It's Just a Midlife Crisis

Archaeologists have it pretty rough. They can spend months or years looking for an important historic site. Then months or years excavating that site. Then months or years studying what they have dug up and STILL never know the true historical or social relevance of what they so painstakingly unearthed. But what they do is unbelievably important. As humans, we seem to be strangely obsessed with our own species. Where did we come from? What is our purpose on the Earth? Why did a certain species like us die out? All questions we ask thinking the answers will help us sleep better at night. We can try to predict the future if we study the past. We can uncover patterns. As humans, we have become especially good at detecting patterns...but we also have a habit of creating or completing patterns when they don't exist. We want things to be predictable. We want to feel safe. So I imagine being an archaeologist would be terribly frustrating if, after a lifetime of work classifying and documenting physical discoveries like bones or artifacts, some evolutionary psychologist or cultural anthropologist could come along and make up stories about the artifacts you discovered that completely misrepresent your findings. That would not work for me.

Hold on. You just started reading a blogpost called "It's Just a Midlife Crisis," didn't you? You are probably wondering what the bleep archaeology has to do with a midlife crisis! A lot. And I’m hoping you have 5 minutes to read this idea through.

Midlife was not a crisis for a prehistoric human. Midlife for a cave-dweller, for example, was a rare occurrence--usually if you were above 40, you were already dead. But if you made it past that age, you were treated like gold. That is because a Paleolithic mid-lifer had a ton of experience, stories and information that could help a tribe with countless issues they might run into. A cavedwelling mid-lifer was a living, breathing internet, and those groups of dwellers who had one fared better than those groups of dwellers who did not. If you were a tree-dwelling mid-lifer, however, you were treated like dirt. That's because if you were a tree-dweller, you did not have verbal language that would allow you to easily share information...and verbal language is what eventually made cavedwellers so special. What also made cavedewellers special is that they could work together seamlessly, as a tribe, to keep each other alive. They had to learn who they could trust, and if you were not trustworthy, you were not going to be part of a tribe for very long. You had to put the group's needs above your own...and that rule was law whether you were a cave girl or a cave guy.

Men and women are different, but not in very many ways. Most researchers will tell you that cavedwellers, especially, did very different things to support their tribes because redundancy of work would not be efficient and therefore bad for a tribe. This idea does not make very much sense to me because if men did all the hunting and the women did all the gathering, that would mean they would be in separate groups for much of the time. And it's not as if hunting ceased near the campsites if the hunters were away; certainly there was someone around who could take out a wart hog if it happened by. And if the hunters were out tracking big game for days on end, did they not eat while they were hunting? Pretty sure the men had to know how to grab and go to keep their energy up while they were out and about. So when I imagine prehistoric dudes and dudettes, I imagine them doing almost all of the same things, just at different times. YES, the majority of the women gathered and the majority of the men hunted, but they both foraged. Modern people like things neat and labelled clearly, but I think there was a lot of grey area way back when we were first learning how to be humans. How did I come to this conclusion? I make a conscious effort to NOT push a story onto the archaeological discoveries I learn about...even though this can be tempting if you are a human and know a lot about a specific culture.

So just for fun, let's say I'm right. How can one then justify the supposed vast differences between modern men and women? Studies "prove" that men are better at spatial judgments or women are better communicators...it's hard to go a week without hearing about some researcher claiming another way guys and gals are different. But these studies are describing cultural differences, not biological ones. My best example of this misrepresentation is how we assume modern men and women experience a midlife crisis. Let’s have ladies first: Most people will tell you the prospect of a woman not being able to have (anymore) kids is the crisis. This would be true for females of other species, but not humans. Human females evolved to stop having babies before their typical natural death so that the grandmas of a tribe could help pass along knowledge to kids around the campsite, so making babies is not a human female's sole purpose. Plus, archaeologists have discovered that at least some prehistoric ladies were built like elite athletes. And the menfolk? It would be silly to think that those prehistoric human males who lived past hunting age would suddenly be able to boink younger cavedwellers and acquire whatever would be equivalent to an expensive Paleolithic sports car. The stereotypical male midlife crisis is based purely on material goods and completely culturally based. So is there a biological explanation for a modern man’s mid-life crisis? Sorta. Fellas back in the day who did not lose their lives hunting served the same purpose as the wise old women did--they shared information and stories. Today, that looks like dinnertime lectures or Youtube “how-tos,” while modern ladies write blogs or share important social media posts. The crisis actually comes when a modern midlifer gets to the age when they “instinctively” have a lot of things to share, but no one wants to listen. Finally, what is equally as tragic is that prehistoric stories are also being ignored when researchers fail to look at ancient physical evidence from a prehistoric point of view and use recent cultural cues to tell them.

Up Next: We all want to be immortal in "Amir's Choice."

References

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Henrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) & Oxford (UK).

Kaufman, S.B. (2019). Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously. Scientific Americans, Beautiful Minds (Online.) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/

Quirk J. (2006.) Sperm are from Men, Eggs are from Women: The Real Reason Men and Women are Different. Pennsylvania: Running Press Book Publishers.

Weisberg, Y.J., DeYoung, C.G. & Hirsh, J.B. (2011). Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big Five. Frontiers in Psychology, Personality and Social Psycholology(Online.) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178/full#B38

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