Denison University

Tuttle, Violet

Exile 
Volume 72 Number 1 Article 22 
Crisis 
Violet Tuttle 
Denison University 
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Tuttle, Violet () "Crisis," Exile: Vol. 72: No. 1, Article 22. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/exile/vol72/iss1/22 
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contact eresources@denison.edu. 
27 
Crisis 
Violet Tuttle 
 
 


English

Crisis

Exile 
Volume 72 Number 1 Article 27 
Stepping Stones 
Violet Tuttle 
Denison University 
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Tuttle, Violet () "Stepping Stones," Exile: Vol. 72: No. 1, Article 27. 
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32 
Stepping Stones 
Violet Tuttle 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Stepping Stones

Sarupria, Manan

Exile 
Volume 72 Number 1 Article 32 
Disruption 
Manan Sarupria 
Denison University 
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 Part of the Creative Writing Commons 
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Sarupria, Manan () "Disruption," Exile: Vol. 72: No. 1, Article 32. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/exile/vol72/iss1/32 
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contact eresources@denison.edu. 
40 
Disruption 
Manan Sarupria 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Disruption

Foley, Skye

Exile 
Volume 72 Number 1 Article 33 
Šapat naše domovine (the whisper of our homeland) 
Skye Foley 
Denison University 
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Foley, Skye () "Šapat naše domovine (the whisper of our homeland)," Exile: Vol. 72: No. 1, Article 33. 
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contact eresources@denison.edu. 
41 
Šapat naše domovine (the whisper of our homeland) 
Skye Foley 
 
in a tiny boating town 
their love set sail. 
traveling together across oceans, across worlds 
to reach the other side of the painting 
on our living room wall. 
through children, 
through loss, 
through global depression, 
through the endless cascade of tears 
staining the canvas 
from missing their homeland, 
everything seemed to remind 
and distort the feeling of belonging. 
to the olive trees they planted 
which didn’t taste the same, 
to the seashells 
that seemed to forget their hum 
of the Adriatic sea, 
to the wistful sundays spent 
in sprawling sanctuaries 
where hollow worship chords faltered, 
failing to echo the heartfelt hymns 
sung in the cozy village church back home. 
this place, far too cold and vapidly grandiose 
to feel any semblance of God’s presence, 
yet their lives still carried clues of this faraway land. 
in the tiny yellow house 
built on foreign soil, 
stones from the old country lie hidden in the garden, 
where subtle hints of lavender and salt 
permeate the air. 
their native tongue spoken softly inside, 
a desperately held strand 
to a familiar island. 
though Deda and Baka may have felt 
hopelessly lonely here, 
when I gaze upon the painting, 
Croatia is all I see. 


Šapat naše domovine (the whisper of our homeland)

Shay, Hayley

Algorithms of Destruction: Examining Israel’s AI-Powered Military Response in Gaza

Lee, Grace

Memory Wars: Korean Popular Culture and the Politics of Historical Justice with Japan

Altizer, Eva

Prologue: A First-Year Writing Journal 
Volume 16 Article 11 
Hrdy and Wrangham: What Erectus Says About Us 
Eva Altizer 
Denison University 
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 Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Altizer, Eva () "Hrdy and Wrangham: What Erectus Says About Us," Prologue: A First-Year Writing Journal: 
Vol. 16, Article 11. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/prologue/vol16/iss1/11 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Writing Center at Denison Digital Commons. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in Prologue: A First-Year Writing Journal by an authorized editor of Denison Digital 
Commons. For more information, please contact eresources@denison.edu. 
 
Hrdy and Wrangham: What Erectus Says About Us 
Eva Altizer 
This paper was originally developed for an ANTH 202 course taught by Dr. John Soderberg. 
 
