Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model

Abstract

Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the diverse histories model, to replace it. We outline the limitations of using recent foragers as models of Late Pleistocene societies and the considerable social variation among foragers commonly considered small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian. We review ethnographic and archaeological findings covering 34 world regions showing that non-agricultural peoples often live in groups that are more sedentary, unequal, large, politically stratified, and capable of large-scale cooperation and resource management than is normally assumed. These characteristics are not restricted to extant Holocene hunter-gatherers but, as suggested by archaeological findings from 27 Middle Stone Age sites, likely characterized societies throughout the Late Pleistocene (until c. 130 ka), if not earlier. These findings have implications for how we understand human psychological adaptations and the broad trajectory of human history.

Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures

“…Lastly, the ethnographic record of conflict resolution provides greater evidence for conflict resolution within-groups than between groups including across populations with variable subsistence strategies and across distinct social contexts (Figure 2 and see Limitations section). These results are consistent with recent work in anthropology emphasizing heterogeneity, variability, and social complexity among populations such as mobile huntergatherers, often characterized as "small-scale" (e.g., Hill et al 2011;Bird et al 2019;Singh and Glowacki 2021). Between-group conflicts, although relatively less represented, are consistently documented across all subsistence types including hunter-gatherers, providing additional evidence for the ubiquity of inter-group conflicts across the vast majority of human societies (Glowacki, Wilson, and Wrangham 2020;Hames 2019;Lopez 2016).…”

Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures

“…Lastly, the ethnographic record of conflict resolution provides greater evidence for conflict resolution within-groups than between groups including across populations with variable subsistence strategies and across distinct social contexts (Figure 2 and see Limitations section). These results are consistent with recent work in anthropology emphasizing heterogeneity, variability, and social complexity among populations such as mobile huntergatherers, often characterized as "small-scale" (e.g., Hill et al 2011;Bird et al 2019;Singh and Glowacki 2021). Between-group conflicts, although relatively less represented, are consistently documented across all subsistence types including hunter-gatherers, providing additional evidence for the ubiquity of inter-group conflict across the vast majority of human societies (Glowacki, Wilson, and Wrangham 2020;Hames 2019;Lopez 2016).…”

An Evolutionary Explanation for the Female Leadership Paradox

“…While the modal pattern for modern hunter-gatherers is residence in groups of ∼30 individuals (Bird et al, 2019), social networks might expand to hundreds of individuals over a person's lifetime due to fluidity in residence, trading partners, and kinship (Layton et al, 2012;Bird et al, 2019). A minority of hunter-gatherers who occupied highly productive coastal or riparian environments were led by chiefs with some degree of coercive authority, and the frequency of such "complex" hunter-gatherer societies may have been significantly higher in the Pleistocene prior to expansion of agricultural practices in the Holocene (Singh and Glowacki, 2021). Nevertheless, the majority of modern huntergatherers, if not hunter-gatherers in general, were relatively egalitarian with high degrees of autonomy for individuals (Kelly, 2013).…”

“…Of course, dominance-style leadership in humans cannot rest on coercion A prevailing view is that for hundreds of thousands of years, humans were organized largely in small, residential bands with flexible, fluctuating membership and with relatively egalitarian politics (Kaplan et al, 2009;Layton et al, 2012;Diamond, 2013;Van Schaik, 2016). Recent evidence suggests sedentary foragers with institutionalized hierarchies may have been more common in the past (Singh and Glowacki, 2021), nevertheless the onset of agriculture was key to the widespread erosion of egalitarianism and the emergence and spread of formal, often coercive leadership Kaplan et al, 2009). The social power of women in non-industrial societies in part reflected the prevailing inheritance systems, with bilateral descent/matriliny offering more opportunities for female social influence (Low, 2005).…”