Chapter 2: What Were They Thinking?
Digression: Government from the Paleolithic to Philadelphia
Page 54: Band-Level Society
SIS (narrating)
This, then, was our true state of nature… how we lived for tens of thousands of years, almost all of human history. No kingdoms, no towns, no farms… No “peoples” or tribes or clans… Those narratives wouldn’t be told until fairly recently. Until then, we organized in simple
Band family walking along grassland.
SIS (narrating)
BANDS
of anywhere from 50 to 150 people.
Lone group in a vast desert plain.
SIS (narrating)
Each band would have been entirely self-sufficient…
MEMBERS
As if we have any choice!
Who else are we gonna rely on?
Cave art of a hunt.
SIS (narrating)
Living off the land, foraging for whatever fruits and veg were in season, catching fish and small game…
CAVE ART CHEERLEADER
Hunting big game, too!
Communal campfire with a chef roasting something.
SIS (narrating)
…and naturally, sharing everything.
BAND MEMBERS
Selfishness is not a survival skill.
One for all, and all for one!
Duh!
This is my family. The people who’ve loved and cared for me since the moment I was born.
Whoa… it’s difficult to even think of myself as a distinct individual. My identity is “we” not “me”.
Loving family group
SIS (narrating)
I imagine they couldn’t have had much privacy…
FAMILY MEMBERS
Be… apart? From… we?
Pshaw
Why would anyone do that?
(Not much loneliness, either.)
Hiking band
SIS (narrating)
…or property.
BAND MEMBERS
Oh yes, give me more stuff to lug around from campfire to campfire.
Absurd.
Who’d want to be burdened by belongings?
Hunter at the cookout.
HUNTER
Anyway, what stuff we do have we share.
For example, I killed that deer…
But it’s our deer, not mine.
That doesn’t feel unfair to me — providing for us all feels awesome!
People in wide open nature.
SIS (narrating)
They certainly hadn’t come up with a narrative like real estate.
PEOPLE
Own… the land?
Next you’ll say we can own the sea or the stars.
Dumbest think I ever heard.
People camped in winter near volcanic lake.
SIS (narrating)
That makes sense, as (with rare exceptions) stone-age humans were nomadic. Always on the move, foraging for food within a “home territory” that could be dozens or hundreds of square miles in size (depending on the local terrain).
CAMPERS
Should we move camp with the next sunrise? Or the next season?
Who can say? Nothing’s written in stone! (Ha ha! Get it?)
Nope. What’s “written?”
Fishing village huts on stilts.
SIS (narrating)
(Those who found a spot with plentiful year-round resources might settle down in semi-permanent camps.)
Map of human migration
SIS (narrating)
Bands couldn’t grow much bigger than 150 people. In groups larger than that, we simply can’t know everyone intimately, and cooperation breaks down. At normal population growth rates, a new band would probably bud off every 40 years on average. At that rate, if a new band simply strolled to a new territory just over the horizon, humans could have spread from Sinai to Sichuan in only 10,000 years.
Which is what we did!
MULTIPLE MIGRATIONS
There wasn’t one single march across the globe. Several waves eventually filled Europe by about 45,000 years ago.
OUT OF AFRICA
70,000 – 60,000 years ago (after an ice age peak that nearly wiped us out.)
FIRST EXPLORERS
crossed to Yemen, and were living in Australia by 50,000 years ago.
SECOND WAVE
One migration reached the Levant 60,000 years ago, and was populating China by 50,000 years ago.
TRAFFIC JAM
Impassable glaciers in the Yukon blocked the Americas until a big melt, whereupon we flooded south, reaching the Andes 14,000 years ago.
INTERBREEDING
Along the way, we mostly displaced the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other archaic human species. They were all extinct by 45,000 years ago. But they weren’t opposed to having sex with us. Depending on where you’re from, you probably have a little archaic DNA. (But only from archaic males, it seems. Our mitochondrial DNA, inherited from mothers only, is strictly sapiens.)
SIS AND AVERAGE JOE
Before we get to how we governed ourselves, a few caveats are in order:
First, we had no one single way of life.
Millions of us had filled every environment, throughout every continent except Antarctica.
