Why hunter-gatherers were the original cosmopolitans
The coming of civilization actually shrank most people's social worlds
One of the most mind-blowing ideas in The Dawn of Everything is the idea that as human societies scaled up, most people's social world actually became smaller.
This turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The conventional view is that we started out in small, isolated bands that rarely interacted with outsiders. With the invention of agriculture came a gradual scaling up of societies, forging tighter links between diverse cultures and a greater exchange of goods and information. People came into contact with strangers more and more frequently. Eventually these networks grew to span regions, then continents, and eventually the entire world1.
But what if this view is wrong? What if it's actually the opposite?
Recent evidence has shown that hunter-gatherers had broad social networks that were spread out over extremely large geographical areas. Because they weren't tied down to a particular set of crops, hunter-gatherers were far more footloose than the farmers who succeeded them. As we've seen, members of band societies can move freely between different bands over time, and couples can typically take up residence where they please. It's common for members of bands not to be closely related. This provides a greater degree of social flexibility than later tribal groups which were based around linear descent and often highly stratified. In fact, hunter-gatherers were the original cosmopolitans.
Contrast this with the life a subsistence farmer in a typical agrarian society. He would rarely if ever venture beyond his native village. He very rarely interacted with people outside his small community, most of whom had lived there for generations and were related to him in some way. He was tied to tending his crops and animals, catering to their needs before his own. Serfs were literally part of landed estates like livestock or buildings. Travel became a luxury confined to the upper classes. All of this was due to the requirements of the agrarian lifestyle. There's a reason why Marx referred to the “idiocy of rural life2.”
The misconception probably stems from hunter gatherer cultures in modern times who are confined to remote territories and hemmed in on all sides by the larger societies surrounding them. This obviously would not have been the case thousands of years ago. This has led us to badly underestimate hunter-gatherer social networks and therefore, once again, get a lot of history wrong.
This shrinking of the social horizon was probably also a contributing factor towards inequality. People with larger social networks tend to have more freedom. That's one reason why cults and abusers like to cut people off from their social networks in order to make them easier to manipulate and control. If social relationships can be monopolized by certain individuals, that gives them a degree of control over people who don't have access to those networks. This trend has been noted by anthropologists who study the emergence of inequality, such as Brian Hayden. Monopolization of social relationships is one of his contributing factors toward the emergence of inequality in hunter-gatherer societies. We can see this amply illustrated by business relationships today. It also leads to less freedom for women, as Camilla Power writes:
…careful studies…show African hunter-gatherer women lose status and freedom from male control as they become more sedentary. This happens when women are less able to move and avail themselves of sophisticated support networks. African hunter-gatherers especially resist the atomization of nuclear families using many mechanisms to create links between far-flung friends and relatives. One diagnostic of truly egalitarian hunter-gatherers is that people can live where they choose.
Gender egalitarianism made us human… (Libcom.org)
By contrast, the social networks of hunter-gatherers were often quite large and expansive, as the Davids vividly describe in chapter 4 (emphasis mine):
Research among groups such as the East African Hadza or Australian Martu shows that while forager societies today may be numerically small, their composition is remarkably cosmopolitan.
When forager bands gather into larger residential groups these are not, in any case, made up of a tight-knit unit of closely-related kin; in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages. This is true even for contemporary groups that were effectively encapsulated in restricted territories, surrounded by farmers and pastoralists.
In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half of the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as 'brothers' and 'sisters' (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners.
Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements—speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own—with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.
[This was the reason for the North Americans' famous development of sign language. It's interesting that, in either case, one is dealing with systems of totemic clans: raising the question of whether such systems are themselves typically forms of long-distance organization3. If nothing else, the common stereotype that 'primitive' peoples saw anyone outside their particular local group as enemies appears to be entirely groundless.]
