Chapter 9: Centuries to Millennia Before

Sapolsky explores how culture, ecology, and long historical trajectories—spanning centuries to millennia—shape human behavior. Sapolsky demonstrates that culture coevolves with biology, leaving lasting imprints on how we cooperate, fight, love, and hate. The chapter opens by showing that differences often attributed to biology, such as math performance, are powerfully shaped by culture, as evidenced by the narrowing gender gap in math scores in egalitarian societies. Culture persists across generations, influencing behaviors as trivial as unpaid parking tickets among diplomats to life-and-death conflicts rooted in centuries-old sectarian disputes. Sapolsky examines definitions of culture, contrasting anthropologists’ views with primatology findings that animals like chimps, dolphins, and crows transmit traditions. Yet human culture is unique in scale, symbolism, and capacity for moral frameworks. Cultural universals, such as empathy, reciprocity, rituals, and kinship, coexist with vast differences in values and outcomes—from literacy rates to life expectancy and violence exposure across countries. A key contrast is collectivist versus individualist cultures. Individualist societies (like the U.S.) emphasize autonomy, uniqueness, and guilt-based morality, while collectivist cultures (like East Asia) emphasize interdependence, conformity, shame, and holistic thinking. Ecology underpins these differences: rice cultivation fostered communal interdependence, while wheat farming favored autonomy. Pastoralist ecologies birthed cultures of honor, where theft vulnerability led to reputations guarded by violence, still evident in the American South’s traditions of dueling, feuds, and retaliatory aggression. Honor killings in patriarchal societies illustrate how violence regulates reputation, especially for women. The chapter also explores stratified versus egalitarian cultures. Agriculture created surpluses and inheritance, spawning inequality. Stratified societies often thrived militarily but produced low social capital—less trust, reciprocity, and cooperation—while inequality worsened health, crime, and violence. Phenomena like air rage reflect how reminders of inequality fuel aggression, usually directed laterally against peers rather than upward. Population growth, density, and heterogeneity further transformed human behavior. Urbanization demanded new systems like third-party punishment, legal institutions, and “Big Gods” to regulate anonymous interactions. Population density predicted “tight” cultures with stricter norms, while heterogeneity could foster either tolerance or conflict depending on boundary clarity. Ecological crises—famine, disease, disasters, and climate shifts—produced long-term legacies of authoritarianism, xenophobia, and violence. Finally, Sapolsky addresses the age-old Hobbes vs. Rousseau debate: are humans innately violent or peaceful? Archaeological evidence of massacres and fortified settlements suggests war predates states, yet critiques argue violence was overemphasized, with many hunter-gatherers relatively peaceful. Ethnographic studies reveal lethal violence but also fairness, indirect reciprocity, and avoidance of despotism in nomadic groups. Sapolsky concludes that humans are capable of murder, but large-scale war was rare before agriculture. Farming, surplus, and inequality unleashed the structures enabling organized warfare, making agriculture one of history’s most consequential transformations.