Customs may not have varied much from one band to the next, but globally we must have had hundreds of distinct languages and cultures, if not thousands.
If modern experience is any guide, local norms, narratives, and taboos probably varied more than the geography.
But we can’t draw too much analogy to modern ways of life. How modern humans think — even modern hunter-gatherers — would be utterly alien to our ancestors in Paleolithic band society.
We live in a world of our own making, and we’ve been making it very different in the most recent five or ten thousand years.
And tribal society is one of those recent inventions. Contrary to popular belief, tribal ways are not our default state of nature.
Mastodon hunters
SIS (narrating)
Also, it would be a mistake to paint too rosy a picture. This wasn’t a perfect Eden by any stretch of the imagination.
SPEARMAN
Nature is harsh! Even a minor accident could’ve killed you.
Plus, everywhere we went, animals rapidly went extinct — it’s estimated that half of all large species died out during this period.
We either hunted them to extinction, or they couldn’t adapt to the havoc we wreaked on the ecosystem.
And as for our own handicapped or infirm?
We weren’t demons. but we weren’t angels, either. We were just human.
MASTODON
Oh, ignore those little things, dear. I’m sure they’re harmless.
People crossing a creek across a log.
SIS (narrating)
So how was band society structured?
GIRL
It wasn’t.
Life was fluid, not fixed.
You could come, you could go…
You could off in a temporary party, rejoin later…
Whatever you did, it was up to you.
Warning label: The Surgeon General has determined that this image may cause diabetes and/or nausea, and has deleted it in the interests of public health.
SPEAKER
But that said, the members of a band were generally family members who knew each other intimately.
You spent your life surrounded by people you loved, who loved you, and who were 100% on your team.
Family hiking, singing “The Bear Went over the Mountain”
SIS (narrating)
You were all tightly bonded by a lifetime of shared experiences, shared dangers, shared secrets… walking together, working together, eating together… doing practically everything together… It instilled a sense of unity, that you were all one.
We found solidarity in synchrony.
Teen girls, and teen boys.
SIS (narrating)
You were family, but not the independent entity we think of as “the family.” Family, kinship, lineage, bloodline… those were more narratives we wouldn’t need to invent for a while.
Your family was these people — right here, right now.
TEEN GIRLS
And when we girls hit our teens, we get the urge to move out! And find adventure!!
…in a new band!!!
One where the boys aren’t our brothers?
If you make a “boy band” joke, so help me…
TEEN BOYS
We boys, on the other hand, tend to stay with the band we’re born into.
At puberty, our brains dump tons of risk-aversion!
DAD
And good judgment.
TEEN
(Oh hush, Dad) We can’t hide behind Mommy’s skirts any more. We’ll be joining the adults in protecting this band. We gotta start getting some skills!
“Three is a magic number” family.
SIS (narrating)
The modern “nuclear family” wasn’t a natural unit of society. Even marriage wouldn’t be invented for quite some time.
Instead, our biology seems to be set up for “serial monogamy.”
MOM
I’ll probably breastfeed this little girl until she’s around four years old.
Until then, my hormones will suppress ovulation, so I likely won’t have another baby in the meantime.
During that time, she’ll be in almost constant contact with another human. If she were to be my herself, her hormones will make her suffer great distress!
DAD
We’ll stay together while she’s a baby.
My hormones kick in, too, and I’ll have a strong drive to care for them both during these early years.
Couple waving to small child being welcomed by the whole band.
DAD
Once kids are no longer toddlers, the whole band shares the job of raising all the children…
PERSON 1
Yeah! It takes a village to raise a child.
PERSON 2
What’s a “village”?
Dad and Mom embracing new partners.
DAD
…Which is not only great for the kids, but it also frees us to move on to new partners, if we so desire.
MOM
That’s good for genetic diversity in our smallish population!
(And no pressure to remain in bad relationships? That’s good for everybody else’s sanity)
SIS (narrating)
[Coincidentally, most divorces nowadays come after 4 years of marriage, and during peak child-bearing years.]
Couple with “what’s wrong with you?” body language.
SIS (narrating)
But… polygamy?
MAN AND WOMAN
Pointless!