It's difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distance attest to the existence of such systems. 'Society', insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents. (pp. 122-123; n. 4 p. 547)
If we accept the depiction of hunter-gatherers I've been trying to sketch out in last several posts, then none of this should come as a surprise. We saw plenty of evidence last time of large-scale cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies all over the world. As cultures gradually began to differentiate themselves from one another during the Neolithic, the social world of hunter-gatherers gradually shrank. Agrarian societies, then, for most people, did not lead to an expansion of the social web, but a contraction of it—a slow withering away of a once large and vibrant social world. If this is true, our cosmopolitan nature is not some sort of recent invention, but rather the original state of affairs.
The 'culture areas' of...Mesolithic foragers were...extremely large. True, the Neolithic versions that soon developed alongside them—associated with the first farming populations—were typically smaller; but for the most part they still spread out over territories considerably larger than most modern nation states.
Only much later do we begin to encounter the kind of situation familiar to anthropologists of Amazonia or Papua New Guinea, where a single river valley might contain speakers of half a dozen different languages, with entirely distinct economic systems or cosmological beliefs. Sometimes, of course, this tendency towards micro-differentiation was reversed—as with the spread of imperial languages like English or Han Chinese.
But the overall direction of history—at least until very recently—would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it aimed at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other...Overall...what we observe is not so much the world as a while getting smaller, but most peoples' social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions are more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class and language. (124)
Much of this seems counter-intuitive. We are used to assuming that advances in technology are continually making the world a smaller place. In a purely physical sense, of course, this is true: the domestication of the horse, and gradual improvements in seafaring, to take just two examples, certainly make it much easier for people to move around.
But at the same time, increases in the sheer number of human beings seems to have pulled in the opposite direction, ensuring that, for much of human history, ever-diminishing proportions of people actually traveled—at least, over long distances or very far from home. If we survey what happens over time, the scale on which social relations operate doesn't get bigger and bigger; it actually gets smaller and smaller. (123)
Key to this are two factors that I discussed in the very first post on this site: the fact that humans are a fission-fusion species; and the fact that we live in multilevel societies. Just as the fission-fusion of chimpanzee societies disguised their true nature from researchers for a long time, it has done much the same for hunter-gatherer societies.
We can imagine similar expansive systems present in many other part of the world that have been lost in the mists of time. Yet there is plenty of evidence for their existence.
The Social Network
The kinds of large-scale, continent-spanning social networks sketched out by the Davids among hunter-gatherers appear to have been present very far back in time—indeed, all the way back to the Paleolithic and even before the Out of Africa migration.
For example, one recent study looked at ostrich eggshell beads from regions around Africa. What they found was evidence of a social network spread across eastern and southern Africa as far back as 50,000 years ago:
Almost identical beads made from ostrich eggshells have been discovered by researchers in eastern and southern Africa that date back more than 50,000 years. The jewellery has been found covering an area of about 1,800 miles, suggesting a social network that linked Stone Age people across the continent. This would make it the 'world's oldest social network' that connected different cultures, according to a team from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
This phenomena can also be detected in stone tools across southern Africa, which display a remarkable degree of similarity:
Across Southern Africa, these [stone] blades could have been made in any number of different shapes in different places. However, around 65,000 years ago, it turns out they were made to a very similar template across thousands of kilometers and multiple environmental niches. The fact they were all made to look so similar points to strong social connections between geographically distant groups across Southern Africa at this time. Importantly, this shows for the first time that social connections were in place in Southern Africa just before the big “out of Africa” migration.
What Ancient Stone “Swiss Army Knives” Mean (Sapiens)
And not only material culture, but genetic analysis has also confirmed the existence of widespread regional networks among humans tens of thousands of year ago. People weren't just exchanging goods, but also mates across a wide geographic area:
A new analysis of ancient human DNA demonstrates that people moved and chose their reproductive partners along complex social networks that stretched across large swathes of Africa between 80,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to a study co-led by Yale anthropologist Jessica Thompson. These movements continued for tens of thousands of years before people began to live more locally, and long before they began farming and keeping livestock.
The findings reveal that these foragers shared genetic connections across a region that now stretches thousands of miles, from Ethiopia to South Africa, and into the central African rainforest. They also support hypotheses developed by archaeologists that demographic shifts accompanied well-documented changes in material culture that occurred in the Later Stone Age, starting about 50,000 years ago...
