Mortal Rituals: What the Story of the Andes Survivors Tells Us About Human Evolution

By Matt J. Rossano

A psychology professor examines what the survivors of the airplane crash hailed “The Miracle of the Andes” can show us about human evolution.

On December 21, 1972, sixteen young survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 were rescued after spending ten weeks stranded at the crash site of their plane, high in the remote Andes Mountains. The incident made international headlines and spawned several best-selling books, fueled partly by the fact that the young men had resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Matt Rossano examines this story from an evolutionary perspective, weaving together findings and ideas from anthropology, psychology, religion, and cognitive science. During their ordeal, these young men broke “civilized” taboos to fend off starvation and abandoned “civilized” modes of thinking to maintain social unity and individual sanity. Through the power of ritual, the survivors were able to endure severe emotional and physical hardship. Rossano ties their story to our story, seeing in the mortal rituals of this struggle for survival a reflection of what it means to be human.

“[Rossano’s] narrative describes a “microcosm of human evolution,” and I think this book will grab the interest of many readers―students as well as the general public―as it teaches essential facts about the way Homo sapiens evolved.”—David Hicks, Stony Brook University and Clare College, Cambridge University

“[Rossano] masterfully weaves a moving contemporary drama with a compelling account of the evolutionary history of ritual and religion. An impressive accomplishment and a truly captivating read from start to finish.”—Richard Sosis, University of Connecticut, cofounder and coeditor of Religion, Brain, & Behavior

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231535465

Book preview

MORTAL RITUALS

MORTAL RITUALS

What the Story of the Andes Survivors Tells Us About Human Evolution

MATT J. ROSSANO

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53546-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rossano, Matthew J.

Mortal rituals : what the story of the Andes survivors tells us about human evolution / Matt J. Rossano.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16500-6 — ISBN 978-0-231-53546-5 (electronic)

1. Evolutionary psychology. 2. Behavior evolution. 3. Taboo. 4. Airplane crash survival. I. Title.

BF698.95.R67   2013

155.7—dc23

2012039649

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

COVER PHOTO: © Popperfoto / Getty Images

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE. Natural Versus Civilized

CHAPTER TWO. The Evolution of Taboo

CHAPTER THREE. This Cold and Capricious Place

CHAPTER FOUR. Mountain Rituals

CHAPTER FIVE. Rituals of Love

CHAPTER SIX. Ritual Defeats the Mountain

CHAPTER SEVEN. God of the Mountain

Notes

References

Index

Preface

Saturday, September 1, 2012, a few miles west of Independence, Louisiana (about fifty miles northwest of New Orleans). I just had my first shower in four (hot and stormy) days. Hurricane Isaac came through on Tuesday and Wednesday, knocking out the power on Wednesday afternoon. It did not return until earlier today. Since we live in a rural area, no power means not only no lights, television, air condition, and Internet but also no water (the pump on the well goes dead). Three days of living primitive were uncomfortable but manageable.

How long could you survive in your house without power or running water? A few days? Maybe a week or more? Being prepared for such a possibility would certainly make a difference. My family and I had the benefit of past experience—Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the infamous Katrina of 2005. That experience taught us how to prepare the house for a storm and its aftermath. We knew we had to store water—fill the bathtubs, the washing machine, and the ten-gallon containers in the storage closet. We filled the freezer with ice and put it on the coldest setting; bought plenty of dry goods (pop tarts, peanuts, breakfast bars); and checked the flashlights, batteries, candles, charcoal, and lighter fluid. For a while, we were going to be living a bit more like our great-grandparents, so we’d better get ready for it.

Our preparation had to be not just physical but also mental. During the storm, life would be more arduous. Merely using the toilet, for example, would require refilling it after each use. After the necessary thirteen scoops and dumps from the water stored in the tub, our backs would ache, and the day had just started. Life would also be more monotonous. We would be stuck in a dark, hot house with the same unshowered people day after day, with few if any distractions. Get your mind right, I told myself—be patient, don’t whine, and be open to the unexpected lessons of your circumstances.

Our great-grandparents did just fine without air-conditioning, running water, and television. In some ways, they were probably happier than we are today. When one’s goals are whittled down to just what needs to be done to get through the day, the importance of those activities is suddenly magnified. For example, each evening during our family’s post-Isaac existence, the darkening house chased us onto the patio, where to the flickering illumination of citronella torches, we talked, laughed, and listened to the battery-powered radio. It was some of the most enjoyable family time we ever had. My suspicion is that such gatherings were more common in our great-grandparents’ time than today. These gatherings may count as what I call in this book an ancient way, that is, a behavioral pattern more common to our ancestral past, which reemerges when current cultural conditions change.

