Human Adaptation

The Biosocial Background

Yehudi A. Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138525382
• eBook ISBN: 9781351514712
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Underlying the anthropological study of humans is the principle that there is a reality to which a human must adapt for survival. Populations must adapt to the realities of the physical world and maintain a proper fit between their biological makeup and the pressures of the various niches of the world. Social groups must develop adaptive mechanisms in the organization of their social relations if there is to be order, regularity, and predictability in patterns of cooperation and competition. This book presents an introduction to anthropology that is unified and made systematic by its focus on adaptations that have accompanied the evolution of humans, from non-human primates to inhabitants of vast urban areas in modern industrial societies.

Human Adaptation contains over forty outstanding essays that are intended to serve as an introduction to physical anthropology, archeology, and linguistics from the point of view of the processes of adaptation. The organization of these selections contains a balance between biological and prehistoric cultural adaptations. They provide coherence for the study of human evolution. Several selections, notably those in connection with linguistic adaptations, deal with contemporary people in order to shed light on earlier evolutionary processes. More than half of the selections deal with biological evolution.

This volume unifies the subject matter of anthropology within a single and powerful explanatory framework and incorporates the work of the most renowned anthropological experts on man.

VI.
BEGINNINGS IN CULTURAL ADAPTATION: ARCHEOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS

WE BEGAN THIS BOOK with an exploration of the gene as the basic mechanism of adaptation; we conclude with man’s embarkation on the voyage to civilization. The purpose of this section is not to present a survey of the established archeological records from many parts of the world; it is, rather, to highlight one of the principal themes of this book: The evolution of Homo sapiens seems to show that man has striven to free himself from the limitations of his genetic constitution and natural habitats.

This section also represents a shift in our subject matter. Until now we have discussed man’s adaptations for coping with different and changing conditions in his habitats, and especially the evolutionary changes in particular features of his architecture. Now we turn directly to the most important mechanism in human adaptation: man’s culture. Because of this shift in our focus it is necessary to discuss different processes and introduce new concepts.

At the beginning of this book we stressed that adaptation refers to a population’s relationship to its habitat; however, the concept of “habitat” must be qualified, depending on whether I am speaking of physiology, language, or organizations of social relations. Because physiology and culture refer to qualitatively different processes, it is also necessary to speak in different ways of the contexts in which adaptations take place. As I have noted, by “culture” we mean the energy systems, objective and concrete artifacts, organizations of social relations, modes of thought, ideologies, and the total range of customary behavior that are transmitted from one generation to another by a social group and enable it to maintain life in a particular habitat.

When we speak of changing habitats in connection with biological adaptation, we can refer to the migrations of populations from one altitude to another, from forests to plains, from dry to wet areas, or to shifts in mean annual rainfall, changes in climate, and the disappearance of flora and fauna. In other words, biophysical adaptations often can be viewed in terms that suggest that changes in the habitat are “due to natural causes.” But other changes are at least of equal significance in connection with man’s adaptations. These are the changes that are wrought in his habitats by man himself, which are visible in the feedback between his technology and the natural milieu.

Man does more than effectively exploit the physical habitat. His adaptations are different from those of all other living forms because he makes effective use of energy potentials of the habitat (energy being that which makes work). When the habitat changes—whether due to “natural causes” or to the changes that man himself has wrought in it—the group must change its means of making effective use of energy potentials. Before the emergence of man on the evolutionary scene, this was accomplished almost exclusively by genetic change. Man, however, does this by cultural means: by distinctive processes of extracting energy from the habitat.

Whenever man introduces a new energy system into the habitat he seeks to exploit, he must also change the institutions—that is, the organizations of social relations—in society so that they will be appropriate to the efficient use of the sources of energy on which he relies for maintaining mastery over the habitat and freeing himself from its restricting limitations. Every culture represents a unique strategy for extracting energy from the habitat and for maintaining the social groups with which people equip themselves for making effective use of the energy systems they have developed. Every energy system requires organizations of social relations that will enable people to use it; no energy system can be effective in human society without groups that are designed for using it.

