For most organisms, when it comes time to select a mate you look for a hot prospect and the hot prospect looks for you. It’s a pretty direct relation. Before strong language skill, it applied to humans as well.
One of the surprise uses of strong language skill is that humans have another way of selecting mates. Through most of human existence, parents have selected mates for their children. We call this arranged marriage.
Arranged marriage seems like an anachronism in Western culture, but the practice is still widely spread today and it was nearly universal up until the 20th century.
In Neolithic Village you didn’t have to look good to your prospective mate, you had to look good to your prospective mate’s mother and father!
What difference does this make?
At first glance, not much. Mates and mates’ parents both are looking for healthy, good looking, well-adjusted prospects. There are “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” differences, but other than that the criteria are much the same.
In truth it took a long time for me to think of serious differences between what a parent looks for and what a child looks for in a mate. What I finally came up with was this.
Moms and pops look seriously at how a mate is going to help them. Moms and pops are much more concerned with cooperativeness than their children are.
“Getting with the program” is a parent concern.
The result of this parental concern has been a steady and dramatic increase in cooperative thinking. As I’ve pointed out earlier, human males are dramatically more cooperative than males in closely related species and human females are also more cooperative.
This change to cooperation has come about very quickly in evolutionary time, so it is laid over deeper, less cooperative, thinking that still often shows through. An example: Two men getting drunk in a bar and having a seriously damaging fight over a woman. This is old-style thinking coming to the surface.
The somewhat surprising change that comes from cooperative males is patriarchy. When males are mostly loners and only come together to fight and mate, then women run whatever community the species has.
When males hang around and cooperate with each other they run the community. Many human communities are patriarchies.
Surprisingly, there are matriarchies in modern human communities, too. Here are two examples.
When the males of a community are disenfranchised—when they are not providing for the women and children—they tend to resort to old styles of thinking.
When men become disenfranchised on their home ground, often through displacement by a new group that comes to power in their region, they stereotypically become drunkards and fighters. This is an example of male disenfranchisement affecting male thinking. When the men are disenfranchised, the women take charge of a lot more and tend to run the community.
Chronic welfare communities in urban environments are similar. Once again, the males are disenfranchised, tend to come and go, and the women become the center of community decision making.
In polygamist closed cult communities, the men are providing for multiple families. This keeps them very, very busy. Once again, the center of day-to-day community decision making will shift to the women. Polygamist societies are called patriarchies, but the women are making many, many of the day-to-day choices, and if they are choosing, the community is acting like a matriarchy.
What I have just talked about are some of the longest thought about elements of the human condition—meaning that humans of many generations have been thinking about the challenges of living in this environment. Because they have been long thought about, the programming of the human brain—the instinct level thinking—is well set up to think about these things.
So, to review, Neolithic Village thinking is built around living in the following environment.
These are elements that are common in Neolithic Villages around the world and throughout human history.
About 500 hundred generations (10,000 years) ago, a deep change came about. Human thinking had changed enough that humans began embracing a whole new technology, agriculture, and a whole new lifestyle to go with it.
This change was big, and in the next chapter I will talk about just how big it was.