On the move: Ancient DNA illuminates early Stone Age social networks (Yale News)
Boyd and Richerson describe how artifacts of the Gravettian period bear a remarkable degree of uniformity across much of Ice Age Europe:
One of the best understood Upper Paleolithic cultural phenomena is the Gravettian culture that occupied all of Europe from about 30 [thousand years ago] to 21 [thousand years ago]. There was considerable stylistic uniformity across the whole region from the Urals to the Atlantic and from the ice margins to the Mediterranean.
As in Western North America long distance movement of toolstone and marine shells testified to a sub-continent spanning trade system. Abundant archaeological data from Southern Siberia suggest the functionality similar but stylistically distinctive culture there. The ethnic frontiers where conflict was most likely appear to have been far to the east of France and Spain beyond the Urals and south of the Ukraine.
Gamble argued that the stylistic similarity of the Gravettian across such a large area could only be maintained by open interaction networks in which ideas and probably people could flow with little hindrance. Stone and bone plaques elaborately marked with rows of small pits have been interpreted as calendrical devices used to coordinate the movement of dispersed groups. Gravettian burials indicate significant inequality in status as if, at least in some circumstances, strong leadership roles existed perhaps for organizing communal hunts, feasting, or long-distance trade.
Given these multiple lines of evidence, it's reasonable to assume that the picture sketched out by the Davids above is indicative of what hunter-gatherer social networks were probably like thousands of years ago.
So the evidence indicates that as we go farther back into the past, the average person’s social network appears to have been larger rather than smaller. On the whole, it appears that the shift to agriculture and sedentism shrank most people's social world rather than expanded it.
Forager Monumentality
The Davids also look at large-scale monuments constructed by hunter-gatherers all over the world as further proof that they were far more complex than simply wandering nomadic bands and small, isolated tribes.
The exemplar of this is, of course, Göbeckli Tepe, the massive stone complex which dates back to before the Neolithic revolution when all humans everywhere in the world, so far as we can tell, lived exclusively on wild food resources. Another is the previously discussed Sannai-Maruyama site in Japan, where a vast 99-acre “city” was built by fisher-foragers long before rice agriculture and metalworking came to Japan.
But there are many others. The Davids mention the Jätinkirkko, or “Giants' Churches” of the Bothnian Sea between Sweden and Finland, built by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 B.C. Although built during the Neolithic period, the major building phases of Stonehenge took place during a time when the natives of Britain had abandoned cereal agriculture and reverted to fishing, foraging, gathering hazelnuts, and grazing animals. Tests on animal bones found at the site found that the inhabitants of Neolithic southern Britain had social networks that stretched all the way to Scotland: “…the findings suggest that people were traveling from all across Britain to attend feasts at these henge sites. And that means Neolithic Britain may have been much more interconnected than archaeologists realized.”
In North America, Iniskim Umaapi, on the plains of Alberta, Canada, is often described as "Canada's Stonehenge," The Umaapi Medicine Wheel consists of a central stone cairn with 28 spokes radiating outward surrounded by a wider stone circle. It was built around 5,000 years ago—roughly the same time as Stonehenge—and is one of the oldest religious monuments anywhere in the world.
The earthen mounds at the site of Poverty Point in the U.S. state of Louisiana were constructed by hunter-gatherers in a very short span of time. Rather than being slowly accumulated over many seasons, a cross section through the mound revealed that it was built between periods of rainfall, indicating that it could not have taken much longer than ninety days to build, maximum. Given the large size of the mound, thousands of people must have taken part in its construction to make this feat possible. One archaeologist described the builders of Poverty Point as “sophisticated engineers”:
The Native Americans who occupied the area known as Poverty Point in northern Louisiana more than 3,000 years ago long have been believed to be simple hunters and gatherers. But new Washington University in St. Louis archaeological findings paint a drastically different picture of America's first civilization.
