We are living in an era of great and rapid change. A theme that arises regularly questions whether humans, shaped by evolution during a much earlier era, have innate tendencies that will not allow them to respond appropriately to the political, social, and environmental challenges which we currently face. It behooves us to understand our own natures and separate what is innate from what is culturally acquired to proceed in in an orderly fashion. David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their recent book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, provide us with an engaging and enlightening romp through recent archeological and anthropological research that provides new understanding as to who we were in past millennia, and perhaps helps us learn who we might be today or could be tomorrow.
Human history began about 6 million years when a primate branch split into what became today’s chimpanzees and what became Homo Sapiens. Our path to the present was not direct. Several branches diverged and eventually died off along the way. A few, most notably the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, emerged from Africa and left records across the Eurasian continent. We arose in Africa 200,000-300,000 years ago and emerged from that continent and spread throughout the world perhaps as long as 100,000 years in the past. There is little record of what we were like until after the last period of glaciation receded.
“Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo Sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.”
This lack of knowledge did not hinder those who would take up limited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century information and construct histories for humanity. The most common even today are variations on the original hypothesis of Rousseau from 1754.
“Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of child-like innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and the ‘state’—which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding we spend much of our lives filling in forms.”
There would be an alternate, Hobbesian version in which we also lived mostly in small bands, but within and between those bands the current humanitarian deficits of self-interest, self-aggrandizement, greed, and the struggle for dominance were already present. Neither of these views were particularly flattering for humans. At best, they were innocent sheep unable to control their future and locked in a system from which they could not escape; at worst, they created a hierarchy which could maintain stability through violence and its threat.
This notion of small, isolated bands living in harmony seems a bit off to even the most casual observer. It seems inconsistent with what we claim to know about human behavior, or even animal behavior. All primates seem to know that they should avoid inbreeding by having one of the genders migrate out of the group to another. It is not surprising that humans would have learned this as well, and quite early on. This need for mixing people between groups should have generated some form of interaction to facilitate the process—so much for the isolated group. One of the features of human nature is that to truly despise another individual, one must get to know them quite well. Small groups with the equivalent of a few families would inevitably lead to animosities and generate a need to move individuals to other groups, leading to additional population churn. Groups would have been in contact and unlikely to be in constant warfare over resources as some male anthropologists like to fantasize.
The authors bring their perspective to this issue.
“There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them. New work on the demography of modern hunter-gatherers—drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu—shows that residential groups turn out to not be made up of biological kin at all; and the burgeoning field of human genomics is beginning to suggest a similar picture for ancient hunter-gatherers as well, all the way back to the Pleistocene.”
“…it turns out that primary biological kin actually make up less than 10 percent of the total membership of any given residential group. Most participants are drawn from a much wider pool who do not share close genetic relationships, whose origins are scattered over very large territories, and who may not even have grown up speaking the same languages.”
The standard theory of human evolution is highly biased by the focus on events in what we now call the Middle East and naively refer to as “the cradle of civilization.” Archeological evidence indicates humans were collaborating in large numbers to produce structures and monuments in diverse locations many years before any so-called “agricultural revolution.”
“In Europe, between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Krakow to Kiev. Along this transect of the glacial fringe, remains of impressive circular structures have been found that are clearly distinguishable from ordinary camp dwellings in their scale (the largest were over thirty-nine feet in diameter), permanence, aesthetic qualities and prominent locations in the Pleistocene landscape. Each was erected on a framework made of mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals, which were arranged in alternating sequences and patterns that go beyond the merely functional to produce structures that would have looked quite striking to our eyes, and magnificent indeed to people at the time. Great wooden enclosures of up to 130 feet in length also existed, of which only the post-holes and sunken floors remain.”
