Universals All Humans Share

- Click Here for a List of 211 Universal Traits All Humans Share

In Human Universals, Anthropologist Donald E. Brown posited a list of several hundred human traits, “features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception”—characteristics that represent the evolution of our species’ mental adaptation to communal life.

In this list, “they,” “them,” and “their” refer to the people of any given culture.

1. They are aware of a difference between culture and nature
2. Culture is embodied in their language
3. They think about and discuss their internal state and the external world
4. They use language to organize, respond to and manipulate the behavior of their fellows (Note: their language is a window into their culture, minds, and actions)
5. Language allows them to think and speak in abstraction
6. Language allows them to think and speak about things or processes not physically present
7. Proficient use of language gains prestige, especially for males (because skillful speech allows him to manipulate the behavior of his fellows more effectively)
8. Gossip is an important means of verbal manipulation
9. Non-verbal expression allows more meaning than mere words indicate
10. Speech is used to misinform as well as to inform
11. Individuals understand lying and watch for it in others
12. Language use includes ways to be funny and to insult
13. Speech is highly symbolic
14. Sound and sense (meaning) are only arbitrarily associated
15. Language includes phonemic, grammatical and semantic features
16. Speech phonemes form a system of contrasts (e.g. kill vs. kiss or pat vs. bat) and the number of phonemes is from 10 to 70
17. Language undergoes change
18. Language includes a series of contrasting terms that theoretically could be phrased in 3 ways, but are only phrased in 2 ways (for example, “wide” and “narrow” are terms that enable us to express contrast without having to say “wide” and “not wide” or “narrow” and “not narrow”)
19. By virtue of its grammar, the language conveys some information redundantly. For example, in English both the subject and verb convey number.
20. The grammar includes nouns and verbs, and the possessive – possessive of both “intimate” or “inalienable” possessions–“my hands;” and “loose” or “alienable” possessions– “my axe”)
21. There are special forms of speech for special occasions
22. The language includes figurative speech (metaphor and metonymy)
23. There is onomatopoeic speech
24. There is poetry in which lines, demarcated by pauses, are about 3 seconds in duration
25. There are unique specific elementary units of meaning not found in other cultures
26. A few words or meanings are found in all cultures (e.g., black, white, hand, face)
27. There is kin terminology
28. Durational time is explicit (or rarely semantically implicit) in the language, and the language has units of time (days, months, seasons, years, etc.)
29. There is a temporal cyclicity to their lives
30. They distinguish past, present and future
31. The language classifies many different topics such as parts of the body, inner states (such as emotions, sensations and thoughts), flora, fauna, etc.
32. The language refers to such semantic categories as motion, speed, location, dimension, and other physical properties; to giving (e.g., lending); and to affecting things or people
33. Some words will have multiple meanings
34. There are numerous antonyms and synonyms
35. More frequently used words will tend to be shorter, and less frequently used words are longer
36. Language includes proper names and pronouns – at least 3 persons (e.g. I, you, he), and 2 categories of number (e.g. singular and plural)
37. Language includes numerals (at least one, two and many)
38. There are separate kin categories that include father and mother
39. Kinship terms are partially or wholly translatable by reference to relationships inherent in procreation (e.g. father, son)
40. They have an age terminology that includes age grades in a linear sequence (e.g. baby, child, adolescent, adult)
41. They have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic (even if there are 3 or 4 categories)
42. Naming and taxonomy are fundamental to their cognition, including binary discriminations (such as black and white) and gradations between polar opposites.
43. There are elementary logical notions (“not,” “and,” “same,” “equivalent,” “opposite,” etc.)
44. They distinguish the general from the particular, and parts from wholes
45. They use conjectural reasoning (e.g., using minute cues to deduce the presence of animals)
46. Language is not the only means of symbolic communication (e.g., gestures, exclamations)
47. They interpret external behavior to grasp interior intention
48. Facial communication is complex – and several facial expressions are recognized everywhere
49. Smiling while greeting signifies friendly intentions
50. They cry when they feel unhappiness or pain
51. They can mask, modify and mimic otherwise spontaneous expressions
52. They show affection as well as feel it
53. They have a psychological conceptualization of people (awareness of self in relation to others)
54. They distinguish the self from others
55. They see the self as subject and object
56. They see people as influencing events (i.e. as neither wholly passive recipients of external action nor wholly autonomous)
57. They see people as responsible for their actions
58. They distinguish actions that are under control from those that are not
59. They understand the concept of intention
60. They know people have a private inner life
61. They know people experience pain and other emotions
62. They distinguish normal from abnormal mental states
63. They recognize that individuals have differing characters
64. They are capable of empathy
65. They are moved by sexual attraction
66. They have childhood fears (loud noises, strangers)
67. They react emotionally (usually with fear) to snakes
68. With effort they can overcome some of their fears
69. The Oedipus complex is a part of male psychology
70. They recognize individuals by their faces, which means they have a concept of the individual (often implicit)
71. They recognize individuals in other ways as well
72. They make tools, of many different kinds
73. They are dependent on their tools
74. They use tools to make tools
75. They make cutters
76. They make pounders
77. They make containers
78. They make something like string (cord, vine, wire, etc) to tie things together
79. And to make interlaced materials
80. They know and use the lever
81. They have weapons
82. They make tools that can be used over and over again
83. They make some tools in arbitrary patterns that allow us to distinguish one people’s tools from another, and these patterns persist beyond any one person’s lifetime
84. Most of them are right-handed
85. They know how to use fire (most cultures know how to make it)
86. They use fire to cook food and for other purposes as well
87. Tools and fire do much to make them more comfortable and secure
88. They have other ways to make themselves feel better, including substances like intoxicants, stimulants, or narcotics
89. They have some form of shelter from the elements
90. They have patterns of preparation for birth
91. And for giving birth
92. And for postnatal care
93. They have a more or less standard pattern and time for weaning infants
94. They live part or all of their lives in groups
95. An important group is the family
96. One or more groups maintain a unity even though the members are dispersed
97. There are groups defined by locality or claiming certain territory, even if they happen to live almost their entire lives as wanderers upon the sea
98. They are materially, cognitively, and emotionally adjusted to the environment in which they normally live
99. They are characterized by a sense of being a distinct people
100. They judge other people in their own terms
101. The normal family core is composed of a mother and children
