Why are we like we are? Why do we do what we do?

What follows is my opinion of why people are the way they are and my technique for understanding how they might react to a situation. I have found that it makes a great many otherwise incomprehensible human reactions seem unsurprising.

Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago. For the following 190,000 years we pursued a certain strategy for survival. We are here because that strategy worked and it is deeply wired into our brains. If territorial spread and raw numbers are defined as success, then we are very successful. Our DNA must be very satisfied. We evolved in Africa and in our ancestral home there are many forces at work which restrict our numbers. Once we left Africa, we left behind those forces and, like most “weeds”, we had the potential to grow in numbers without restraint. For 190,000 years our strategy looked like this.

A group of 10 to 30 people move into an uninhabited area, frequently following shorelines, and exploit the resources. The wildlife have never seen Homo sapiens and are easy prey. When the group finally has to wander further afield for prey, they decide to move to the area where prey is still plentiful. As soon as anyone in the group disagrees with the chosen site, the group splits.

That’s it. The implications of that lifestyle make us what we are today. Using that as the model, many insights can be gleaned about the behaviour of Homo sapiens. As our current style of living is only a very recent adaptation, I believe that only very small changes have occurred in the way we operate. Our instincts are those that served us well for those 190,000 years. Our instincts are the patterns of behaviour that were most likely to lead to successful passing on of our genes for the vast sweep of time until about 10,000 years ago.

Here’s an example. We are all familiar with the suggestion that it is in our nature to explore. Few would dispute this, but why is it so? For 190,000 years, exploration brought great rewards. Most importantly, there would be fresh game unfamiliar with humans and their nature. We don’t look like most other predators. They could leave behind the competition from the growing bands of Homo sapiens in their wake. They could leave behind any pollution they had created by their own presence and any disease they may have encountered. They could leave behind any disease that had entered their own group. So a great many problems could be addressed by simply picking up and moving on. The advantages were so great that they became instinctive. That is, anyone who had the inclination to “move on”, to explore, was much more likely to survive.

Why did I say the groups were 10 to 30? Well, I just pulled those numbers out of my head. But let’s chew them over. Imagine it is 100,000 years ago and you are standing naked and alone on a plain in Africa. You would be quite vulnerable. Among the most vulnerable mammals standing on the plain in fact. Tasty. Now imagine you are standing with your tribe of 10, 20 or 30 people and that the tribe has the usual profile of such groups. Some are hunters with spears and simple axes. Your group is now the most dangerous thing on the plain. A pride of lions or pack of hunting dogs would think long and hard before attacking. It is in the nature of Homo sapiens to be capable of vindictiveness. If a pride took one of our young we just might decide to say, make killing an adult lion a rite of passage to adulthood (it’s been done), or simply decide that the entire pride has to go and hunt down every last one. It is an aspect of self-defense. Rage and vindictiveness are our “motivation”. We are very dangerous.

So why not groups of 1,000? We were hunter-gatherers. If 1,000 hunter-gatherers move into a valley, they’d be falling over one another immediately. We can readily imagine that such a group would break up rapidly and disperse over more territory. Only when agriculture appeared did these rules begin to change.

There is another aspect to this. If we were discussing another species, it would not be valid to opine in the absence of data. But, while emphasising that these are just my opinions, it is “us” we are talking about. Not another species. How big does a group have to get before you know that you are disconnected from some of them? At what point do friends become acquaintances? We are wired to cope with a society of a certain size, and that size is the size of a group best adapted for exploiting fresh terrain as hunter-gatherers. For most people, special coping techniques are required to deal with communicating with groups above a certain size. Some folks simply close their eyes. Some address “the front row” or “the back row”. These techniques are designed to reduce the size of the group that the mind has to cope with to a natural size.

If you use this model to analyse human behaviour, it leads to an obvious line of thought. Does the belief that a certain behaviour is instinctive make it ok? Well, no. We are not living in those societies any more. Adaptations must be made. The more our circumstances diverge from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the more our intellect must override our instincts to keep society functioning. The more our laws can allow people to obey their natural instincts though, the more successful those laws are likely to be.