Lice, Men and the Origins of Humanity

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Lice, Men and the Origins of Humanity
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Of Lice and Men
(adapted from posts to Anthro-L)
Timothy Mason, IUFM de Versailles with Scott MacEachern, Bowdoin College.
If you wish to make a comment on this article, please write to me at
tmason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Abstract : While wild beasts, large-scale climatic changes, floods and other
dramatic changes are often invoked in current scenarios intended to explain
the process of hominisation, more humble and less noticeable factors shaping
the ecological niches within which our ancestors developed are left to one
side. Spurning more heroic versions of our species' emergence, the authors
of the present paper advance the idea that it is in our relationship with a
small-scale predator or parasite that the key to the development of a number
of the more prominent features of human beings may be found. Comparative
hairlessness - the Naked Ape - the upright posture and the opposable thumb
can all be understood as adaptations to the depredations of a particularly
troublesome strain of lice. Subsequent interaction and co-evolution with the
lice lead to the growth of our relatively large brains, and to the first
fumblings of culture - the beach-robe and the dance.
Key words : hominisation, evolution, culture, lice
It has for some time been clear that a well-disposed anthropological
imagination is of far more use in the development of fundamental theories
about the evolution of our species than is all that thumping about with
spades and bone-measuring that archaeologists, serious-minded fellows, go in
for. Stoczkowski's round-up of evolutionary scenarios1 demonstrates most
clearly that a capacity to spin a good story is more profitable than careful
measuring and theoretical caution ; so much so that David Batten2 felt moved
to propose that our forefathers evolved to full humanity upon the
snow-fields of Norway, where the discovery of skis led to their standing up
so as to maintain equilibrium while freeing their hands to grip the skiing
sticks. So it is that we find ourselves emboldened to argue that our apish
forebears - for we refuse to favour either male over female or the inverse,
seeing this as a failing which has put too many scenarios out of court3 -
developed in and through their relationship to a particularly vicious strain
of lice.
It was while reading Keegan4 on the development of warfare that the
realisation came to the major author of this paper that some such drama must
lie at the basis of our speciation. Keegan, in his analysis of Andreski's
Malthus-inspired theory of the Military Participation Ratio5 - or MPR -
makes the point that the case would have been harder to put if it had been
published after the appearance of McNeill's 'Plagues and People'6, in which
it is convincingly advanced that maladies cause far more deaths than does
warfare. McNeill's has always been a favourite bed-time book, but it was
only at this instant that Mason realised that it held the key to the
understanding of our evolutionary history. As Gould and Eldredge7 have
argued, speciation is likely to occur when a small sub-population finds
itself for one reason or another isolated from the main stream. We may
imagine then - paleoanthropology allows or even encourages such feats of
insight8 - that a small group of ape-like individuals found themselves cut
off, through some dramatic geological or meteorological event, in a remote
and rather swampy site within the African Rift-Valley. Isolated with them,
of course, was a much larger sub-population of the lice that apes carry with
them wherever they go9.
Under these conditions, the rate of reproduction is such that the lice would
evolve comparatively quickly. We may imagine that, through genetic drift, a
race of particularly voracious, efficient and dangerous lice developed. In
the swampy conditions in which this population was trapped, the lice will
probably have become vectors for a number of quite nasty diseases. For our
fore-fathers and mothers the ability to defend oneself and one's offspring
from the attentions of these ferocious parasites would become a sine-qua-non
for survival and would, most certainly, have given rise to a number of
radical adaptations.
In the first place, those children who had less hair, and therefore afforded
less cover for lice, would have stood a greater chance of survival than
would hairy infants. The adaptational benefits of hairlessness would, we
surmise, have encouraged neotony10. This, in turn, would have meant that
women, as mothers, would have had greater need of their hands, for as the
species became smoother, and as offspring were born earlier, so babies would
have become less able to hang onto their mothers as young monkeys do.
Bipedalism would also have been encouraged by the benefits of having hands
free to scratch the head ; a hairy creature may get at most of the itchy
bits by using its hind foot, as a cursory knowledge of canines or felines
will confirm. But the ape whose hair is only to be found on its head will
find it difficult get at the itch in a satisfactory way. This, we surmise,
is why males also adopted upright walking. Moreover, the upright stance,
coupled with bipedalism, would have enabled the canny individual to keep an
eye out for any con-specifics who were scratching suspiciously, and to step
sharply out of their way, thus avoiding infestation.
The need to eliminate the lice would have given the impetus for the
development of the opposable thumb and the fingertip precision of human
manipulations - this marks us out from our simian cousins who, infested by a
less life-threatening form of the parasite, merely treated it as a stand-by
food supply, to be gross-cropped when the need arose, but never entirely
eradicated. As to the development of language, our scenario owes something
to Dunbar's work, but stands it on its head. Language developed in order to
permit socialisation to occur at a sufficient distance to establish good
relations with other individuals while nevertheless avoiding sharing their
parasites. It is only subsequently that language, in turn, leads to the
formation of larger and larger groups.
