What we talk about when we talk about hunter-gatherers

On the nature of band societies

I've been reading Mark W. Moffett's book The Human Swarm over the past couple of months. One of the things Moffatt points out in the book is that when we talk about hunter-gatherers, what we’re usually talking about is actually the dynamics of band societies.

Band societies are one specific type of social organization, and they are generally only found among hunter-gatherer (foraging) groups. In these societies, the primary social unit is the band. A band typically consists of a few unrelated extended families, numbering in the range of perhaps 30-50 people. A band almost never gets much bigger than around 65-75 individuals. If a band gets too big, it typically splits up. There were no specialists except for perhaps healers and storytellers, and, for the most part, every member of the band knew almost everything he or she needed to survive. As Yuval Noah Harari notes, “The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.”

An upside of this factory life was that people weren't occupied with raising crops or struggling to take in excess food. They ended up with leisure time—a commodity that earned these nomads the moniker "the original affluent society." The only thing stockpiled was time to devote to social relationships.

The typical population of a band turns out to be ideal. Enough meat, produce, and goods were procured, processed, and exchanged on an average day to keep everyone fed and comfortable. Success became problematic when fewer than 15 or more than about 60 individuals resided in a band.

A band's size was self-regulating. The individuals and families, although interdependent, did as they wished. People could leave an overcrowded band to join another or go it alone for a time. (114)

Typically, the members of band societies were associated with one particular band throught their life but were entirely free to leave it and seek membership in other bands if they chose to do so. Membership was fluid and informal. In this regard, they are quite similar to today’s music bands where members might come and go with a few core members remaining over the long term. If you go to the State Fair to see a band like Toto or Boston, the odds are they will be a different group of people than when they recorded their greatest hits. Even REM and Metallica have had members leave and be replaced. And sometimes—most famously the Beatles—bands can break up entirely. This fluid social organization is characteristic of band societies

Members of band societies say that this social dynamic drastically cuts down interpersonal conflicts and helps keep peaceful relations between band members. The interpersonal familiarity and easy-going camaraderie of bands meant that there was no need for formal legal or political structures. There was no such thing as a stranger. There was also no need for formal leaders. Behavior was socially determined by informal cues, with expulsion as the ultimate sanction. Decisions affecting all band members are made collaboratively via debate and consensus. All members had equal decision-making power. Thus democracy, rather than being a recent invention, was actually the original form of human political organization.

Moffett describes the band as kind of factory, able to permanently provide for the needs of all its members on an ongoing basis:

Division of labor by age and sex was the backbone of the factory. In a human band almost invariably the men hunted large game or fished, while the women, often weighed down by breastfeeding children (which made hunting impractical), gathered the bulk of the band's calorie intake in the form of fruits, vegetables, and small prey like lizards and insects, and cooked dinner...

As a factory, each band was assembled redundantly: there could be multiple hunting and gathering parties, and the families performed many chores on their own. Because they had to be mobile to keep their stomachs full, the hunter-gatherers couldn't accumulate stuff, and didn't have ownership the way we think of it. People could possess just what they could lift—about 25 pounds of supplies is a figure sometimes given, the weight airlines permit for a carry-on bag...

Few tasks in a band factory demanded multiple players. When something had to made in steps, like a spear or lean-to, usually the same person (or maybe two) carried out the process from start to finish. Teamwork, when required at all, was seldom elaborate, although felling a giraffe or mammoth might have taken the coordinated efforts of several men, and perhaps butchering it required the ant-like participation of everyone available. (pp. 112-113)

One thing that band societies didn’t have was formal leaderhship or hereditary social positions. The people invested with some authority couldn’t coerce other members to do anything they didn’t want to, nor could they deprive them of the resources they needed to survive. Instead, they led by influence and example, and could be removed or ignored at any time if they misbehaved:

Among jobs absent from bands were leaders. Anyone eager to make decisions for others was a problem for people who spent most of their lives in small groups day after day with little privacy. Ridicule and jokes were weapons deployed against those seeking to sway others, as often as they were used to deflate others shows of skill or superiority. To be influential, then, flamboyance wasn't an option; keeping the economy of a band humming along required nuanced social skill, with a goal to, in the words of one anthropologist, "persuade but not command." (117)

Fission-fusion

The key defining feature of band societies, Moffatt explains, is that they have a fission-fusion dynamic. Fission-fusion is a process of regularly aggregating together in larger groups and then breaking apart again. As this article descibes:"Group formation is a highly dynamic process where group size and composition changes frequently within the lifetime of the group members as groups split (fission) and merge (fusion)." [1]

It is this fission-fusion dynamic, says Moffett, which is the primary characteristic of band societies, and not how they get their food—what anthropologists refer to as their subsistence strategy. It’s also not the fact that they are nomadic, which is also a feature of some non-hunter-gatherer societies. This actually came as a surprise to be because I had thought that what distinguished hunting and gathering societies was, well, hunting and gathering!