102. The biological mother usually is the social mother
103. There usually is a man involved on a more or less permanent basis
104. He serves minimally to give the children a status in the community and/or to be a consort to the mother
105. There is an institutionalized publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman deemed eligible for childbearing (e.g., marriage) – almost always by a male, not always by a single individual
106. There is a pattern of socialization – children are not left to grow up on their own
107. Senior kin are expected to contribute substantially to socialization
108. One way children learn is by watching elders and copying them
109. Socialization includes toilet training
110. Through practice, children and adults perfect what they learn
111. They learn some things by trial and error
112. One’s own children and other close kin are distinguished from more distant relatives or nonrelatives, and close kin are favored in various contexts
113. Sexual regulations affect relationships between family members and relationships to outsiders, limiting or eliminating mating between genetically close kin
114. Mother-son mating is taboo
115. Sex is a topic of great interest, though there may be contexts in which it is not discussed
116. There is a social structure, with statuses and roles
117. Some statuses and roles are based on kinship, age and sex
118. There are statuses and roles beyond kinship, age and sex
119. There are both ascribed statuses (e.g., based on kinship, age, sex) and achieved statuses
120. There are rules of succession to some statuses
121. There are social identities, including collective identities, that are distinguishable from the individuals who bear them – i.e., some statuses are spoken of as if they were entities that can act and be acted upon (e.g., the legislature punished the university)
122. Prestige is differentially distributed, and not all individuals are economically equal
123. Inequalities of various sorts are acknowledged (they may be approved of or disapproved of)
124. There is a division of labor – minimally based on age and sex statuses, e.g., women have more direct child care duties than men
125. Children do not engage in the same activities in the same way as adults
126. Men and women, and children and adults are seen as having different natures
127. Men on average are more physically aggressive than women and are more likely to murder
128. Men form the dominant public political element
129. Women and children are correspondingly submissive or acquiescent (particularly) in the public political sphere
130. In addition to division of labor, there are customs of cooperative labor
131. There are reciprocal exchanges, whether of labor, or goods, or services, in a variety of settings
132. Reciprocity (including retaliation) is an important element in the conduct of peoples’ lives
133. They engage in trade
134. They give gifts, too, whether reciprocal or not
135. In certain contexts, food is shared
136. They attempt to predict and plan for the future
137. Some plans involve the maintenance or manipulation of social relations
138. They have triangular awareness – they think of their own relationships to others and of the relationships between others in relation to themselves
139. They form coalitions
140. They have government
141. Some regulation takes place in a framework of corporate statuses – statuses with orderly procedures for perpetuating membership in them
142. They have leaders, though they may be ephemeral or situational
143. They profess to admire generosity, and this is particularly desired in a leader
144. No leader has complete power lodged in himself alone
145. Leaders go beyond the limits of reason and morality
146. They always have a de facto oligarchy, since they never have a complete democracy, and they never have a complete autocracy
147. They have law (at least rules of membership, rights and obligations)
148. Violence and rape are proscribed in certain situations
149. Unjustified murder is proscribed
150. There are sanctions for infractions, including removing offenders from the social unit, whether by expulsion, incarceration, ostracism, or execution
151. They punish certain acts that threaten the group or are alleged to do so
152. Conflict is more familiar than they wish it were, and they have (imperfect) ways of dealing with it
153. Wronged parties may seek redress
154. Consultation and mediation are used in some conflict cases
155. Important conflicts are structured around in-group-out-group antagonisms
156. These antagonisms divide them as an ethnic group as well as set them off from other ethnic groups
157. Ethical dualism distinguishes the in-group from the out-group
158. Right is distinguished from wrong
159. Responsibility and intentionality are recognized
160. Promises are recognized and employed
161. Reciprocity is a key element in morality
162. Ability to empathize also is a key element in morality
163. Envy is ubiquitous, and there are symbolic means for dealing with its unfortunate consequences such tipping a waiter, offering consolation prizes, or having losers congratulate winners
164. Ideals include etiquette and hospitality
165. There are customary greetings and customs of visiting kin or others who dwell elsewhere
166. There are standardized, preferred, or typical times of day to eat
167. There are feast occasions
168. There are normal daily routines of activities
169. They are fundamentally diurnal
170. There are standards of sexual modesty
171. Copulation normally is not done in public
172. There are some attempts to use modesty in relieving themselves
173. Certain utterances are taboo
174. Some foods are taboo
175. There are some foods (e.g., sweets) that are relished
176. There are religious or supernatural beliefs beyond the visible and palpable
177. They anthropomorphize and some (if not all) of them believe things that are demonstrably false
178. Magic is practiced to do such things as to sustain and increase life and to win the attention of the opposite sex
179. There are theories of fortune and misfortune
180. There are explanations for disease and death
181. Sickness is seen to be connected to death
182. There are medications (and other procedures) to heal the sick
183. Divination is practiced
184. There are attempts to control the weather
185. There are rituals
186. Rituals include rites of passage that demarcate the transfer of someone from one status to another
187. The dead are mourned
188. There is an understanding or conceptualization of the world & their place in it
189. Their worldview in some ways is structured by features of their mind, e.g. the ability of infants to recognize the same item through more than one sense
190. Their worldview is a part of their supernatural and mythological beliefs
191. They have folklore
192. They dream and attempt to interpret their dreams
193. They are materialists, however spiritual they may be
194. There are concepts of property, distinguishing what belongs to the individual or group from what belongs to others
195. There are rules for the inheritance of property
196. Speech is used in poetic or polished ways
197. There are additional aesthetic standards
198. Bodies are adorned in one way or another
199. They have distinctive ways of maintaining or shaping their hair
200. There are standards of sexual attractiveness (e.g., signs of good health, male preference for signs of early nubility)
201. Artifacts are decorated
202. There also are patterns of hygienic care
203. They know how to dance and have music
204. At least some dance, and some of their religious activity, is accompanied by music
205. Music includes melody, rhythm, repetition, redundancy, and variation
206. Music is seen as an art, a creation
207. Music includes vocals
208. These vocals include words, a conjunction of music and poetry
209. There is children’s music
210. There is play and play fighting, especially for children
211. Play provides training in skills that will be useful in adulthood

