Using Early Human Existence To Understand Historical Societies

This is chapter 5 of “The Construction of Reality”, one of the rewards of our 2023 fundraiser.

Human at Dawn

We humans adapt to the world in two ways: thru biological evolution and thru changes in culture: where culture is everything from tools and technology to language and philosophy. We are still evolving physically, and it can be seen in different human groups. Northern Europeans are more likely to be able to digest milk properly than those of African descent, for example, while whites have less melanin due to spending time in areas with less sunlight, and so on.

But cultural evolution is far faster and it is how we have done most of our adaptation since we started making stone tools.

How humans lived for most of pre-history is important, because it tells us what we are biologically adapted for: what sort of life is natural to us. Cultural adaptation often takes us away from what we were adapted for. The classic case, again, is agricultural adoption: humans became sicker, lived less long, developed serious dental problems and so on, because what they were eating is not what they were evolved for and because long terms settlements made disease more deadly. (Hunter gatherer bands move often enough, that crudely, they “didn’t shit where they eat.”)

This is a very important point and one we’ll come back to: the word progress does not mean “better life.” New technology, organization, ideology or identities may make most people demonstrably worse off and may do so for very long periods of time. Agriculture made most of the world’s population worse off for thousands of years. Yes, there were more us, and almost all of us lived worse lives than hunter-gatherers had had.

All that said, let us examine humanity at dawn.

For most of human existence we probably lived in small bands of about forty to sixty people, and interacted with other bands of similar size whom we shared ancestors or fictive kinship with. We hunted and gathered. We knew almost every person in our life.

Humans have the ability to know approximately one hundred and fifty people well (x_Dunbar’s number). This is the human span. When groups become larger than the human span we are no longer able to interact with others in the way our species was primarily adapted to do so: as individual members of our band, or of bands we have close relations to, and who probably split from our band in the past when numbers became larger than hunting and gathering could support in one location.

Within our span, we are able to:

• Surveil others. We know what they’re up to, through direct observation or gossip with others who directly observe them.
• Empathize and sympathize with them. Because we are physically with them much of the time, we feel their emotions almost as our own through the action of mirror neurons and bodily mimicry. We feel their pain and their joy, if not as strongly as our own, then strongly enough that their emotions matter to our own emotional well-being.
• Apply social feedback. Since we know what they’re doing, we can apply social sanctions. If we don’t like what they’re doing, we can let them know. This may escalate to violence, but in most cases it is verbal or non-verbal approval. Since we surveil them, we will know if these social sanctions are working to improve their behaviour. Conversely, we can apply positive feedback directly, approving of them: smiling, hugging, praising and so on.

Surveillance, empathy and sympathy, social feedback. We know these people, they know us, their well-being and behaviour is in our face.

When we belong to larger groups, we can’t do these things. We use hacks, like culture and identity and ideology and organization and technology (writing and radio and Facebook & TikTok!) to scale. But none of these scale properly, they are always different from what we evolved for, and these differences generally show up as social pathologies, though there are also advantages to larger societies, even socially, as anyone who has ever lived in a village or institution knows. (I grew up in a boarding school, those who have been in the military will probably be nodding as well.)

In addition to the problems of social scaling, hunter-gatherer band societies have five other features which are important. All of these features scale badly as the number of people in a society increases, and the cultural hacks used to scale them often lead to pathologies.

We’ll circle back to these features throughout the book, so as you read each one think “how do we do this today? What has gone wrong and right?”

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And here they are:

Equality, lack of surplus, reciprocity, ownership rules, and identity.

Equality. At humanity’s dawn we’re about equal. Some people may be better hunters, gatherers, talkers, dancers or singers than others, but generally speaking the differences are minor. Older people know more than younger, men are stronger than women, young people are generally healthier and fitter than older people.

And that’s about it, that’s the sum total of inequality. Any other variations are usually a result of lifestyle and geography. In colder climes hunting produces more food proportionally, and men are higher status because men are all or most of the hunters. In more lush climes gathering produces more food, women are the primary gatherers, and women have better status (though matriarchies are almost unknown, rough gender equality appears fairly common.)

Hunter gatherers who live in bands go out of their way to make sure that no one becomes unequal. Food sharing is generally enforced by social sanction, starting with mockery and humor but escalating to ostracism or violence.

Among certain tribes the hunter who made the arrow that kills an animal is considered to be the one who brought it down: but hunters share arrows and one check found that two hunters didn’t have a single arrow made by themselves in their quiver.

In Inuit bands every hunter had a group of 11 other hunters whom he shared every kill he made with, and they shared with him.

There is little material inequality in most band level societies, then (yes, there are a few exceptions). Sharing is enforced and in many societies if you want something another person has you simply admire it and they give it to you. (Then someone else may admire it and so on.) (X-Debt)

Equality here includes violence. Maybe somebody’s better at it than others, but generally one man is as good as another, and numbers are what matters. There is nothing like later societies where a few skilled, well equipped and disciplined men can defeat far larger numbers.

Lack of Surplus: Band level societies keep very little surplus. Either they have immediate return strategies in which it is not allowed to keep surplus, or they regularly use up their surplus in feasts and gifts. Surplus, and especially private surplus, is the beginning of civilization and inequality.(x-winter surplus.)

Reciprocity: Band level societies expect reciprocity: if I give you a gift, you will give me a gift, usually within one or two years. In many societies you are not allowed to give me a gift that is more impressive than the one I gave you or larger than I can reasonably be expected to pay back. Society mitigates hard against the equivalent of “overrunning your credit card” or “running up student loans.”

Ownership: The people who already live in an area have first rights to use the land. Others who have ties with them, such as kinship, fictive kinship or gift exchanges may also use the land, others who try to may be attacked. There is no concept of private ownership of the land, however, only group rights to hunt and gather. Private ownership of land is another marker of inequality and civilization.

Identity: Everyone has about the same understanding of who they are. They live the same types of lives (hunting or gathering); they spend most of their time not working doing the same activities (art, music, dance, gossip), they live in the same dwellings, eat the same food, have the same basic life experiences.

Different cultures had very different identities from each other not because they lived differently, but because they had different stories about who they were. They had different gods and most importantly, different ancestors. Identity was learned, as you grew older you would be initiated to become more and more one of your people.

It’s important to understand this: humans who weren’t part of your identity group were often considered, by default, enemies. Common humanity is not powerful for humans. Human bands are inclined to view other human bands who don’t have the same identity and, usually, also kinship (or fictive kinship) as other. People who aren’t “of us” are fair game for murder, theft and all sorts of nastiness. In this we are similar to many other animals: humans evolved to work the same ecological niches as other humans, other humans are our direct competitors.

In periods when there weren’t that many humans and when the land provided more than enough, we didn’t fight each other much: but as the land’s carrying capacity for hunting and gathering was approached violence increased.(X).

Identity told us who we should fight, who we should help and who we should ally with.

This problem, of identity, is one of the primary problems we humans have had to overcome as we lived in large groups and wanted to interact with other groups other than violently, such as for trade. Learning to expand identity also helped us be better at violence.

But identity is much more than who, it is what creates our self, the reality of who we are, and it expands far past ties with other humans. Identity, in a very real sense, is our body, expanded far beyond our mere flesh.

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