When man began to cultivate land by means of the hoe or digging stick, he had to create new organizations of social relations and ideologies to legitimate these activities, which were different from those of people who gained a livelihood by means of the bow and arrow or spear. As a result, man began to live in an entirely different environment—a total system of components that interact with each other and characterize the group—even though the locale (the habitat) may have been the same. Foragers are not responsible for the presence of the food on which they subsist; they collect and hunt food that is made available by natural forces. Horticulturists, however, create a new environment by their digging and planting, and the environment they produce by means of the hoe or digging stick requires a particular type of care and protection that can be provided only by appropriate organizations of social relations and that is inappropriate in the environment om nomadic foragers.

Pastoralism is another technology that creates an environment in which unique institutions are required, because the animals on which pastoralists depend for their livelihood demand a type of care and protection—herding, pasturage, defense against various predators—that is not required by a horticultural environment. The introduction of terracing or large-scale irrigation networks requires institutional organizations of personnel who will care for these structures, and it produces new environments to which institutional adaptations must be made throughout the social system. Similarly, industrialization must be understood as a technology that creates a new environment to which man must adapt, and this environment also has unique institutional configurations.

Why is it more advantageous to conceptualize the processes of human adaptation in terms of the different environments produced by man than to say simply that each technology requires institutional adaptations throughout the social system? Such a formulation suggests practical considerations, in addition to its theoretical advantages. If modern man is to act on the basis of his self-consciousness with respect to his society (or societies) and try to change institutions that are deleterious to human welfare, he must have a clear notion about priorities and consequences in social change. He must, for example, recognize that any change in technology or social institutions—such as the institutions of the culture of poverty, war, and the curtailment of individual freedom and dignity—will in turn completely change the environment in which he lives. The study of human adaptation teaches us, among other things, that we cannot change institutions like spark plugs in an automobile. The relationship between adaptive changes and habitat is reciprocal, and the feedback between the two is unceasing.

This is not to suggest that man should not change his social institutions merely because he would thereby produce entirely new environments; he should try to produce such changes when they will benefit people. But we must also bear in mind that there appears to be a realistic basis for the uneasy feeling held by many people that the world (environment) “will fall apart” if changes are instituted in the family, in the institutions that perpetuate poverty and indignity, and in political and other centers of power. Correlatively, as long as modern man in industrial society seeks to maintain the environments in which he lives, he willy-nilly preserves the institutions he claims he wants to change, because they are aspects of the environment created by his adaptations. This, in turn, raises the central question about the world in which industrial man lives: What is the nature of his environment? This question has yet to be answered by students of modern society. If we can accurately portray the environments in which premodern man has lived, we will have a model for depicting our own environments, and for this reason studies of prehistoric societies are of great practical importance.

Another advantage to this formulation of the concept of environment is that it enables us to understand the order of priorities in social change at different levels of technological development; each level represents a successive cultural adaptation. The ordering of priorities in social change is different at different stages of cultural evolution; there are stages in which a new environment is created through the harnessing of new sources of energy, while political institutions seem to have priority at other stages. Thus if man is to have control over the evolution of his adaptations, he must adopt policies that are appropriate to specific levels of adaptation: What is true of horticultural society is not necessarily applicable to modern industrial organization. For example, the Great Plains of North America have been exploited by pastoralists, agriculturists, and industrial man. Each of these groups of people lived in an entirely different environment, albeit within the same habitat. Industrial man’s adaptations to this habitat have to be understood in terms of the properties that inhere in an industrial environment, not in terms of the physical environment of the Great Plains as such.

