“Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?”
— Lighthousekeeping by Jeannette Winterson, p. 146-147
What is human love? When did it begin? Where did it originate? Love—roughly defined, but most definitely felt—can hardly be categorized, yet is understood as some intersection of intimacy, passion, and commitment found between two or more people. It differs for each bond, with the love of a parent and child felt differently than those between siblings, friends, and lovers. Each person expresses it uniquely as well, with their own “love language” that dictates how they connect to others. But is this unique to humans? We continuously study whether or not our dogs, cats, ferrets, and so on love us in the way we love them, but—arguably—even if they do love us, wouldn’t it be different?
The origins of human connection is a concept that perhaps we inherited from our ancestors and evolved to make our own, or maybe it’s similar across species. When it comes to our ancestral hunter-gatherer societies, there are not many insights into what love was like within them, largely due in part to the difficulties that exist in even categorizing the concept. Love is hard to quantify and study but is a driving force within our modern world. From Helen and Paris’ love inevitably destroying Troy to the infinite amounts of romantic Hallmark Christmas Movies, love is everywhere and so deeply ingrained in us many hardly question it. But perhaps we should investigate love. From an anthropological sense, is love a form of behavioral modernity? Have humans evolved a capability of love that is distinctly human?
First, perhaps love should be considered as a concept humans inherited from their ancestors. A 2017 research article focusing on how love affected reproduction success among the Hadza—a modern hunter-gatherer people living in northern Tanzania—found that “…passion and commitment may be the key factors that increase fitness, and therefore, that selection [promotes] love in human evolution” (Sorokowski et al., 2017). Their findings that passion and commitment, two of their major components of what is quantifiably love, contributed greatly to the success of a couple in reproducing and rearing their young—meaning that, in some fashion, love is advantageous to human evolution. From an evolutionary perspective, reproduction is one of the aims of establishing a successful relationship, and love as a selective force would then be quintessential as a behavior in AMHs. Thus, in some way, the factors we can quantify as love—intimacy, passion, commitment, etc.—could then be another evolved piece of behavioral modernity.
Our societal love language, however, may not be fully evolutionarily advantageous. After all, what is the evolutionary benefit of romance movies and Valentine’s Day? Love’s position as incredibly difficult to define and categorize makes it hard to argue love is scientific. Or, perhaps, that is a personal bias of love shining through; love is idealized so much, it’s hard to allow oneself to take a completely indifferent approach to the concept. We, as humans, wish to see it as some ethereal force, outside of the control of nature, but there is no reason for it to be. In the quote from Jeannette Winterson, she creates an idealized story of how love may have come to be, with a human dragging home food before picking up a flower simply because “I love you.” Yet, these romanticized stories of romance and even the scientific interpretations of Sorokowski et al. may not paint a full picture. Love, as a concept, is the combination of these ideas; and, as Gregory Schrempp explains in his review of Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, the science behind these behaviorally modern traits “[could] enrich its perspective through a sympathetic attitude toward myth and other forms of traditional wisdom” (109).
Combining both these ideas—science and myth—is our form of love then distinct to humans? There is hardly enough research to make a claim for either side, but it is interesting to consider both for a moment. We potentially see our “human” love in other species: penguins bringing their mates small pebbles, otters holding each other’s hands. But are we simply projecting our interpretation of love onto these animals? It’s sweet and adorable, yes, but there are evolutionarily beneficial mating tendencies underlying these behaviors in both animals and humans, making it hard to see love as fully unique and outside of an evolutionary trait. It may have evolved into something completely different within us, becoming a concept of behavioral modernity, but our love is not necessarily the distinctly human trait society craves to see it as.
Perhaps, love should be seen more as both scientific and something else entirely. Scientific does not always mean some impartial standpoint, but an understanding of the origins of concepts. As such, understanding the scientific and evolutionary origins of love is what can help us fully appreciate and perceive the ways we interpret and interact with love, from all the art and myths to the impossibly complex emotions. Human love, while maybe not entirely unique scientifically, is unique to each of us emotionally—and, while love may not be fully distinct to humans, our interactions with it may just be.
Works Cited
Schrempp, Gregory. “Catching Wrangham: On the Mythology and the Science of Fire, Cooking, and Becoming Human.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 48, no. 2, 2011, pp. 109–132., doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.48.2.109.
Sorokowski, Piotr, et al. “Love Influences Reproductive Success in Humans.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01922.
Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Collins, 2004.
The Museum of Modern Pasts 