a bonobo humanity?

‘We all belong… to an MAC – a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from 15 to 25 assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents – everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teenagers’. 

Susila, in Island, by Aldous Huxley, 1962

Bonobo mum with adopted child

I’ve mentioned how, in childhood, I perused a book called Children of the Dream, which looked at a different way of rearing children, in which they had a variety of adults and older kids to learn from, and they could gravitate towards some and away from others according to their inclinations. I was hungry for ideas like this as I felt trapped in an embattled family situation and yearned for both freedom and some kind of instruction or sponsorship that would promote my development in the most positive way. I was five when our smallish nuclear family (2 adults, 3 kids) moved from Scotland to the other side of the globe, so I had no experience of an extended family. And we lived together within a brick construction divided into compartments for eating, watching TV, sleeping and reading, washing our clothes, washing ourselves and defecating, surrounded by some land on which we could grow grass, various plants, or nothing much. 

Twenty-five or so years later, I learned about bonobos, our closest living relatives, equally with chimpanzees. The lifestyles of these two other types of ape provided a fascinating contrast, while both types provided an equally fascinating contrast with H sapiens.

Returning to my childhood, I gradually learned that, outside of my family, which was female-dominant, the human world was dominated by the males. They were the headmasters, the bosses, the political leaders and so forth. We kids were, rather suddenly, sent to Sunday school where we were taught about our Father who was in heaven, but also everywhere else, who made us and made the world and loved us and watched over us constantly, and whose son died for our sins on a wooden cross long ago. None of this made any sense to me, and it seemed of a part with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, only the adults who told us these stories took it all so seriously that I felt no inclination to question them. I was a timid child, but also skeptical before I knew the word.

Much later, I came to wonder more about this religious double act of the Father and Son, and about the Church as it existed before the Protestant Reformation, with its history of male Popes, and its male Cardinals, male Archbishops, male Bishops and male Priests. And of course I learned about the history of male political leaders, generals, dictators, monarchs and emperors, and the tiny sprinkling of females among them, and it all stuck me as very odd and sad. And a bit stupid. And then, again, bonobos.

We are, of course, the only mammals who build our own structures for our nuclear families to live in. In doing so we have in a sense, ‘naturalised’ the nuclear family. And this happened not so long ago in the history of H Sapiens, which goes back to around 315,000 years ago according to the findings from Jebel Irhoud in present-day Morocco.

The term ‘housing’ isn’t so easy to define. If we think of purpose-built structures for living in, what about termite mounds or bee-hives? And before these human structures we imagine cave dwelling, but just how many caves are there dotted about the place? It’s likely that our first domiciles combined natural shelter and human ingenuity, using wood, bones, skins and such. Fireplaces would probably have featured. But it surely wasn’t just families in the modern sense that built or used these sites. Think again of bonobos:  

Bonobos live in fission-fusion social groups where a large community of individuals separate into smaller groups, or parties, of variable size and composition. These “unit-groups” range from lone individuals to groups of 20 or more bonobos (Badrian et al. 1984; White 1988, 1996).

The size of human groups would have evolved over time – not too big, not too small, and quite likely having flexible fission-fusion lifestyles for much of human history. This also reduces inbreeding, as even chimps/bonobos have come to realise (unlike the Habsburgs). 

What I’m really getting at, though, is when did we, as kids, come to recognise and acknowledge that we had one father, one mother, and the odd sibling? And that we belonged to this grouping, were in effect ‘owned’ by it? In spite of the great service the internet has provided for us over the past few decades, I can’t find any clear answer to this question – unsurprisingly, I suppose. Neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, but of course they live in ‘troops’, with the mother as principal care-giver, but with plenty of other adults or adolescents to help out, siblings or no. This is especially the case in bonobo society, which can, at a stretch, be seen as one big Mutual Adoption Club. The difference of course is that the bonobo way developed naturally, it simply evolved, whereas the ways of the Kibbutzim and Huxley’s MAC have a seemingly top-down artificiality about them. Interestingly, we’re having the same problem with our own gender issues, with a ‘natural’ understanding, based on neurology and the study of history, not to mention a multitude of writings such as Woolf’s A room of one’s own and Beauvoir’s The second sex, that women have been intellectually undervalued for millennia, together with a more artificial quota system for women/girls in STEM, or women in government. In any case, with the gradual receding of patriarchal religious systems (very gradual in some places), and obvious successes of women in science, business and politics, as well as the much more publicised behaviour of men behaving badly, re warfare, political machinations, capitalist exploitation and the like, it seems inevitable, to me at least, that we will gradually, in a two steps forward, one step back fashion, evolve into a female-dominant human culture (remembering that that there’s no gender equality among any of the social mammals – gender inequality isn’t just the norm, it’s universal). It seems to me unproblematic that the gender that brings humans into the world should be the ones in charge – with a little help from their friends.

As for the compartmented nuclear family thing – who knows? Change is a constant, and we now accept same-sex marriages, no-fault divorce, single parentage and the like, all in the last few decades. Our society has also become more child-focussed, just as we’ve reduced family sizes. No more corporal punishment in schools (too late for me, sadly), no more ‘bastards’, and more government assistance in terms of subsidies, childcare centres, maternity leave and so on. The concept of family itself has been altered and extended, and evolution is a never-ending story…

References

Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz (note especially the subsections ‘children’ and ‘child rearing’)

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-female-wild-bonobos-infants-social.html