https://humanjourney.us/discovering-our-distant-ancestors-section/detailed-list/

 

DISCOVERING OUR DISTANT ANCESTORS

Human Universals: Traits All Humans Share

Human evolution has produced a remarkable set of common characteristics, which is what makes us human. Some are physical, like the skeleton for walking upright, a vocal tract for speech, and dexterity for tool use. We share a common set of emotions and the capacity for self-awareness, abstract thinking, knowing right from wrong, and doing complicated math. All are examples of the hundreds of traits shared by all human beings in the world today.

The process of human adaptation is the simultaneous development of all the following distinctly human characteristics, in a positive feedback loop. The effects of the loop have continuously increased the difference between our nearest ancestors and us.

Bipedalism: Standing Up and Walking

Bipedal Lucy dates from about 3.75 million years ago.

Human beings are bipedal—that is, we walk on two feet instead of on all fours. Chimps and gorillas can stand upright at times, but when they move they typically do so on all fours. A fossil skeleton called Lucy is the earliest ancestor found to date whose bones show that she walked on two legs. Lucy is about 3.75 million years old, about 1 million years older than the use of tools.

Bipedal walking and running enabled us to cover greater distances over time than any other animal. Almost all other animals live their lives in the environment in which they are born. Our ancestors more readily travelled into unexplored territories and thus triggered several adaptive advantages for us over other animals:

A standing animal can see farther than it can smell, so a more sophisticated visual system needed to develop along with our upright posture. Our ancestors thus were able to spot approaching danger as well as opportunities from farther away.

Hands were freed from weight-bearing responsibilities, making tool use possible.

Erect posture also led to profound changes in human sexuality and in our social systems.

Immaturity and its Consequences

Female human pelvis bone.

With the freeing of the front limbs, the hind limbs had to adapt to bearing the entire weight of the body. The human back was not originally “designed” to support an upright posture (which partially explains why back pains are a common complaint). To support the additional weight, the human pelvis grew thicker than that of the great apes, which made the female’s birth canal, the opening through which infants are born, much smaller.