MAN
Care for multiple “wives” and infants at the same time? One is plenty, thanks!
WOMAN
Share a “husband”? So I only get half of his help raising my baby? Are you out of your mind?
Since everybody shares everything else, it’s not like I’d need to attach myself to a better provider.
And with no social hierarchy, I’m not looking to “marry up.”
No “up” to marry into!
Average Joe
JOE
Hang on, what was that about “no social hierarchy”?
We’re still talking about people, right?
SIS (narrating)
That’s an important point: Compared to our modern world, early human society was astonishingly
EGALITARIAN
Nobody could have had higher rank or privilege.
No chiefs, no commoners. No wealthy, no workers.
No priests, peasants, or slaves.
Man, woman, warrior, elderly person, all equals
WARRIOR
Rank rankles!
Fisherman with string of fish and a shark on the end
FISHERMAN
I may be the best at catching fish (and telling fish stories), but that doesn’t make me better than anybody else.
Stick figures
SIS (narrating)
It can be hard for use to think this way now, but being equals couldn’t have been about you.
WOMAN
Equality isn’t something I’m entitled to.
MAN
It’s not about me deserving the same treatment as her.
Or opportunities…
…or outcomes…
MOM WITH TANTRUM TODDLER
Our equality is the absence of entitlements. Each of us has our own free will, our own “agency.”
Giving orders? Or insisting that others treat me a certain way? That would mean putting my interests above their agency.
That’s the opposite of cooperation.
Not a survival skill.
More stick figures.
SIS (narrating)
So they couldn’t have had any conception of individual rights. After all, you don’t need protection from powers-that-be restricting your freedom when such powers don’t exist.
DUDE
Nobody has the “right” to free speech. We just speak freely.
CHICK
And you’re not entitled to be treated other than how people decide to treat you.
GUY EATING DRUMSTICK
So nobody has the “right” to be given a share of the food. We just, y’know… share.
GUY WITH CLUB
You don’t even have a “right” to life. We don’t have to protect you if you give us good reason not to.
Group of people getting ready to move out.
SIS (narrating)
When it comes to politics, then, it should be no surprise that important decisions could only have been reached by consensus.
As equals, nobody had the power to command you to do anything against your will (and using force to compel you would have been intolerably uncooperative). Which also means that a democratic majority vote could never work! Because that means forcing minority voters to do what the majority wanted. Not an option.
Politics therefore meant finding solutions that everyone would freely consent to.
SHRUGGING WOMAN
“Consent” doesn’t necessarily mean I want to do this. It doesn’t even mean I prefer this option.
BALD GUY
Don’t confuse “consent” with “affirmative agreement.”
GIRL HEFTING A SACK
All it means is we don’t actively oppose the idea.
oof!
SPEAR GUY
It’s the difference between saying “fine… whatever…” and “heck yeah!”
WALKING WOMAN
Sure, I may feel social pressure to go along with the decision.
But what I do is still up to me. Nobody took away my freedom to say “no.” Nobody forced me to come along against my will.
All right, let’s get a move on.
New band budding off
SIS (narrating)
If a disagreement was big enough, nobody was stopping your side from splitting off and going your own way as a new band.
BUDDER
No hard feelings!
ORIGINALS
Of course not!
It’d take more than this to undo a lifetime of love and affection.
Not to mention, it’s hard for conflict to escalate when you can move away instead.
Traders on a boat visiting people by a river.
SIS (narrating)
As equals, you’d expect that every adult would have had an equal voice in group decisions.
RED
Hey, if I have to live with the consequences, then you’re damn right I’ve got a say in what happens!
BEARDO
That goes without saying.
TRADERS
I’m only here to trade with your band (check out these shells!) but I say you ought to-
SASS
No offense, but who asked you?
SKEPTIC
No skin in our game? No say in how we play it.
SIS (narrating)
[Being self-sufficient and all that, trade between bands would have been minimal. But there’s evidence that tools, weapons, and trinkets got traded across long distances.]
Hunters driving caribou off a cliff into waiting archers.
SIS (narrating)
Cooperation between bands was probably routine, albeit temporary.
HUNTERS
We can go a while without seeing anyone but our own band, but we can usually rely on our neighbors if need be.
