Free How to Be Alone (School of Life) by Sara Maitland Page A

validity; because of reproduction, virtually no animals can be entirely solitary, but there is enormous variety in their sociability. Some species of hamsters, for example, live extremely solitary lives, meeting each other very occasionally and almost exclusively for sex; other species, like ants or termites, are so highly socialized that huge numbers of the members of any particular colony are not even capable of reproduction but devote themselves to the very highly organized support of their fertile ‘queen’ and her young. But on the whole, popular ‘sociobiologists’ do not write bestsellers about termites and hamsters. They prefer more glamorous species.
    Most of our closer animal relatives, particularly primates – and specifically chimpanzees, with whom we share a full 98 per cent of our genetic makeup – are social beyond the direct biological needs of feeding, reproduction and child-rearing: they play, groom each other, compete and fight, cooperate, exchange a range of vocalizations and continue to have relationships with their own weaned – even mature – offspring. For most primates their social relations transcend immediate family groups. Like humans, it is apparently unnatural for primates to be alone.
    Homo sapiens have one particular behaviour that is not shared with other primates – organized hunting. The collective hunt is, inevitably, a communal and social experience. It has even been suggested that it is hunting as a group that led to the development of language, and the anthropological and archaeological evidence strongly supports the idea that the original human societies were hunter-gatherers.Because of this there has been a tendency to compare ourselves and our social needs to other species who also hunt collectively – especially wolves and lions.
    But in making the claim that being alone is unnatural because we are fundamentally like other primates and hunting species, it is important to take a wider view of a species’ ‘lifestyle’.
    Lion packs are female-led. However, a newly arrived male lion will kill all the immature offspring of his predecessor. We would not justify such behaviour in human societies on the grounds that it was ‘natural’.
    Wolves are highly gregarious. But their social groups are organized on entirely familial lines. A pack usually consists of a group of sisters and their young and a single non-related male: if I set up house with my sisters, sharing a single man as a sexual partner and the father of all our children, this would not be seen as a ‘natural’ relationship.
    Nonetheless, the popular argument that it is somehow unnatural for human beings to be alone claims a scientific basis in the behaviours of primates and hunting-pack species. And to some extent this makes good sense: humans have a biological need for sociability, if for no other reason than that it takes so long for our young to become independent; our survival requires us to support and protect these generally pretty useless and vulnerable members, and that in itself needs some sort of social interaction (unlike, say, salmon, whose mothers abandon their eggs before they are even fertilized, let alone hatched). All the archaeological evidence of the earliest human societies, together with the anthropological studies of different societies, make clear that Homo sapiens is a social species and cements survival through a complex web of practical, kinship and cultural structures. It is ‘natural’ for humans to associate, cooperate and bond both emotionally and ritually.
    But it is wrong to assume that this necessary sociability, even in the obviously complex forms that exist among primates, means that individuals of other species never spend time alone. This is simply not the case.
    Gorillas, for example, despite living in groups, spread out and forage alone. They are capable of a range of vocalizations with distinct meanings – about twenty-five different sounds (‘words’) have been