Scott MacEachern, in a praiseworthy attempt to fill out the paradigm
established here, advances the idea that lice and human-beings co-evolved,
for as we all know, any parasite that is *over*successful is ultimately
*un*successful. So it is clear that the lice will have had to take measures
to make their continued existence more palatable to our ancestors. Here is
how we suspect that to have happened : We have always rather liked the
Acquatic Ape scenario, but felt that it lacked in proper foundations - that
is to say a convincing retroprojection of the American way of life onto the
habits of proto-humans. However, with a little adjustment of the scenarios
provided by Elaine Morgan, we can clearly see that our ape-like
predecessors, in their struggle against the lice, will have taken to bathing
on a regular basis in an attempt to wash the little beasts out of their
hair. This, in turn, lead to the development of culture.
How was this? Why, as we all know, if you are to bathe in the waters of the
sea or of an estuary, you need some protection against the cold - not while
in the water, of course, for as any regular swimmer can testify, it is
better in than out. It is only when you emerge that you need a beach-robe or
garment of some kind to protect you from the cutting breezes that are ever
blowing along such sandy shores as our forebears would naturally have
favoured. The first cultural invention, then, was this garment. And this it
was that lead to the development of peaceful co-existence between ourselves
and the lice. Obviously, lice would very quickly have taken to lying in
waiting for the bather in his or her own beach-robe. However, if they were
so thoughtless as to immediately set to biting and sucking the moment the
individual donned it once more, he or she would only discard it and leap
back into the water. So it would have been that a race of restrained lice
developed, able to profit from deferred gratification.
This, in turn, would have been a lead for our quick-learning ancestors ; we
hypothesize that the bath-robe would soon become a signal to would-be mates
that the wearer was clean and could therefore be considered as a proper
object of sexual desire. The confection and modelling of bath-robes was,
then, one of the very first of cultural phenomena. We believe that this
would quickly have developed into a more general use of clothing to signal
sexual desirability ; in particular, it would have lead to one of those
continual and interesting battles between the honest fellow and the cheat
that so pre-occupy theorists of evolution. For clothing of any kind would,
quite obviously, have allowed the lice-infested to conceal the bloody traces
of their presence. In their turn, the lice would, quite certainly, have
developed an unerring instinct for identifying those individuals that were
most skilled in the confection and display of alluring and concealing
vestments.
Proto-humans, for their part, may well have responded to the propensity to
cheat by developing a taste for rituals of divestment, in which the desired
partner demonstrated his or her freedom from lice by slowly undressing,
while contorting his or her body in such a way as to allow it to be minutely
examined11. (This lead to the evolution of rhythm and of dance ; music would
have arisen to accompany it). To counter this, cheats would have developed
the cultural and psychological trait of modesty. In the long run, and with
the invention of patriarchy, both these throw-backs to our evolutionary past
would have been imposed on women by the dominant males.
Here follows an exchange between the senior and junior authors of the
present article :
... So you see, Scott, I already have a fully worked-out model of our
co-evolution. I do not wish, however, to seem ungenerous, and will certainly
afford you a footnote12.
Best wishes
Timothy Mason
Dear Timothy,
Oh, well, all right then. I'll content myself with a footnote13, and with
hitching a ride on the back of your theory, rather like a ... well, you know
what I mean. I do, however, think that some archaeological (read:
serious-minded, spade-thumping) considerations need to be brought into this.
Wanderings into more northerly zones would (especially during glacials) tend
to inhibit full use of the seashore in the manner that you describe, since
only a madman would ever attempt to swim in say the North Atlantic or the
North Sea. Cultural adaptations to such conditions in the region involve
quick submergence and then a pell-mell run back to the sauna, minimizing the
potential for both display of lice-free status and the detection of cheating
that you mention. In addition, the biological stresses caused by high-lice
status would decrease the general fitness of the population. This is
obviously a possible explanation for the relative lack of cultural advance
that we see in these northerly zones compared to more tropical climes. (The
masochistic submergence behaviours exhibited by Brits at Brighton and by
German bathers at a number of Baltic beaches are obviously the result of
ancient genetic isolation of small populations [pace the Classic
Neandertals]. It is unlikely that they have any adaptive value.)
The appearance of awls in Solutrean sites in Cantabria during the LGM (Last
Glacial Maximum) may then be confidently explained as a response to these
very difficult climatic conditions, allowing for the development of
form-fitting fur bathing suits analogous to (but far heavier than) the wool
suits of the LVP (Late Victorian Period). Patriarchy for the Solutrean may
then be assumed. The cultural advances associated with these new
developments will explain the florescence of rock art during the late
Solutrean and the Magdalenian.
Hurray for intradisciplinarity.
Scott
Dear Scott
that looks good to me, and I think we might work out a deal on
co-authorship14. The pictorial art thing has been bothering me slightly, but
I think a reworking of Knight's ideas about the use of red ochre15 may lead
us in the right direction. I'd assume that ochre could be used both as a
protective lotion for the bather and as an aid to the cheater, obscuring the
red weals left by heavy albeit surreptitious scratching. This in turn would
segue into early forms of scarification and body-painting. Once bodies were
more usually concealed - that cold weather again - the frustrated artistic
type would naturally turn to rock as a medium.