The feature that distinguished band societies from other modes of life wasn't specifically hunting or gathering, which people still enjoy, if only when they bag deer or excavate truffles. Nor were these hunter-gatherers totally distinct for their nomadism. Pastoralist tribes like the Huns could disperse to camps part of the year to secure pasturage for their domestic animals.

What most set them apart was the pattern of movement of their members: nomadic hunter-gatherers spread out by fission-fusion, with people roaming with considerable freedom.

Fission-fusion nevertheless generally took a regimented from for the nomadic hunter-gatherers of recent times, as it presumably did for those living prior to the invention of agriculture as well. People mostly clumped here and there in bands. Each band consisted of on average 25 to 35 individuals comprising several, usually unrelated nuclear families, often spanning three generations.

A person could visit other bands, yet tended to keep a long term connection with one. Shifts between bands usually came about with little effort but not often, a far cry from the eternally fluid movements of chimpanzees and other fission-fusion species characterized by ever-changing parties. (100-101)

As Moffatt alludes to, the reason the subsistence strategy is not the main defining feature of hunting and gathering societies is because hunting and gathering activities are not confined to what we typically think of as hunter-gatherer societies. All sorts of societies engage in hunting and gathering from time to time, including large, hierarchical ones based primarily around growing crops. An Appalachian tobacco farmer who goes hunting for deer in the autumn, fishes in the local stream, and gathers edible wild plants and berries from the woods is engaging in hunting and gathering, but he is not a member of what we would normally think of as a hunter-gatherer society. More than likely, the earliest farmers spent a lot of their time engaging in hunting and gathering activities, especially if their crops failed.

The fission-fusion dynamic of a band society can take multiple forms. For example, members of hunter-gatherer bands would typically break up into smaller groups called parties on a daily basis to forage, to hunt, to scout, to collect water, to build shelters, to look after children, to process and prepare food, and other basic tasks. The members of the band would reconvene at night—often around a campfire—to tell stories, sing songs, dance, and partake of the fruits of the day's labor.

At the other end of this fission-fusion dynamic, bands would congregate in larger groupings at various times of the year for lengths of time ranging from just a single day to a few weeks or months at a time. These collective gatherings were typically associated with some kind of superabundant seasonal resource, whether it was game animals, plant resources like nuts or wild grasses, or water sources during the rainy season.

When that resource was depleted or became scarce, the bands would once again break apart and go their separate ways, dispersing across the landscape in order to make a living until the next rendezvous. Burning Man could be seen as a modern manifestation of this phenomenon. Just like Burning Man (or any modern-day rock festival, really), there was typically a lot of singing and trance dancing (not to mention, f**king) at these events.

Some of the versatility of the human expression of fission-fusion was on display when hunter-gatherer bands converged in aggregations of as many as a few hundred. These occasional social gatherings were staged during a season when resources were bountiful enough to sustain everyone for a few weeks. During this time, people massed together much like monkeys in a troop, except lodged in one place. The chosen site could be a watering hole or other productive location...(124)

We can see numerous examples of fission-fusion behavior throughout the animal kingdom. Schools of fish, pods of whales, flock of birds, troops of monkeys, prides of lions, packs of wolves, herds of antelope, parliaments of elephants, shrewdnesses of apes, and swarms of insects are a few of the more common examples of this widespread behavior. In fact, fission-fusion behavior is so common in the animal kingdom that some biologists argue that all animals exhibit fission-fusion behavior to some extent, and that it is a spectrum rather than a single mode of social organization. In this conceptualization, there is no single fixed size for an animal's social group; rather, it varies depending on the season as well as environmental factors such as the abundance of food, mates, shelter, and other key resources.

Spreading out allows for a territory to sustain a greater population, as everyone in the society isn't clambering on top of each other to gain access to the same resources. Imagine what would occur if 100 chimpanzees stayed in one tight troop: the land they passed through would be picked clean, forcing them to move relentlessly and scramble for each tidbit like shoppers on Black Friday. Instead, the chimpanzees keep apart, meeting in temporary groups, called parties, of a large size only where they hit a resource jackpot, such as a tree weighed down with fruit (39)

The fission-fusion dynamic was first described by a biologist named Hans Kummer who was studying Hamadryas baboons. While these baboons are not as closely related to us biologically as are chimpanzees and bonobos, they live in large, complex societies on the open plains of the African savanna—an environment very similar to that of our ancestors.