This book tells the story of a group of young men whose lives were violently reduced to the basics of daily survival. The Andes survivors’ story is remarkable and leaves us wondering: How did they do it? This book explores one answer: They did it by accessing the resources of their own human legacy. Their ability to do this, I argue, was enhanced because of a specific type of preparation they brought with them. They were a team, and not just any kind of team. They were a rugby team, and rugby got their minds right when confronting the challenge of survival. Rugby forced them to think in an ancient way that they were individually insignificant and that the greater good of the group was paramount, an attitude rather alien to the modern West but essential to our ancestors’ success.

In this event we also see something else quite noteworthy: the hazy reflection of human evolution itself. Not that the Andes survivors became a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. That would have been impossible. Instead, the actions they took and strategies they employed in their struggle to survive had deep evolutionary histories. In other words, their story has an evolutionary backstory, which is what I attempt to bring to the fore. This backstory makes it a truly human story, one that we all share simply because of our common humanity.

For example, the survivors organized themselves into a complex, hierarchical (as opposed to egalitarian) social system. Where do complex social systems come from? They have an evolutionary history that extends back to our primate heritage, through our hunter-gatherer forebears and on into settled agriculture and the first civilizations.

Pushing the questions even deeper, we could ask, How were they able to form themselves into a complex social system? The answer here draws on our uniquely human cooperative abilities (abilities that, in this case, were sharpened by their rugby training). If the plane that crashed in the Andes had been filled with cats or camels, they never would have survived. Those species simply do not have the cooperative abilities necessary for forming the kind of complex social system that the Andes survivors created. And why don’t cats and camels have those same cooperative abilities? Again, the answer is evolution: those species’ evolutionary histories are different from ours’. To understand how the Andes survivors came to possess the cooperative abilities allowing them to form a life-sustaining complex social system, we have to examine our species’ unique evolutionary journey.

Undoubtedly, I could have used other, similar events as the evolutionary exemplar. Indeed, the fact that women and children are largely absent from this story excludes the possibility of exploring the evolutionary background of the sexual division of labor. Of course, no single event can encompass all the important evolutionary issues relevant to humans. The advantage of this event is that the relevant evolutionary issues are fairly clear and are embedded in a highly gripping human drama. To put it more bluntly, it’s a really good story.

Each chapter of this book opens with a scene based on accounts of the event as they were told in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read in 1974, two years after the crash; Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, by Nando Parrado, one of the survivors, in 2006; and interviews with the survivors. These passages introduce a particular issue, such as the decision to eat the dead, the creation of their social order, and the rituals and routines of daily life. I then examine and discuss the scene and the issue it raises before presenting the evolutionary backstory of that issue. With that evolutionary understanding in hand, most of the chapters conclude by returning to the Andes survivors and looking again at the original issue, now from a more informed perspective.

Many people deserve thanks for making this book a reality. First, of course, is my family, whose love and support make possible projects like this. My colleagues in the Thursday science and religion lunch group were an unceasing source of ideas, critical analyses, and challenging viewpoints. They and the students in my graduate seminar in the spring of 2012 added much to this book. I’m also deeply grateful to Piers Paul Read and Nando Parrado for their informative, vivid, and inspiring accounts of the Andes event. Readers of this book are strongly encouraged to read their books as well. Numerous reviewers gave generously of their time, providing helpful and thoughtful critiques of the manuscript as it was being prepared. The final product was immeasurably strengthened through their efforts, and I am in their debt. My thanks go also to Karen Phung and Timothy Lynch for their proofreading. Finally, the editors at Columbia University Press were a delight to work with. Patrick Fitzgerald and Bridget Flannery-McCoy were enthusiastic about the project from the start, and their encouragement, diligence, and expertise were essential to transforming a rough idea into a polished work.

Even though my name is on the front cover, what is best about the book owes its origin to many others.

INTRODUCTION

The Crash of Flight UAF 571

We know what the pilot did wrong: he badly miscalculated the plane’s position. What we don’t know (and probably will never know) is why it happened. When Colonel Julio Cesar Ferradas¹ radioed air traffic control in Santiago, saying that he had just passed Curico on the western (Chilean) side of the Andes, he was actually some fifty miles east of Curico, deep in the mountainous Planchon Pass. When the controller gave permission for Ferradas’s American-built Fairchild F-227 to begin its descent toward Padahuel airport, the plane proceeded to plummet into territory so remote that the peaks were unnamed. Thick clouds obscured the rugged slopes below, and by the time the plane was low enough to visualize the terrain, it was too late.

Possibly the plane was at fault. As a class, the Fairchild F-227 had a poor safety record. In the two years of the planes’ production, they tallied twenty-five incidents with nearly four hundred fatalities. This particular plane, however, was nearly brand new, having logged fewer than eight hundred hours in the air, and it was well-equipped with both a VHR Omni directional range and an ADF (automatic directional finder) radio compass.

