Many tens of thousands of years ago, everybody slept together.
I know how that sounds, but I’m speaking literally: in our migratory millennia, long before we invented towns and villages and neighborhoods, human life consisted of hunting and foraging and camping around fires by rivers. And when we slept, we huddled in groups, for warmth and safety.
Now, it’s easy to dwell on the potential kink of such an arrangement – and we can be sure that kink abounded (how could it not?) - but there’s much more going on in a world where human beings spend much of their lives cuddled up.
To begin, we turn to the nursing mother.
Paul Zak – aka “Dr. Love”, among his colleagues – provides us with a portrait of just how human empathy as we currently experience it evolved. It’s all to do with the relationship between early hominin mothers and their young. The latter have a “latch reflex” that can be triggered by softly stroking their cheeks – they will, sensing that contact, turn their heads to latch onto mother’s nipple, and draw milk. This reflex is a key component of human connection, as we all are born with it. It is built around the neurotransmitter oxytocin.
The subsequent chain of events is that the mother-infant bond that forms around oxytocin, triggered by the brushing of the skin of the infant’s cheek against the skin of the mother’s breast, stays within us; skin-to-skin contact triggers a positive neurotransmitter experience, deeply enhancing the quality of mating contact (far beyond what other mammals experience), and the emergence of trust between humans who touch frequently.
This touch need not be cheek-breast, of course (though few would campaign against it); it can be anything from the simplicity of a handshake to the wide variety of embraces to the catalog of sexual positions in the Kama Sutra. The take-home is simple: when humans touch repeatedly, a bond is formed.
We all touch a handful of people intimately on a regular basis: we are naked with our lover, hugging and affectionate with our children and close friends/family, casually touchy (handshakes, hugs, back-slaps) with familiar and safe people. Formal and limited, touch-wise, with everyone else.
Now imagine that you live in a neighborhood of 150 people. But your neighborhood has no houses; you and all of your family and friends live in the open, sleeping on the ground by a big fire at night. You don’t sleep apart from others; that’s an invitation for a very large cat (that can see in the dark) to flash past the fire and carry you away in its jaws and consume you at leisure in the darkness. Instead, you sleep in a big human knot with others.
Oh... and everybody is naked. That’s key. Clothing as we know it doesn’t exist yet, and what’s in its place is scarcely a barrier.
This is not to say that human community after sundown was an on-going, indiscriminate orgy; it wasn’t. We know from the genetically-derived propensities of human females to choose mates based on their scent that females were the sexual choosers, not males; yes, lots of mating went on, every single night we slept in groups, for hundreds of millennia. But the women picked and chose which males got the booty.
The sex isn’t the point here; the touch is the point.
Imagine how much more physical touch our ancient grandparents experienced in their vigorous lives. Thousands of times more than we do! Physical touch with other community members was the rule, not the exception.
It is not overstating to say that it was our language, prior to the invention of actual language. This level of deep intimacy allowed for many layers of communication, such that all manner of messages could be conveyed through a vast array of touches, from a fingertap on an arm to the stroke of a face to a slap of a shoulder to the tugging of hair to a hip-bump to a bicep squeeze to an affectionate ass-grab. Who needs words?
And even here, we haven’t gotten to the point, which is this: such a tribe, touching to communicate, day in and day out with not a few but many, would be awash in oxytocin.
Oxytocin, the Trust Drug.
Put simply, human beings in such a scenario would be mutually bonded beyond any concept we have of family, more intimate than we are able to imagine. They would trust each other, one and all, with their lives.
And did, day in and day out, year in and year out, from birth to death, for hundreds of thousands of years.
In other words, our ancient ancestors must necessarily have been empaths, one and all; tuned in to one another’s thoughts and feelings through every day of their rich-yet precarious existence, opening themselves to loving more than just a handful of others, caring deeply about those they slept with and those they didn’t, investing deeply in every single child, willing to lay their lives down when they had to. Family, one and all, more deeply than we can conceive.
All because they slept together...
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