Born to Learn: A Selection from Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)
“As they howled and beat on his chest, William Buckley figured they were going to kill him. Gradually, however, he realized that this small band of Australian hunter-gatherers was rejoicing because they had mistaken him for one of their deceased kinsmen. His rescuers believed that adults returning from the afterlife were light-skinned, like their newborns. Feeding the band’s misperception, Buckley had picked up the dead man’s spear a few days earlier, which the band had left implanted at the foot of his burial mound. With this lucky stroke, Buckley effectively slotted himself directly into their kinship network. His inability to speak, weakness, and general ineptness were written off as the unfortunate side effects of death.
Weeks earlier, in late December of 1803, Buckley and a few of his fellow prisoners had escaped from an Australian penal colony and fled along the wild coast of Victoria. He soon split from his companions, who all eventually died. On the verge of death himself, unable to forage food, locate fresh water, or make fire, Buckley was rescued and restored to health by his new Aboriginal family.
Buckley’s band was one of several that together formed a patrilineal clan, which was one of about two dozen clans that composed the Wathaurung tribe. Clans in the region owned and controlled specific territories, which contained valuable resources like clam beds, quartz deposits, and spawning grounds. Territories were owned corporately by all clan members, and membership was inherited automatically through one’s father.
Threaded together by marital and ritual ties, the Wathaurung were enmeshed in a tribal confederation that spoke related languages and possessed similar customs. Each clan belonged to one of two marriage groups. Everyone had to marry someone in the other marriage group, and sex with members of one’s own marriage group was considered incest. Men arranged marriages for their daughters or sisters, often when they were children or even infants. As in most hunter-gatherer societies, men could marry polygamously, with prestigious hunters and great warriors sometimes accumulating five or even six wives, leaving lesser men with no wives and few prospects. Buckley also described the white-streaked bodies, rhythmic drumming, synchronous dancing, and roaring fires at large ceremonies that periodically brought together diverse clans and neighboring tribes. These rituals sometimes included circumcision rites that initiated adolescent boys from scattered communities.
Despite the ties of marriage and ritual, the most striking feature of Buckley’s three decades with the Wathaurung were the violent conflicts that occurred among bands, clans, and tribes. In his life story, Buckley recounted 14 conflicts, which included several deadly night raids as well as pitched battles involving hundreds of warriors. In one instance, 300 enemy tribesmen amassed at the far side of a clearing. Buckley’s band fled for their lives but eventually had to regroup, assemble allies, and defend their territory at great cost. In another horrifying scene, his band stumbled across the bloody remnants of a friendly band that had been massacred the day before. The dominant justifications for most of this violence involved disagreements over women—over who would marry whom—though in a few cases the attacks were revenge for the use of sorcery to cause ‘unnatural’ deaths (e.g., sorcery-induced snakebites).
In describing one of these conflicts, Buckley gives us a glimpse of corporate guilt. A man from another clan had ‘lured away’ one of the wives of Buckley’s band. By ‘lured away,’ it seems that she simply preferred to live with a different man. When Buckley’s band happened across the ‘thief’s’ band, the escaped wife was forcibly taken back. She ended up residing in Buckley’s lodgings, much to his distress. Months later, in the middle of the night, the woman’s jealous lover suddenly appeared, stabbed the sleeping husband, who was lying next to a snoozing Buckley, and fled with his mistress. A few weeks later, Buckley’s band again encountered this group, but this time the murderer and ‘stolen’ wife were elsewhere. To Buckley’s horror, his band wreaked vengeance, killing both the murderer’s adult brother and four-year-old daughter, who seemed completely innocent, from Buckley’s point of view.
After 25 years with his band, saddened by the violent deaths of those closest to him, Buckley began to live independently from his tribe. Like other hunter-gatherers, he’d learned to fear and distrust strangers, since lone travelers could be scouts for raiding parties. Following standard practice, Buckley surrounded his little camp with low turf-and-bark fences to conceal his campfires at night.
After seven years of living on his own, having actively avoided contact with ships and sailors, Buckley finally decided to reenter the European world, at a new settlement called Melbourne.
Buckley’s experience in Aboriginal Australia highlights two central questions for understanding human nature. First, Buckley and the other fugitives utterly failed to survive by hunting and gathering despite starting with about four days’ worth of supplies and entering one of Australia’s most bountiful ecologies. They couldn’t find enough food, start fires, build shelters, or make the necessary spears, nets, or canoes. That is, these men couldn’t survive as hunter-gatherers on a continent where humans had lived as foragers for nearly 60,000 years. Why not? Since our species has spent most of the last two million years living as hunter-gatherers, one might think that the one thing our big primate brains should be good at is surviving by hunting and gathering. If they didn’t evolve to make us better at hunting and gathering, then what did our big brains evolve for?”—Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020)
