I don't think we need to go to prehistory to explain the "manna" phenomenon. The modern/eternal form of it is called "mamma" and has to do with the infant having every need met, without even having to formulate that need. Given a supportive environment, human beings strive to grow beyond the infiantile state, to become aware of their needs, and to work to satisfy them. But given enough frustration and trauma, everybody just wants to regress, curl up into a ball and have mamma fall from the sky.
\ [WS:] Interesting. So basically what you argue is that those who lack effective/nurturing parenting that teach them how to outgrow natural dependency on parental support in the infanthood tend to regress to that infanthood dependency in their adulthood. It has a definite Freudian twist, but it is also consistent with certain explanations of delinquent behavior (e.g. violence toward women) formulated by a feminist psychologist from Berkeley (?) whose name escapes me at the moment. According to this argument, males who lack positive male role models in their childhood define their manhood as a "negation" of femininity with which they have direct contact through their mothers, and that negation translates into opposites of feminine care and nurturing - delinquency and violence.
What's interesting about these arguments is that unlike most Freudian stuff, they can be empirically tested e.g. by comparing the rates of delinquency or "manna" expectations in populations with deficient parenting experiences to those with nurturing parent histories. AFIK, inadequate parenting is a known risk factor and predictor of delinquent behavior in adolescence and adulthood, but I am not sure about "manna" expectations. I wonder if any psychologists on this list (Miles?) can comment on this or perhaps add some references.
Wojtek