(continuing the previous post)
In his essay on the origin of the first cities, economist Michael Hudson argues that the roots of urbanism go back to these ritual sites of the Upper Paleolithic era, which were the gravitational centers of their respective communities thousands of years prior to the establishment of the first cities or full-time sedentism, both of which came thousands of years later:
Concentrations of people first occurred at ritual sites...The localization of specialized meeting areas for ritual and exchange may be found as early as the Ice Age, and later in sacred groves and seasonal gathering spots. These sites were occasional rather than year‑round settlements. It therefore is appropriate to view them as social constructs independent of their scale, performing urban functions long before they came to grow substantially in size and attract year-round settled population...Only if we assume that the earliest gatherings of people must have been year‑round does it follow that urban forms could not have developed prior to the agricultural revolution. Seasonal gathering sites existed already in Paleolithic times….
The great ceremonial sites from Stonehenge to Turkey were based on the particular equinox or solstice...The calendar keepers were usually the chiefs (there may have been “sky chiefs” and “war chiefs” separately, or perhaps their roles were combined as dynastic rulers developed) [more likely the "sky chiefs" were shamans--CM].
Most of the religions were cosmological. They wanted to create an integrated cosmology of nature and society (“On earth, as it is in heaven”). Administration was based on the astronomical rhythms of the calendar, lunar and solar cycles. For instance, you typically find a society divided into 12 tribes, as you had in Israel and also in Greece with its amphictyonies*. In a division of 12 tribes, each could take turns administering the ceremonial centre for one month out of the year...
Alex Marshack...published The Roots of Civilization reporting on the carved bones he found with notations for the phases of the moon. The job of the chieftain was to keep the lunar calendar, trace the waxing and waning of the moon to calculate how long the month would be, and to decide that, “Ah, in this month, six months after the equinox, here’s where we have to get together and have everybody come to the gathering and begin working on the big site”…You would have big feasts, and also these were the major occasions for socialization. All over the world, communal feasts were the primordial way to integrate societies.
It may seem unusual to begin the history of urbanization in the Ice Age, but this is a logical corollary of viewing cities as originating simultaneously in sacred cosmological functions—ordering their communities, supporting astronomical observers who helped administer the festival calendar, and sponsoring festivals of social cohesion—while also organizing external relations (trade and war) with the objective of preventing external trade and warfare from deranging the ordered proportions that governed domestic social life…
Functionally speaking, the localization of specialized ritual exchange centers is found already in the European Ice Age, between 30,000 and 10,000 BC, thousands of years before hunting and gathering bands settled down to cultivate the land on a year‑round basis. By the Early Bronze Age for all practical purposes the temples (and in time the palace) were the city…The idea of sanctifying their ground must have survived to play a germinal role in patterning more permanent cities...
From Sacred Enclave to Temple to City (Michael Hudson)
Sovereignty in the Ancient Near East (Michael Hudson)
Before people settled down and started farming full-time, such agglomerations were temporary by necessity, because natural resources are diffused and seasonal. If you are living primarily off of nature's bounty, then your social organization has to reflect that. For this reason, band societies spent most of the year apart. Any long-term concentration of people would quickly strip the surrounding landscape bare:
The gatherings were a step in the direction of permanent settlements. But while they may have reaffirmed people's affiliations, this type of assembly, in which the itinerant hunter-gatherers simply stopped moving, was doomed for several reasons. Nearby sources of food would be cleaned out, offal and wastes piled up (a problem that the nomads managed poorly), and biting insects had a field day. Worst of all, with so many personalities right on top of each other, jealousies and resentments came to the fore. After all, what reunion doesn't reunite a few archenemies? Indeed, the foremost reason people have never scaled up the egalitarian lifestyle of band societies is that, like most mammals, we squabble a lot... (124-125)
Such agglomerations served multiple purposes. One was to reaffirm a shared cultural identity through music, song, dance, and ritual. Even though the members of anonymous societies did not see each other on a day-to-day basis unless they belonged to the same band, they must have seen each other occasionally—enough to reaffirm the shared cultural markers that kept them united as a separate and distinct people from the other societies around them. If members of anonymous societies never saw one another, they would inevitably drift apart, splitting and fracturing into different societies over time.
Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar describes the importance of such ritual activities to the human ability to form anonymous societies:
Dunbar believes that a few hundred thousand years ago, archaic humans took a step that ramped up this capacity [for awe]. They started deliberately to make music, dance and sing. When the synchronised and collective nature of these practices became sufficiently intense, individuals likely entered trance states in which they experienced not only this-worldly splendour but otherworldly intrigue. They encountered ancestors, spirits and fantastic beasts, now known as therianthropes. These immersive journeys were extraordinarily compelling. What you might call religiosity was born. It stuck partly because it also helped to ease tensions and bond groups, via the endorphin surges produced in trance states. In other words, altered states proved evolutionarily advantageous: the awoken human desire for ecstasy simultaneously prompted a social revolution because it meant that social groups could grow to much larger sizes via the shared intensity of heightened experiences.
How trance states forged human society through transcendance (Aeon)
As groups got ever larger and inevitably spread out over broader territory, it may have become infeasible for all members of a band society to attend such regular gatherings. The speed at which human groups were able to move from place to place was confined, after all, to the speed of moving on foot. This may be one reason why new societies eventually splintered off from previous ones. Over time there were just too many people spread out over too wide an area to engage in the kind of ritual activities and regular feasts that reaffirmed their collective sense of shared identity as a people. And so they split off into different cultures over time, each with their own distinctive songs, dances, stories, and rituals, somewhat like cellular division in biology.
Another reason for such regular gatherings was simply biological. A small band does not contain enough genetic diversity within it to provide suitable mates. Inbreeding within such a small group would quickly lead to genetic disorders, as has been repeatedly documented in small populations that mate exclusively with other members of the same small population (i.e. endogamously). At Aboriginal gatherings in Australia, for example, one of the main activities was arranging marriages (and settling scores). In many cultures, people were actively forbidden from marrying within their own social group and had to choose mates exclusively from other groups, whatever those groups happened to be (i.e. exogamously).
A large number of cultures appear to have practiced bride exchange, with the brides leaving the society of their birth and going to live with their husband's social group. This type of mating behavior—called female exogamy—is seen in chimpanzees and bonobos who are our closest relatives. This suggests a very remote origin for this type of behavior. A study of the teeth of Australopithecus africanus specimens found in the Sterkfontein and Swartkrans caves in South Africa determined that females came from different regions than those in which they were found. As one researcher noted, "What [the results] show was that the females were more likely to come from outside the dolomite valley region than the males. It wasn't too far away but it wasn't the same natal group in which they grew up.” [1]
We know that early humans seem to have recognized the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, as recent genetic research has determined. Here again, markers may have been used to distinguish between different groups within the society as well as from those outside of it.
The study, reported in the journal Science, examined genetic information from the remains of anatomically modern humans who lived during the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonised western Eurasia. The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, in order to avoid becoming inbred. This suggests that our distant ancestors are likely to have been aware of the dangers of inbreeding, and purposely avoided it at a surprisingly early stage in prehistory.
The symbolism, complexity and time invested in the objects and jewellery found buried with the remains also suggests that it is possible that they developed rules, ceremonies and rituals to accompany the exchange of mates between groups, which perhaps foreshadowed modern marriage ceremonies, and may have been similar to those still practised by hunter-gatherer communities in parts of the world today...
Sunghir contains the burials of one adult male and two younger individuals, accompanied by the symbolically-modified incomplete remains of another adult, as well as a spectacular array of grave goods. The researchers were able to sequence the complete genomes of the four individuals, all of whom were probably living on the site at the same time. These data were compared with information from a large number of both modern and ancient human genomes. They found that the four individuals studied were genetically no closer than second cousins, while an adult femur filled with red ochre found in the children’s’ grave would have belonged to an individual no closer than great-great grandfather of the boys.
The people at Sunghir may have been part of a network similar to that of modern day hunter-gatherers, such as Aboriginal Australians and some historical Native American societies. Like their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, these people live in fairly small groups of around 25 people, but they are also less directly connected to a larger community of perhaps 200 people, within which there are rules governing with whom individuals can form partnerships.
By comparison, genomic sequencing of a Neanderthal individual from the Altai Mountains who lived around 50,000 years ago indicates that inbreeding was not avoided. This leads the researchers to speculate that an early, systematic approach to preventing inbreeding may have helped anatomically modern humans to thrive, compared with other hominins.
Prehistoric humans are likely to have formed mating networks to avoid inbreeding (Artdaily)
Another important reason for such gatherings was cultural exchange. If one particular band discovered, for example, a new type of tool for hunting, or a new medicinal plant, it could then spread that knowledge to all the other bands. Such knowledge would then disperse throughout the entire society via learning and imitation.
