.
With the growth of their brains, people also gradually developed the ability to oversee the long-term consequences of their actions, and to restrain their natural impulses for that reason. Rationality is a typical human characteristic, with immense moral implications.
Other typical human characteristics are, among others, language, art and religion. I wouldn't call them moral modules, but their influence on our morality is quite significant, as we shall see shortly.
Human cultural morality
How has human morality evolved from our spread across the earth (50,000 years ago) to the Axial age, about 2,500 years ago? Biologically — apart from genetic mixing — not much can have happened in 50,000 years, if you compare that to the millions of years in which our distant ancestors succeeded each other in generations of great apes. In a genetic sense, we hardly differ from our ancestors of 50,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers; biologically, we still are. This is how our brain is structured, and for example our digestive system.
But as biological hunter-gatherers, we have gone through a number of cultural revolutions. The most significant was the Agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. Between the Agricultural revolution and the Axial age, cities gradually emerged, so did written language, religious development took place, trade increased, and more complex, larger-scale forms of government developed. One might call that the urban revolution.
The morality of human hunter-gatherers
Hunter-gatherers lived (and still live) in groups, bands, an extended family. The group size is roughly thirty to fifty people. Hunter-gatherers still live here and there in inhospitable, sparsely populated areas on Earth. Anthropologists are quite successful in mapping the morality of this form of society.
Hunter-gatherer societies show great cultural differences, but there are also similarities. This is mainly about the similarities. The already mentioned moral modules form the basis.
Kin selection
As a rule, all members of the band are related to each other. Favouring family members and group members therefore coincide. The behaviour of all members is aimed at the survival and prosperity of the band. Cultural customs, norms and values are geared to this, taking into account the form of society and the ecological conditions.
There are often complicated constructions to prevent inbreeding within a group. For example, brides can be exchanged with a neighbouring band.
The elderly occupy a special position. From an evolutionary point of view, the role of the elderly is special: they have already played their role in reproduction, and they also contribute little to hunting and harvesting, so what value do they represent? This value is assessed very differently in different cultures.
For example, in New Britain, an island off Micronesia, widows are strangled after the death of their husband. Widows apparently get in the way from an evolutionary point of view.
On the other hand, the elderly can lend a helping hand in raising children, or use their wisdom and experience for the benefit of the group. There are also many civilisations where the elderly are virtually untouchable and get everything they need in their old age. That is not necessarily because the elderly there contribute more to the survival of the group; it might also be an element of compassion or reciprocity.
Out-groups
Often there are neighbouring bands with family relations. With those, relations are usually peaceful. But other surrounding bands are generally viewed with suspicion. There are often incidents, unexplained destruction or illnesses that are attributed to the neighbouring band. The most stable form of coexistence is that of a kind of truce. But it can also be over just like that: skirmishes and wars are never far away.
Strangers should not show up without being introduced by a common acquaintance. Many missionaries and anthropologists have learned that lesson through trial and error. The basic attitude of a hunter-gatherer band is xenophobic and violent towards outsiders.
Property
Not all hunter-gatherers live completely nomadic lives. Most bands have a vast but fixed territory, or they have different territories depending on the season or ecological conditions. Almost all of them exhibit territorial behaviour: do not enter their territory uninvited, or you will suffer. This is of course especially true if an outsider appropriates stuff from another band, or destroys it.
Distribution
Hunter-gatherers are mainly collectivists. The proceeds from the hunt or from the harvest are usually shared equally within the group.
As hunter-gatherers move around less, there is a greater difference between rich and poor within the group. Not all food is eaten immediately, but stored. More personal items are collected and decorated, and wealth passes from parents to children.
Hierarchy
The hierarchy within itinerant bands is slight. The emergence of hierarchy is even actively suppressed. For example, good hunters should not get too excited, then the group will turn against them, or they will be laughed at. There is often a kind of a headman, but that role is mainly symbolic. Decisions are usually made by consensus.
As hunter-gatherers move less, the hierarchy within the group increases. This can result in hereditary leadership, and can even lead to slavery within the group.
Reciprocity and retribution
Retribution of good and evil plays a central role in hunter-gatherer morality.
An example is giving gifts. In many civilisations it is good practice to give precious gifts to members of another band, if it is convenient. This also includes the arranged marriage of a fertile daughter or sister. But a gift received never comes without obligations. It is remembered. The recipient is indebted to the giver, and everyone knows it. As long as the gift has not been matched with a gift of equal value, the giver's band visits regularly, for socialising, but also to implicitly remind the recipients of their debt.