As you can see, the argument as it stands, although somewhat sketchy,
fulfils the necessary criteria to qualify as a serious scenario in the
context of palaeoanthropological discourse as it is practiced in today's
universities. I have, of course, left the details to one side ; I do not
wish to show my hand too clearly in this place, prior to the publication in
a learned journal which will establish my intellectual property-rights.
Unless, of course, I discover that I have here merely re-invented the wheel.
Which would not come as a great surprise.
BTW, as someone who would, in his youth, swim in the North Sea even during
the months of winter, I am reluctant to consign the hardier northern
variants to an evolutionary back-water. But perhaps you are right, and our
place is back there with Piltdown and his fossilized cricket-bat.
Best wishes
Timothy Mason
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Notes
1. Stoczkowski, Wiktor, " Anthropologie naïve, Anthropologie savante : De
l'origine de l'Homme, De l'imagination et des idées reçues ", CNRS Editions,
Paris, 1994. Stoczkowski's thesis is that academic scenarios purporting to
describe and explain the process of hominisation overwhelmingly follow in
the traces left by folk-tales and philosophers, thus leaving to one side
such possibilities as do not fit those grooves, even though they might be
quite as scientifically valid and interesting.
2. Batten, David, "Bipedalism Revised", Journal of Anthropological Research,
42 : 81 - 82. (Cited in Stoczkowski, op. cit., pp. 86/7).
3. On this, see Haraway, Donna, 'Primate Visions ; Gender, Race and Nature
in the World of Modern Science', Verso, London, 1992.
4.Keegan, John, " A History of Warfare ", Pimlico, London, 1994.
Disappointingly, Keegan, although aware and admirative of McNeil's work,
does not take a great deal of account of it in his book, and we find nothing
of the impact of lice on the military. This must be considered a gross
error.
5. Andreski, Stanislaw, " Military Organisation and Society",1954, cited in
Keegan, op. cit., p. 223. Keegan gives the publication date as 1908, but as
Prof. Andreski is still, I believe, at Reading University, this seems
unlikely.
6. McNeill, William, H., " Plagues and People ", Penguin, London, 1979.
7. Gould, S.J. and N. Eldredge, "Punctuated Equilibria ; the tempo and mode
of evolution reconsidered", Paleobiology, 3, 115-151, 1977.
8. For some discussion of what is permissable within the field of
paleoanthropology, see Knight, Chris, " Blood Relations ; Menstruation and
the Origins of Culture ", Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991,
where he writes, among other wonderful things ; "... I am of course
constructing a myth. I am doing what all palaeoanthropological storytellers
have been doing since the birth of their science .. The test of a good myth,
however, is that it is both widely and enduringly believed." (p. 5) Although
Knight goes on to claim that the scientific myth must also obey other rules,
Stoczkowksi (op. cit.) has demonstrated that these secondary rules of
evidence are both flexible and permissive. As for my own thesis, I expect
considerable resistance, for it unfortunately lacks the glamour of such
accounts as the hunting scenario or the killer ape story. It certainly isn't
as sexy as Knight's contribution - see my account of his book. Fingernails
scrappling at an armpit seem far less heroic than a prehistoric
confrontation with a hungry tiger.
9. Dunbar has grasped the central importance of the parasite in the life of
our forefathers. Unfortunately, although he sees that language replaces the
ceaseless hunt for lice, he has not fully understood the mechanisms by which
this substitution took place. See Dunbar, Robin, "Grooming, Gossip and the
Evolution of Language", Faber and Faber, London & Boston, 1996.
10. In this scenario, neotony is not driven, pace Gould, by the large brain;
the latter is an accidental consequence of the former. Lice, then, are the
indirect progenitors of human intelligence.
11. I am hoping that this part of the scenario will make it more attractive
to the general public ; it works in both sex and rock and roll. I can't for
the moment figure on how to get drugs and violence in and have to recognize
this as an almost fatal flaw. The story evidently needs still further
elaboration.
12. And here is that footnote. It is to a large extent due to Professor
MacEachern's promptings in that most rigorous of anthropological forae, the
e-group Anthro-L, that this thesis took on the elaborate, not to say
baroque, form that it now has. Thank you, Scott. I should also mention, at
least in passing, John McCreery and Tom Riley. But I'm damned if I'm giving
them their own personal footnotes.
13. Hey, you've already had the footnote. See 12 above.
14. Professor MacEachern has, inexplicably, renounced his right to citation
as co-author. As the careful reader will have noted, I'm giving it back to
him.
15. See Knight, " Blood Relations ", op. cit. Knight points to the discovery
of large quantities of red ochre in a number of sites associated with human
habitation, and suggests that it was used in early rituals centred upon
menstruation.But where he sees women as advertising menstruation, I see them
as concealing lice