EEA (wherever and whenever that was) are still working. The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but th 'e human ones are not. We are still consumed by gossip about people we know or have heard about: Men are still obsessed with power-seeking and building or dominating male-male coalitions: Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics. Modern monogamy may be just one of the many tricks in our mating-system repertoire, like harem polygamy in ancient China or gerontocratic polygamy in modern Australian aborigines, where men wait years to marry and then in their dotage enjoy huge harems:
If so, then the 'sex drive ' that we all acknowledge within us may be much more specific than we realize. Given the fact that men can always increase their reproductive success by philandering, whereas women cannot, we should suspect that men are apt to be behaviorally designed to take advantage of opportunities for polygamy and that some of the things they do have that end in mind: There is broad agreement among evolutionary biologists that most of our ancestors lived in a condition of only occasional polygamy during the Pleistocene period (the two million years of modern human existence before agriculture): Societies that hunt and gather today are not much different from modern Western society: Most men are monogamous, many are adulterous, and a few manage to be polygamous, sharing perhaps up to five wives in extreme cases: Among the Aka pygmies of the Central African Republic, who hunt for food in the forest using nets, 15 percent of men have more than one wife, a pattern typical of foraging societies. 29
One of the reasons hunting and gathering cannot support much polygamy is that luck, more than skill, plays a large part in
hunters' success. Even the best hunter would often return empty-handed and would be reliant on his fellow men to share what they had killed. This equitable sharing of hunted food is characteristic of these people (in most other social hunting species there is a free-for-all) and is the clearest example of a habit of 'reciprocal altruism' on which the whole of society sometimes appears to be based. A lucky hunter kills more than he can eat, so he loses little by sharing it with his companions but instead gains a lot because next time, if he is unlucky, the favor will be repaid by those with whom he shared now. Trading favors in this way was the ancient ancestor of the monetary economy. But because meat could not be stored and because luck did not last, hunter-gatherer societies did not allow the accumulation of wealth.'°
With the invention of agriculture, the opportunity for some males to be polygamous arrived with a vengeance. Farming opened the way for one man to grow much more powerful than his peers by accumulating a surplus of food, whether grain or domestic animals, with which to buy the labor of other men. The labor of other men allowed him to increase his surplus still more: For the first time having wealth was the best way to get wealth. Luck does not determine why one farmer reaps more than his neighbor to the same degree that it determines the success of a hunter: Agriculture suddenly allowed the best farmer in the band to have not only the largest hoard of food but the most reliable supply. He had no need to share it freely, for he needed no favor in return. Among the
//Gana San people of Namibia, who have given up their !Kung San neighbors ' hunting life for farming, there is less food sharing and more political dominance within each band. Now, by owning the best or biggest fields or by working harder or by having an extra ox or by being a craftsman with a rare skill, a man could grow ten times as rich as his neighbor. Accordingly, he could acquire more wives. Simple agricultural societies often see harems of up to one hundred women per top man.'
Pastoral societies are, almost without exception, traditionally polygamous. It is not hard to see why. A herd of cattle or sheep is almost as easy to tend if it contains
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Such scale economies allow a man'to accumulate wealth at an ever-increasing rate. Positive feedback leads to inequalities of wealth, which leads to inequalities of sexual opportunity: The reason some Mukogodo men in Kenya have higher reproductive success than others is that
By the time ' civilization ' had arrived, in six different parts of the globe independently (from Babylon in 1700 B.C. to the Incas in A.D: 1500), emperors had thousands of women in their harems. Hunting and warrior skills had previously earned a man an extra wife or two, then wealth had earned him ten or more. But wealth had another advantage, too. Not only could it buy wives directly, it could also buy ' power. ' It is noteworthy that it is hard to distinguish between wealth and power before the ti me of the Renaissance. Until then there was no such thing as an economic sector independent of the power structure. A man's livelihood and his allegiance were owed to the same social superior.' Power is, roughly speaking, the ability to call upon allies to do your bidding, and that depended strictly on wealth (with a little help from violence):
Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals. Cape buffalo rise within the hierarchy of the herd to positions of dominance that bring sexual rewards. Chimpanzees, too, strive to become 'alpha male' in the troop and in so doing increase the number of matings they perform: But like men, chimps do not rise entirely on brute strength: They use cunning, and above all they form alliances. The tribal warfare between groups of chimps is both a cause and a consequence of the male tendency to build alliances.
In Jane Goodall 's studies the males of one chimp group were well aware when they were outnumbered by the males of another group and deliberately sought opportunities to single out individual males from the enemy. The bigger and more cohesive the male alliance, the more effective it was.'
Coalitions of males are found in a number of species. In turkeys, brotherhoods of males display competitively on a lek. If they win, the females will mate with the senior brother: In lions,
brotherhoods combine to drive out the males from a pride and take it over themselves; they then kill the babies to bring the lionesses back into season, and all the brothers share the reward of mating with all the females. In acorn woodpeckers, groups of brothers live with groups of sisters in a free-love commune that controls one
' granary tree, ' into which holes have been drilled that hold up to thirty thousand acorns to see the birds through the winter: The young, who are nieces and nephews of all the birds of whom they are not daughters and sons, must leave the group, form sisterhoods and brotherhoods themselves, and take over some other granary tree, driving out the previous owners.'
The alliances of males and females need not be based on relatedness: Brothers tend to help one another because they are related; what 's good for your brother ' s genes is good for yours since you share half your genes with him: But there is another way to ensure that altruism pays: reciprocity. If an animal wants help from another, he could promise to return the favor in the future. As long as his promise is credible—in other words, as long as individuals recognize each other and live together long enough to collect their debts—a male can get other males to help him in a sexual mission. This seems to be what happens in dolphins, whose sex life is only just becoming known: Thanks to the work of Richard Connor, Rachel Smolker, and their colleagues, we now know that groups of