As with gifts, so with loss. The geographer Jared Diamond described in his great book The world until yesterday (2012) a car accident in which a child from another tribe dies, through no fault of the driver. The driver flees to the police station after the accident, and has to hide until the matter is settled. The child's family could just go on a warpath, and it could easily turn into a feud. A tactful approach is required. The victim's family is seeking redress from the driver's employer. That employer is in danger too. In this case, the family is not unreasonable, and mediators are appointed. After a compensation has been negotiated, the employer must go to the next of kin to extensively express his regret and sympathy. This case ended well, but the coin could just as well have rolled the other way, and then it could have ended in a series of bloody retributions.
What retaliation has in common in most civilisations is that obligations arising from it are borne by the whole band or family. If an individual has a debt of honour, everyone who maintains a relationship with him can be held accountable for it. Thus, individual actions very quickly have collective consequences. The band shares both joys and sorrows. This way everyone is constantly aware of the consequences of their behaviour for the rest of the group.
Compassion
We are specifically talking about compassion for fellow human beings who are suffering or in need, who are not part of the in-group, and with whom there is no conditional cooperation. Just as compassion has an erratic pattern in the animal kingdom, empathy or compassion in hunter-gatherer bands is not structurally observed. As an outsider in need, one shouldn't count on anything.
Neighbouring bands in need are helped (as long as they are not at war), but that help is conditional. If the roles are reversed next time (and that chance is not imaginary), help is counted on.
Yet hunter-gatherer bands can be hospitable, maintaining generous and amicable ties with outsiders. Anthropologists and missionaries can relate to this. It is not entirely clear to what extent a favour is expected in return for this.
All in all, compassion remains a wonderful thing. Frans de Waal is a serious scientist, and he has well documented the compassion of great apes. The Economo group consistently shows compassion, also for other species. Humans have an irrepressible tendency to compassion for suffering animals. And in many modern cultures (particularly those influenced by Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), people are often selflessly generous and merciful to unknown people in need. But in anthropological research on hunter-gatherers, unconditional compassion for outsiders is hardly ever documented, unless a favour is expected in return. Is compassion culturally determined after all?
Friendships
Everyone within a band will get along better with some members than with others. But the relationships within a band are mainly determined by relationships, marriages and who you grew up with as a child. Where in modern society, we have an almost unlimited possibility to choose our friends, a band member has that possibility much less. Friendships within a band therefore play a minor role. Outside of their own band they theoretically have more opportunities to make friends. But bands usually live quite isolated lives and it is not always easy with neighbouring bands. The opportunities to make friends outside the band are therefore limited. And the need is often not that great either.
Diamond described how he introduced Yabu, a New Guinean assistant of his, to a British schoolteacher who lived a village away. The two got along very well. At the end of the meeting, the teacher invited Yabu to visit him when he was in the area. Yabu remained polite, but neglected the invitation. Diamond asked him why. Yabu explained to him that he had no interest in that, nor any need. Friendships with outsiders meant little to him; he had enough to deal with the complex family relationships within and outside his own band.
Identity memory
That hunter-gatherers have an identity memory is a truism. Of course they recognise individuals, they attach themselves more to one than to the other, and reciprocity and retribution require them to remember who betrayed them or who did them a favour. We need not dwell on this further.
We have now learned about the moral common thread of hunter-gatherer cultures. But then the picture is of course far from complete. Every culture is different, a unique mixture of moral modules mixed with sometimes unimaginable cultural practices.
The agricultural revolution and the urban revolution
We have just seen that some hunter-gatherers move around more than others. The peoples that have permanent places where they regularly return are less egalitarian, that is the main difference. The differences in power are increasing, and so are the differences in wealth. This is mainly due to the natural conditions of the terrain and the extent to which agriculture can be practised.
Where circumstances permit, settlements arise. Bands will keep livestock, and permanent places to plant crops. There will be huts next to the field, where people will settle permanently. Productivity increases, and the ability to store things. Prosperity gets shared less and less in the band, and more often passes from parent to child. Technology is being developed to make agriculture more efficient. The yield grows, and with it the population of the settlement.
Successful settlements eventually grow to more than 150 inhabitants. Either because the group of kin continues to increase, or because members of other groups also settle in that settlement. For example, in-laws or neighbouring groups with which they become familiar through trade.
Biologically, we are able to maintain individual, personal relationships with no more than about 150 people. This rule of thumb is known as Dunbar's number. In an evolutionary-game-theoretical sense, this means that with more than 150 players we lose the overview; the correlation effect then drops significantly. If we encounter players we don't know well, we are more likely to treat them as a stranger. We do not trust them in advance, and therefore opt for a defensive game strategy.
