Free Norman Invasions by John Norman

attention is the risk involved in socialization.
    Socialization, you see, though this has been seldom noticed, is replete with its own perils.
    Obviously the child must be socialized, taught to grunt, and such. Food is to be placed in the mouth and not the ear. One does not romp with tigers. One should treat others nicely, particularly if the others are enormous and ill-tempered. One should be careful where one throws one’s spears and shoots one’s arrows. And, if the group is sufficiently advanced, and has mastered fire, one should not set fire to one’s fellow tribesmen, and so on.
    But this socialization, which must be achieved for group flourishing, and perhaps even group survival, also, interestingly, poses a dire threat to the very existence of the group itself.
    But more of this anon.
    Let us appear to digress briefly now, before suddenly revealing a plethora of startling connections and relationships which will astonishingly reveal that a seeming digression actually betokened a subtle fact of such moment that the very survival of the human race was contingent upon it.
    It is recognized that your average human being is relatively hairless, compared, for example, to your average baboon or orangutan. Whatever the advantages of bipedalian hairlessness might be, in, say, avoiding overheating in the pursuit of antelope, one may well imagine the horror of hirsute parents upon discovering that some of their offspring were, in effect, born naked. Imagine the misery of relatively hairless young females poignantly observing their troubling reflections in merciless, reproachful pools of still water. What self-respecting baboon or orangutan could take them seriously? Was this some tragic genetic drift, like the ever-larger canines of the saber-toothed tiger which might end up doing little more than allowing the poor, doomed beasts to lacerate their own jaws? Clearly such biologically short-changed maidens would be of little interest to your average hairy swain. They must watch sadly while their more hirsute sisters were caught in the bushes or dragged to the back of caves.
    Accordingly, as your average male could not overcome his disgust at the very appearance of a hairless female, and could soon see through the artifices and subterfuges of false hair, feathers, and such, he routinely chose hanging out with the boys, leaping off cliffs, or devoting himself to the service of, say, the bear god, who preferred to keep down the number of human beings, thus reducing the competition for desirable caves. So human males, rather than mate with hideously hairless members of the opposite sex, in one way or another, opted for a smug, fastidious celibacy, that in preference to a life of connubial revulsion.
    And thus the numbers of humankind began to dwindle alarmingly, at least from its own point of view if not from that of other life forms.
    Return now to the dangers of socialization.
    There are obvious fads or fashions in many human endeavors, and such was the case, as well, in the paleolithic times now under consideration. The standard theory at the time among the child psychologists and social workers of the day, as can be made out from rock carvings, cave paintings, and such, was, in effect, “Spare the club and spoil the child.” Many is the carving or painting showing a tyke in mischief being approached by an adult bearing a large club. The club then descends rapidly and squarely, and the little tyke, we gather, from his prone position, has learned his lesson, and is certainly unlikely to repeat his behavior. Now, clearly, striking the small child heavily on the head with, say, a large rock or a stout club does tend to reduce the likelihood of the child’s repeating the disapproved or unacceptable behavior, but, too, obviously, it reduces considerably the likelihood, as well, of his eventually replicating his genes.
    It is here that two evolutionary currents converge, to postpone, at least for a time, the