92 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



the higher primates and finally in man was so vastly accel- 

 erated. 



Anthropologists seem in accord that the social organiza- 

 tion of the earliest men must have gotten under way at levels 

 only slightly higher than that of the gorilla— small groups of 

 biological families, loosely associated as nomadic wander- 

 ers. And there followed a very long period of several hun- 

 dred thousand years of what is now called the "hunting and 

 gathering" stage of man's social evolution. Such loosely held 

 groups exist even today in tribes like the primitive Kalahari 

 Bushman, Eskimos, and others. There were advantages in 

 group living; and early man, a very weak animal, of neces- 

 sity increased the sizes of the groups as he turned more and 

 more to the hunt of animal flesh to augment his diet. 



The tendency of jealous old males to drive the young 

 males out of the family, a trait that keeps the gorilla family 

 small, lessened in man. Early human mothers were tending 

 to keep their sons, as well as their daughters, with them, 

 probably by inspiring their young with fear of their elders, 

 particularly the ruling Old Man. The young males learned 

 to be wary of infringing on the Old Man's rights and, espe- 

 cially, of arousing his jealousy. The strength and the tem- 

 pers of the elders of these early families, the anthropologists 

 say, gave form and direction to a tradition. The young males 

 were growing up with a knowledge that possessing the fe- 

 males of the group was taboo to them. Even in many other 

 mammals, especially chimpanzees, the young males are well 

 aware of the danger they run if they poach on the dominant 

 male's preserves. In man, fear of the Old Man was con- 

 sciously becoming a guiding force. Young males with a dis- 

 position to propitiate remained and groups enlarged; the 

 young deferred to the older— a "peck order" of sorts. 



According to anthropologists, man learned the elements 

 of self -suppression through taboos, one of the earliest being 

 the taboo against incest. Here, it would seem, is the first idea 

 of sin and the first of the repression complexes of the psy- 



