Like many other species, humans are social animals and live in groups. However, one of the distinguishing features of human societies is the amount of cooperation among the group members. Studies of young children suggest that cooperation may be an innate characteristic.Cooperation is an important behavioral characteristic in understanding human evolution.
For humans, interpersonal cooperation is vital as humans live, and survive, in groups. In his book A Natural History of Human Thinking, Michael Tomasello writes:
“In all, cooperation is simply a defining feature of human societies in a way that it is not for the societies of the other great apes.”
This cooperation is enhanced through language which enables members of the society to communicate more easily and rapidly with each other and to develop common goals. Michael Tomasello also reports:
“Human social life is much more cooperatively organized than that of other primates, and so, in the current hypothesis, it was these more complex forms of cooperative sociality that acted as the selective pressures that transformed great ape individual intentionality and thinking into human shared intentionality and thinking.”
In his book Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Pascal Boyer writes:
“We live in groups, which imposes certain limits on people’s behavior; living in groups is possible and advantageous only if individuals are not completely opportunistic, if there is some restraint on their pursuit of individual gain.”
Humans cooperate with and help not only those who are easily recognized as relatives, but also friends and even strangers. This desire to cooperate, to help others, may be innate as studies of children have shown that cooperation occurs among very young children.
There are evolutionary advantages to cooperation in human societies which include the sharing of food, childrearing, and other tasks. With regard to the evolution of cooperation, Michael Tomasello writes:
“But early humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances into more cooperative lifeways, and so their thinking became more directed toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others to achieve joint goals or even collective group goals.”
Thus, individuals who were genetically inclined toward cooperation had a reproductive advantage over those who did not and through natural selection cooperation evolved as a human trait.
There are some researchers who see the human evolution of toolmaking as being on a par with cooperation. In his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Steven Pinker writes:
“Evolutionary psychologists believe that aside from language itself, the two things that make humans stand out from other animals are a talent for tools—manipulating the physical world to our advantage—and a talent for cooperation—manipulating the social world to our advantage.”
Children
Our understanding of the evolutionary importance of cooperation begins with two basic human anatomical characteristics: (1) humans are bipedal, that is, they walk upright on two legs, and (2) humans have big brains. These two things mean that for female humans, birth is more difficult than for other primates because of the small size of the birth canal due to bipedalism. In addition, the large human brain means that most of the brain development must occur after birth which means that human infants require more care during the first few years of life.
Cooperation begins with the birthing process: human mothers almost always require assistance in giving birth due to the restricted birth canal due to bipedalism. In apes, newborns emerge from the birth canal face up which allows the mother to reach down and pull the newborn out. In humans, the newborn emerges face down which means that it cannot safely be pulled out and up by the mother.
Another aspect of cooperation which was evolutionarily important for childbirth is befriending. In their book The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page write:
“And befriending—reaching out to other women—would provide safety in numbers, but it would also encourage other women to help, perhaps most importantly during that highly stressful event, childbirth.”
With regard to brain size, human infants are born premature, particularly when compared to their ape cousins. In their book From Lucy to Language, Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar describe human brain growth this way:
“To compensate, the fetal pattern of rapid brain growth continues after birth for the first year of life, during which the brain more than doubles in size from the newborn dimensions. And as any human parent knows, newborn human babies are extremely dependent in the first year of life. So, as far as our brains are concerned, human gestation lasts 21 months.”
This means that human infants are unable to obtain their own food for a fairly long period and must be given food by others. It also means that mothers and others must spend more time caring for infants and children which means that they have less time to devote to obtaining food for themselves and the children.
In hunting and gathering societies, cooperation in childcare is extremely important. In these societies, children have multiple caregivers. Comparing these societies with modern societies, Marlene Zuk, in her book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live, writes:
“In hunter-gatherer societies, by contrast, babies spend a substantial amount of time being held and cared for by someone besides their mother.”
Marlene Zuk also reports:
“Human mothers are likely to be the primary or only source of milk for very young children, but other forms of food can be provided by the rest of the group.”
Food Sharing
For most of human existence, people have been food foragers, that is, they have depended on gathering wild plants, and on hunting and fishing as the primary means of obtaining the calories they needed for survival. Many researchers have, therefore, turned to hunter-gatherer ethnographies as potential models for the role of cooperation in human evolution. In his book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, David Wilson writes:
“Anthropologists don’t agree on much, but they appear to agree that hunter-gatherer societies around the world are egalitarian. The most impressive fact is that meat is usually scrupulously shared. The successful hunter and his immediate family get no more meat than the rest of the band.”
In other words, one of the basic features of cooperation among humans is food sharing.
In hunting and gathering societies cooperation was important in both the procurement of food and in food sharing. Writing about the !Kung, a hunting and gathering people in the African Kalahari Desert, Lorna Marshall, in a chapter in Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbors, reports:
“An individual never lives alone nor does a singular nuclear family live alone. All live in bands composed of several families joined by consanguineous or affinal bonds. The arduous hunting-gatherer life would be insupportable for a single person or a single nuclear family without the cooperation and companionship of the larger group.”
