That Which Brings Us Together at the Library

by Bill Peak

Back in September, I attended a lecture at the library, given by Meg Daley Olmert, entitled Sit, Stay, Heal. Olmert is a writer who has worked on documentaries for Smithsonian World, National Geographic Explorer, and PBS, among others. In 1992 she was asked to join a research team studying the neurobiology of social bonding.

Listening to Olmert speak, it became obvious that her work on that study changed her view of history; and I began to think it might change mine as well. You never know what you’re going to run into when you enter the Talbot County Free Library. So I picked up a copy of Olmert’s book on the subject, Made for Each Other, rushed home, and devoured it.

I have referred to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel before in this column. That book’s thesis, that geography rather than racial superiority gave Western Civilization a leg-up on the rest of the world, is now the lens through which I view and understand the past. But if Diamond’s book posits geography as history’s fulcrum, then Olmert’s work places an even less obvious entity at that pivot point: a simple molecule, oxytocin.

Oxytocin is often referred to as the “love hormone.” All mammals produce it, and in all mammals it produces the same effects. When it’s time to give birth, oxytocin brings on labor. When it’s time to suckle our young, oxytocin brings on lactation. When animals groom one another—whether it’s a ewe licking her lamb or a man helping his wife with a zipper—oxytocin is released and all concerned feel a rush of goodwill.

Oxytocin boosts trust, empathy, fidelity, and nonverbal communication; it encourages and solidifies social bonding.

All of this is well known, but what Olmert’s book makes clear is that these benefits are interspecific, that is: the effects are the same whether a woman is straightening her husband’s tie or removing a thorn from her cat’s paw. In both cases, oxytocin is released and both animals benefit from the interaction. Their health improves and their bond is strengthened.

For years it has been received wisdom among archaeologists that humans created their first permanent settlements around 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture. But recent discoveries have pushed that date back to a point 15,000 years before people began cultivating crops. Why then?

Well, it turns out that the earlier date dovetails nicely with humanity’s first successful domestication of a wild animal; the wolf became a dog, oxytocin was released, and the bond between man and man’s best friend was created. Which meant that people could now go to sleep in the same place night after night secure in the knowledge that their dogs would alert them if a saber-toothed cat or an enemy band approached their settlement.

If permanent settlement is the necessary first-step toward civilization, then we can thank Fido for Chartres Cathedral and the great pyramids at Giza. But before those piles could be erected, oxytocin still had more tasks to perform.

When Homo sapiens first entered Europe, among the megafauna they encountered was a monster that stood six feet tall at the shoulder and sported eight-foot horns: the aurochs. When Caesar saw his first aurochs in Germany, he declared them too vicious to ever be tamed. The general would have been surprised to learn that the cattle marching placidly along in his army’s wake were, in fact, descendants of the first domesticated aurochs.

But let’s think for a moment about how that animal’s vastly significant domestication first took place. Imagine the courage it took for some Neolithic man or woman to approach a wild aurochs, corral it, and slip a rope over its neck. Olmert makes the case that this person, whoever they were, was the test pilot of their day, that their one small step toward an aurochs represented a greater leap in world history than Neil Armstrong’s. And it was successful, almost certainly, thanks to the oxytocin released in both man and beast by that first tentative touch.

If oxytocin helped create the bonds between people and animals that made civilization possible (think horses, camels, sheep, dogs, cattle, pigs, etc.), then Olmert’s book closes with a cautionary note about what a deficit of oxytocin might mean for our modern world.

Since the Industrial Revolution, people have been moving in ever greater numbers away from the animals that fueled civilization’s development. Today, so few Americans still live on the land that the Census Bureau no longer lists farming as a career category to be checked off.

As we moved away from our farms and our farm animals, two particularly devastating mental disconnects blossomed among our children: autism and ADHD. Both conditions are characterized by low levels of oxytocin in the bloodstream. The severity of both has been found to be reduced by giving affected children the opportunity to care for a non-human animal.

In a study performed in 1995, oxytocin was found to protect adults against the modern world’s leading cause of death. Among 369 victims of heart attack, dog ownership was found to be a better predictor of survival than regularity of heartbeat, absence of diabetes, or strength of the patient’s heart. One year after their coronary, twenty of the 369 patients studied had died—only one of the dead owned a dog.

Whether you think the world would be a better place if we all spent more time stroking Fido or milking Clarabelle, Meg Daley Olmert’s Made for Each Other will convince you there’s more to both than meets the eye, that each—and the remarkable molecule that makes each possible—also made civilization possible. You can find Made for Each Other at that hallmark of civilization: our local library.