While the birth canal was becoming smaller, however, the fetus’s brain and head were growing larger. If there had been no evolutionary correction for this, the human species would have died out; the solution was to have human babies born very early in their development.

Human children have the longest infancy in the animal kingdom. They are not as competent and independent as baby chimps or baboons. Within a day, baby baboons can hold onto their mothers by themselves. The human child is helpless and will die if not cared for during the first few years of its life.

At birth a chimp’s brain is about 45 percent of its adult weight, while a human baby’s brain is 25 percent of its adult weight. This means that the major portion of the human brain’s development occurs outside the womb, and the environment plays a much greater role in it than in any other animal’s brain development. Because the environment we are borne into differs for each person, the specific abilities that each of us develops differ considerably.

The Mother-Father-Infant Relationship

A helpless infant requires at least one caregiving parent to survive. In other species, a newborn can fend for itself within a relatively short time, and the mother can almost immediately resume her place in the group, providing her young with food and protection. But taking care of a human infant is a full-time job. For most of human history, taking care of the infant has been the mother’s job. In subsistence societies, like hunter-gatherers, parents working together as a team were better able to get enough food than a nursing mother alone. The father can hunt for meat and bring it home to the mother, who stays close to home gathering fruits and vegetables. Human fathers take an active role in feeding their young.

Dexterity and Tool Use

Once the early humans walked, and the forelimbs were freed from their weight-bearing function, the limbs developed into hands with great dexterity, capable of more precise movements such as those needed for fashioning and using specialized tools.

Human ancestors began to make tools as early as 3 million years ago. Specialized tools for chopping, digging, killing, cooking, washing, and skinning led to specialized labor by those who used them. Some people gathered wood or nuts, others dug for roots, still others hunted and killed animals. Axes made the hunt more efficient; choppers and scrapers could be used to butcher a large animal at the kill. At home, tools helped scrape the nutritious marrow out of the bones; animal hides could be scraped to make warm clothing.

The growing sophistication of human stone implements, and of their manufacture, is illustrated here. Each wedge symbol represents a blow struck in making the tool and the clusters of symbols stand for the different operations during manufacture.
—Campbell, 1979

One mark of improved dexterity is the modification in the tools themselves. Those made by Homo erectus about 1 million years ago took 35 blows to make. The knives of Cro-Magnon, made about 20,000 years ago, were more delicately fashioned, requiring at least 250 separate blows. About 5000 BCE, human beings began to extract and use metals. This advanced technology created the need for more specialized labor. Specialization led inevitably to greater interdependence among individuals.

The Brain

Pivotal to human adaptation is our large brain, which has evolved faster than any other human organ. It took hundreds of millions of years to develop the 400 cc. brain of Australopithecus, yet in only a few million years the human brain had grown to 1250-1500 cc. and had developed the capacity for abstract thought. Our brain helped us adapt to every kind of geography and climate, and it enables us still today to transcend our biological inheritance. The brain underlies mental life: to learn, to create, to invent, to think and say things no one has ever thought. It is the largest brain, relative to body size, of all land mammals, but the size is not what matters.

What is crucial is where the brain expanded. Although the anatomy of much of our brain is identical with that of other primates, our cerebral cortex, the uppermost part of the brain, is the largest and most elaborate of all primates. The cortex is the area of the brain associated with higher brain function. It is divided into four sections or “lobes”. The frontal lobe is associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving; the parietal lobe is associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli; the occipital lobe is concerned with visual processing and the temporal lobe with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech.

Those areas of the brain that control fine motor movements (enabling nonhuman primates to swing through trees and grasp tightly onto branches) became further developed once we came down from the trees. Our early ancestors used these fine motor movement skills to make tools and to use them.   And these fine movements are the same ones involved in language. The increasing size of the cerebral cortex thus gave our ancestors great advantages—from control of delicate muscle movements to the development of speech and written language.

Language

A necessary part of human culture is language, a form of symbolic communication of external action and internal thought that has a structure of sound, gesture, meaning and logic which is similar in all other languages. It contains a classification system and allows humans to speak and think in abstractions. Thus we can plan for the future or make conjectures about something or someone not present. The subtleties of language include manipulation of others, lying, humor, gossip, insults, metaphor, and poetry.

Personhood: Self Consciousness

Another important feature is personhood, which includes a responsible self as distinguished from others that understands intentionality and the difference between right and wrong. Conflict is familiar to the groups, who have customary ways of handling it and are aware of what belongs to them and what belongs to others. They are moved by sexual attraction and at times disturbed by sexual jealousy. They know that other people have an inner life just as they do and feel emotional pain and other kinds of emotions in the same way.

