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Now that the woman had some help in child rearing, her children had a greater chance of reaching adulthood to help her further in raising more children. Just as she domesticated the male, she would also domesticate her children to assist her with further children. As the female was selected for her maternal love, her children would be selected for motherly love, as those that stayed to help out would more likely survive. Hence love of mother is probably more primary than love of father. Again love of mother is a prevalent theme in literature and seems to be a fundamental human moral. Of course it is institutionalized in many moral codes, including the ten commandments of the Bible, indicating how important culturally this value is. Interestingly love of children is not institutionalized in the same way, maybe because it is so fundamental.
The image we are getting is of the mother, desperately or not, marshaling all of her resources to save her family, clan, or tribe from a hostile world. Again we see many literary examples of this strong female. Mother Courage from Bertolt Brecht or Scarlett OÕHara in Gone With the Wind are but two famous examples. It seemed to be the woman who established and held the tribe together against all odds, rather than the man who was naturally quite distanced from the childbearing process.
Hence the mother gathers her growing family around her to establish a clan or tribe, Indeed her son may have even impregnated the mother to create more children for the tribe. In many ways the son would be more tied to his mother than a man to his wife. Thus the foundation of the tribe would be based more around the mother/children unit rather than the wife/husband unit. The sexual union of mother and son is also seen in many ancient mythologies including Isis and Osiris. Further it is implied in the Christian mythology, where Mary is impregnated by God, who is her son. The importance of the mother-son relationship independent of father is also seen in Taoism where Lao Tzu is born of his mother with no father, reflecting the minimal importance of the father.
The early matriarchal nature of the tribes also would confirm this theory of tribe origination. The early male would impregnate a woman from another tribe but wouldnÕt necessarily have any role in raising the child. The child would certainly not belong to the father or his tribe in any significant way. We see the importance of the maternal connection in the Jewish religion. A child is considered Jewish if the mother is Jewish. However if the mother is not Jewish, the child is not considered Jewish, even if the father is a devout Jew.
Therefore just as the mother was selected for her capacity for maternal love, the male was selected more for his capacity for mother love than his capacity for couple love. Socially and in literature, we see many residuals of this archaic program. Rarely is marriage glorified for the male and he is even chided for being Ōroped into marriageÕ. While marriage is culturally suspect for the male, mother love is never joked about. While the motherÕs obsessive love of her children is the butt of many jokes, the manÕs love of his mother is sacrosanct. While romantic love has two distinct philosophies associated with it, those who glorify it and those who consider it ŌunnaturalÕ, nobody dares to attack a manÕs love of his mother. Indeed the insult of oneÕs mother is one of the highest insults and most likely to cause a violent altercation.
As an aside: one of the ways that the son was both tied to the mother and attracted to another female was through the mammary glands, the breasts. The longer period of breast feeding up to two or three years in many tribal cultures has the child passing total dependency into a bit of consciousness. Those breasts, which are associated with nutrition, warmth, and security, acquire a huge symbolic importance. Further because of the need for continuous breeding, which could take up a womanÕs whole life, her breasts were continually enlarged. Hence the man when selecting a mate would be attracted to a woman who reminded him of his mother and her big breasts. Thus very early on, female breasts were selected for, i.e. women with enlarged breasts were chosen to breed more frequently than those who didnÕt. Remember that this was primarily a function of the longer breast-feeding period of the human.
Again this archaic program of choosing women for their breasts is still alive and well. Cindy Crawford, super model and actress, has said that the most powerful men are like little boys or putty in her hands after she flashes a little cleavage and jiggles her breasts. This male obsession with breasts has created careers, motivated fashion, and led to an incredible industry of breast implants. Most trophy wives of the rich and famous have beautiful breasts. This urge is at the level of deep cultural genetics – highly motivational, but more easily resistible than deep genetic conditioning.
What are the implications of love of mother? For the daughters, it is simple. They simply role model off their mother, bearing children and having their own family, supporting it the same way their mother had done, mustering support from children and other tribal members to assist in child rearing, hence the overused expression, it takes a village to raise a child. This is a tribal expression, minimizing the role of the modern father in the child rearing process.
