Facebook in our Genes?

A new study indicates that social networking is an integral part of humankind's nature, carried down from ancient humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago.
This was Hadza land, a type of rugged African landscape that we have all seen in pictures and movies about the African Serengeti. Coren Apicella and her research assistants were frequently on the move, traveling the region by Land Cruiser, struggling to cross mud-drenched trails. At one location, they had to lay felled trees on the ground in order to advance, and at another point, they had to flee a horde of elephants. But it all came with the territory. They were studying a nomadic people called the Hadza, or Hadzabe, an ethnic group of people in north-central Tanzania, living around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and in the neighboring Serengeti Plateau. The Hadza people number less than 1,000 in total population. Roaming over 4,000 square kilometers of the African landscape, several hundred of them still live as hunter-gatherers, much as their ancestors lived tens of thousands of years ago before the invention of agriculture. Some consider them to be the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. To Coren and other researchers, they offer an interesting case for ground-breaking research and discovery about the dynamics and evolution of social networking in the human family, one element that made modern humans what they are today.
Their study produced some illuminating results. The findings brought to light some key elements of social network structures that may have existed tens of thousands of years ago, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years ago, in the formative years of human history. They suggest how our ancestors formed social networks, contributing to the evolution of cooperation.

"We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we've always done—not just before Facebook, but before agriculture," said James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, and study co-author. Nicholas Christakis, a senior author of the study and professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, agrees: "From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind."

Apicella and her assistants interviewed 205 adult Hadza over a two-month period to measure their tendency to cooperate and to map their friendships. As part of the study, they asked adult individuals who they would prefer to live with at their next encampment. Then, they gave each adult three straws of honey and were told they could give them to anyone in their camp. Both activities created 1,263 campmate ties and 426 "gift" ties. As a separate experiment, the researchers measured cooperation by giving them additional honey straws that they could optionally keep or donate to the group as a whole. They also measured connectedness of the people by height, age, food preference, and other characteristics, and the likelihood that a person's friends are also friends with one another.

When the networks were analyzed, they found that cooperators and non-cooperators developed distinctly different clusters. Said Apicella, "If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve. Social networks allow this to happen." The premise is that for cooperation to evolve, altruistic acts, such as sharing food with a non-relative, must benefit both receiver and giver in some way. If not for this, as the principle goes, self-serving persons would essentially overcome and replace those that are selfless, leading to societal collapse. At least theoretically, the evolution of cooperation depends on the existence of a system that makes it possible for the cooperators to group together with others who also tend to share.

Equally as significant, the study found that the data that described the structure and dynamics of the Hadza hunter-gatherer social networks were basically the same as the data drawn from modern communities.

"We turned the data over lots of different ways," said Fowler. "We looked at over a dozen measures that social network analysts use to compare networks and pretty much, the Hadza are just like us."

Apicella, Fowler and Christakis designed the study, working with Hadza expert Frank Marlowe, a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Cambridge. The research was funded by the National Institute on Aging and by the Science of Generosity Initiative of the University of Notre Dame.

The findings, detailed in the article, "Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers" by Coren L. Apicella, et al., are published in the January 26, 2012 issue of Nature. See video below for additional information about these findings.

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/december-2011/article/facebook-in-our-genes1