Finally, the first cities emerged about 5,000 years ago. Tribal ties must have faded considerably in those urban societies.
How did the townspeople learn to combat this game-theoretic disadvantage? We will consider the role of language, the cultural expansion of our thinking in terms of in-groups and out-groups, the development of religion, and the rise of rulers who enforced morality with a firm hand.
Group dynamics
We have already discussed group dynamics. Something special is going on with in-group thinking. We don't just give the members of our band preferential treatment because they are family, but we can also treat groups as 'family' with whom we have nothing genetically in common. That effect has been observed in experiments, even when we hardly have anything in common with the rest of the group. Suppose you get together with a hundred strangers for a game, and the game leaders divide the participants into several groups. Automatically there will be rivalry between the groups, and some solidarity within each group. We will devote a whole series to this group effect later.
Instead of bands and tribes, cities started to rival each other. Somehow we must have learned that cooperation gives the city an advantage over other cities in the long run. We learned through the unconscious application of game theory that a degree of trust of our fellow citizens, even if we don't know them personally, ultimately benefits everyone.
Language
Hunter-gatherers naturally also have language. But the use of language also makes it possible to form larger communities.
Many animals can communicate with each other. You also usually understand perfectly well what your cat or dog means, and often vice versa. But you can't ask your cat what time the train to Istanbul departs, and you can't explain Ohm's law to your dog. In the course of evolution, humans have developed a much more sophisticated way of communicating that no other animal has. First of all, we can explain complex concepts. Instead of 'I'm hungry' or 'Watch out: a snake!', we are capable of a lot more. For example, reading this article. This has also had major consequences for the development of our morality.
We can warn each other of danger and transfer knowledge. And we can tell each other things that may or may not have happened, or speculate together about things that might be true. We can explain why we did things, to clear up misunderstandings that might otherwise have ended in a scuffle, we can apologise. And of course we can lie, but so do apes: cases have been recorded in which one ape warns the other about a non-existent predator in order to be able to eat the fruit it has just discovered.
The effect is game-theoretic: if you can talk to each other about others, you know who can be trusted and who cannot. That gives us an advantage over the Economo group, who also remembers who can be trusted and who cannot. But those animals have to rely on their own experience: they cannot share their experiences with each other (as far as we know.) The net result is that cooperation is improved: we start working more closely with trustworthy people.
The use of language makes it easier to work with larger groups.
Religion
People (and some animals) have known certain rituals since prehistoric times, especially around death. The first signs of people burying their dead date back to 100,000 years ago. The use of symbols and rituals has been found around the same time. From a later date there are indications that mythological animals were worshipped, and places have been found that seem to have been set up for a ritual function, including sacrifices. The sun, the moon, the seasons, rain and drought, fertility and death, fate and coincidence and inexplicable phenomena were the reason to seek connection with the 'higher'. Images of mythological figures are found from about 7,000 years ago, before the emergence of cities.
This part of what we now call religion was generally not very moral in nature, but that was about to change. Not coincidentally, religion entered moral waters once the agricultural revolution took hold, villages sprang up and different tribes learned to work together. The notion of supreme beings seeing everything, even when no one else is watching, is very conducive to cooperation.
Gradually, this notion of an all-seeing supreme being was combined with a reward in the form of prosperity, or a punishment, whether or not after death. The effect is unequivocal: even if no one else finds out that you have put your self-interest above the group's interest, there is always an invisible supreme being who will deal with you sooner or later.
Writing and the law
Among the oldest surviving writings are a number of clay tablets and inscriptions from Mesopotamia (roughly present-day Iraq) that recorded legislation from about 4,000 years ago. From that time on, the development of our morality is much easier to follow. Invariably, that legislation was linked to a divine command, usually passed on by the gods to the secular ruler on duty. In the passage below, Ur-Nammu is the ruler, and An, Enlil, Nanna and Utu are the gods.
After An and Enlil had turned over the Kingship of Ur to Nanna, at that time did Ur-Nammu, son born of Ninsun, for his beloved mother who bore him, in accordance with his principles of equity and truth ... Then did Ur-Nammu the mighty warrior, king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, by the might of Nanna, lord of the city, and in accordance with the true word of Utu, establish equity in the land; he banished malediction, violence and strife (…)
Codex of Ur-Nammu, ca. 2100 BCE.