It certainly is and has been a strongly debatable subject -- what does Homo erectus 
contribute to our understanding of human origins? Despite the same evidence being presented  
under scrutiny, many anthropologists have come to vastly different conclusions on the bigger  
picture of what Homo erectus represents to human society. With Homo erectus came the  
discovery of fire, cooked food, advanced tools and more important milestones, and yet not many  
can agree on what all of it means. There are two anthropologists in particular who have popular  
and opposing views – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Richard Wrangham. Hrdy and Wrangham’s  
perspective on Homo erectus differ because of the complexity of human empathy, the sexual  
division of labor, and interpretations of human society. To understand why, both arguments must  
be laid out in their entirety.  
To start, Wrangham’s hypotheses about Homo erectus comes from a seemingly  
mechanistic, though it may be more accurate to call it utilitarian, perspective. One of the theories  
Wrangham is the most concerned with is how fire plays into the development of complicated  
social relations and overall decreased mortality in Homo erectus. He believes that fire is what  
freed men to carry out tasks while women attended to preparing and cooking food (Wrangham  
2009, 136), and that this was a purely transactional and logical operation between group  
members. Cooking food allowed Homo erectus to spend less time chewing and more time on  
other pursuits, as the food was softened by fire, making it more digestible and nutritious, and  
safer to eat as it became significantly less likely to contain diseases.  
While cooking food was a net benefit for Homo erectus, it had different impacts on the  
respective sexes. The other half of Wrangham’s thoughts relating to fire are about what he  
believes to be the nature of human families: “Human families are unique compared to the social  
arrangements of other species because each household is a little economy” (Wrangham 2009,  
136). It mostly boils down to the assumed “sex contract,” where a male provides food for the  
family in exchange for sexual fidelity from a female mate (Hrdy 2009, 147). A more recent build  
on this idea is one where the male hunts while the female gathers, and they each provide to the  
“household” food supply in a different but established manner; males hunt what is considered  
valuable meat that is the main source of calories (Wrangham 2009, 137), while the females make  
37 
 
up for his shortcomings with gathered food, and each sexes’ contributions can vary based on  
environment and season (Wrangham 2009, 137).  
Wrangham claims that sexual division of labor helped Homo erectus develop emotional  
and intellectual skills because it relies on other members in the group, which requires  
cooperation and “exceptional intelligence,” and that the sexual division of labor is the big  
altering difference between humans and apes (Wrangham 2009, 137). This idea explains that  
cooking is an agreement – females spend time cooking and preparing food while males protect  
their mates from food thieves, in exchange for food themselves (Wrangham 2009, 154).  
Consequently, females would have no choice in this agreement, because of the physical and  
social protection that males provided and was required for survival (Wrangham 2009, 155).   
While a grim picture, this is what Wrangham paints as being Homo erectus life – Homo  
erectus had become patriarchal because of males exploiting female labor, and human society  
built itself on this foundation of the “family.” He draws these conclusions from evidence of  
human reliance on cooked food and examples from modern human societies, such as the real 
world phenomena of raw foodists, stating that they were unable to have healthy, sufficient diets  
without cooked food, usually developing cases of amenorrhea (Wrangham and Carmody 2010,  
188). Wrangham also pulls evidence from examples regarding the sexual division of labor,  
including but not limited to hunter-gatherer societies:  
Although men often like to cook meat, overall cooking was the most female-biased  
activity of any, a little more so than preparing plant food and fetching water. Women were  
predominantly or almost exclusively responsible for cooking in 97.8 percent of societies. 
(Wrangham 2009, 149) 
Another stark example comes from the people of Vanatinai, of the South Pacific, who  
were studied by cultural anthropologist Maria Lepowsky (Wrangham 2009, 150) where women  
seemingly have more autonomy than in other hunter-gatherer societies, but still get straddled  
with “low grade” work such as finding water, gardening, looking for firewood, looking after  
children, and cooking and cleaning: “…when they asked for help with these tasks, ‘The men,’  
wrote Lepowsky, ‘usually retort that these are the work of the women’” (Wrangham 2009, 151).  
Ultimately, Wrangham believes the sexual division of labor was created by cooking and  
consequently created the enduring structure of the human family.  
 
 
38 
 
But, while being mostly but not entirely contrary to Wrangham, Hrdy’s arguments are  
departing from these ideas. Hrdy says that empathy was the key to Homo erectus life, and that it  
shaped what human society became in the future. The question of human compassion is a  
difficult one, because attempts at objectivity on the issue come out seemingly biased regardless  
of the evidence surrounding it. What exactly is human compassion? What is its purpose? Is it a  
product of natural selection as a very specific tool, or is there some other reasoning to this  
(apparent) altruism? Hrdy attempts to answer this rather convoluted set of questions with an  
argument concerning cooperative breeding. 
A building block of Hrdy argument is the theory of the mind – which is the inherent  
ability/desire to know what someone else is thinking, as in “reading their mind,” a trait which is  
present in humans (Hrdy 2009, 2). Another term for this is intersubjectivity, which has almost  
the same meaning as the theory of the mind, but with emphasis on the desire to share emotions  
and experiences with others (Hrdy 2009, 2). Humans display behaviors indicative of a need to  
cooperate, as seen every time someone responds to a call of distress or shares a piece of food  
with someone else, common acts in our everyday lives. Hrdy says of it: “This ability to identify  
with others and vicariously experience their suffering is not simply learned: it is a part of us.”  
(Hrdy 2009, 4). Hrdy claims that this is the key development that takes us from Homo erectus to  
Homo sapien.  
This altruism has a distinct use. Investing time and effort into relationships reap better  
rewards than those who do not have prosocial tendencies (humans’ high social aptitude) (Hrdy  
2009, 4). If you help someone else out in their time of need, you are much more likely to receive  
that sort of help yourself, and this is a net benefit for everyone – that is a common and well  
understood construct of human society. It is quite a practical system, but it relies on playing this  
long-term game of investment and navigating the complexities of the human social world, and it  
is difficult to imagine how these traits came to be in natural selection with no immediate rewards  
coming from it (Hrdy 2009, 67). According to Hrdy, the positive reinforcement for this came  
from alloparenting, the practice of caring for offspring that is not yours, and it was the catalyst  
for our intense reliance on community. Unlike possessive and protective ape mothers, human  
mothers tend to be a lot more open to sharing a baby among caretakers, as seen in African  
hunter-gatherer societies such as the Aka and Efe, whose babies are known to be handed off to  
39 
 