It is difficult to capture the full profundity of Homo’s uniqueness in nature, but the essential difference between man and all other forms of life is that man’s adaptations are governed by his cultures. Before the emergence of man, the preservation of life was determined almost exclusively by the interaction of challenges in the habitat with gene mutations, by natural selection. In man, the perpetuation of life is determined by a new kind of natural selection: man’s ability to meet challenges in the habitat artificially—culturally—by altering his relationship to his milieu and freeing himself from its limitations, even though he remains biologically constant. To repeat an earlier caveat, we do not say that man’s physical evolution has ceased. But his ability to live in a variety of habitats and environments has completely outstripped his rate of genetic change.

Has man realized his evolutionary potential? Clearly and decidedly, the answer to this query must be no, whether we are thinking of physical or cultural adaptation or of both in juxtaposition. Can man realize his evolutionary potential? This is something we are very far from knowing, if only because we do not know what this potential is.

There is no potential—in an individual, a population, or the species as a whole—without accompanying limitations. Man’s potential for culture and for making adjustments among the elements of each adaptation is not unlimited. His biological makeup—and this includes his genetic programming—restricts his ability and presents him with a number of imperatives, as in the care of his young. Reciprocally, the adaptations achieved in his cultures exert a direct influence on his biological adaptations, as in stature, respiratory mechanisms, genetic strains, and the like. The disentanglement of this skein is one of the foremost challenges in the study of man, which anthropologists have only recently begun to meet.

The feedback between biology and culture notwithstanding, the development of human culture represents a revolution in nature. As a result of his cultures, man has completely reversed his specific relationship to nature. This can be illustrated in a variety of ways and on many levels, all of which point to the fact that, in man, fitness for survival and the perpetuation of human life is cultural more than biological. Man puts on warm clothes to make the Arctic wastes habitable, even though nature has not seen fit to grow a coat of fur on him. Man is biologically unsuited for living in the ocean depths, but he can do this creating artificial habitats. Man can enter into treaties and other agreements to govern territorial relationships. His languages change instead of remaining genetically fixed signal systems. He can rebel, protest social inequities, and be horrified at his inquisitions, witch hunts, and mass slaughters rather than participate exclusively in biologically ordained pecking and dominance orders.

But let us not forget that we have not created the best of all possible worlds. In nomadic hunting and gathering groups, man’s achievements in freeing himself from the limitations of the habitat are minimal, though far from insignificant. Among such groups the organization of social relations is governed largely by seasonal cycles and random fluctuations in available food and water. When food and water are abundant, groups increase in size; during shortages, groups almost invariably divide; and social relations vary accordingly. At such levels of evolution the patterns of human life and behavior are directly tied to cycles in nature. At the other extreme of cultural evolution, one of the outstanding characteristics of an industrial society’s adaptation is that the supply of food and the content of the diet remain constant the year round. Correlatively, the institutional structure of the society remains unaffected by seasonal cycles. Cutting across this, however, is the fact that although the standard of living of most people in the United States, for example, has improved at a relatively steady pace, American blacks and other disadvantaged groups have been able to make their greatest economic gains almost exclusively during periods of wartime. These cycles have recently become very short. Thus there seems to be an important element of cyclicality that affects a significant portion of the population, albeit not a seasonal intermittency.

The adaptations that have been achieved in the cultures of industrialized societies are the products of accretions in knowledge over many hundreds of centuries. Of course, the present can be taken for granted, and many people do so, but we cannot understand the present without understanding our past. Nor can we exercise control over our cultural future (if control is to be a part of the civilization of the future) without a grasp of the principles and processes that are locked into the record of the past.

What can we learn about the processes of adaptation from a study of the past? It is often said that present cultural adaptations have grown out of those of previous stages of development, but this is true only in a very limited sense. Cultural adaptations—conceptualized in terms of energy systems, appropriate organizations of social relations, techniques, and value systems—arise from the pressures engendered by the society’s relationship with the habitat. Patterns of kinship relations or rules of property, to say nothing of political and legal organization, are influenced by a society’s past, but they are most profitably understood as adaptations and adjustments to the relationship currently maintained with the productive milieu. For example, the bilateral kinship systems of modern industrial nations often show subtle traces of patrilineal backgrounds,¹ but they cannot be said to have grown out of those pasts. Instead, how one reckons his kinship affiliations is intimately tied to many other factors in the system.