While troops of Hamadryas baboons can get quite large—up to 750 individuals—Kummer noticed that most of their socialization took place in several sub-groups. The smallest one he called the one-male group, which was a semi-permanent association of a dominant male, his "harem," and their dependent offspring. Several one-male units together formed a clan, which also included solitary males. Males in a clan cooperated in defense against predators and fought off intruding rival males. A collection of several clans together formed a band, which stayed together for the part of the daily foraging expedition. Several clans formed a troop. While a band was a genuine social unit, troops were temporary aggregations of assorted bands that would congregate together at watering holes and overnight together at sleeping cliffs.

It was subsequently discovered that our closest living relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—also exhibited this fission-fusion dynamic. Chimps live in multi-male and multi-female groups. Sub-groups are permanent or temporary and can completely disappear after a while, or their members can join other community members to perform activities such as foraging, hunting, or traveling. The maximum size of a chimpanzee group is in the range of 100-150 individuals, with rare ones reaching up to two-hundred.

The most fluid societies of any nonhuman primate are found among chimpanzees and bonobos, humanity's nearest living relatives. Chimpanzee communities, for instance are rarely seen together as a whole. Instead, subgroups of various sizes constantly coalesce and split based on moment-to-moment foraging and socializing needs. Subgroups of adult male chimpanzees separate from the group to cooperatively hunt mammalian prey or to patrol their border, and male-female dyads split off from the group to engage in sexual consortships with minimal mating competition. As a consequence of such fission-fusion processes, the composition of traveling chimpanzee parties is highly variable, often changing by the hour. [2]

Fission-fusion dynamics are associated with social complexity. Unlike a herd dynamic, where all the members are always in close proximity to one another, members of fission-fusion societies are spread out yet still need to maintain social ties. The structure of a fission-fusion society, as a result, is fluid and open, with members freely choosing whom to associate with and for how long.

Contacts in fission-fusion societies are less frequent and more flexible. To this end, members have to navigate a complex social world forming factions, alliances, and coalitions on an ongoing, ever-changing basis. As a consequence, the social dynamics of fission-fusion societies are the most complex in the animal kingdom—much more than in herd societies or social insects. The social brain hypothesis argues that human intelligence was driven primarily by the need to manage and navigate this complex and protean web of social relationships rather than just simply meeting the needs of mere survival as with other, less social animals:

Freedom of movement allows social interactions to grow more complex, and it also pays off whenever personal relationships become hard to manage. Options open up that impossible for animals living "face-to-face"—monkeys, for example, that have no choice but to stay constantly together in a troop. Object to the local scene? A cunning chimpanzee of low social rank may find an opportunity to slip off to a quiet spot in his community's territory for a quiet liaison with a female. Even more surreptitiously, a gray wolf or male lion can sneak away to visit another pack or pride as a first step to defecting—transitioning to become a member of an other society can require this sort of painstaking duplicity. No surprise that many fission-fusion species are so bright. (38-39)

One unique solution that humans used to manage their fission-fusion societies was gossip. In the absence of face-to-face communication, one of the things which allowed band members to maintain social relationships across long distances was language. Gossip would have been especially important in this role. Without personal knowledge of all the members of the society, how could you know who was trustworthy and who was not? How could you keep track of who was attached, or who had a falling out? Gossip provided a means of reputation assurance in the absence of direct physical contact. It would make sure that norms were enforced across the society, because anyone who violated them would quickly become the topic of gossip and ostracism, just as they are today. Gossip has even been described as a form of grooming—that is, it takes the place of grooming rituals in other primates where members of social groups spend time directly touching one another in face-to-face interactions:

Gossip, in the strict sense of talking about third parties who are elsewhere at the time of the dialogue, appears to be uniquely human. Of even greater interest, most of our species' conversations—over two-thirds by some study estimates—focus on gossip.

But why is gossip necessary? Far from being mere small talk, gossip serves myriad vital functions within our fission-fusion societies, both at the individual level and at the group level. Gossip can facilitate social cohesion in the face of repeated separations, reminding individuals of the bonds they have with distant others. And it can also allow information to percolate through the group about the trustworthiness of each individual member, enabling listeners to keep track of others, despite limited first-hand observation.