In hunting and gathering societies, all food is shared. Richard Lee, writing about the !Kung in a chapter in Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbors, reports:
“Within the camp, food is shared in such a way that everyone—residents and visitors alike—receives an equitable share.”
What this means is that in times of plenty, all eat well and in times of scarcity, all go hungry.
Work Sharing
Cooperation means that human groups work together rather than being simply a collection of individuals each seeking personal gain, such as food. Cooperation in human societies is not just a matter of people doing things together but, more importantly, it involves people doing different things in a coordinated manner. The fact that everyone doesn’t have to do the same thing—such as gathering wild plant foods or hunting—means that the society can more efficiently access the resources it needs for survival. It also provides for greater flexibility to adapt to different or changing ecological conditions.
In attempting to understand the role of cooperation in human evolution, researchers often look to hunting and gathering (food foraging) groups for realistic models. Michael Tomasello writes:
“In modern forager societies, individuals produce the vast majority of their daily sustenance collaboratively with others, either immediately through collaborative efforts or via procurers who bring the food back to some central location for sharing.”
One way that early humans cooperated was through a division of labor. Rather than having each person gather their own food, some people would do certain tasks while other people did different tasks and the food accumulated in this way would then be shared. One of the most common forms of division of labor was based on gender: men tended to do the hunting of wild animals, while the women gathered plant foods. Ethnographic accounts show that this division of labor, however, was not rigid: there were times when women hunted and there were times when men gathered plant foods.
Language
Work cooperation, particularly the coordination of a hunting and gathering group, requires more than basic communication. First, for nomadic hunting and gathering groups information about the location of resources—plants, animals, fish—is needed. This information needs to include when resources will be available. For a band to arrive at a berry gathering area, for example, either too early or too late means that no usable berries are collected. Cooperation in hunting and gathering groups requires the sharing of knowledge as well as labor and food. For this reason, some researchers hypothesize that cooperation and language co-evolved.
In his book The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, Daniel Lieberman writes:
“Humans are unusually good at working together: we share food and other crucial resources, we help raise one another’s children, we pass on useful information, and few even sometimes risk our lives to aid friends or even strangers in need. Cooperative behaviors, however, require complex skills such as the ability to communicate effectively, to control selfish and aggressive impulses, to understand the desires and intentions of others, and to keep track of complex social interactions in a group.”
With regard to cooperation and dependence on information, Pascal Boyer writes:
“Humans need cooperation because they depend on rich information, well beyond what individual experience can provide. Other people provide most of this information.”
Reciprocity
One aspect of cooperation among humans is reciprocity: the giving of something to another person with the expectation that at some later time that person will give something in return. This is not a form of market economics as no value is given to the gift but rather the emphasis is on establishing and reinforcing relationships. In his chapter in Becoming Human: Our Past, Present and Future, Martin Nowak writes:
“As I see it, humans, more than any other creature, offer assistance based on indirect reciprocity, or reputation. Why? Because only humans have full-blown language—and, by extension, names for one another—which allows us to share information about everyone from our immediate family members to complete strangers on the other side of the globe.”
One interesting example of reciprocity in many hunting and gathering societies can be seen in the idea that hunters never eat the game they have harvested: it is given freely to the camp (though there may be cultural rules governing the actual distribution) and hunters are, therefore dependent upon game harvested by other hunters.
Altruism
One of the human characteristics associated with cooperation is altruism—putting a concern for the welfare of others ahead or equal to personal welfare. With regard to etymology, the word altruism was coined in 1851 by the French philosopher Auguste Comte.
Concerning the role of altruism in human evolution, David Wilson, in his book Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, writes:
“Altruism occupies center stage in Darwinian thought because it appears difficult to explain as a product of natural selection. If natural selection favors traits that cause individuals to survive and reproduce better than other individuals, and if altruistic acts increase the survival and reproduction of others at a cost to the altruist, then how can altruistic traits evolve?”
In the hunting and gathering cultures which have dominated the bulk of human evolution, altruism can be seen in the egalitarianism in which the overall needs of the group are seen as superior to the needs of any individual. David Wilson writes:
“A hunter-gatherer society is above all a moral community with a strong sense of right and wrong that organizes the practices of the group. The specific practices regarded as right and wrong might vary across groups, but in general ‘right’ coincides with group welfare and ‘wrong’ coincides with self-serving acts at the expense of other members of the group.”
While there is a tendency today for pundits, philosophers, and others to assume that the human tendency toward altruism is directed primarily at biological kinfolk, the actual ethnographic and historical data indicate little concern for biological kinship as fictional kinship is seen as equally important. The practice of cooperation—as seen in actions such as food sharing—is extended to strangers as well of band members.
More Human Origins
Human Origins: Making Spoken Language Possible
Human Origins: A pre-farming religious monument
Human Origins: The human face
Human Origins: Eyes
Human Origins: Transitional Humans
Human Origins: Ancient urbanization
Human Origins: Fossil Evidence
Human Origins: Sexual Dimorphism