ARCHER
Um, whose idea was it to stand here?
TOOLMAKER 1
They are our friends and cousins. Their women are our daughters and sisters.
We face similar challenges, share similar cultures.
TOOLMAKER 2
So we can double or triple our numbers for a common purpose, like a big hunt or celebration.
But large numbers of people are unwieldy.
Once we’ve done what we joined up to do, we’ll dis-band back into our self-sufficient, self-regulating bands.
Joe and Sis
JOE
What did it mean to be “self-regulating”?
And how did bands do it, without government?
What sources are you using for all this prehistoric information?
Everything I can get my hands on!
There was a scientist named Satoshi Kanazawa who said that Polygamy was the norm among early humans, with men having multiple wives simultaneously. The title is “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent.”
A pdf of that article with the figures and tables can be found here. But I find it less than compelling. If you ask me, Kanazawa tends to write so as to support his own daydreams, which can be alarmingly racist, and his conclusions strike me as neither rigorously tested nor substantially supported.
His conclusions about polygamy in this article (more gratuitous than germane) are based on data from 20th-Century tribal cultures, which are actually a much more recent social structure, having more in common with classical Greeks than with the paleolithic band-level society. (We’ll be touching on that in the page after this one, btw.) And he analogizes from what he’s read about the social structures of gibbons and gorillas, which aren’t all that analogous to human social structure. Primates do not all share the same social patterns. If he was going to go down that road, he should instead have looked at the much more closely-related fission-fusion social structure of chimpanzees.
There is a lot of fascinating research in this area lately, and I highly recommend hitting up Google Scholar to see what’s out there. I’m personally biased towards what’s being done in neuroscience, genomics, and anthropology, but it’s a truly interdisciplinary study with valuable input from all over.
“His conclusions about polygamy in this article (more gratuitous than germane) are based on data from 20th-Century tribal cultures, which are actually a much more recent social structure, having more in common with classical Greeks than with the paleolithic band-level society.” It actually is Germane, unfortunately for Kanazawa. If sexual exclusivity was the norm for both men and women in human pre-history, then having multiple wives at the same time is the evolutionary novel behavior. So it should be smart men who are more likely to have multiple mates at the same time. Not the other way around, like his data showed.
Speaking as a Liberal, I think that title already displays why Kanazawa’s words probably can’t be trusted, the title of that study SCREAMS biased.
I understand why someone would think that. However, conservatives also make the claim that our ancestors were polygamous. https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/
So, political bias can’t be the reason that people believe that.
That wasn’t what I was saying. I mentioned being a liberal because I didn’t want someone thinking I was only disagreeing because I was conservative, which I am not. My main point was that the title of the study showed a very clear bias, and biases make for bad science.
It is funny to think about the elaborate sets of rules we build in an attempt to get the consensus small bands have. Sadly, the fight over limited resources are one of the roots of politics. Functionally Infinite land to expand into held that off for a long time. But at the end of the day we all just want things to work and to have some say in the things that matter to us specifically.
A book recommendation: The Old Way, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.Thomas lived with the Kalahari bushmen in the 1950’s, when they were still almost entirely unfamiliar with outsiders, and she makes a compelling argument that, of all known primitive peoples, the bushman way of life is the closest to the life our ancestors evolved to live over hundreds of thousands of years.
What she has to say is similar in a lot of ways to how you have it here, but there are differences. For example, while marriages could dissolve, they often lasted a lifetime, and while they lasted they were taken quite seriously. The murder rate, while low compared to most known hunter-gatherer societies, would still have been considered seriously high in the modern West, and most of the violence involved jealous men killing other men over women. And while adults were always willing to keep an eye on other people’s children, they always retained a special bond with their own. But yes, the bushmen were almost militant about sharing and consensus and nobody being better than anybody else. Chimpanzee societies are ruled by cliques of bullies, but to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, a society where everybody has spears and poison arrows is a polite society.
Thomas of course goes into far greater detail than I can possibly do here, and since you are interested in this sort of thing I strongly recommend the book.