Gossip, therefore, and maybe even language more generally, may have evolved specifically as an adaptation to the highly fission-fusion oriented societies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. [3]

So, really, when we talk about hunters and gatherers, what we're really talking about is band societies and their fission-fusion dynamic. Based on similarities with chimpanzee and bonobo social organization, it is likely that this was the original form of human social organization—and the one we have spent the most time in—going back to the days of our remote ancestors like Homo erectus over two million years ago.

Social boundaries always exist

For a long time, fission-fusion behavior among chimpanzees obscured the fact that they even lived in social groups at all because the entire group was rarely seen together in one place at the same time. Instead, membership among chimp groups was initially seen as fluid and open, with no fixed or defined social boundaries. Primatologists like Jane Goodall were eventually able to discern that chimpanzees did indeed live in well-defined social groups, even if the composition of those groups was highly variable. Subsequent studies have even determined that many of these chimp groups feature distinctive “cultures” of some sort.

In a similar fashion, anthropologists have often ignored, downplayed—or even outright denied—the idea that hunter-gatherers lived in societies with similarly defined social boundaries. Some anthropologists looked to places such as Australia's central desert—where the boundaries between different groups was often blurred and members of different groups regularly criss-crossed each others' territories and intermarried—to argue that hunter-gatherer societies were "open" and had no social boundaries, and thus were not true "societies" in the way we think of them today. In this conception, societies—and the distinction between insiders and outsiders— are a relatively recent phenomenon

Yet even the relatively fluid and open societies of Australia made a distinction between themselves and members of other groups, despite their lax attitude toward boundaries and relatively fluid membership. "There are two kinds of blackfellows," an Aboriginal elder informed anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt, "we who are the Walbiri and those unfortunate people who are not;" adding, "Our laws are the true laws; other blackfellows have inferior laws which they continuously break." The characteristics that anthropologists observed in Australia likely had more to do with low population densities and a harsh environment requiring a substantial degree of interpersonal cooperation rather than the lack of distinct societies. As Moffett points out, "The border between France and Italy isn't as fraught as the one between North and South Korea, but it is present nonetheless." (p. 104).

The misunderstanding can be cleared up somewhat by making a distinction between a social group and the society. While small foraging bands were indeed the primary source of most people’s day-to-day social interactions, these bands were part of a wider social milieu that could consist of potentially large groups of people, even if they were spread out across a wide geographical area. The Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, for example, are conscious of being part of singular people, even though they spend most of their time in small, mobile bands.

My term "band society" could suggest that one band constituted a society, and that was true at times, but societies generally extended across a specific set of bands.

There are shelves of articles and books by anthropologists who write of hunter-gatherers based solely on what happened in bands, while ignoring how hunter-gatherer bands identified with a broader society. Sometimes, when they acknowledge the connections between bands at all, their solution is to claim that the nomads didn't have societies to speak of. This view often intimates that hunter-gatherer culture varied from one band to the next, with no wider human affiliations and nary a sharp boundary to be seen.

I find this doubtful. For one thing, all other human populations live in groups we call societies. Additionally, the hunter-gatherer bands documented over the last few centuries were affiliated with societies. Indeed, there is ample evidence that membership in societies was a crucial aspect of hunter-gatherer existence—one that is indispensable to understanding how the societies of today came to be.

I am not surprised these societies have been missed or misinterpreted. Until primatologists like Goodall deduced that chimps had societies from the animals' spacing and confrontations with outsiders, the consensus was that fission-fusion animals were "open-group species," without social borders. So it made sense that these human bands, whose movements were marked by fission-fusion as well, wouldn't have had them either.

Because the members of human band societies, as well as chimpanzees, rarely come together, finding out where a society stops and the next starts can be tough, but sharp separation in the memberships of societies are in place just the same.

Numerous accounts tell how hunter-gatherers of recent centuries felt secure in the presence of their "own kind." Asked who they were, typically a hunter-gatherer would give you the name for a community encompassing several, often a dozen or more, bands spread out over a wide geographic range. These band societies had populations ranging from a few dozen to perhaps a couple of thousand individuals. (103-104)...Because society membership is not always visible in daily life, societies, profoundly as important as they are, can be easy to miss. (218)

Moffett makes a distinction between band societies and tribes. Moffett applies the term "tribe" to settled village societies practicing a degree of horticulture, as well as to nomadic pastoralists. Most anthropologists use the term tribe to refer to social organizations based around family descent. These descent groups tend to arise where the right to use certain resources needs to be determined (for example, garden plots or flocks of animals), and some method of inheriting resources needs to be established. Unlike bands, one’s membership in a descent group is determined by birth, persists throughout one’s life, and cannot be changed except perhaps by marriage or adoption. We’ll talk more about tribes later.

