Mankind has been living in the Neolithic Village environment for 10,000 generations. Mankind’s thinking is well adapted to this environment, which means a lot of instinctive thinking, fast and comfortable thinking, works well here.
Modern humans came out of Africa about 2,000 generations ago (40,000 years) and reached the Americas about 700 generations ago (14,000 years). There have been, and are today, humans living in hunter-gatherer societies on all continents but Antarctica, so there is a lot of diversity in what I’m calling Neolithic Village.
There are also many common features, and those are what I will concentrate on. It’s the common features that have pushed the gene pool the longest, so those have had the most effect on human thinking.
Here are the common features.
The size of the group could be limited by many things. The important one for thinking processes is the energy devoted to dominance checking—the checking of who is who in the group pecking order.
As a group’s size grows, the number of checks grows according to the Fibonacci Sequence: 0, 1, 3, 6, 10 … In other words, it grows quickly as size goes up.
This is a problem because each check takes some time and energy and causes some stress.
Because the health and well-being of group members can change on a day-to-day basis, there is an incentive to have frequent checks. But if the checking happens so often that leaders get exhausted, and their replacements get exhausted, and their replacements get exhausted … the group is too big.
The fix is easy: Split the group. The number of checks going on in two separate smaller groups is dramatically less than in one large group. Problem solved.
The not-so-surprising fallout of living in small groups is developing an us-versus-them way of thinking. Outsiders can be dealt with, but they can’t be trusted like insiders. Note that this “don’t trust strangers” thinking is adult thinking, not child thinking. I will talk about why this happens later.
In Neolithic Village, females gather and raise, males hunt and provide. This is a big change for thinking in males from average primate thinking. Females of most primates raise children and form groups that move around together. Most herbivorous mammal males don’t socialize much. Once they mature beyond needing a mother’s care, they go it alone until mating season. Then they come back to the female groups and fight each other over the females.
For males to be around females a lot, but not fighting each other a lot, and giving food to females and young a lot … this is a big, big series of changes in male thinking. Mother Nature was hard pressed. Here are some resources she kludged from.
This is how Mother Nature’s experimenting tends to work: She doesn’t like creating brand-new solutions as much as she likes moving existing solutions to new tasks.
So to adapt from pre–Neolithic Village environment to Neolithic Village environment, male thinking probably had to go through more change than female thinking, and much of that change came from moving child and female thinking patterns into males.
There are surprises, of course. One is that while males became more cooperative, they didn’t give up wanting to dominate the show, and they haven’t. Another is that males care a lot more about the tools than females—males like the toys, especially the new ones.
Another not-so-surprise is that the old herbivorous male thinking patterns are not gone, and these older thinking patterns will show themselves when conditions are right. Stories of two men fighting over a woman are a staple of storytelling throughout the ages.
For most mammals, the end of reproductive ability signals the end of value to the species—and the oldsters quickly die. Humans are a noticeable exception; Oldsters live for many years. What this means is, grandparents can help grandchildren survive and Mother Nature nods her head in approval at humans who live well beyond reproductive age.
She shows this care in a very tangible way: The human brain of older people is not the same as that of younger people and the changes occur in an orderly fashion. If grandparents had no influence on the success of their grandchildren, the changes in old people’s brains would be random changes … because the changes wouldn’t make any difference to the outcome of the grandchild test.
Because old people are valuable, the humans of Neolithic Village learned to think respectfully of old people—even though they are slow and infirm, the younger members of the community don’t routinely grab their food and starve them to death.
Keep in mind: Old people are shown respect because they are valuable. They are valuable because they know a lot and they can teach their children and grandchildren lots of valuable things.
Pop Quiz
Q: What important human invention took away a valuable commodity function of old people?
A: Writing. Writing remembers even better than old people, and costs a lot less to maintain.
What this means is, old people were a lot more obviously valuable to the community in Neolithic Village days than they are today.
The effects of this on human thinking are subtle. The most noticeable is the negative thinking about the group this brings out in the exiled person. People are used to belonging. When you are told you no longer belong, it’s pretty scary and upsetting.
The world of Neolithic Village is hugely uncertain. Lots of stuff happens without warning and without reason. Humans had to be resilient, resourceful, and go with the flow. This uncertainty didn’t stop them from looking for patterns. They looked hard to see if they could forecast both good times and bad times. But even with their best guessing, surprises happened and they had to be adapted to.