I’ll admit the lack of social structure and egalitarian-ness are the hardest for me to wrap my mind around. The desire for power and control over others seems to be innate to our nature– have you ever watched a toddler trying to order their parents around? How would these bands avoid the strongest person just deciding they were in charge now?
I think the next page will answer that! (I hope?)
I’m possibly anticipating Nathan’s next page, but as I suggested in my previous comment, the simple answer is that in a small society where everyone has access to weapons, bullies get killed.
This even happens with chimpanzees sometimes, but people have language, and they can keep track of grievances and organize retaliation, so everybody wants to be liked. But the underlying hierarchical primate instincts are still there, waiting to reemerge if conditions change. One complaint I have with the comic above is that it makes band life look idyllic and effortless. But in reality there is always a fair amount of social anxiety, and norms such as sharing have to be enforced through bickering, gossip, and shaming. So the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers is fragile, and doesn’t necessarily survive the transition to larger scale societies.
I do look forward to seeing the next page.
The past couple of pages have shown a pattern I’ve noticed in Utopian writings: “if we postulate the absence of opposing interests that could lead to serious conflict, and assume any situation which could lead to serious conflict can be avoided peacefully, humans self-regulate beautifully.”
In contrast to that, and relevant to the time under discussion, I’d juxtapose osteological evidence from the human remains known as ‘Naia’ found in a subterranean cave in the Yucatan: the bones in her arm had been broken while she was alive, and the pattern of the injury is consistent with her arm being twisted behind her back. The remains are more than 12,000 years old, placing her lifetime before the development of modern social structures.
Obviously the existence of such an injury doesn’t prove she was the victim of violence from another human, but suggests that such violence was at least possible. To feel comfortable excluding the possibility of such violence, I’d like to see an argument stronger than, “that just didn’t happen.”
More generally, I’d like to see an argument that addresses the problem of information lag: acting in concert requires shared knowledge and consensus about what to do. It takes time to communicate, and more time to establish a consensus. Each person is exposed to a unique stream of experiences, and each has a unique stream of wants and needs. Even assuming people fundamentally want to work to advance everyone’s best interests, life happens faster than people can communicate and establish consensus.
If we accept the possibility of short-term lack of knowledge/consensus, and the possibility that those can lead people to make incorrect decisions about what’s good for, or at least harmless to, other people, the problem of natural/emergent self-regulation becomes more difficult to solve.
I realize social systems evolve, and that the most pathological forms will die out quickly, but I also know evolution can be harsh to individuals over the short term.
As others have said, you do have a tendency to treat as certain what is at best probable and at times what is just someone’s clever guess. A couple of points…
Polygamy was likely less common in the good old days, but it was far from absent. The genetic “Eve” lived about 100,000 years before “Adam” [150,000 BC vs 50,000 BC as I recall], which is easiest to explain by assuming the ancient males were about as willing as their modern kin to jump anything that would hold still, and not limit themselves to one lass.
The idea that marriages would break up when the child was 4 or so is probably just wrong. The more modern marriage often breaks up after that age because there is no child and the couple tries for better luck with different partners [usually without realizing the lack of a child is why one is getting bored with the old partner.]
Also, nursing until age 4 may be a response to a full world. While there is lots of room, producing lots of kids is likely a better reproductive strategy. But once there was no longer new places for the tribe to move to, concentrating on a few superior children is likely better.
In modern hunter-gatherer societies, sharing is selective. People share more with people who share with them than with those who don’t. In times of scarcity, sharing can stop all together. Either modern hunter-gatherers are different from our ancestors in this respect. Or sharing wasn’t as ubiquitous as you make it sound. (Link).
I think I’ve touched on this already, but modern hunter-gatherers are MODERN people living in a very different world, and it is a mistake to draw too many conclusions about paleolithic people from them. For one thing, modern hunter-gatherers tend to be tribal peoples, a way of life that wouldn’t be invented for tens of thousands of years. Their social environment and other realities are also significantly different. Differences pertinent to this discussion actually get mentioned in my outline for the next two pages, so I hope to flesh it out at least a bit.