Social Beings

Humans are not solitary beings but live most of our lives in groups or connected to groups of which immediate family and other kin are the most important. In addition, we have a social structure with leaders, laws, politics, division of labor, cultural norms, and religious beliefs. Our “cognitive load,” the mental capacity for managing information, appears to limit our social relationships to about 150 people, a number established by Robin Dunbar and known as “Dunbar’s number.” This is by far the largest social network of any animal, and almost three times larger than that of our nearest hominid relative, the chimpanzee.

Emotions

Human beings all over the world share the same basic emotions which are: sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise and happiness. Different cultural display rules, such as whether one can cry in public or show surprise or digust in different situations, account for different ways that emotions appear.

Color Vision

We all see a spectrum of colors. Most animals don’t see colors at all. Yet, color vision isn’t strictly limited to human beings, as the great apes also have it, although it isn’t clear if it is as good as ours.

Numerical Ability

While the great apes can do rudimentary counting, human beings obviously have a common number sense. In primitive societies it is limited to the concept of “1, 2 … and many”; but all human beings can learn to do mathematics, although it is difficult for some. Complex counting in primitive societies is often done by matching, for instance using stones to represent the number of domestic animals in a group at the beginning of a day and then checking the number of animals against the stones in the evening.

https://humanjourney.us/discovering-our-distant-ancestors-section/traits-all-humans-share/

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Human universals, human nature & human culture

 - Donald E. Brown

Human universals–of which hundreds have been identified–consist of those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that, so far as the record has been examined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history. After presenting some of the basic conceptions and problems concerning such universals per se– their kinds and causes and the methodological and disciplinary considerations that have shaped their study– I will explore some of the issues in how human universals relate to human nature and human culture.

I will begin with some examples. In the cultural realm, human universals include myths, legends, daily routines, rules, concepts of luck and precedent, body adornment, and the use and production of tools; in the realm of language, universals include grammar, phonemes, polysemy, metonymy, antonyms, and an inverse ratio between the frequency of use and the length of words; in the social realm, universals include a division of labor, social groups, age grading, the family, kinship systems, ethnocentrism, play, exchange, cooperation, and reciprocity; in the behavioral realm, universals include aggression, gestures, gossip, and facial expressions; in the realm of the mind, universals include emotions, dichotomous thinking, wariness around or fear of snakes, empathy, and psychological defense mechanisms.

Many universals do not fall neatly into one or another of these conventional realms, but cut across them. Kinship terminologies (in English, the set of terms that includes ‘father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘brother,’ ‘sister,’ ‘cousin,’ etc.) are simultaneously social, cultural, and linguistic. The concept of property is social and cultural. Revenge is both behavioral and social. Lying and conversational turn-taking are simultaneously behavioral, social, and linguistic. Many behavioral universals almost certainly have distinctive, even dedicated, neural underpinnings, and thus are universals of mind too.

A distinction among universals that figures large in anthropological thought is that between ‘emic’ and ‘etic.’ These words (derived from the linguistic terms ‘phonemic’ and ‘phonetic’) distinguish features that are overtly or consciously represented in a people’s own cultural conceptions from features that are present but not a part of the overt or conscious local cultural conceptions. Thus every people has a language with grammar, but not all peoples have an overt cultural representation of the idea of grammar. Merely having grammar is an etic fact. If it is culturally represented as well, then it is an emic fact too. Etically, everyone has a blood type, but the cultural practice of distinguishing between blood types (as in the case of those Japanese beliefs that link blood type with marital compatibility) is far from universal. Emic universals are probably much rarer than etic universals.

Many universals subdivide into yet others. Thus tools are a universal, and so too are some general kinds of tools (pounders, cutters, containers, etc.). The facial expression of emotion is a universal, and so too are smiles, frowns, and other particular expressions.

While some universals are or seem to be relatively simple, others are complex. Ethnocentrism and romantic love are examples: both are best understood as complexes or syndromes rather than simple traits or behaviors.

Many universals have a collective rather than individual referent. Thus music and dance are found in all societies, but not all individuals dance or make music. Yet other universals are found in all (normal) individuals, although sometimes only in one sex or the other or in particular age ranges. Thus women everywhere predominate in child-care and on average are younger than their mates. Children everywhere acquire language with prodigious skill, but adults do not. On the other hand, above the age of infancy everyone employs gestures and such elementary logical concepts as ‘not,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘kind of,’ ‘greater/lesser,’ ‘part/whole,’ etc.; everyone classifies; everyone has likes and dislikes.

It is important to distinguish between kinds of universals. The formally distinct kinds include absolute universals, near universals, conditional universals, statistical universals, and universal pools.

The universals I listed at the start of this essay are absolute universals–they are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history. A near universal, by contrast, is one for which there are some few known exceptions or for which there is reason to think there might be some exceptions. Fire making and keeping domestic dogs are near universals, as there are good reports of a very few peoples who used fire but did not know how to make it, or who did not possess dogs. Many traits are described as ‘universal or nearly universal’ to express a note of caution (given the sampling problems to be described below). Thus the emphasis of percussion or deep-noted instruments and of the colors red, white, and black in rituals around the world should probably be described as ‘universal or nearly universal.’