Possibly the pilot was to blame. Ferradas may not have accounted for the strong headwind buffeting his craft when he made his initial turn into Plachon Pass. But this was his thirtieth Andes crossing; surely, accounting for the wind was by now routine. The experienced air force colonel could hardly be accused of being incautious. The day before, when the weather turned questionable, he scotched his original plan of a direct flight over the mountains from Montevideo to Santiago and instead landed in the Argentinean foothill city of Mendoza to await better conditions. Earlier this very day, he had chosen the more indirect but safer Planchon Pass through the Andes rather than a straight but riskier flight through Juncal. He did this even though another pilot, having just crossed Juncal, told him that while conditions were not good, they were probably no problem for the Fairchild.

The cold facts of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 are by now well known: A chartered flight carrying forty-five passengers and crew, most of whom were affiliated with the Old Christians rugby team, crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972. Seventy-two days later, two ragged, emaciated survivors, Fernando Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, emerged from the mountains and spotted a Chilean peasant, Sergio Catalan. Catalan alerted authorities, and a subsequent rescue pulled another fourteen young men from the Fairchild’s wreckage, eleven thousand feet high in the Andes.

The Miracle in the Andes was a crucible punctuated by a series of dramatic, gut-wrenching events: the crash itself, the gruesome decision to eat the dead in order to survive, the avalanche that magnified their suffering and further culled their depleted numbers, the numerous failed expeditions to the outside world, and the final, successful expedition. But this book is not about those events, already so well documented and explored in other venues. Instead, it is about what those events tend to obscure, the equally trying but mundane business of surviving, of hanging on one more day, day after day. What sustained those sixteen survivors for seventy-two days was a combination of many things, among which were teamwork, faith, and a well-organized social system. Behind all these life-sustaining factors was ritual, that is, regimented, purposeful, highly meaningful intentional actions that kept reminding them, day after day, who they were and what their lives were all about.

Mortal Rituals

To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. This is a verse from the prayer Hail Holy Queen, which is recited during the rosary, a Catholic ritualized prayer. The nightly rosary was one of the regular rituals the Andes’ survivors used to keep up their spirits, to give them hope and strength. For them, the prayer’s spiritual banishment had become a physical reality. The vale of tears was no longer a metaphorical place east of Eden; it was a glacier (later aptly named the glacier of tears) perched eleven thousand feet high at the base of an unnamed Andean peak. In this frozen place, ritual took on its greatest urgency.

Ritual is essential to social life. We use it to create increasingly complex social systems so that we can rely on one another for survival. In doing so, we become increasingly insulated from nature’s hazards and its beauty. Ritual is also a way of wresting control away from nature. Nature moves the seasons, but ritual marks them, makes them official to the human world. We are born, mature, struggle, prosper, and die at nature’s command; but it is ritual that welcomes us into, makes us full members of, and dismisses us from the human community—celebrating our successes and lamenting our sorrows along the way. For our ancestors, ritual had mortal consequences. It was ritual that sustained humanity over its long evolutionary journey, just as it was ritual that sustained the Andes survivors.

Ritual’s Promise

When Parrado and Canessa found Catalan, the hour was late, and the rushing water of the Rio Azufre made communication nearly impossible. Initially, Catalan thought they were lost tourists, possibly hunters stranded in the mountains. In the shadowy dusk, their dazed, disheveled appearance could easily have led him to entertain more menacing thoughts about these strangers frantically waving at him across the river. Could they be thieves, murderers, revolutionaries on the run from the army? Desperately, Parrado and Canessa sought for a way to make him understand. For the love of God don’t fear us; help us! In that moment, to save them, they called on the same thing that had sustained them in the mountains: ritual. In an unmistakable act of supplication, Parrado fell to his knees, clasped his hands, and begged for his life. The message was clear but also rich with social irony: A son of the privileged Uruguayan bourgeois demonstrates his dependence on a simple Chilean peasant. Parrado’s expression was more than just a claim of helplessness; it was a promise. I am no threat. I mean no harm—just help me. Against the backdrop of the quickly darkening sky, Catalan returned Parrado’s gesture with a promise of his own, shouted above the roaring waters of the Rio Azufre. Tomorrow, he said.

Long before word could issue promise, gesture was doing so. Or when word was inadequate to ensure promise, gesture could fulfill. Ritual is enacted promise. Ritual promises tomorrow, and the hope of tomorrow sustains.