I distinguish band societies from tribes, a word typically used...to describe simple settled societies, most of which were dependent on horticulture, where plants are cultivated in gardens rather than plowed fields, as well as more mobile pastoralists who tend domesticated herds. (98)

In this distinction, he follows the sociopolitical typology laid out by the eminent anthropologist Elman Service, who classified economies and socio-political organization into the following spectrum based on increasing population and social complexity:

• foragers (hunter-gatherer): band society

• horticulture: tribe

• pastoralism: chiefdom

• agriculture: state

Although it should be noted that these terms are not well-defined—even by anthropologists—and are often used interchangeably leading to confusion. A lot of times when modern people refer to finding their "tribe," what they are really describing is the social dynamics of a typical band.

Foraging bands, then, can be thought of as part of a larger shared people, or culture, whose members were partitioned between multiple different nomadic bands, and who exhibited a high degree of fission-fusion behavior. Often this is referred to as an “ethno-linguistic group.” This is different than a polity, which is largest unit of political decision making. In band societies, the polity was simply the band itself. Unlike the members of a band, not all members of an ethno-linguistic group would know one another on an ongoing personal basis, but they would recognize certain rights and obligations with respect to one another that they would not recognize with respect to outsiders.

When it comes to our own species, there is no doubt that, by nature, we form fission-fusion societies...More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence, characterized by dynamically shifting social groupings at multiple levels.

At the highest tier in hunter-gatherer societies is the ethno-lingustic group or 'tribe', formed by several local 'bands' that fuse together when resources like water are clustered during dry seasons.

Bands themselves, which are made up of around 30 individuals, break up into smaller foraging parties during daily forays out of base camp. While some individuals remain at the camp to watch over youngsters and tend to the old or injured, the foraging parties gather edible plant material and hunt animals, afterward bringing the bounty back to a central place for sharing and redistribution.

Hunter-gatherer societies exhibit division of labor, though mostly between the sexes and not to the extent of highly specialized castes of social insects....Pair bonds, non-existent in the promiscuous chimpanzees and bonobos, enable men and women to assume distinct but complimentary ecological roles, splitting apart during the day and then pooling their assorted resources when they convene at night.

Aside from such ecological reasons for fission-fusion among hunter-gatherers, social reasons also abound. One of the most common is verbal disputes and fighting, which can result in individuals switching camps. The Hadza of Tanzania insist that fissioning into smaller camps is a surefire route to 'less bickering'. [2]

Due to this fission-fusion dynamic, hunter-gatherer societies were often assumed to be quite small, consisting of no more than a few dozen individuals. Even in some textbooks you will still read that human societies prior to agriculture contained only a dozen to perhaps a few hundred individuals. But this is completely wrong. In fact, we can think of a band society as a true nation—one that is united by a distinctive shared culture rather than proximity, territory, or legal and political decision-making as in our modern-day state societies. Just like a nation, a band society is, in the words of Benedict Anderson, “always conceived as a deep, horizontal, comradeship."

We think of nations, which academics call states, as having governments and laws. Band societies have neither, formally speaking. Still, hunter-gatherers expressed the same comfort and trust around the people of their own society that we do at present, and in many ways their societies are analogous to our nations.

The nineteenth century historian Ernest Renan believed nations to be a modern phenomenon, yet his definition of a nation as a strongly bonded people with a shared heritage of memories and a desire to identify collectively is an apt description of band societies, too...As linguist Robert Dixon informs us, again about the Aborigines:

"A [band society] appears in fact to be a political unit, rather than similar to a 'nation' in Europe or elsewhere—whose members are very aware of their 'national unity,' consider themselves to have a 'national language,' and take a patronizing and critical attitude towards customs, beliefs and languages that differ from their own." (103-105)

Multi-level societies

Band societies can additionally be classified as multi-level societies, another concept borrowed from biology and zoology.

A prime example is, once again, the Hamadryas baboons described above who lived in nested hierarchical groupings remiscent of a Russian matryoshka doll. The terms multi-level and fission-fusion are often used interchangeably, yet they refer to different phenomena. For example, forest-dwelling chimpanzees live in multi-male and multi-female groupings as noted earlier, but they do not live in true multi-level societies like the baboons on the savanna. It’s thought that baboons form multi-level societies as a form of protection against predators in the wide-open environment of the savanna ecosystem. The fact that early humans are thought to have evolved under similar conidtions is significant. Multilevel societies in mammals tend to be more common in species with a reliable food resource.

