Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

Humans are, however, unique in the strong bonds that typically develop between fathers and their offspring, a revolutionary development among group-living primates.

Among mammals, however, sexual relationships are often neither stable nor exclusive, and they tend to vary greatly in character and importance from one species to another.

titi monkeys of South America

women are the only female primates capable of being sexually active more or less continuously from puberty to old age.

the state

of

estru...

bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee,

It is notable that of all the primates, the bonobo, by far the most sexually active of all primates (followed closely by the common chimpanzee), is generally considered to be most closely related to humans genetically.

neither bonobos nor common chimpanzees are sexually possessive or sexually exclusive. This is a striking contrast with humans, who are intensely competitive over sexual partnerships and who tend to be extremely possessive toward their mates.

Monogamy, the most common form of sexual bonding among humans, is nonexistent among

97 percent of all mammalian species and is rare among apes and monkeys.

harem system,

multi-male, multi-female system,

Upon assuming ownership of the harem, the new alpha male often kills the offspring that are still in infancy.

The multi-male, multi-female system is probably the most common type of primate group.

Sexual bonds in such groups are not exclusive, and sexual possessiveness is either greatly diminished or nonexistent.

consort pair.

a strong, stable nuclear family is an indispensable feature of all successful human cultures.

Monogamy is by far the most common sexual bond among humans,

coexists in the same societies with forms of polygamy similar to the harems of monkeys and apes.

To the Inuit, sexual possessiveness was an undesirable trait, and an Inuit man would no sooner deny his guest the pleasure of his wife than he would deny him the hospitality of food or shelter.

Bonds of friendship are found to some extent in most higher animals,

Higher animals that live in groups typically form social hierarchies in which every individual occupies a specific place in a pecking order, with the most dominant individuals at the top and the most submissive individuals at the bottom.

the ability to form social hierarchies based on differences of dominance and submission among individuals is actually essential to the preservation of peace and solidarity within the group.

Social hierarchies are common among group-living animal species because they minimize hostilities among the members of the group as well as provide a mechanism that allows the entire group to take concerted action when necessary.

The fission-fusion society breaks apart (the fission phase) into individuals and smaller groups that disperse throughout the home territory at certain times of day, or in certain seasons of the year,

and then gathers together (the fusion phase) in a single location at other times to form one very large group.

all human societies exhibit the same type of fission-fusion behavior.

“exogamy”

In our modern society, extended families often live scattered over large geographical areas, yet they will often go to great lengths to gather together periodically for the ceremonial occasions that are enshrined in our own cultural traditions, such as holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and funerals.

Finally, we express our individuality and satisfy our unique personal interests by purposefully joining one or more of the thousands of voluntary associations that have proliferated in modern times.

Human society as we know it would not exist were it not for the innate primate passion for group identity and solidarity combined with the flexibility of the fission-fusion society.

The history of our species has, in fact, been marked by ever-larger patterns of fusion. These began to occur when hunter-gatherers developed tribal identities; it expanded again when members of different tribes began living together in villages, towns, and city-states, and it finally expanded to its present size when many thousands of city-states were forged into approximately two hundred nation-states, in which the members of our group typically number in the millions and tens of millions.

exogamy—meaning

“marriage outside of the group”—and

and among most primate species it is the males who leave to join another group, a phenome...

Some species of primates, however—most notably the chimpanzees—practice just the reverse: female exogamy.

Incest taboos require men and women to choose partners from outside of their own kinship group.

Exogamy benefits primate societies in two ways.

First, it ensures that there is constant genetic mixing among groups who live in adjacent territories, even if the groups are hostile to each other.

Se...

it ensures that within each group there are many adults that were born in other groups and already have relationships with their friends and family memb...

The richness and variety of chimpanzee technologies indicates that the human use of technology began with prehistoric apes that were ancestral to both humans and chimpanzees.

human evolution began at least five million years ago.

“expensive-tissue hypothesis”

Aiello and Wheeler observed that the size of the human brain is more than four times as large, relative to its body weight, as the brain of the average mammal. The human brain weighs about three pounds—about 2 percent of the average adult’s total body weight. Yet when it is active, the human brain can consume as much as 20 percent of the body’s available energy—roughly ten times as much energy, pound for pound, as is consumed by the human body as a whole.

glycogen,

the expensive-tissue hypothesis suggests that only a diet of cooked food—and the major reduction in the size of the digestive system that cooked food made possible—would have enabled this human ancestor to support as “expensive” an organ as the modern human brain.

Sleeping with fire is one of the most universal of all human behaviors.