This kind of cultural diffusion between groups is unique to our species. There is no indication that chimpanzees or monkeys who learn or discover a new technique transmit it to other chimpanzees or monkeys beyond their immediate social group. Such culturally-transmitted behavior must have taken place for many thousands of years, and would have encouraged innovation. In fact, innovation seems to have rapidly sped up with the arrival of our species approximately 320,000 years ago, perhaps due to a rapidly changing climate around this time [8]. We can clearly see the diffusion of, for example, tool-making in the archaeological record. Many other cultural innovations in wood and fiber, along with innovations in thought, have no doubt been lost to us in the mists of time.
A recent study determined that the mutli-level nature of human societies played a signifcant role in accelerating human cultural evolution. The researchers used wireless sensing technology to map the social interactions between camps of Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who are split between woodland and coastal camps. The members of various camps had frequent interactions with members of other camps. They then simulated the dissemination of a cultural innovation (a medicinal plant) based on the social network they had mapped out. They found that the information spread much more rapidly in the hunter-gatherer's actual social network compared to a random or artificial one. From this information, the anthropologists concluded that,
"[T]his social structure of small and interconnected bands may have facilitated the sequence of cultural and technological revolutions that characterizes our species as we expanded within and then out of Africa."
And furthermore that,
"[M]ultilevel structuring already characterized Middle Stone Age populations emerging as early as 320,000 years ago, which were also known to have established trade dyads connecting sites up to 160 kilometers apart." [3]
It's quite possible that such highly-developed social abilities were the "secret weapon" that assured the survival or our particular species of hominid over the many other species of archaic hominids with whom we shared the planet at this time.**
For all of the reasons listed above, it’s clear that the multi-level band societies humans lived in must have been reasonably large—at least 500—going as far back as 35,000 years ago, and possibly all the way back to our very emergence as a species from our remote evolutionary ancestors. However, societies could not have gotten too large at this time either, indicating something of a “Goldilocks” size for ancestral human societies for millennia prior to the Neolithic Revolution.
One can infer a practical reason for a society to contain at least 500: by some calculations, a population of this magnitude gives humans the opportunity to select a spouse who isn’t a close relative. This may explain why people, unlike the many mammal species that live in societies of a few dozen, rarely show the restless and risky drive to join a foreign society. Thanks to the abundance of mates, most people throughout history have had the option to stay with their birth society for life.
But what set the divisions in motion at this size rather than at some larger one, which would have given our ancestors an even wider choice in spouses, as well as the defensive advantages of a more imposing group? That number doesn’t seem to reflect the checks and balances of societies living enmeshed in nature, as ecological factors like predators and food availability differ remarkably between the jungle and tundras where hunter-gatherers lived. The territories hunter-gatherers occupied differed in total area in those different ecosystems, with Arctic people ranging farther, but the populations of the societies were pretty much the same everywhere.
That band societies hit a low population ceiling may have been a function of the psychology governing the expression of human individuality. Maintaining a balance was essential: members had to feel similar enough to each other to share a sense of community, yet different enough to think of themselves as unique…
I have left open the question of what is special about the anthropologist’s magic 500. My suspicion is that it’s at about this population that the human wherewithal to have even the crudest knowledge of everyone in the society begins to be sufficiently strained for individuals to lean heavily on markers as a crutch in their interactions. In groups larger than 500, humans would start to feel truly anonymous, something that has no effect on ants but that undercuts people’s desire to matter as individuals.
This loss of self-worth would make people eager to enhance their distinctiveness by accepting what novelties come thier way. Without the tight organization and oversight of a major settled community, such novelties would spur a division…Once their population swelled [hunter-gatherers] would hunger for the differences offered by connections with narrower groups. This increased drive toward diversification of identity would promote the emergence of factions that ended up causing discord among the bands and severing their relationships…
What I can’t say is whether this attribute of social identity evolved in the Paleolithic to keep band societies at a size that (for reasons yet to be fully understood) was ideal for life at that time. Alternatively, it could have been an adaptation to enhance people’s individual social interactions, in which case perhaps the 500 number was an accidental outcome of this psychological feature. More likely both were important. (266-268)
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Citations in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett; Basic Books, New York.
* In the Archaic period of Greek history, an amphictyony (Greek: ἀμφικτυονία), a "league of neighbors", or Amphictyonic League was an ancient religious association of Greek tribes formed in the dim past, before the rise of the Greek polis. (Wikipedia)
[1] Ancient cave women 'left childhood homes' (BBC)
[2] Turbulent era sparked leap in human behavior, adaptability 320,000 years ago
[3] Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution (Science Advances)
** At present, we know of at least eight: The Neanderthals (Europe), The Siberian Densivoans, the Australo-Densiovans, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo naledi (South Africa), Homo floriensis (Indonesia), Homo erectus (Asia) and Homo luzonensis (the Philippines).