close family and friends soon after the mother gives birth (Hrdy 2009, 76) – Efe babies have a  
close connection to their community from the very beginning.   
The infants are passed through fourteen caretakers in the days following birth, on average  
(Hrdy 2009, 79), and this behavior continues throughout childhood. This encourages social  
bonding between group members and causes the group to create support systems of alloparents.  
Sharing is quite important in these societies, as resources tend to be well distributed in the group,  
perhaps as a result of alloparenting, and is a lesson taught to children early, as with the  
Ju/’hoansi, who first learn to say words like na and i when they are very young, meaning “give it  
to me” and “here, take this,” respectively (Hrdy 2009, 23). It shows how important the bonds of  
cooperative breeding are, and how that shapes our social tendencies.  
A considered explanation for human alloparenting is found among extreme examples of  
cooperative breeders, like the naked mole rat – in their colonies, alloparents carry the burden of  
caring for offspring rather than the biological parents (Hrdy 2009, 185), to the point where only  
dominant female mole rats get to reproduce, leaving less than five percent of all mole rats able to   
reproduce at all, providing labor to the group offspring instead (Hrdy 2009, 186). This is an  
example of a eusocial species, meaning a species in which “alloparents routinely put survival of  
group or hive ahead of their individual interests” (Hrdy 2009, 184), which may sound like human  
alloparenting. For a species to be eusocial, they must live in a group with overlapping  
generations, have alloparents, and have these alloparents be so limited by caring for others’  
offspring that they do not reproduce much themselves (Hrdy 2009, 184).  
These alloparents may be prevented from reproducing by being forced to care for other  
offspring from dominant group members, or simply not have enough resources to reproduce, and  
it is less costly to further the genes of kin (who may or may not actually be related to them), as  
according to Hamilton’s rule (Hrdy 2009, 186). What alloparents are doing is avoiding a  
negative consequence that is usually enacted by a dominant member of the group, which is  
keeping alloparents from reproducing.  
As a consequence of the similarities human alloparents share with eusocial community  
structures, it may be easy to look at humans and say we are a eusocial species and that explains  
away the strange, seemingly altruistic traits we have, but that idea takes away from the fact that  
human alloparenting is not contingent on “dominant” group members, and that it is actually quite  
strange when compared to other species. It is not done through coercion, but social pressures that  
 
 
40 
 
conform us to the needs of the group, even when it does not seem like the logical thing to do  
(Hrdy 2009, 205). Aka children interviewed by Adam Boyette answered the question of what  
would happen if they refused to care for younger kin, and 57% answered their mothers would  
refuse them food, and 30% said their mothers would hit them, even though Boyette recorded that  
he never saw these forms of punishment being used (Hrdy 2009, 205).  
Humans manage to maintain a sense of negative consequence for acting out in the group,  
while not having the same rigid structure or dominant hierarchy of a eusocial species. Social  
pressure is clearly important here and may be the key to cooperative breeding in humans, and  
what makes human groups so flexible and attentive to the needs of costly human children  
(Soderberg 2024). Intersectionality paves the way for this social pressure, as it creates a  desire 
for humans to understand and interact with each other in the first place, especially in  groups 
trying to work together – and allows the complex workings of social pressure to take  hold.  
The idea that pressuring members of a group to behave in the interests of the group even  
works as a tactic to maintain stability, would speak highly of humans’ social nature, and how  
mind-reading affects the dynamics of group survival. This is Hrdy’s hypothesis, and it is a much  
different view than the ones that have dominated the study of human origins for a long time.  
Hrdy’s hypothesis is a stark contrast to Wrangham’s -- one sees Homo erectus social dynamics  
as a small family made from sexual division, while the other sees bigger, supportive  
communities as a result of alloparenting.  
How did Hrdy and Wrangham come to such different conclusions with such similar  
evidence about Homo erectus? It is not a stretch to say the influence of Charles Darwin has far  
exceeded his time in the sun, and he himself was influenced by personal beliefs about men and  
women and how society works. He once wrote, “The most able men succeeded best in defending  
and providing for themselves and their wives and their offspring,” concerning human origins  
(Hrdy 2009, 147), which is an assumption based more on how his society worked in his time  
than the ancient complexities of Homo erectus. As Hrdy points out, the nuclear family has been  
pushed as the ideal of human existence that has always prevailed, despite the lack of serious  
evidence to back this up and its fairly recent development as a widespread family unit (Hrdy  
2009, 144). It is an assumption born of the social conformity of modern humans, especially in 
Western society, that ended up impeding research:  
41 
 
