The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK g

and Kirghis have similar restrictions. The woman must never use the name of her husband’s father. Now let us leap to Ceylon and we find the Veddah must not speak alone to his mother-in-law nor speak with or take food from his son’s wife. Again in Melanesia in the Banks Islands a man must not enter a house in which is his mother-inlaw, and if he meets her in the bush he must turn aside to avoid her. The daughter-inlaw must not name her father-in-law. Similar restrictions are found in New Guinea and Torres Straits. Parallel tabus prevail throughout Australia. In Africa a Zulu covers his face with his shield if he chances to come upon his mother-in-law, throws away a mouthful he is eating if she happens to pass by and must never mention her name. Frazer cites similar customs from the Bantu tribes and the Masai. They are found very widely among the American aborigines. It is impossible not to believe that here we must be dealing with a “ fossil institution” of once universal importance, a common fundamental idea. That in many instances it should be lost and in many distorted or perverted is only what was to be expected.

The ‘‘ fossil’? reminders of exogamy in marriage ceremonies are equally widespread. The evidence of the marriage ceremonies lies parallel to the tabus and is similar in its world-wide extent. The primordial procedures have been complicated, distorted, varied enormously, but always at the root we can detect a barrier against free intercourse and the necessity of mitigating by special conventions the discord and harmful excitement of a_ stranger introduced to the close intimacies of a family group. The primordial marriage introduces while the primordial tabus protect the newcomer. The excitement of novelty is denied free play. The disturbance is damped down below the level of social disruption.

The sexual psychology of the apes and monkeys in their natural surroundings has still to be studied with any thoroughness. What is known of the behaviour of these creatures is entirely compatible with the suggestions of Atkinson. They have no breeding season, no rut, such as prevails among mammals ; like man, their breeding season is all the year round. And all the year round sexual intercourse goes on and most vigorously in seasons of abundance and well-being. ‘Their sexual impulse is excessive. When they are social like the baboons, there is a perpetual bickering and scolding

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going on in the swarm, insults, pursuits and recriminations due mostly to their intense sexual impulses. The males are possessive and keep a sharp eye on their particular mates. In the London Zoological Gardens there were for a time only six females to many more males and all these were individual wives. When one “ married’? male happened to die, his widow was actually torn in bits by other males eager to acquire her now that her strong Old Man was no more. Homo sapiens, when he is thrown out of his ordinary social atmosphere so that the fundamental tabus are no longer in effective action, that is to say when his sense of sin is lulled or out of action, shows himself to be closely akin in these matters to the rest of the primates his cousins. His instinctive restraints, as distinguished from his reasoned ones, are slight or non-existent. He is possessive as a lover, but disloyal. It is the primary tabus that restrain him. It is these tabus that hold back our species from incessant sexual squabbling and make the disciplined tolerance needed for sustained economic co-operation possible.

The survival value of the tribe (that is to say, the group with numerous mated males, living in comparative mutual toleration) over that of the narrower family group under a jealous patriarch must have been particularly evident in these drier phases of climatic change when forests were giving place to more open country and shrinking in their area. Such phases, as we have shown in Book 5, Chapter 7, were recurrent during the age of human evolution. Life was being repeatedly squeezed out of the forests to try its luck on the steppes to the north or the deserts to the south. Whenever a diminution of forests occurred a dietary of varied small pickings would be replaced by a menu with quantitatively larger and_less diversified items. The tribe of kindred, as distinguished from the mere patriarchal family, was able to hold larger territories and choose and hold the best territories against any smaller groups of competitors. It was also more able to attack larger animals for food than a lonely hunter or a one-man group could do, and to defend itself more effectively against hostile beasts. It could venture into open country where isolated men would certainly have been hunted down and killed.

It is idle to guess how early in the development of the Hominid this movement towards the co-operative gregariousness of a life in the open began. It may have begun first as the vegetation of the Miocene Age