It’s true that modern hunter-gatherers are, by definition, modern (which means in most cases that they have some level of contact with other more advanced peoples), and that most (but not all!) are tribal. But still, what else do we have? The archeological record doesn’t have much to say about the culture of our pre-Neolithic ancestors, so we really have only two sources of information about their way of life: extrapolation from the lives of modern hunter-gatherers; and hand waving speculation. I would weight the former more heavily than the latter!
The Lost Tribes of the Amazon
The point of polygamy isn’t so much economics as it is parasite mitigation. So our paleolithic ancestors would have been polygamous if they were at serious parasite risk. [link]
You commented the following passage to the previous comic:
> I would caution, however, against concluding that we were able to speak with Neanderthals and Denisovans simply because we interbred with them. Archaic species don’t require words to have sex, and neither do humans. (Language can make it oh so much more enjoyable, but it’s not a prerequisite.) Archaic DNA isn’t found in the Y chromosome very much. That could indicate that Neanderthal males couldn’t produce viable offspring with Sapiens females. It could also indicate that choosy Sapiens females weren’t opting to mate with less-to-offer archaics, while male Sapiens were less discriminate in where they sowed their wild oats. The latter is plausible in any primate species, and the former certainly becomes more likely as the species diverged. If language had any role to play in the mixing of our species, I’d glibly propose it was the LACK of Neanderthals’ ability to whisper sweet nothings that played a role, rather than their having such an ability.
Whereas in this comic, you write:
> But [Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other archaic human species] weren’t opposed to having sex with us. Depending on where you’re from, you probably have a little archaic DNA. (But only from archaic males, it seems. Our mitochondrial DNA, inherited from mothers only, is strictly sapiens).
These seem to be directly contradictory? Which is in error?
The error is in assuming that males only have the Y chromosome to share. There’s 22 x 2 + 1 other genes that men can pass on (including one X half of the time), so the Y does not even need to be passed on at all, which results, genetically, in a daughter. It might just be that archaic Y chromosomes didn’t make it very far down the descendents’ line, unlike other genes we got from them.
On another topic to my previous comment, you claim that (all?) modern hunter-gatherers live a relatively modern life, more tribal than the egalitarian band-based described here. But at least National Geographic Magazine’s article on the Hadza ([link], not coincidentally one of my favourite articles I’ve ever read from it) in my opinion resemble the described band-based social structure very closely. They Hadza do have some collective identity and a shared language across neighbouring bands, but I would wager that the former is at least partially imposed on them from the outside (“those hunter-gatherer people in that area, we call them Hadza”), and has little effect on their usual life, and a shared language by bands inhabiting the same region is hardly surprising. On the other hand, their way of life is described as being free to come and go from the band, they hunt some prey alone but all the men group up for other kinds, like baboons, they share each kill among the whole band (the size of the band is mentioned as being limited by how many people a single medium-size food animal can feed). They also have basically no hierarchy, excepting increased respect to the senior members of the band, but not really a “chief” or such. The Hadza also generally practice serial monogamy, with few exceptions (one being the patriarch in the band NGM’s reporter stayed with, who had been with his “wife” their entire adult lives).
Of course, it’s still credible and likely that most modern hunter-gatherers differ from this model more, including the Bushmen someone else commented on, with their more long-term pair-bonding and the jealousy and violence that causes, but there do seem to be at least some examples that have maintained the band-based model too.
Lest we go overstating the probable egalitarianism of ancient societies, bear in mind that many of the cognitive prerequisites described above only occur in other mammals with unstable social hierarchies (rats and chimps). While it may have been nothing quite as complex as formal government, things like laughter and embarrassment probably did not appear outside of a context in which there was some notion of social standing. Some members of the band were more likely important and more respected than others.
The idea that paleolithic people were all egalitarian nomadic people is probably wrong. We know of societies in the Americas and Asia that were stratified and sedentary without agriculture, like the Calusa. We have had the kind of conspicuous consumption and craftsmanship that you only get from a society of specialists for at least 30,000 years. |Source|
Pr-agricultural people even had slaves.
Obviously there were exceptions. For example, constrained geography where one couldn’t “just walk away” led to more violence.
But the people in the article you cite lived only 500 years ago. They were a modern—modern—institutionalized society—not paleolithic bands. Two entirely different things. The rest of the article also deals with what it calls large, sedentary, stratified societies. These are essentially the opposite of paleolithic bands, which were small and not stratified. Occasionally they were sedentary where food was plentiful year-round, as on a coast with good fishing, but the overwhelming majority moved around from place to place.
