[What kind of society did people live in for most of our history?
There is strong evidence that humans lived in nomadic egalitarian
bands. This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like
us, our ancestors faced complex politics. ]
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THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIETY ARE MORE COMPLEX THAN WE THOUGHT  
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Vivek V. Venkataraman
November 2, 2022
The Conversation
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_ What kind of society did people live in for most of our history?
There is strong evidence that humans lived in nomadic egalitarian
bands. This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like
us, our ancestors faced complex politics. _

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In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in
a linear fashion. Our ancestors started as Paleolithic
hunter-gatherers living in small, nomadic and egalitarian bands.
Later, they discovered farming and domesticated animals for food and
service.

Before long, they progressed to complex societies and the beginnings
of the modern nation-state. Social hierarchies became more complex,
leading to our current state of affairs.

“We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the
institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves,” writes historian
Yuval Noah Harari in his bestselling _Sapiens_
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A new book — _The Dawn of Everything_
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by late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow
— challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic
hunter-gatherers, they argue human societies during the Palaeolithic
were, in fact, quite diverse.

Today, increasing inequality
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polarized political systems
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and climate change [[link removed]]
threaten our very existence. We need a deeper historical perspective
on what kind of political world shaped us, and what kinds are possible
today.

Social flexibility

[orange book cover with red text reading THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING A NEW
HISTORY OF HUMANITY DAVID GRAEBER DAVID WENGROW]
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In ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ Graeber and Wengrow make the claim
that Palaeolithic human societies were quite diverse. (Penguin Random
House)
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Ice Age hunters in Siberia constructed large circular buildings from
mammoth bones
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At Göbekli Tepe, a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, hunter-gatherers
hoisted megaliths to construct what may be the world’s “first
human-built holy place
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In Ukraine, 4,000 year-old cities
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hierarchy or centralized control. And in modern times,
hunter-gatherers shift between hierarchy and equality
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To Graeber and Wengrow, these examples speak to the virtually
unlimited social flexibility of humans, undermining Harari’s dark
assessment about the possibility for social change in the modern
world.

As an evolutionary anthropologist and hunter-gatherer specialist, I
believe both accounts miss the mark about the course of human
prehistory. To see why, it is important to understand how
anthropologists today think about nomadic egalitarian bands in the
scheme of social evolution.

Human social evolution

In the 19th-century, anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan
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categorized human social evolution into three stages: savagery,
barbarism and civilization
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to hunting and gathering, farming and urban life, respectively. These
so-called “stage models” incorrectly view social evolution as a
steady march of progress toward civilized life.

Scholars do not take stage models seriously today. There is little
intellectual connection [[link removed]]
between stage models and modern evolutionary approaches toward
studying hunter-gatherers.

Anthropologists developed the nomadic-egalitarian band model during a
1966 conference called _Man the Hunter_. According to this model,
humans, prior to agriculture, lived in isolated nomadic bands of
approximately 25 people and subsisted entirely on hunting and
gathering
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Research since _Man the Hunter_ has updated our understanding of
hunter-gatherers.

[illustration of primitive red figures on a rock background]
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Hunter-gatherer rock art paintings in the Vumba Mountain Range in
Manica, Mozambique. (Shutterstock)

Hunter-gatherers and prehistory

One assumption was that small bands consist of related individuals. In
fact, band societies consist of mostly unrelated individuals
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know that hunter-gatherer bands are not closed social units. Rather,
they maintain extensive social ties across space and time
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in large groups [[link removed]].

Hunter-gatherers are profoundly diverse
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were in the past [[link removed]] too. This
diversity helps anthropologists understand how the environment shapes
the scope of social expression in human societies.

Consider nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers like the !Kung in the
Kalahari [[link removed]] or the Hadza in
Tanzania [[link removed]].
Being nomadic means it is difficult to store food or accumulate much
material wealth, making social relations relatively egalitarian
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decision-making power and don’t hold power over others.

On the other hand, sedentary societies tend to have more pronounced
levels of social inequality and leave material evidence such as
monumental architecture, prestige goods and differential burial
treatment [[link removed]].

When these markers are not present, anthropologists can reliably infer
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more politically egalitarian lives
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Palaeolithic politics

Human societies have _generally_ become larger-scale and more complex
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typically implicate farming in kick-starting the path to
“civilization” and inequality. But the shift to farming was not a
single event or a simple linear process. There are many paths toward
social complexity and inequality.

_The Dawn of Everything_, along with reviews in cultural evolution
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complex societies with institutionalized inequality emerged far before
the dawn of agriculture, perhaps as far back as the Middle Stone Age
(50,000 to 280,000 years ago).

This is a tantalizing possibility. But there is reason to be
skeptical.

Complexity on the coastline

Social complexity [[link removed]] emerged
among hunter-gatherer populations living in resource-rich areas like
southern France [[link removed]] and the
Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada.

So rich were the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest Coast,
Indigenous peoples [[link removed]] could
sustain themselves on wild foods while living a sedentary life, even
evolving complex hierarchies dependent on slave labour
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Similarly, complex societies could have arisen in the Palaeolithic
along rich riverine systems or on coastlines
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changes — with plentiful marine resources. But there is no
unambiguous evidence for sedentary settlements where marine sources
are used in the Middle Stone Age.

Collective hunting

Collective hunting is another pathway toward social complexity. In
North America, hunters cooperated to trap pronghorn antelope, sheep,
elk and caribou [[link removed]]. At “buffalo
jumps,” ancient Indigenous hunters drove bison over cliff sides by
the hundreds
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feat likely required, and fed, several hundred people.

[aerial photo of a cliff]
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Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta was the site of a communal
Indigenous hunting practice where bison were driven over a cliff. (V.
Venkataraman), Author provided

But these examples represent seasonal events that did not lead to
full-time sedentary life. Buffalo jumps occurred in the autumn, and
success was probably sporadic. Most of the year these populations
lived in dispersed bands.

Egalitarian origins

Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years
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markers of sedentary lifestyles or institutionalized inequality going
back more than 30,000 to 40,000 years.

That leaves a big gap. What kind of society did people live in for
most of the history of our species?

There is still strong evidence that humans actually lived in nomadic
egalitarian bands [[link removed]]
for much of that time. Complementing the archaeological evidence,
genetic studies [[link removed]] suggest that
human population sizes in the Palaeolithic were quite low. And the
Palaeolithic climate may have been too variable
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instead favouring nomadic foraging
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This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like us, our
ancestors faced complex politics and domineering individuals.
Egalitarian social life needs to be maintained through active and
coordinated effort
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From these origins, an astonishing variety of human societies emerged.
Our politics today reflect a small and unusual slice of that
diversity. Prehistory shows us that human political flexibility is far
greater than we can imagine.[The Conversation]

Vivek V. Venkataraman
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Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, _University of
Calgary
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This article is republished from The Conversation
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the original article
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* anthropology
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* paleolithic
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* Politics
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