Over the years, especially since retirement, mariner has watched dozens of TV programs, read science journals, roamed about in Wikipedia – all of which had in common the subject of behavioral zoology. Evolution provides each creature with a set of behaviors that help them to survive in the wilderness of Planet Earth.
What brought the idea of a post on the subject is that Junk University recently ran a series of programs on some of our fellow creatures: Hyena, elephant, three varieties of monkeys, and cougars.
To make a long documentary about peculiarities short, he will leap to insights that seem to reflect common similarities – including humans.
Just to give merit to matriarchs, numerous female insects and birds decide who the father will be. Most predators do the same.
About half the monkey species have matriarchies. Elephants have matriarchies. Gorillas have a shared matriarchy-patriarchy where female rank in the herd carries over to her offspring while patriarchal domination of the herd is a competitive rank that dictates herd-wide activity. In hyenas, ranking mothers give birth to larger, stronger females who have a firm authority sufficient to ward off predators. Most of the feline class have dominant mothers probably because the male comes along only when its time to have sex.
A further delineation is mammals versus species who abandon their young, mostly small animals and birds. Social behavior is much more prominent in mammals.
The pattern that mariner perceived is that all mammals are born with a genetic capability to maintain some degree of family order. While there are different patterns, the objective is universal: maintain order in the clan.
Is this true about humans, that there must be a sustained social behavior in order to function as humans? Yes, of course. What is fascinating is to study how earlier versions of Homo handled that control. Our hunter gatherers had a matriarchy-patriarchy like the gorillas. This hardly changed as a principal behavior until about 10,000 years ago when the economics of power switched from surviving to survival of the fittest. Centuries of King patriarchs became the dominant social rule as a defense against an era of continuous warfare.
The Western Culture was planted in Europe during the first peaceful period after Roman domination. Early agricultural economics led to patriarchs who owned land. Lords and barons and such became the controllers of behavior both for men and women. Society in general still had not ranged far from total dependency on natural resources.
But something was changing. Patriarchal politics remained too primitive to deal with the new economics of local jurisdictions. To keep this post brief, the singular benchmark in history that flopped society from the rule of inbred animal behavior to something called ‘government’ was the signing of the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215.
That was the moment inherited animal behavior became subservient to standardized individual rights published in a constitution. Are 21st century humans about to revisit what controls human behavior?
Ancient Mariner