Once the idea took hold that the nuclear family is ‘at the heart a biological arrangement  
for raising children that has always involved fathers as well as mothers,’ even otherwise 
very  thoughtful researchers overlooked the need to continuously challenge their 
underlying  assumptions about what children need in order to prosper. (Hrdy 2009, 146)  
On the other end of the spectrum, it can be argued that in the study of our own species,  
we exaggerate our own nature as being kind and compassionate and inherent. Sentimentality may  
creep in, (with notable hints of organicism,) despite how natural selection works in its random  
and relentless ways. Empathy is likely a tool that exists to serve our own selfish goals, and it  
might be easy to forget that, despite the strength of human social bonds. Perhaps Homo erectus  
worked in the more methodical and seemingly ruthless ways of other species that Wrangham  
describes and had no need for such a tool to function. Empathy is a strange trait for any species,  
and the circumstances in which it came to be in humans are shrouded in mystery. It is wise not to  
rely on our own perceived experiences too much in the study of human origins.  
In displaying these lenses on human origins, one could see how these ideas work in the  
context of the 2024 United States election. While a complex and nuanced issue, there is certainly  
much to be said on what it represents about human society, especially in a modern context.  
Different perspectives of how the United States should function have come to clash in brash and  
unexpected ways, deeply dividing the population, with two major distinct sides; first, there is a  
version of the country which desires stability in the “economical family” structure Wrangham  
proposes, with emphasis on how the surrounding group maintains this system, focusing on  
competition and limited resources, such as money and jobs. It is distinctly individualistic and  
aligns well with Wrangham’s idea of Homo erectus society, and there are certainly social and  
political parallels that can be drawn in this theory to begin with.  
This idea is mostly about maintaining familial stability, that it is the best avenue to  
human progress, and conforming the new complexities of human society to uphold this ideal, in  
reaction to vastly changing views and ideas. They believe in protecting the group by protecting  
individual interests. On the other side, there is the lost art of alloparenting and group care, which  
Hrdy notes has been declining: 
The modern emphasis on individualism and personal independence along with  
consumption-oriented economics, compartmentalized living arrangements in high rise  
 
 
42 
 
apartments or suburban homes, and neolocal residence patterns combine to undermine 
social  connectedness. (Hrdy 2009, 286) 
This side of the country has more concern for the group as a united unit, and how we all  
contribute to its upkeep. No longer does humanity depend so heavily on neighbors supporting  
each other as was so common with alloparenting, and this has caused distress in a population  
who seeks the United States to function as an affected whole, rather than individuals pursuing  
their own needs, as they believe acting on the interests of the entire group will protect individual  
interests as well. This group seeks, perhaps ironically, a return to the past values of alloparenting  
that theoretically were the most effective at progressing humans forward.  
Regardless of these differing points of views, there is something to be said about how  
each argument has its own roots in humanity, whether or not it was present in Homo erectus. The  
nuclear family is a real social structure that clearly still influences how society is run, and how  
individualism has been budding over the centuries. Alloparenting is certainly real and important  
to the foundations of human society, having played its part in ancient history, despite us not  
knowing how far back it goes. Hopefully Homo erectus will soon reveal its nature in human  
origins. 
 
Works Cited 
Carmody, R., and R. Wrangham. 2010. “Human Adaption to the Control of Fire.” Evolutionary 
Anthropology. 
Hrdy, S. 2009. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. 
Harvard University Press.  
Wrangham, R. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
43 


Hrdy and Wrangham: What Erectus Says About Us

Moreno, Jazlyn

Quiet Please! Ethical Considerations on New York City’s War on Noise

Front Matter

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Unearthing the Undead Prejudice: How ‘Feminist Science’ Creates A More Empirically Accurate Scientific Framework By Revealing The Inherent Bias In All Investigate Methodologies