Humans are comfortable with moving around. The move can be for benefit or to avoid disaster. Moving to a better job opportunity and vacations away from home are modern variants of semi-nomadism.
The modern limited group size instinct interacts with the instinct for exile, as indeed they did in the Village.
Our world is increasingly globalized. Each of us does things with a lot of different people, either by directly communicating with them or else by using products that other people have created, still other people have transported, and yet other people have marketed to us.
In the face of this wide net of value added to our lives by strangers, we still feel more comfortable dealing with familiar faces, and family faces in particular. This “familiar is better” thinking is an instinct that comes from Neolithic Village living.
One of the odder places this instinct shows up is on TV. TV news and TV entertainment shows are dominated by familiar faces. These TV personalities are high-technology relatives—they share space with us on a daily basis. In the same vein, constant repetition of advertising stimulates the familiar-is-better instinct.
This is an instinct that grows in strength with age—younger people don’t feel it as much; older people feel it a lot more.
Another way this instinct shows up is in closed membership cults. This kind of cult is built on developing strong us-versus-them thinking. This becomes very comfortable for members, and this comfort is the source of the brainwashing accusations that are often spread about closed membership cults. These cults also bring out a second aspect of Neolithic Village thinking: Exile.
When members who have become comfortable with cult thinking are thrown out of a cult, they are often very unhappy. They are unhappy, but they often hang around the edges of the cult, and say bad things about it because the cult is still very much on their mind.
In stark contrast is the practice of rumspringa (aka rumschpringe and other spellings) in many modern Amish communities. Without being upbraided or shunned, adolescents are allowed freedom to rebel for a while—sometimes rather spectacularly—against traditional constraints on clothing, vehicle driving, drinking, and attending home prayer. Details vary widely between groups, but can even include self-exile among “the English” outside the community.
Interestingly, after this experience the overwhelming majority choose to be baptized and remain in the church and the community.
Raising a human from childhood to adulthood takes a lot of resource. If an adult is lost to the community, the community loses a lot of investment.
In spite of this expense, tossing humans out of a community happens often. The toss-out can be voluntary—when “the brightest and best” leave—or it can be involuntary—stoning, hanging, imprisoning, riding someone out on a rail.
One of the modern forms of exile is going to jail. We can see how deep that instinct runs by watching how much children use the concept in their let’s pretend games.
Human communities view tossing out members as routine, but risky and expensive.
“Men provide for the family, women keep the household and raise the children.” This so-called traditional family image in fact dates way, way back. One modern implementation is that a man earns a paycheck, then hands it over to his wife, who organizes its spending.
That pattern is becoming steadily less universal.
When we see quaint ’50s-era advertising about American families, it is emphasizing this way of thinking. Americans of the ’50s cherished this image because they longed for the placid “good old days” before the traumatic upheavals of the Great Depression and World War Two, and advertisers were happy to oblige by producing these images.
On the face of it, in modern society, old people are a social burden—they consume a lot and provide little. But people of all ages still show respect for old people.
This feeling of respect is a holdover from days when older people added a lot of value to the community by contributing memories and wisdom.
From writing onwards, all the new communication tools humans have invented have steadily diminished the value of old people as repositories of knowledge and wisdom.
This respect for old people is a good example of an old idea dying hard. It’s also an example of the variety of thinking that exists in the human community. Old people are mostly respected, but they are also preyed upon—there are alternative ways of thinking in every human community.
Dealing with change is very much a part of the human condition. The media likes to make big news of disasters and treat each one as unique. But in fact they are very much a part of the human condition.
Mother Nature designed humans with a lot of adaptability. At first glance this looks like an odd choice. Adaptability, like redundancy, is an expensive way to design; adaptable designs are slow and expensive compared to dedicated designs.
But when change comes—and disaster is just one of many forms change takes—adaptability works a whole lot better than dedication.
Humans once again move around a lot and they don’t mind doing so. This comfort with moving has deep roots.
Those are some human features that come from Neolithic Village thinking. The Neolithic Village environment has been around a long time, so human thinking has had a long time to adapt to it.
There is one more important style of human thinking that developed during the Neolithic Village period. But it’s a big enough issue that it gets its own chapter.
What is worthy of its own chapter?
A thinking style that has powered romance, fashion, passion, and heartbreak since man became human—thinking about beauty.