It was a tradition that was continued a millennium later in the Law of Moses, and still later in the Sharia of Muhammad (c. 570 CE) and in Dutch law in the 21th century: “by the grace of God”.
Analysis of the oldest legal texts such as the Code of Ur-Nammu and the somewhat later ones Code of Hammurabi shows that the legislation of the time was primarily concerned with retaliation, protection of property, control of slaves, and sexual regulation, especially adultery. You can imagine that at that time these could be the main sources of conflict between citizens themselves, and then it was useful if it was clear in advance what was and was not allowed, and if not, what punishment would be.
The behaviour of the monarch himself, and what laws he should enact, ordinary citizens, of course, had no say in that. Morality came directly from the gods through the monarch.
But that changed in the axial age. For example, when in the Greek city-states around 600 BCE democracy was introduced. Citizens were allowed to have a say in the content of the legislation, so discussions could take place about the content of morality. Great ethical thinkers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle did their job with gusto. With that, thinking about morality first came into the hands of the philosophers, a task they still reluctantly allow other disciplines to participate in.
Cooperation and justice
In the next newsletter we will therefore finally give the philosophers the floor again about morality. To start with the — also for philosophers — hard question of how to determine what is good and bad. So far in this series we have mainly dealt with a description of how our morality came about. The gist: cooperation and altruism are good, selfishness is bad.
But you can't get away with that with a philosopher. How do you determine moral progress, if any? A society that ruthlessly fights evil with evil does justice to our retaliation module, and may actually fight crime effectively. But is that a better society? And according to what criteria?
Evolutionarily, we measure the quality of society by its success: is society growing, is it prosperous? Game-theoretically, those are societies with little conflict, with a lot of mutual trust, where scarce goods are distributed efficiently, where people also volunteer for the common good and where free riders don’t exist. Rules are in the public interest and compliance is voluntary.
Is that the ideal? Is that it then? Or are there also other criteria? Suppose there is a society that meets all the conditions, but where slavery is the natural order of things. Or where a deep hatred exists towards the neighbouring country or where a domestic population group is discriminated heavily. Or where women have no say. Or where some are in deep poverty. Or where no one dares to say what they actually think. Or the population is growing and thriving and abundantly rich, but everyone feels deeply unhappy. What role do happiness, justice, freedom and equality play? We will be addressing such questions in future episodes.
Further reading
Robert Bellah, What is axial about the Axial Age?, European Journal of Sociology (2005)
Alex Mesoudi, Peter Danielson, Ethics, evolution and culture, Theory in Biosciences (2008)
Alex Mesoudi, Cultural evolution (2011)
Francisco Ayala, The difference of being human: Morality, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2010)
Scott James, An introduction to evolutionary ethics (2011)
Philip Kitcher, The ethical project (2011)
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, a brief history of mankind (2011)
Jared Diamond, The world until yesterday: what can we learn from traditional societies? (2012)
Vicki Cummings, The anthropology of hunter-gatherers (2013)
Michael Ruse, Robert Richards (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of evolutionary ethics (2017)
Cathryn Townsend, review of: Penny Spikins, How compassion made us human: the evolutionary origins of tenderness, trust & morality (2017), Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2017)
Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint, the evolutionary origins of a good society (2019)
Oliver Scott Curry et al., Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies, Current Anthropology (2019)
Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big history, religion and morality, in: Craig Benjamin et al. (ed.), The Routledge companion to big history (2020)
This was the third episode in the series on morality and toleration. The episodes so far are:
The morality that everyone is born with
About the moral modules that all people have in common. About kin selection, cooperation, empathy and much more.Playing games with morality
Our ingrained moral modules interact. With simple games you can simulate how people in societies interact with each other. About dealing with power, division, revenge and trust.The morality of our inner hunter-gatherer, farmer and citizen
Our morality is layered: every phase of human history has left its mark. Culturally, there are still layers of hunter-gatherer, farmer, and citizen in our ethics.Annoying questions about good and bad
Is there such a thing as moral knowledge? And how do we find out? About self-doubt, man-eaters, emotional judgements, and the difference between theft and vegetables.Good people are happier. But how to become a good and happy person?
Aristotle's virtue ethics along the empirical ruler. Do we even need an ethical system if everyone is virtuous and happy? And positive psychology: how to become a happier and better person?
The next episode in this series will be about meta-ethics, the philosophical question of whether moral knowledge is actually possible, and how to find out.
But first, a newsletter in the series about toleration and Christianity will arrive in a week's time, about the justification of war, in particular the holy war against Islam.