Far from the simplicity of life sometimes portrayed in anthropology books, these early Indigenous people were highly skilled engineers capable of building massive earthen structures in a matter of months—possibly even weeks—that withstood the test of times, the findings show...
"One of the most remarkable things is that these earthworks have held together for more than 3,000 years with no failure or major erosion. By comparison, modern bridges, highways and dams fail with amazing regularity because building things out of dirt is more complicated than you would think. They really were incredible engineers with very sophisticated technical knowledge."
Perhaps even more remarkably, the Davids cite evidence that similar earthworks built by hunter-gatherers across a large portion of eastern North America were laid out according to similar geometric proportions, indicating a level of standardization of measurement normally associated only with later literate civilizations:
Throughout the great valley of the Mississippi, and some considerable way beyond, there exist other smaller sites of the same period. The various configurations of their mounds and ridges adhere to strikingly uniform geometric principles, based on standard units of measurement and proportion apparently shared by early people throughout a significant portion of the Americas. The underlying system of calculus appears to have been based on the transformational properties of equilateral triangles, figured out with the aid of cords and strings, and then extended to the laying-out of massive earthworks. (p. 143)
Similarly impressive constructions made by hunter-gatherers, including mounds made out of seashells, are found throughout North America:
On the shores of the Atlantic and around the Gulf of Mexico lie enigmatic structures: just as remarkable as Poverty Point, but even less well known. Formed out of shell in great accumulations, they range from small rings to massive U-shaped 'ampitheatres' like those of St Johns River valley in Northeast Florida.
These were no natural features. They too were built spaces where hunter-gatherer publics once assembled in their thousands. Far to the north and west, on the other side of the continent, more surprises loom up from the windswept shores of British Columbia: settlements and fortifications of striking magnitude, dating back as far as 2000 BC, facing a Pacific already familiar with the spectacle of war and long-range commerce. (p. 145)
This illumination of a rich world of prehistory and the depiction of hunter-gatherers as far more sophisticated then we've been led to believe is one of the best and most striking features of The Dawn of Everything. This alone makes the book worth reading. However, the Davids use these facts as evidence of political variability. As they write in chapter 4 (emphasis mine):
...the truth is that we still know precious little of the political systems lying behind a now almost globally attested phenomenon of forager monumentality, or indeed whether some of those monumental projects might have involved kings or other kinds of leaders. What we do know is that this changes forever the nature of the conversation about social evolution in the Americas, Japan, Europe, and no doubt most other places too. (147)
Bold Experimentation?
While I wholeheartedly agree with that last point, I'm skeptical of the idea that widespread social networks and forager monumentality are evidence of hierarchical civilizations in prehistory. To me, this information indicates precisely the opposite.
Rather than a"carnival parade of political forms" which were the result of "bold experimentation"; it is easier to imagine these kinds of continent-spanning social networks and cultural uniformity if people everywhere had more-or-less similar political systems—not radically different ones—and in all likelihood those political systems were far more likely to be egalitarian rather than hierarchical. It is difficult to reconcile such a high degree of forager mobility with the presence of top-down hierarchical societies, after all. Would people simply choose to live under oppressive hierarchies when there were so many other options available? Most hierarchical societies tend to be suspicious of outsiders, not welcoming of them.
Rather, to me this evidence seems to validate the idea that our original forms of social organization were highly egalitarian, which is also what the majority of anthropologists believe. This would have permitted the kind of social flexibility that the Davids describe, including between different social modes at different times of the year. Only once these expansive systems atrophied and the social world shrank could hierarchy and inequality emerge in my opinion. With the rise of stratified and unequal systems of governance, social structures became sclerotic as burgeoning elites monopolized critical resources and manipulated the social system to their advantage—including by encouraging fear of outsiders and waging aggressive war against their neighbors4.
A common theme in Big History is that once we regularly came into contact with more individuals that our limited brains were biologically equipped to handle—the famous 'Dunbar's Number'—we invented various crutches that allowed for the existence of more expansive social networks: things like writing and mathematics, for example. Once these tools were in place, the argument goes, inequality was the inevitable result.