In addition to baboons, multi-level societies have been observed among a wide variety of species including monkeys (snub-nosed and proboscis monkeys), zebras, elephants, giraffes and sperm whales, as well as multiple species of insects. Despite shared similarities between multilevel societies, social dynamics could be quite different. For example, in geladas (another species of baboon), units are comprised of closely-related females, whereas in Hamadryas baboons the strongest bonds are between male relatives in clans. African elephants form sophisticated multi-level groupings with mothers and their offspring forming the core units.

As with Hamadryas baboons, we can clearly recognize multiple social groupings in our own societies. At the most basic level is the pair-bond, or the nuclear family, consisting of a man, a woman, and their dependent offspring (husband and wife are legal/cultural terms). Such pair bonds may or may not be permanent—the evidence indicates that humans are a serially monogamous but not a lifetime monogamous species. An extended family might be another level, consisting of siblings and their children.

Different levels [in multi-level societies] fulfill different adaptive functions and have evolved in response to different cost-benefit trade-offs. In humans, reproduction and close social support are the domains of the lowest tier; mid-level tiers are a pool from which one can choose partners for cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting, while cooperative defence is best served by higher-level tiers. In essence, higher levels of sociality can tackle problems that core structures cannot. [4]

A band, then was a larger agglomeration of nuclear and extended families and other individuals attached to the group. The society would be the collection of all the bands who recognized themselves as part of the same people, or culture. Many band societies developed additional groupings as well, often to avoid interbreeding: "The people of many Australian societies...belonged to groups known as skins and moieties. Children were assigned to a skin next in sequence from that of one of their parents, and to a moiety based on their connection to an ancestral being and ties to a plant or animal species, connections that determined how they socialized and whom they could marry." (133)

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has reconstructed what some of these intrinsic levels are. It appears that, for some reason, each level in human societies tends to scale up by roughly a factor of three. Also, our relationships with people differ depending on which layer of the society we are interacting with. In Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, he writes (my emphasis):

It is obvious...that hunter-gatherer communities are one layer in a hierarchically nested series of levels of social organization. In this respect, hunter-gatherer societies are typical of all human societies (we all live in nested layers of this kind) and, as it turns out, most monkeys and apes...(78)...In hunter-gatherers these consist of families, camp groups (or bands), communities (or clans), endogamous communities (or mega-bands), and ethnolinguistic units (or tribes)...In most hunter-gatherer societies, [the layer I identify as the community] is associated with a group of people who own rights of access to territory or to special resources like permanent waterholes or sacred sites; they also meet together for events like rites of passage, usually on an annual basis...(67)

...these social layers have a very distinct scaling signature: each layer is three times the size of the layer inside it. For our hunter-gatherer dataset, this yields a series of layers at 50, 150, 500 and 1,500: three camp grounds of around 50 individuals make up a bonded community (or clan), three bonded communities male up an endogamous community (or mega-band) and three endogamous communities make up an ethnolinguistic unit (or tribe)...(79)...One obvious hypothesis is that hominin social evolution consisted of progressively extending out beyond the core chimpanzee community of 50 to add, successively, the 150, 500 and 1,500 layers. We still have no idea why the scaling factor should be almost exactly three, however—even though we find exactly the same scaling ratio in primates, elephants and orcas (killer whales)...(81)

It seems likely that the difference between species with more and less complex social systems lies in the number of layers they have rather than the sizes of the layers themselves. Humans, for example, have six layers, while chimpanzees and babons have only three, and the decidedly less smart colobus monkeys have only one (or at most two) layers. The capacity to maintain these multi-level social systems may well depend on a species having sufficiently developed social cognition to be able to manage several grouping levels at the same time, and hence a large enough brain to support the mentalizing capabilities required to do this...(81)

This structuring really reflects the extent to which an individual interacts with (grooms, in the case of monkeys and apes) the other members of its group. In our case, something like 40 percent of or total social effort—our social capital, if you will—is devoted to the five people in our innermost circle of relationships, our five most intimate friends and family, and about 60 percent is devoted to the 15 people in the two innermost layers, with the remaining 40 per cent being divided between the remaining 135 people in the outer two layers. These frequencies of interaction correspond rather closely to levels of emotional closeness...As with monkeys and apes, we concentrate our social capital where it is most important—the core members of our close alliance that will provide us with emotional and other kinds of support. But at the same time we retain links with a number of others who provide rather more diffuse forms of support. In the sociological literature, these are often referred to as strong and weak ties...(82-84)

