The causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial: a multi-disciplinary perspective

Abstract

This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further explored. Viewing social and political organization in the Last Glacial in a much wider, multi-disciplinary context provides the footing for coherent theory building and hypothesis testing by which to further explore Authors are PEP members. human political systems. We aim to overcome the claim that our ancestors' form of social organization is untestable, as well as counter a degree of exaggeration regarding possibilities for sedentism, population densities, and hierarchical structures prior to the Holocene with crucial advances from disparate disciplines.

A theory of discrete hierarchies as optimal cost-adjusted productivity organisations

“…Throughout most of Homo sapiens 300'000 year record, humans have lived in small-scale, mostly egalitarian huntergatherer societies, comprising around 30-50 or, at most, a few hundred individuals [1][2][3]. Following the strong warming of Earth by 5 to 10 • C from about 15'000 years ago leading to the end of the last ice age, settled communities emerged around 10'000 years ago, together with agriculture and animal domestication.…”

Optimizing Engines: Rational Choice in the Neolithic?

“…2. I here assume that the ethnography of mobile foragers is a reasonable guide to basic features of Palaeolithic forager groups (see Shultziner et al 2010;Boehm 2012). cieties emerge out of cultures in which it was in the interests of (most) agents to control aggrandizers, societies in which agents had the capacity to control aggrandizers and were primed to do so. What explains the failure of collective action in defense of those common interests?…”

Genes and Politics: A New Explanation and Evaluation of Twin Study Results and Association Studies in Political Science

“…2 It should be stressed that the alternative explanation of the twin study results I propose in this article does not posit that there are no biological dispositions which are relevant to social life and politics. Human universals and dispositions have been identified as well as their relevance to social science (e.g., Brown 1991Brown , 1999Brown , 2004Pinker 2003;Shultziner 2010;Shultziner et al 2010). My main point is that the method of comparing twins does not and cannot reveal a genetic basis of political preferences.…”