A conditional universal (also called an implicational universal) is an if-then universal: if a particular condition is met, then the trait in question always accompanies it. Such universals are analogous to the facultative adaptations of evolutionary biology, of which callusing is an example: not all individuals have calluses, but if there is sustained friction on particular locations of the hand, say, then calluses develop. An example from culture of a conditional universal is that if there is a cultural preference for one hand over the other, then it will be the right hand that is preferred (as in Western culture, where the right hand is used in greetings and taking oaths). It is the rule or underlying causal mechanism that is the real universal in such cases.

A statistical universal is one that may be far from absolutely universal but that occurs in unrelated societies at a rate that seems well above chance. An example is the name different peoples give to the pupil of the eye. In a surprisingly large number of unrelated languages, it is a term that refers to a little person; the apparent explanation for this is the common experience of seeing a small reflection of oneself in other people’s eyes. Although it is something of a stretch to think of such phenomena as universals, the explanation for them is drawn not from cultural particularities but from universal experience.

A universal pool refers to those situations in which a limited set of options exhausts the possible variations from one society to another. The international phonetic alphabet, which does not really cover all the possibilities, nonetheless serves to express the idea: it consists of a finite possible set of speech sounds or sound contrasts, from which a selection is found in each distinct language. An early-twentieth-century analysis of kinship terminologies showed that a quite small set of semantic contrasts accounts for the differences in kin terms in all or nearly all societies (a few further contrasts have been added since).1 Examples of the semantic contrasts are sex, which distinguishes ‘brother’ from ‘sister,’ ‘father’ from ‘mother,’ etc.; and generation, which distinguishes ‘son’ from ‘father,’ ‘father’ from ‘grandfather,’ etc.

There are severe methodological limitations on what can be known about universals in general. No one can really know the conditions in all societies, so any statement about universality is based on some sort of sampling. In most cases this sampling has not been rigorous. Furthermore, the precision with which a real or alleged universal has been described often leaves much to be desired, in part because the original reports or descriptions were provided by different observers, sometimes at widely spaced intervals in time. Thus the confidence one can have in particular claims of universality is quite variable. Given the costs involved in studying even a single society, this range of problems will persist.

However, it should be noted that a sample as small as two societies–so long as they are very different–can be highly suggestive. Thus one can view the documentary film First Contact and make observations about what is common to two highly diverse societies: one’s own modern society and a previously uncontacted highland New Guinean society. Australian prospectors took the footage for this documentary in the 1930s, when they were the first outsiders to enter a high and isolated valley.2 The differences between the Australians and the isolated New Guineans are striking, and yet the two groups also have a lot in common, much of which would be difficult to trace to cultural borrowing. In spite of anthropology’s professional charge to study all cultures, which uniquely qualifies the discipline to both identify and verify universals, some anthropological practices have not been congenial to the study of universals. Notably, anthropological attention has been riveted more surely by differences between societies than by their commonalities. Moreover, that attention has tended to be limited to surface or manifest universals, those readily available to observation or readily expressed by their informants. Innate universals have tended to be neglected (in extreme cases, their existence was even denied). This neglect was to a large extent overt and principled, seeming to follow logically from the view of culture that anthropologists held throughout much of the twentieth century, a view that seemed to be supported by exaggerated (and in some cases false) reports of the extraordinary extent to which cultures both differ from one another and yet decisively shape human behavior, a view that was construed to indicate that there must be few, if any, universal features of the human mind. As a result, the anthropological study of universals has been spotty at best, unified neither by theory nor by sustained inquiry. There is thus ample reason to suspect that a great many universals have yet to be identified.

In contrast to anthropologists, psychologists have been much more open to the discovery of presumably universal features of the human mind. But only rarely have psychologists conducted their research outside the modernized Western world, so the cross-cultural validity of the numerous mental processes and traits they have identified has often been in doubt. Some cross-cultural research has indeed shown that psychological phenomena that one might think are unaffected by cultural differences–the perception of certain optical illusions, for example–are in fact not universal.

A relatively small number of causal processes or conditions appears to account for most if not all universals. These processes or conditions are: 1) the diffusion of ancient, and generally very useful, cultural traits; 2) the cultural reflection of physical facts; and 3) the operation, structure, and evolution of the human mind.

Some universals (the well-authenticated examples are tool making, the use of fire, and cooking food) seem to have existed in the very earliest human populations and to have spread with humans to all their subsequent habitats.3 As for the cultural reflection of physical facts, I have already mentioned the case of terms for the pupil of the eye, as well as the cultural preference for the right hand, which probably reflects the observation that in all societies most people are right-handed. I have also mentioned kin terms, which everywhere reflect the relationships created through sexual reproduction–parent-child, sibling, and marital/mate relationships, as well as the various compounds of these relationships. Kin terms often include more than, or sometimes partially omit, what such relationships entail, but in every language there is a substantial mapping of the locally named (emic) relationships onto the actual (etic) kin relationships. In all these cases, the ‘world out there,’ so to say, is reflected in the cultural conceptions of each people–even though the reflections vary in many ways from one society to another.