[W]e might think of these layers as intimate friends (the innermost 5 layer), best friends (the 15 layer), good friends (the 50 layer), friends (the 150 layer), acquaintances (the 500 layer) and people whose faces we can put names to (the 1,500 layer). In our contemporary societies, the four innermost layers (out to 150) consist of roughly half family and half friends, and the layers beyond 150 consist purely of people we know casually or by sight: this layer rarely contains family...(79-81)

In human societies comprised of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of unrelated individuals, then, it is this multi-level nature of human social organization that needs to be grasped in order to fundamentally understand human sociology and human history. From this standpoint, it is the addition many more levels to the society that distinguishes more recent forms of social organization rather than any sort of qualitative change in fundamental human social dynamics. Even members of agricultural and industrial societies are not so different from our Stone-Age or Bronze-Age ancestors¹.

The downside of tribes

Moffett argues that humans will always inherently from societies, and this is just intrinsic to our species. We cannot *not* be a member of a society, nor can everyone just live together in one indiscriminate society. We will always separate into groups of insiders and outsiders, he says—it's in our nature. He cites the 1954 Robber's Cave experiment as an example. As Yuval Noah Harari remarked in Sapiens: “Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.” Moffet illustrates this by describing the isolated South Sea island of Futuna, an tiny island with two distinct ethnic groups:

Over the long-term…the boundaries between societies trump the markers that define them (252)…For centuries, the Pacific island of Futuna, a low chunk of volcanic rock, at 46 square kilometers in size, offered space and resources for just two chiefdoms—Sigave and Alo. These societies, claiming opposite ends of the island, were in almost constant conflict, pausing only briefly now and then for island-wide ceremonies featuring a psychoactive drink made from a shrub native to the western Pacific...One might expect that in such a confined space, and over the course of so much time, one chiefdom would have conquered the other. That this never happened might bear on the human craving for an outgroup, if not an outright opponent. Could Alo have continued on without Sigave—a society in a vacuum? Would it, alone in the world, even be what we could call a society? (344)

[...] "A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears," wrote Ernest Gellner, a prominent thinker on nationalism. Gellner—who went on to argue, mistakenly, that the human need to be part of a nation is nothing more than a contrivance of modern times—never fathomed how right his statement was. The mind evolved in an Us-versus-Them universe of our own making. The societies coming out of this psychological firmament have always been points of reference that give people a secure sense of meaning and validation. (352)

Hunter-gatherers tend to take what can be described as a chauvinistic view of their societies. Chauvinism is defined by Wikipedia as, "an irrational belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong and virtuous, while others are considered weak or unworthy." Nearly all hunter-gatherer groups have a term for themselves that has the connotation of "the real actual human beings;" while terms for outsiders have the unfortunate connotation of being 'sub-human', or even 'animal'. Psychological research has shown that people have a tendency to dehumanize those who transgress established social norms, even if they are members of the same society. This assignment of people and things to various ranked categories seems to be an intrinsic subconscious pattern (i.e. heuristic) of the way that humans think about the world and their place in it.

Research shows that children think of people as superior to animals, and of outsiders as closer to their own group to animals. Furthermore the proneness of hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples to describe themselves as human suggests that this type of thinking is typical even among societies that are small and have much in common with their neighbors...Their use of epithets meaning nonhuman or animal also suggests those people felt entitled to treat at least some outsiders categorically as other species, an outlook that would naturally affect their relationships. (185-186)

Among hunter-gatherers, the Jahai of Malaysia call themselves the menra, or "real people." This is also the meaning of Dana-zaa, the name the Canadian Beaver Indians give their kind, and mihhaq, the word used by the Kusunda of Nepal. "even the gentle San [Bushmen] of the Kalahari," E.O. Wilson tells us, "call themselves the !Kung—the human beings"—true, yet even there the designation "human" applies not to every Bushman but merely those Bushmen who belong to the !Kung society… (184)

Given the practical payoff of a skill at humanizing animals (hunters, for example, often imagine what a deer is thinking to predict it’s next move), it’s a shock to discover just how readily people dehumanize other humans. The names many hunter-gatherers give themselves reflect how humans treat outsiders differently from, and usually inferior to, their own people or other groups they know and trust. Even the names many modern nations apply to their own citizens, such as Deutsch for the Germans and Dutch in the Netherlands, derive from the world in their languages for “human.” (185)

Because of the multi-level nature of human societies, exactly how many separate groups band societies were comprised of varies greatly between societies around the world. Some of them are very uniform, while others have multiple divisions, yet still see themselves as belonging to the same overall shared culture. This isn't confined to band societies—an American might identify as a Bostonian or a Midwesterner with clear distinctive behaviors from people in other parts of the country yet still see himself as a member of the broader category of Americans.