But the descriptions above tell a different story. Widespread hunter-gatherer social networks and forager monumentality indicate that we are perfectly capable of maintaining large-scale social networks much larger than Dunbar's number without having to resort to top-down social structures or authoritarianism. All the evidence indicates that we invented tools like writing and numbers to manage the flow of goods, and not to manage social relationships or people. The first writing systems, for example, were developed to manage the flow of items in and out of central palaces or temple storehouses. These are what the clay tokens and envelopes (bullae) were used for. Sometimes these “data storage devices” weren’t even written down, as with the Inca use of quipus. The Inca managed to develop a far-flung empire without even needing the written word. We are certainly capable of managing very large numbers of social relationships using peer-to-peer interactions, and this appears to have been the case for most of the last 50,000 years of human existence—no kings or potentates required!
If this is true—and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is—then it is not the scaling up of society alone which led to the emergence of hierarchy or social inequality. This is an important point of The Dawn of Everything. Instead, we should look to things like the increasing movement of goods, occupational specialization, and the monopolization of social networks in the hands of a few select people or families as the real culprits behind inequality, rather than simply the fact that societies got a lot bigger. In fact, for most people—at least as far as individual relationships go—it didn't.
A Hopeful Note
If all of this is true, then what it suggests is that we're potentially capable of large-scale cooperation in the absence of top-down coercive, manipulative social structures. We don’t have to go back to hunting and gathering to have a glimmer of hope for a more egalitarian future after all. Nor does our social world have to shrink to less than 150 people to have a chance at equality. We don't have to accept oppressive, hierarchical structures and self-serving, greedy sociopaths in charge as the inevitable outcome of living in complex, technological societies. Freedom and equity are not incompatible goals after all. They certainly weren't for the vast majority of our existence.
This approach offers us both a way out of some of the questionable assertions made by the Davids in The Dawn of Everything and the cynical, pessimistic outlook offered up by the authors of the Big History that they are trying to debunk. I think this vision of society has been well articulated by Ran Prieur, who describes the book's true importance:
February 7. A "100% volunteer workforce" is my new way of describing the kind of society I want to live in. You could also call it "zero coercion" or "non-repressive" or "intrinsic" because everything that's done emerges from whatever people find intrinsically enjoyable. But I think "100% volunteer" gets to the heart of the difficult thing we're aiming for.
And yet, it's actually been done multiple times. And here, the worst move you can make is to look for some broad category that includes the societies that have done it—whether you call them "primitive" or "low-tech" or "nature-based" or "indigenous" or "non-civilized"—and argue that all we have to do is join that club, and we'll be happy.
On a practical level, that's just not true, and on an intellectual level, all the naysayers have to do is look through your category until they find one terrible tribe, and say, "Ha, you lose! Now go back to stocking shelves at Walmart."
A better move, which is made easier by Graeber and Wengrow's book, is to say, "The people who did that thing are human. We're human. So we can do it."
Now someone is going to point out that none of those people had airplanes or video games, and if we want the benefits of high technology, our society must force people to do stuff they don't want to do. I've found that it's not helpful to tell my adversaries what motivates them, but I'll say this: of all the reasons someone might choose to believe that high tech requires repression, love of high tech is not one of them.
Right now there are amateur enthusiasts in basements and garages doing all kinds of cool high tech stuff. On a practical level, we're a long way from making that culture the heart of our society. But there's general agreement that that's the direction we want to go. The most cynical corporate consultant knows that you can't brute-force creativity—it comes out of social spaces with a lot of slack.
Going back to my January 31 post, about technologies needing the right context, Iphikrates wrote: "Plunk a fully functioning steam engine down in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and I guarantee you that absolutely nothing will happen." What we're aiming for is a social technology, in which you can plunk down a person whose spirit has not been broken, doing whatever they feel like, and they will find a niche that serves the system.
https://ranprieur.com/archives/079.html
More and more, it’s looking like that’s how our earliest ancestors lived all around the world, even in hunter-gatherer societies which existed long before the onset of agriculture and domestication.
