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.
Yes, that's right. That's my understanding of the concept as well.
What I'm critiquing, though, is not Dunbar's concept, but the pop-science interpretation of it, which the Davids are critiquing as well. That's the idea that human societies prior to the advent of agriculture were universally small--under 150 people--and that only once agriculture was invented did we regularly interact with more than 150 closely-related people, and that's when all the trouble started.
The pop culture interpretation assumes that once the 150 threshold was breached, all of these techniques were invented to deal with that fact, and inequality was the result. Clearly that's not the case with what I'm sketching out here, and it's not even a correct interpretation of Dunbar's concept. In fairness, it's probably a bit of a misrepresentation of the Big History authors as well, but it seems to be remarkably durable, for example: https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
One of the important features of the book is that it pushes back against these overly simplistic notions which, unfortunately, have caught on in the popular imagination and distorted discussions surrounding the topic of societal evolution. I probably didn't express it very well, though.
I agree that shining a light on the complexity of "prehistoric" life is one of the best things about The Dawn of Everything, and it does give people a good idea of what life before civilization looks like (not the typical dumb brutes hitting each other over the head kind of story). The authors actually manage to make pre-civilization life sound *desirable*, a life worth living, and I think deep down a lot of people can instinctively identify with the kind of society described in The Dawn (and summarized by you in the above). Furthermore, I agree that the idea that those societies were *not* egalitarian seems far-fetched. You absolutely nailed when you wrote:
"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 seems to indicate 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 than hierarchical."
Arnold Schroeder from the Fight Like An Animal podcast had similar complains, as do I. I actually wrote a critique of the book a few months back, from an anarcho-primitivist perspective:
One thing that I think is important to point out is that a lot of plane-hopping rich kids ("travellers" and the like) that like to call themselves "cosmopolitans" now think they have indisputable proof that their wasteful, destructive and rootless globalist lifestyle has a precedent in prehistory. I've often heard techno-optimistic globalists like "digital nomads" say things like "well, it's human Nature to be nomadic" - yes, but that doesn't mean living on a different continent every few months while being part of an impersonal consumer society that you're 100 percent dependent on. From what the available evidence suggests, foragers usually stayed within the boundaries of a given bioregion (bioregions are usually quite large, often spanning areas that traverse several "countries"), sometimes visited relatives or friends in the adjacent one, and only occasionally did people traverse several bioregions - it took them months to travel that far.
Also, it seems pretty obvious that those "prehistoric cosmopolitans" were, like indigenous people everywhere, deeply and profoundly connected to the landscape they inhabited (spiritually and culturally), and knew every plant and animal they encountered.
I just feel it's important to point that out to clarify that those contemporary "cosmopolitan" trends have nothing to do with human Nature or our species' history. They are a symptom of alienation, of disconnection, and are ultimately unsatisfying when compared to nomadic foragers' lifestyles. We humans need to be connected to the land we inhabit.
Thanks for the comment and the reference. My approach is to kind of "rehabilitate" the book by pulling out the valuable topics and evaluating them on their own while at the same time staying within the anthropological consensus, which I think is mostly correct. So, for example, the revised version of the origins of agriculture (not a revolution) and the fact that life before civilization was far more interesting and diverse that we've been led to believe. That means I can put them inside a more conventional framework where physical conditions still matter. I like your characterization of them as "proclaim and retreat." So true! It's a great review (I would have saved it for several posts--it took me a few days to get through it).
Cosmopolitans back in the day would have probably walked around rather than fly in Gulfstream jets. I cut out a part where I pointed out that our unique method of locomotion means that we are one of the most footloose species besides birds and insects which can fly. I recently read about a guy who ran across the length of Ireland in a day, for example. So it's not hard to imagine interpersonal links that stretched over large areas long before the domestication of animals.
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.
Yes, that's right. That's my understanding of the concept as well.
What I'm critiquing, though, is not Dunbar's concept, but the pop-science interpretation of it, which the Davids are critiquing as well. That's the idea that human societies prior to the advent of agriculture were universally small--under 150 people--and that only once agriculture was invented did we regularly interact with more than 150 closely-related people, and that's when all the trouble started.
The pop culture interpretation assumes that once the 150 threshold was breached, all of these techniques were invented to deal with that fact, and inequality was the result. Clearly that's not the case with what I'm sketching out here, and it's not even a correct interpretation of Dunbar's concept. In fairness, it's probably a bit of a misrepresentation of the Big History authors as well, but it seems to be remarkably durable, for example: https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
One of the important features of the book is that it pushes back against these overly simplistic notions which, unfortunately, have caught on in the popular imagination and distorted discussions surrounding the topic of societal evolution. I probably didn't express it very well, though.
All of that makes great sense, thank you so much for the thoughtful reply.
Excellent article, really great writing.
I agree that shining a light on the complexity of "prehistoric" life is one of the best things about The Dawn of Everything, and it does give people a good idea of what life before civilization looks like (not the typical dumb brutes hitting each other over the head kind of story). The authors actually manage to make pre-civilization life sound *desirable*, a life worth living, and I think deep down a lot of people can instinctively identify with the kind of society described in The Dawn (and summarized by you in the above). Furthermore, I agree that the idea that those societies were *not* egalitarian seems far-fetched. You absolutely nailed when you wrote:
"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 seems to indicate 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 than hierarchical."
Arnold Schroeder from the Fight Like An Animal podcast had similar complains, as do I. I actually wrote a critique of the book a few months back, from an anarcho-primitivist perspective:
https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/primitivist-critique-dawn-of-everything
One thing that I think is important to point out is that a lot of plane-hopping rich kids ("travellers" and the like) that like to call themselves "cosmopolitans" now think they have indisputable proof that their wasteful, destructive and rootless globalist lifestyle has a precedent in prehistory. I've often heard techno-optimistic globalists like "digital nomads" say things like "well, it's human Nature to be nomadic" - yes, but that doesn't mean living on a different continent every few months while being part of an impersonal consumer society that you're 100 percent dependent on. From what the available evidence suggests, foragers usually stayed within the boundaries of a given bioregion (bioregions are usually quite large, often spanning areas that traverse several "countries"), sometimes visited relatives or friends in the adjacent one, and only occasionally did people traverse several bioregions - it took them months to travel that far.
Also, it seems pretty obvious that those "prehistoric cosmopolitans" were, like indigenous people everywhere, deeply and profoundly connected to the landscape they inhabited (spiritually and culturally), and knew every plant and animal they encountered.
I just feel it's important to point that out to clarify that those contemporary "cosmopolitan" trends have nothing to do with human Nature or our species' history. They are a symptom of alienation, of disconnection, and are ultimately unsatisfying when compared to nomadic foragers' lifestyles. We humans need to be connected to the land we inhabit.
Thanks for the comment and the reference. My approach is to kind of "rehabilitate" the book by pulling out the valuable topics and evaluating them on their own while at the same time staying within the anthropological consensus, which I think is mostly correct. So, for example, the revised version of the origins of agriculture (not a revolution) and the fact that life before civilization was far more interesting and diverse that we've been led to believe. That means I can put them inside a more conventional framework where physical conditions still matter. I like your characterization of them as "proclaim and retreat." So true! It's a great review (I would have saved it for several posts--it took me a few days to get through it).
Cosmopolitans back in the day would have probably walked around rather than fly in Gulfstream jets. I cut out a part where I pointed out that our unique method of locomotion means that we are one of the most footloose species besides birds and insects which can fly. I recently read about a guy who ran across the length of Ireland in a day, for example. So it's not hard to imagine interpersonal links that stretched over large areas long before the domestication of animals.