Moffatt makes the paradoxical case that the more densely crowded a region is, the more social groups there will be, because people will have a greater need to differentiate themselves from their neighbors than they would in a sparely populated region where they would rarely, if ever, encounter a stranger². New Guinea, for example, is home to hundreds of distinct societies—some no larger than a handful of small villages.

[T]he Hadza are all of one group; those we call the Ache had four societies; Tierra del Fuego's Yamana, now culturally extinct, had five; and the Andaman Islanders were originally separated into thirteen societies. Meanwhile, "the" Aborigines, spread across the Australian continent, had societies numbering five or six hundred (108)

At the same time, often people will be grouped together by outsiders in ways that the people themselves would not recognize (such as being grouped together by skin color, for example, or by geographic location). For example, in the United States, a person from Kenya and a person from Nigeria will both be considered “Black”, despite the fact that they grew up in different cultures two thousand miles apart and Africans are the most genetically diverse people on the planet. Similarly, a person from Samoa and a person from Tahiti will be grouped together as “Pacific Islander” despite the fact that these islands are separated by thousands of miles of open ocean and are home to very distinct cultures.

[T]he Bushmen never felt themselves to be a single unit, worthy of a name and acknowledgement of affinity, any more than America's original inhabitants thought of themselves as Indians before Europeans coined the term. Bushmen was a category that the Bushmen, who thought of themselves in terms of their societies such as the !Xõ and the !Kung, didn't recognize. Even now they consider themselves Bushmen—or San, a pejorative name given to them by their Khoikoi neighbors, meaning rascal—only when they leave the bush to take jobs elsewhere. (107)

It's important to recognize that "hunter-gatherer" is a term of art. It simply refers to any society that depends primarily on wild foods for its sustenance. That covers a wide variety of very different societies, some of which have more complex social organization than band societies as we’ll see. Despite their differences, many anthropologists maintain that confronting their environments at fairly low densities is a distinctive shared characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies, one which has validity for the purposes of study despite the many differences between them.

To summarize, then, when we talk about about hunter-gatherers, what we're often really talking about are band societies. Band societies are multi-level societies, and they exhibit a high degree of fission-fusion behavior. Band societies are true societies, with a shared sense of social identity, comprised of a number of nomadic groups consisting of 30-60 individuals, both related and unrelated, whose membership is flexible and changing over time. They were likely the original form of human social organization going back millions of years, probably all the way back to our shared common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. It follows then, that all subsequent human societies ultimately developed out of band societies. This is important to keep in mind.

Band societies are a subgroup of what Moffett calls Anonymous Societies: societies in which not all of the members need to know each other personally in order to function, and thus can grow much larger than the those of most other animals which require direct face-to-face contact. Humans cooperate with strangers on a regular basis, and this is so natural to us that we don’t recognize how exceptional it actually is. Very few species in the animal kingdom besides humans and ants have the capability to form anonymous societies. In humans, anonymous societies are made possible by markers such as language and behavior:

Commonalities with chimpanzees and other fission-fusion animals notwithstanding, the societies of hunter-gatherer bands were anonymous—they were dependent on markers of identity rather than the members' direct personal knowledge of each other. Individuals were regularly spread out to such a degree that not all the strangers they came across belonged to other societies.

This would suggest that hunter-gatherers conceived of their societies as being united around a common identity—language, culture, and other markers... (108)

We'll talk about those things next time.

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Citations in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett, Basic Books, 2019. All bolded emphasis mine unless otherwise noted.

[1] Current Biology Vol 19 No 15 (PDF)

[2] Current Biology Vol 19 No 15 (PDF)

[3] Current Biology Vol 19 No 15 (PDF)

[4] Current Biology 27, R979-R1001, September 25, 2017 (PDF)

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Thanks for reading. Hopefully you learned something new. Please sign up if you would like to receive updates. While I don't have a "typical" narrow subject matter, I try to write about ways to understand the society around us—both where we came from and where (I think) we're going. Or anything else that might be of interest. Thanks!

1. One of the more mind-blowing (and controversial) theories about how human societies were able to overcome these scaling limitations and form larger societies comes from psychologist Julian Jaynes. He argued that it was made possible by the human capacity for language as mediated by our split-brain structure. See this video for details:

2. This is related to Gregory Bateson's concept of schismogenesis, which David Graeber and David Wengrow discuss in their book, The Dawn of Everything.