As has been mentioned before, one has to be careful not to extrapolate too much from modern non-agricultural societies when discussing a form of human society that hasn’t existed for many thousands of years. Set aside the large, sedentary, stratified societies of that article—even modern hunter-gatherers live very differently from ancient bands. They are constrained by “civilization” or geography and thus more likely to be violent; they are organized not as bands, but as tribes and clans, with all that entails for their beliefs, behavior, and ways of life; and they have lived thus for many thousands of years, evolving their own cultures just as the rest of us have. They are not a snapshot of a long-gone past—different from us they may be, but they are no less modern.
“The rest of the article also deals with what it calls large, sedentary, stratified societies. These are essentially the opposite of paleolithic bands, which were small and not stratified. Occasionally they were sedentary where food was plentiful year-round, as on a coast with good fishing, but the overwhelming majority moved around from place to place. ” But the thesis of the article is that such groups were not typical in the paleolithic.
“As has been mentioned before, one has to be careful not to extrapolate too much from modern non-agricultural societies when discussing a form of human society that hasn’t existed for many thousands of years. Set aside the large, sedentary, stratified societies of that article—even modern hunter-gatherers live very differently from ancient bands. They are constrained by “civilization” or geography and thus more likely to be violent; they are organized not as bands, but as tribes and clans, with all that entails for their beliefs, behavior, and ways of life; and they have lived thus for many thousands of years, evolving their own cultures just as the rest of us have. They are not a snapshot of a long-gone past—different from us they may be, but they are no less modern.”
True. But, the belief that paleolithic people lived in small non-stratified bands was always based on observations of modern hunter-gatherers like the !Kung. Since those people are all modern peoples and products of interactions with “civilization” they are not a guide to what our pre-agricultural ancestors are like. So then what is the basis for the belief that our ancestors lived in egalitarian bands? Especially when we know from the archeological evidence like Il Principe that they practiced conspicuous consumption and had specialized artisans?
Any thought on the issue of warfare between bands? Most I’ve read on the subject is that such wars tended to be akin to warfare between our closest animal relatives (Chimps and gorillas and others) as well as more modern hunter-gatherer societies: mainly harassing and raid oriented, with direct and “decisive” battles avoided and individuals trying to be picked off while away from their individual bands until the opposing side has been whittled down enough.
Hey Nathan,
I was wondering where you got the information that women tended to leave their clans and join new ones? I was also wondering what the biological basis for this is. Do you have any idea? Thanks!
Hey, PSplit, welcome to the comic!
It’s an evolved social pattern typical of primates. Actually, the Homo sapiens pattern is one of several primate varieties. Fortunately, they’ve been well-studied. If you go on Google Scholar and look for keywords like “female dispersal,” “philopatry,” “sex-based dispersion patterns,” and so on, you’ll find quite a lot of scholarship.
The reason it’s evolved to the level of instinct—that is to say, the reason why we’re hardwired to behave this way—is presumably because it is a behavior that is very successful for survival of the species. As females approach childbearing age, they get the urge to disperse to a new place to find mates. The male brain gets different priorities at puberty. Both male and female brains go through complex changes at puberty, which involve among other things the dumping of cautious risk-avoidance in favor of these new drives which adults can see as reckless. As any insurance company actuary can confirm, the brain doesn’t finish evolving until around 25, at which point your car insurance will finally go down to something affordable.
Interestingly, females disperse sooner than males, doing so before they start having children. Males, on the other hand, tend to disperse much farther, going beyond neighboring peoples to explore unpopulated places as full-grown adults either as adventuring hunters or as the advance guard of new bands (or in more modern times, new settlements).
(If you’ll excuse the pedantic quibble, we’re not talking about clans yet. This page is still about band-level society. Tribes and clans won’t form for tens of thousands of years yet, not until after humans start settling down in one place to grow crops. Even so, however, these evolutionary drives remain strong to this day, and go a long way towards explaining some human behaviors—and frustrations—in adolescence and in relationships!)