See, for example, The Human Web by William and J. R. McNeill. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2003-05-01/human-web-birds-eye-view-world-history
In fact 'idiot' comes from a Greek word referring to people who were politically inactive and chose not to take part in the daily affairs of the polis. Only later did it acquire the meaning of 'stupid' or 'foolish.' This original meaning might be what Marx was getting at rather than calling rural people stupid.
Interestingly, totemic clans may have facilitated environmental stewardship as well as social networks. In totemic clans, the entire group is seen as descended from a particular animal, rather than in later tribal clans where descent is reckoned from a human ancestor. Members all bear a special connection to this animal. In the natural world there are no hard boundaries—water flows where it flows, seeds scatter to the wind, and animals roam freely. Rather than geographic boundaries, then, hunter gatherers used totemic clans to organize their social world in accordance with nature rather than in opposition to it. Bill Gammage, whose work we looked at last time, describes how the Aborigines used this system to effectively manage Australia's ecosystem for thousands of years:
A common management system can be recognised in enough dispersed places to say that the system was universal - that Australia was...a single estate, and that in this sense Aborigines made Australia....
This system could hardly have land boundaries. There could not be a place where [this land management system] was practised, and next to it a place where it wasn’t. Australia was inevitably a single estate, albeit with many managers.
Two factors blended to entrench this, one ecological, the other religious. Ecologically, once you lay out country variably to suit all other species, you are committed to complex and long-term land management. Aboriginal religious philosophy explained and enforced this, chiefly via totems. All things were responsible for others of its totem and their habitats.
For example, emu people must care for emus and emu habitats, and emus must care for them. There was too a lesser but still strong responsibility to other totems and habitats, ensuring that all things were always under care. Totems underwrote the ecological arrangement of Australia, creating an entire continent managed under the same Law for similar biodiverse purposes, no matter what the vegetation.
https://theconversation.com/the-biggest-estate-on-earth-how-aborigines-made-australia-3787
The emergence of novel zoonotic diseases would have also encouraged this trend. There is a concept called the 'behavioral immune system' which encourages xenophobia and is connected to the prevalence of infectious diseases.
Дякую, я нажаль не маю багато часу для читання, через відсутність інтернету і перебої з електропостачанням, тут в Україні.
Дуже цікаві думки і репрезентація розділів і тем з книги!
Маю думку, що егалітарні та 'вільні' міжособистісні та міжгрупові зв'язки та питання щодо певних умінь, технологій, речей і знань були симбіотичними а не конкурентними. А мова, погляди і переконання не могли бути нав'язані великій кількості МИСЛЯЧИХ індивідуумів.
Грубо кажучи 'реклама' ріжучого інструменту спрацює, якщо ти покажеш його здатність, як ним користуватись, і як виготовити, але абсолютно не спрацює, якщо ти скажеш будувати земляні вали, в обмін на ріжучий інструмент. Це так не працює. Лише суспільна вигода чи прийняті переконання щодо чогось могли змусити фуражирів-інженерів будувати Стоунхендж чи інші монументальні споруди доісторії.
Це робить лише залучення людини до природнього циклу. Розуміння взаємопов'язаності між живим, між людьми в різних куточках регіону, пояснення сил природи і її магії, астрономії і т.д. Тонке відчуття рівноваги, геометрії, простору, часу, маси, контурів і матеріалів. Це можливе лише з передачею досвіду, традицій і знань тисячоліттями від незапам'ятних часів. Коли для всього є природнє пояснення і кожен цілісно бачить і репрезентує картину світу.
Це були часи розквіту людства.
Його золота доба. Яка, нажаль, безповоротно втрачена.
Great content, as always. If I understand "Dunbar's Number" correctly...Robin Dunbar wasn't postulating that the human brain wasn't capable of handling relationships over 150 individuals; 150 is simply the max number of people we can physically come into personal contact with on a daily basis when it come to forging relationships around us. Anything beyond that number, humans need more "bang for our social buck" to cement our relationships: language, art, culture, and other common experiences and characteristics.