For example, a bilateral system such as ours is closely related to people’s freedom to choose their own spouses rather than have their marriages arranged; they establish their own households regardless of where their parents live, and men and women inherit wealth equally from both parents. However, the choice of spouse, rules governing where people will reside after they have married, and modes of inheritance are very different when people reckon their kinship affiliations patrilineally. Furthermore, kinship patterns are closely tied to the society’s strategy of adaptation. For example, our bilateral emphasis is inseparable from the need to amass large concentrations of capital, which is facilitated by keeping wealth within the small nuclear family of parents and children instead of allowing a large group of kinsmen to have access to each other’s wealth, as is often the case in societies with patrilineal systems. Bilateral kinship is often associated with the independence of the nuclear family from wider kinship ties, and this is also an accompaniment of widespread physical and social mobility and of recruitment of individuals for jobs in terms of their competence, rather than in terms of nepotism.

Are we, then, to agree with Henry Ford, who, in an attempt to deify the automobile (or perhaps himself), said “History is bunk”? I hope not, for several reasons. First, if man himself is interesting, his past is of equal intellectual moment with his present. Second, and perhaps of greatest significance from the point of view of a science of man, it is only the study of the past that can tell us what kinds of shifts men have had to make in their thinking to move from one stage of sociocultural development to another. Another way of phrasing this is by posing questions such as the following: How rapidly can people be pushed in the course of social change? Can they be impelled to move more rapidly in one direction than in another? What alternatives are available to man in trying to reach a particular stage of development, or are there some sociocultural integrations that can only be reached along a single path? In view of the fact that the rate of change in culture increases as evolution advances, can we make any educated guesses about the future rate of change from the study of prehistoric adaptations? For example, why is it (apparently) easier for a population to shift from a sedentary to a nomadic way of life than from nomadism to sedentism? Is it more disruptive for a society to shift from a horticultural to an industrial level of integration than from horticulture to agriculture? Is there a necessary relationship between the development of urbanization and statehood and between large-scale irrigation networks and political centralization?

It is in light of such questions, which are among the most important questions confronting contemporary anthropology, that many anthropologists (archeologists among them) maintain that the study of prehistoric cultures is an adjunct of social and cultural anthropology. Archeology provides data for the dimension of time to a degree that is almost entirely lacking in the study of living cultures. More precisely, archeology cannot provide answers to such questions directly, but it can provide data in depth that, when combined with data from historic cultures, can give us greater insight into the processes involved.

It is important to remember, in connection with archeological explorations, that archeologists face many of the same problems as paleontologists in trying to uncover the nature of human adaptation during the prehistoric past. Often, in their interpretations of prehistoric cultural remains, archeologists have to make educated guesses about the adaptive significance of the tools and other goods they uncover. One of the ways in which they make these inferences is by relying heavily on what is known about existing and currently functioning societies. If, for example, an archeologist has uncovered the remains of a prehistoric society with a complex irrigation system, one of the things he can do is compare what is known about that society’s climatic conditions with data of contemporary societies that have similar irrigation systems. He can also compare the two societies with respect to settlement patterns, evidences of social stratification, political organization, and religious integration. If an archeologist has uncovered the remains of a prehistoric hunting and gathering society, he can apply what is known ab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
• INTRODUCTION
• I ISSUES AND CONCEPTS IN THE STUDY OF ADAPTATION
• II INCIPIENT ADAPTATIONS: MONKEYS AND APES
• III EXPLORATIONS IN THE NATURAL HISTORY OF HUMAN ADAPTATIONS
• IV ADAPTATIONS IN LOCAL POPULATIONS
• V SPEECH AS A HUMAN ADAPTATION
• VI BEGINNINGS IN CULTURAL ADAPTATION: ARCHEOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS
• INDEX