For the son, it was more complicated. He obviously couldnÕt have children. His direct duty to his mother would be to protect and provide for her and her successive children. Hence his duty is immediately extended from mother to the family and by extension her tribe or clan. Hence his duty becomes generalized to the collective from the specific.
However his ability to protect and provide would be dependent upon knowledge he could obtain from other adult males in the tribe. Hence after an early period of maternal dependency the training of the male had to be transferred to the other adult males of the tribe. They were necessary to transmit their male technologies.
The role differentiation by gender has already begun at this early tribal level. It was necessitated by the extended period of pregnancy and child rearing, which maximized cultural transmission, further fueling human evolution. The male is raised, not to be the solitary hunter, but to be a provider and protector for these mysterious females (amongst which is his own mother), who are all part of the collective tribe. Thus his propensity for collective tribal duties was also selected for rather than his child raising abilities. Also because of the importance of technological transmission from both male and female, the males who were obsessed with cultural transmission must have been chosen for.
As mentioned the man/son had three important roles relative to the mother child transmission structure. First he became the main food-provider during the initial mother-child dependency. Normally this role of provider extends far past the dependency stage, but is especially crucial at the very beginning. As the duration of dependency increased the duration of this love of mother and her children must also have been extended by natural election.
The second important function of these early tribal males of the homo species is their role as protector. This was a necessary aspect of the social role of the male because of the extreme vulnerability of the mother/child unit during the dependency. The ability of the female to escape predators was severely limited by the increasing physical limitations of her offspring. The role of protector needed the male close to the mother-child home. What mechanism would keep a man close to home to protect the helpless? The same as before, the love of mother, which is both chosen for and trained into, binds the son to his mother and her tribe. She is the creator the one that keeps the tribe alive. Without children there is no tribe. Hence the love of a son for his mother bound him as protector and provider for her extended family, the clan or tribe. Indeed the early symbolic images include the Mother Goddess with her protector, a strong Hercules type, not operating independently, but in conjunction with the Goddess.
The third role of male of the species was that of cultural transmission. While this role came later, inevitably it was just as crucial as his role of provider and protector. The homo species was notable primarily because of their ability to transmit over generations. If only the female transmits, it limits the amount of information transmitted. The life experience of the female tends to be based around child rearing and gathering by necessity. This family orientation of the female was especially important because of fragility of the early tribes. The fertile women must have spent most of their adult life bearing and raising the child. Hence the male knowledge of hunting, geography and perhaps even stone technology, although this could have also easily been the female province, had to also be transmitted for the good of the tribe.
The transmission of cultural information unique to the man needed a development of tribal love connected with his gender. The need for cultural transmission to oneÕs own gender must have been selected for early on. Deep down within the human species is the need for cultural transmission. Basic to the need for the male as a transmitter is the reality of the role differentiation based upon gender. Hence while the female of the species had to transmit her female understanding to her daughters, the male had to transmit his life experience to the males of the tribe. Remember that the male is not quite connected with paternity yet.
Thus deeply intertwined into necessary male roles is his love of mother which extends to the tribe and manifest as provider, protector, and transmitter. Note that neither specific paternal or couple love needs to be chosen for the functioning of the tribe. However the desire to transmit to his own sex must have been chosen for. Thus the collective fathers train the collective sons. The males of the tribe must have early formed a bond with the young males of the tribe, providing them with the necessary cultural transmission for survival in the Stone Age. Hence the earliest forms of love for the man were not necessarily that specific. Instead of love of wife, it was love of women in their role of child bearing, the desire to provide and protect, women as a gender, not just as a wife. The love of children did not necessarily extend to his children, as paternity was always suspect, but primarily extended to the boys of the tribe. The desire to protect and provide for the tribe was connected with women and children collectively rather than wife and son specifically. Also the desire to transmit had to do with boys in general rather than a specific son or daughter.
Although the early maleÕs loves were general, the femaleÕs maternal love was very specific. It could easily be generalized, but it started out very specific with a being growing in the stomach for 9 months followed by breast feeding for perhaps another few years. There is a specific bond between mother and child that does not exist between father and child.