Natural Selection For Less Aggression Enabled Complex Societies

[Judi Lynn]

August 09, 2014

Natural Selection For Less Aggression Enabled Complex Societies

In order for human societies to grow in complexity and sophistication humans first had to evolve to become less aggressive. A greater capacity for cooperation was needed. Well, 50,000 years ago human skulls developed more rounded appearances with and brows became less heavy. Technology boom 50,000 years ago correlated with apparent reduction in testosterone

DURHAM, N.C. -- Modern humans appear in the fossil record about 200,000 years ago, but it was only about 50,000 years ago that making art and advanced tools became widespread.

A new study appearing Aug. 1 in the journal Current Anthropology finds that human skulls changed in ways that indicate a lowering of testosterone levels at around the same time that culture was blossoming.

I've been reading a lot of books lately on rises and declines of great civilizations. I've wondered whether a large scale settled society selects for less aggressive males which eventually makes it vulnerable to being overrun by a neighboring society that is less civilized. Take the Roman Empire for example. Were the Romans of 100 BC a more genetically masculine people than the Romans of 400 AD? Did their own success and long period of fairly safe living set them up to be overrun by genetically more masculine tribes sweeping down from northern Europe?

Cooperative temperaments are needed for larger scale human undertakings.

"The modern human behaviors of technological innovation, making art and rapid cultural exchange probably came at the same time that we developed a more cooperative temperament," said lead author Robert Cieri, a biology graduate student at the University of Utah who began this work as a senior at Duke University.

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