CHAPTER ONE

Natural Versus Civilized

SCENE 1: THE VIRTUE OF RUGBY

[Nando Parrado describing the brutal action of the rugby scrum] The remarkable thing is this: at the very moment of success you cannot isolate your own individual effort from the effort of the entire scrum. You cannot tell where your strength ends and the efforts of the others begin. In a sense, you no longer exist as an individual human being. For a brief moment you forget yourself. You become part of something larger and more powerful than you yourself could be. . . . No other sport gives you such an intense sense of selflessness and unified purpose. (Miracle in the Andes, 16)

Ancient Ways

The players on the Old Christians rugby team first learned their sport from stern Irish monks. The monks arrived in Uruguay in the 1950s to start the Stella Maris College, a boys’ school. For the monks at Stella Maris, rugby was not just a sport, it was moral training. Selfless striving for a common goal and individual sacrifice for the good of the team were its essential life lessons.

On the surface, rugby appears to have little in common with a plane crash. But on a deeper level, there is something un-civilizing about both. Both entail a detachment from the order, comforts, and social norms that make modern life safe and predictable. Rugby does so intentionally, thereby providing monks with a way to mold adolescent character. A plane crash does so unintentionally. It is a shocking reminder that despite our best efforts, we are unable to control everything: systems fail, humans err, and we are left scrambling to pick up the pieces.

It is a mistake to dichotomize civilized and natural as if they were polar opposites. By nature, humans want to civilize their environments in the sense of making them more amenable to human success and survival. In the course of doing so, their world becomes more predictable, stable, orderly, and, in recent decades, highly technically complex. A by-product of this civilizing process is that it can create cultural conditions that contrast with those of our ancestral past, such as imposing more severe behavioral restraints than those our ancestors typically faced.

For example, one way to make things more orderly is to reduce male aggression, and an effective way of doing that is to force everyone to take one lifelong mate (thus reducing the tendency of males to fight over females) or to insist on courts and legal proceedings rather than personal retribution as a means of settling perceived injustices. The reduction in violence benefits everyone, but it also curtails our sexual and competitive appetites in ways largely alien to our evolutionary past. Not surprisingly, easing some of these more recent cultural restrictions often results in a reemergence of ancestral behavioral patterns, a phenomenon that I call a return to ancient ways.¹

Are ancient ways more natural for humans? Maybe, but not necessarily. By nature we are designed to seek acceptance and success in our cultures, be they modern or ancient (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). Sometimes, however, the pursuit of that acceptance and success entails conforming to cultural restrictions that inhibit some of our natural inclinations. For example, there’s plenty of evidence that by nature, humans are mildly polygamous in their mating habits (Buss, 1994; Daly & Wilson, 1983). That is, we prefer more than just one mate. For males, multiple mates mean more opportunities for reproduction and thus potentially greater reproductive success, compared with strict monogamy. For females, more than one mate can produce more resources for their offspring and, likewise, potentially greater reproductive success.

Traditional societies typically view marriage as important for raising children, although lifelong monogamy is generally not the norm (see Konner, 2010). At the extreme end are the Ache—traditional hunter-gatherers of the Amazon—among whom by age forty the average woman is likely to have been married and divorced nearly a dozen times (Hill & Hurtado, 1996). The Ache are somewhat exceptional, however, as the low male/female sex ratio makes it hard for females to keep one man’s attention for very long. The !Kung San, traditional hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, may be more typical. Shostak (1981) examines in detail the life of Nisa, a young woman of the !Kung San. Nisa had two failed marriages as a young teen before a more stable marriage later. Unstable marriages early in life appear to be fairly common among traditional people, with increased stability when offspring are produced (Goodman, Estioko-Griffin, et al., 1985; Konner, 2010, 520–524).

Psychologist Kevin MacDonald’s careful analysis (1995) of the rise of monogamy in the West credits centuries of strong influence by the Christian church as instrumental in making monogamy the social norm in Europe (a conclusion reiterated in a more recent study of monogamy by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, 2012). But as the influence of religion has waned in the West, divorce and various forms of multiple matings have again become increasingly common. Indeed, a recent survey of Americans found that the proportion of married adults has reached a low point and that married couples soon will be a minority (see http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2147/marriage-newly-weds-record-low). For some people, this reflects the moral collapse of Western civilization, but for evolutionists it is just another example of an ancient way reemerging. As cultural restrictions have eased, humans (for better or worse) have settled back into a historically more common (and probably more natural) mating habit—staying together just long enough to satisfy their evolved reproductive interests.

Ancient ways need not always be more natural ways. For example, nearly all our anthropoid (monkey and ape) relatives live in some form of social hierarchy. Thus, we might argue that social hierarchy is natural to humans. Traditional hunter-gatherers, however, live in aggressively egalitarian societies in which any attempt at individual social dominance is met with derision, ridicule, and sometimes violence. So when French revolutionaries dispatched the old aristocratic regime—declaring liberty, equality, and fraternity for all—they may have been returning to