Actually, studies have been done on how a society's adult behavior
can be correlated to infant feeding/parenting practices.  The book
Three In a Bed by Deborah Tanner or Tannen, although it is mainly
concerned with promoting co-sleeping, gives a brief overview of this
method of societal analysis.  Basically the idea goes like this:  the
more NON-NORMATIVE, aka not meeting evolutionary expectations, a
parenting/feeding style is, the more deviation from an attractor (in
this case, normal human behavior) you will see in a any complex
system (like human behavior).  Okay actually this is my idea as it
relates to chaos theory, but what the book said was that the most
warlike tribes in Africa and South America are/were those who tended
to have very strict confines on the amount of touch and body
contact, along with demand feeding, that babies get.  Some tribes
only allowed nursing after a long period of crying, restricted baby's
movements with tight swaddling at all times, and had strict cutoffs
as to when nursing should end, co-sleeping should end, and dependence
should end.  Hmmmmmm....reminding anyone here of ye olde Ezzo
mentality?  At any rate, these peoples tended to grow into adults who
were extremely distrustful, even of others in their own tribe, and
had higher rates of war, internal violence, etc.  They also tended to
be extremely physically harsh with their children, which is somewhat
of an oddity in indigenous peoples.  Now here's the rub:  is the
parenting style an expression of a people's basic "mean" tendencies,
or does the parenting style produce such mentalities.  Probably it's
a combination of the two, but certainly only the parenting can change
anything for the future.
        One interesting note:  Germans have up until fairly recently fed
"pap", rather than breastmilk, to babies.  Not only did most peasant
babies not receive breastmilk, neither did they receive the known
advantages of suckling:  blood pressure and heart rate moderation.
These babies were fed whey or mead mixture in a cloth, sucked
through  Explanation for German historical aggression and feelings
of desire to subvert others to their will?  I don't know; I am just
an anthropology student looking for answers, and I know that only
through the behaviors that served to select for survival through
100,000 generations of hunter-gatherers (rather than 500 farmers and
only 10 of  industrialized man) can we hope to follow the genetic
blueprint, and therefore see the greatest potential for normal human
behavior be achieved..

Joy Berry-Parks
LLLL, LR AR (youngest in AR!)
Attachment Parenting Group of AR
Anthropology student

"Childhood decides."   --Jean-Paul Sartre