Wolves and Monogamy

Abstract

In her recent article, Pat Shipman asserts that it is human involvement with and control over animals that has driven key factors in human evolution, such as tool making and language (Shipman 2010). There may be an additional factor. Male and female monogamy has been and is the dominant form of marriage among human beings. Among most individuals and cultures, it is the most common form of marriage, and even in societies allowing other forms of marriage, monogamy is the most common form. By contrast to this ideal, real human behavior is fairly promiscuous, as is the behavior of the close relatives of human beings, chimpanzees and bonobos. The origin of marriage has been a topic of interest to the earliest anthropologists as well as to contemporary anthropologists, at least as “pair-bonding.” C. Owen Lovejoy (White et al. 2009), for example, suggests that male provisioning of a particular female through pairbonding may have led to bipedalism among Ardipithecus species and their descendents. Pair-bonding, despite all its advantages, does not seem to have led to a “monogamy gene” as such. With the ability of humans to attach symbolic meanings, however, pair-bonding can be elevated to monogamy. Human beings’ abilities to attach intense symbolic meanings to things and behavior, however, are often inspired and sustained by strongly meaningful circumstances that affect survival. Such may be the case with monogamy. Dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years before any plant or other animal was domesticated. In the hunt, as human companions, dogs compensated for humans’ lack of speed, sense of smell, sense of hearing, and tearing teeth and claws. The transition of some wolves into dogs must have had a profound effect on human survival. At the center of wolf pack social organization is the pair-bond of a dominant male and female who are the only breeding individuals in the pack. It would have been easy for humans to attribute part of dogs’ mystique to their “monogamy” and to seek that power by imitating the pair-bond of wolves.