Finally, there are those universals whose causes lie more or less directly in the nature of the human mind, or that are features of the human mind. The latter in turn trace causally to the evolutionary past of humanity as a species. These universals of mind require a more extended discussion.

Recalling what was said earlier about disciplinary differences, it should be noted that those sociocultural anthropologists who are most qualified to document universals are not as a rule well qualified to explain them. By training, most sociocultural anthropologists are neither psychologists nor biologists. But psychobiology and evolutionary psychology surely are crucial in explaining many innate universals (and in providing guidance in the search for further such universals). The reasoning is simple: whatever is constant through all human societies must be due to something that goes with people wherever they go; that would certainly include human nature–and psychobiology and evolutionary psychology are the tools for understanding human nature.

Examples of universals of psyche or mind that have been identified through broad cross-cultural studies are dichotomization or binary discriminations, emotions, classification, elementary logical concepts, psychological defense mechanisms, ethnocentrism or in-group bias, and reciprocity as a mechanism for bonding individuals to one another.

Among the universals formulated more recently (and more tentatively) in the light of psychological-evolutionary propositions are a social-cheater-detecting mechanism, a mental mechanism for thinking about ‘human kinds,’ and a facial-template-constructing mechanism that averages the facial features in the observable population as a baseline calibration from which optimums of attractiveness for each sex and age are calculated. Among the apparent projections from the latter mechanism is a preference in males for skin colors in females that are lighter than the observable average (because in the past relative lightness of skin correlated with female fecundity).

The concept of incest avoidance–a phenomenon now shown to be present in many animal species as well as humans–is an evolution-minded rethinking of what had long been one of the most frequently discussed and prototypically cultural human universals: the incest taboo. Similarly, most anthropologists long recognized the sentiments generated by kinship and reciprocity as universal, but they only received a sound theoretical understanding when evolutionary biologists illuminated their crucial role in providing solutions to the Darwinian puzzle of how altruism could evolve.

The determination and causal explanation of innate universals, predicted or illuminated by evolutionary theory, is probably the most active area in the study of universals at present. But a pursuit of causation in the other direction is vigorously underway too: since it follows that features of human nature must provide a continuous and pervasive structuring of human thought and activity–and hence of society, culture, and history, however much variation they exhibit–the findings of psychobiology and evolutionary psychology have clear implications for sociocultural particulars too. In the next section I will discuss analysis that involves partitioning or breaking down sociocultural particulars into the universal elements of which they are compounds.

In turning now to culture in relation to universals, I will ignore those universals that presumably are cultural (such as the ancient and useful inventions and the cultural reflections) and will focus instead on those that are or may be innate universals. Hereinafter, ‘universals’ will refer to those only.

Anthropologists usually define culture in terms that distinguish it from nature, often in radical contrast: culture versus nature. Definitions of culture generally stress patterns of behavior, thought, feeling, and artifact that are passed on extrasomatically from individual to individual, group to group, generation to generation–meaning patterns that are not in our genes, patterns that must be learned. In this vein, culture has often been associated with variability, indeterminacy, arbitrariness–all in contrast to the fixity of nature. In extreme views, there is virtually no human nature: culture is the overwhelming determinant of human behavior, and can be studied with little or no attention to the human mind.

Other definitions of culture correctly acknowledge a continuous intermixing of culture with nature. The philosopher-anthropologist David Bidney, for example, argued that culture should, at least in part, be understood “as the dynamic process and product of the self-cultivation of human nature.”4 Others speak of culture withinnature–that is, as a product of human nature. Some see culture as a control or correction of certain features of human nature. Yet others see culture as an extension of the human mind and body.

There is good reason to distinguish the cultural in human affairs–but in almost everything that humans do it is as useful to insist on either culture or nature as the source as it is to insist that water is either hydrogen or oxygen.

But how can the constants of human nature be reconciled with the manifest variability of cultures or, for that matter, with the manifest variability of human behavior? Let me give five answers.

First, in any discussion of human nature a particularly crucial distinction must be made between functions and effects. The set of mental mechanisms that comprise the human mind, and that are thus fundamental to human nature, were designed by natural selection to solve particular problems that were recurrent in our evolutionary past and that are presumably finite in number. However, a mechanism designed to discharge a particular function may have side effects or by-products. Thus, the shape of the outer ear was designed to gather sound waves but may also be used to support glasses or pencils. The anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld has proposed, on the basis of experimental evidence, that there is a mechanism in the human mind dedicated to processing information on human types, such as kin types, the sexes, and occupational types.5 While this mechanism must have evolved in conditions where racial differentiation was rarely if ever perceived (due to the short distances our Stone Age ancestors could have traveled), it has left the human mind effectively ‘prepared’ to think about races in particular ways. Thus racial thinking has flourished in recent times because it ‘parasitizes’ a mechanism that was designed for other purposes.