It is likely that human hunter-gatherers did live in small groups on a seasonal basis if their hunting and gathering called for it, but at some time they could also gather into larger groups and participate in cooperative activities of a social or cultural nature. This is a behavior that arises again and again in trying to unravel our deep history and is viewed by the authors as critical to understanding our nature. It is reasonable to assume that small bands of people behave in a largely egalitarian fashion and large groups will require some sort of hierarchical organization for efficient cooperation on projects. The obvious conclusion is that humans were quite comfortable moving in and out of such types of organization as the need or opportunity presented itself.
As time went on, what we might recognize as permanent sites of large numbers of people and refer to as cities would be established. However, they could be organized in a much different way than we might expect. It appears that humans can congregate in large numbers, maintain a diverse economy, and live in harmony without permanent political structures enforcing that harmony.
“The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC, that is, for something in the order of eight centuries, which is considerably longer than most subsequent urban traditions.”
“They were the physical realization of an extended community that already existed long before its constituent units coalesced into large settlements. Some tens of these settlements have now been documented. The biggest currently known—Taljanky—extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found.”
“What we do find are houses; well over 1000 in the case of Taljanky. Rectangular houses, sixteen or so feet wide and twice as long, built of wattle and daub on timber frames, with stone foundations. With their attached gardens, these houses form such neat circular patterns that from bird’s-eye view, any mega-site resembles the inside of a tree trunk: great rings with spaces between…But in every known case, the central area is simply empty.”
In this region there was not just one of theses “cities,” there were a number of them, closely spaced. They would have had to possess an economy that was greatly shared and must have lived peacefully for the configuration to exist for centuries.
“Just as surprising as their scale is the distribution of these massive settlements, which are all quite close to each other, at most six to nine miles apart. Their total population—estimated in the many thousands per mega-site, and probably well over 10,000 in some cases—would therefore have had to draw resources from a common hinterland.”
No agricultural revolution was required to allow this population density to exist and flourish, and no king was required to manage it.
“This way of life was by no means ‘simple’. As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from springs in the eastern Carpathians and the Black Sea littoral. Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools. A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans. There is no firm consensus among archeologists about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree that the logistical challenges were daunting.”
An economy of this scale should have presented plenty of opportunities for individuals to accumulate significant wealth and use that wealth to acquire power. But that didn’t seem to happen. Within the records of cultures discussed by the authors, they discovered societies that were wise enough to create societal norms that precluded such an occurrence. This suggests they had suffered from that tendency and found the means to insure it would never happen again.
“A surplus was definitely produced, and with it, ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites.”
“The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things.”
We have presented just a few of the examples the authors discuss. Their book covers multiple eras, multiple continents, and many cultures. This paragraph from the authors can serve as a brief summary of their findings on human evolution compared to the conventional wisdom.
“To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.”
The United States is less than three centuries old, yet it seems to be stumbling towards inevitable partisan conflict. Pundits often claim the inevitability is built into our genes by eons of evolution. They claim that once one group defines another as “the other” animosity will continue to grow because that is what we were designed to do. Currently Democrats and Republicans are defining each other as “the other” and viewing the other as an existential threat. It is claimed that evolution has forced us to protect our group against other groups and there is not much we can do about it. These same people once claimed that humanity was designed for battle and war was an inherent part of our nature. Consider these quotes from Edward O. Wilson.
“Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principle driving force that made us what we are. In prehistory, group selection lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise. And to fear. Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled.
“It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.”
What is encountered in the massive work of David Graeber and David Wengrow is not a humanity for whom “wars and genocide have been universal and eternal.” Certainly, they existed, but we humans appear to have had a somewhat encouraging history where we mostly lived together peacefully and learned to collaborate on great and wondrous projects. These authors might be more likely to argue that our faults lie not in our early evolution but in the most recent millennia when we developed cultures which ensured that there would be conflict and discrimination between peoples of different classes, races, and religions. The impulses that drive us today could be derived from that recent evolution which we imposed upon ourselves, or they could be the result of cultural evolution rather than be genetic in nature.
Let us continue to be optimistic and believe that there
are better angels within our nature; we merely need to learn how to release
them.
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