Human mental mechanisms are numerous and their effects–which presumably include a great many emergent properties stemming from the interaction of the various individual mechanisms–are either potentially infinite or infinitely divisible. In spite of the infinity of possible behavioral effects, the mechanisms leave traces of their existence: some are relatively obvious (as in the uniformity of smiles and frowns), some possess enough observable irregularity to fuel the nature-nurture debates (as with many sex differences), and some reveal themselves only through unusual observational situations (as in extensive cross-cultural comparison or in psychological experimentation). At any rate, the range of effects that may become culturally patterned is thus large.

Second, many mental mechanisms motivate us toward goals (mating, ingesting food, etc.), which we may meet through a potentially infinite variety of means. While the many means are observable, the few goals must be inferred. The range of means that may become culturally patterned is, again, large.

Third, some mental mechanisms involve calibration to environing conditions. The resulting behaviors are variable by design, though the underlying mechanism is unitary. These variable responses may well appear to be cultural. For example, as mentioned earlier, there is evidence to suggest that humans have an evolved mechanism for detecting and preferring faces that are projections from the average of what one sees. Since that average may vary from one population to another, the resulting standards of beauty would vary too, and this could easily be interpreted as cultural difference.

Fourth, many adaptations may in some circumstances conflict with each other, so that the resulting behaviors are compromises. Purely local conditions may favor compromises in one direction rather than another. Various peoples thus ignore the pangs of hunger and thirst for a time, in order to maintain the approval of their fasting fellows.

Fifth, as wondrously precise as genetic replication is, the genes that program the structure and operation of our minds and bodies do so in interaction with the genes’ environment, which can and does vary. This, in turn, results in structures and operations that differ in varying degrees from one individual to another and from one population to another. In this context it is important to note that recent human environments, in almost all parts of the world, present many conditions that are quite unlike those that prevailed over the long period in which human nature evolved. Many modern behaviors–epidemic obesity in environments rich in processed foods comes to mind as an example–may have their analogues more in the bizarre behaviors of animals in zoos than in what the same animals do in their natural habitats. Clearly, local environments account for many of what are seen as cultural distinctions between one society and another.

In sum, observable variation in behavior or culture is entirely compatible with a panhuman design of the mind (barring, of course, sex and age differences that are equally likely to reflect evolutionary design).

Finally, let us return to the notion that innate human universals continuously and pervasively structure human culture. To the extent that this is so, we should be able to do a sort of back-engineering on features of society or culture that allows us to break them down into their component elements and to trace their roots back to the aspects of human nature that gave rise to them. What is the alternative, for example, to concluding that writing, the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the word processor are extensions or augmentations of speech?

And what would be the alternative explanation for literally millions of songs, poems, stories, and works of art, from many parts of the world and over long periods of time, that celebrate the attractions between men and women– except the mind’s preoccupation with the topic? Perhaps the entire cosmetics industry flows from the same cause. Ronald Hyam, a historian of colonialism, has even argued that the sexual drive was as potent a motivator of colonialism as was economics.6 The virulent nationalisms and racisms of modern times may well be ‘hypertrophies’ of an ethnocentrism that for many millennia played itself out on a much smaller scale. What I believe was one of anthropology’s great achievements–an assembly of information about where and when cultural inventions arose around the world –appeared in Ralph Linton’s mid-century book on culture history, The Tree of Culture.7 Missing there, however, were the roots of that tree in human nature. The task of tracing those roots–in literature, the arts, history, and human affairs in general–is now well begun. We can look forward to the time when a great many cultural features are traced beyond the time and place of their invention to the specific features of human nature that gave rise to them. The study of human universals will be an important component of that task.8

Endnotes

• 1Alfred L. Kroeber, “Classificatory Systems of Relationship,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 39 (1909): 77–84.
• 2The making of this documentary is described in Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact: New Guinea Highlanders Encounter the Outside World(New York: Penguin, 1987).
• 3It is sometimes suggested that there are some beliefs that have been with humans from the earliest times not because they are obviously useful, but because there was little or nothing to expose their falsity and thus to hinder their spread.
• 4David Bidney, “Human Nature and the Cultural Process,” American Anthropologist 49 (1947): 387.
• 5Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
• 6Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815 –1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: B. T. Batsford, 1976). See also Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1990).
• 7Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).
• 8This paper has benefited from comments by Donald Symons. References for the assertions made here may be found in Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991); Brown, “Human Nature and History,” History and Theory 38 (4) (1999): 138–157; Brown, “Human Universals and Their Implications,” in Neil Roughley, ed., Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 156–174.

https://www.amacad.org/publication/human-universals