Proto-civilization

Humans are annoyingly social creatures. Not everyone enjoys living in big cities, but lots of people do. Yet the standard narrative is that living in large groups is a relatively recent development enabled only by the invention of farming, that prior to this we lived by necessity in very much smaller communities. After all, you can't support a large population by hunting mammoths and gathering berries.

This would seem to be broadly true as far as it goes, but it may not be the whole story. True, you probably can't sustain an unlimited population size by hunting and gathering : farming definitely helps. But the manageable population size might be considerably larger than that of a small village. There is probably also not a singular moment of agricultural revolution at which point suddenly everyone became farmers. In one of Francis Pryor's books (I forget which one), he makes reference to evidence of Neolithic settlements having deliberately sown desirable plants millennia before the Agricultural Revolution proper; not in anything like as sophisticated an approach as actual farming, but useful all the same.

So if farming doesn't suddenly spring into existence, perhaps neither does full-blooded civilisation. Couple of good recent BBC documentaries about this. First, The Lost Circle Revealed describes how part of Stonehenge was not only originally made of Welsh rocks, but actually assembled in Wales before being moved to England. Second, the slightly older Secrets of Orkney, which presents the case that the stone circle culture first developed in Orkney and then spread to the rest of Britain.

Now, at this point it's probably worth bearing this in mind :

Well fair enough. But if the physical achievements of Stonehenge and the cosy stone houses of prehistoric Orkney pale in comparison to their contemporary Egyptian counterparts, maybe the mental ones are not quite so sub-standard. After all, dragging a series one-tonne stones 140 miles (!) through the Welsh terrain is an achievement not to be sniffed at, but more than that, it requires mass co-operation over a huge geographic area. There surely wasn't a prehistoric British nation-state, but the collaborative effort must have taken place on a similar scale. If they didn't have the capabilities to construct the pyramids, then still had the mindset necessary to formulate, plan, and achieve national-scale projects. They were also (it would seem) considerably less hierarchical than the Egyptians, with the only real difference in the local chieftains being that they lived in - Pryor again - "a slightly larger roundhouse" than the common folk. And this seems to have lasted for many thousands of years.

There is nothing special about Britain. While we can't ever know what exactly the mindset was, whether this mass cooperation was some sort of emergent phenomena from local interests or a more deliberate, pseudo-nationalistic effort, it would still imply that our idea of small roving bands of hunter gathers is hardly the full picture. We are animals, and some animals are social to a degree far exceeding that of humans. So how are back does this large-scale thinking really go ? Maybe tens of millennia. Maybe all the way. Certainly, it would seem, far back beyond the earliest cities.

On to the Aeon piece, which is written in a somewhat tangential style that makes it hard to extract its main point, but I shall try.

This is more than just a theory of prehistory. It’s the modern, scientific origin myth. Yes, we live in mega-societies with property and slavery and inequality but, at heart, we are mobile, egalitarian hunter-gatherers, wired for small groups and sharing. According to the evolutionary social scientist Peter Turchin, this view is ‘so standard that it is rarely formulated in explicit terms’. It’s also probably wrong.

Both a kingdom and a state, the Calusa concentrated power in a hereditary sovereign who had life-and-death control over his subjects, a fact he demonstrated with regular human sacrifice. He ruled from the island of Mound Key – specifically, from a massive house perched atop a 32-foot-high mound and spacious enough to fit 2,000 people. He oversaw full-time military and priestly classes and funnelled surplus production into lavish celebrations... They ruled an area larger than Switzerland... How did the Calusa build such a large, stratified society? A reasonable guess would be through agriculture. Turns out, that’s not what happened. The Calusa built a state not through agriculture but through wild game – in particular, fish.

The more we dig through history, the more we encounter foragers who were sedentary and hierarchical. They covered Japan before agriculture. They dotted the South China coast before agriculture. They inhabited the Levant, tracts of the Nile, the beaches of southern Scandinavia, the central plains of Russia, the coasts of the Atacama Desert, and the grasslands of the high-altitude Andes – all before agricultural peoples dominated those regions. Even today, sedentary foragers live in riverine and coastal regions of New Guinea.

And then there are the Sunghir burials. Roughly 30,000 years old and situated 200 km east of modern-day Moscow, these are the zenith of Upper Palaeolithic funerary extravagance. Especially striking are two adolescent boys: buried head-to-head, coated with ochre, accompanied by 16 mammoth-ivory spears and showered with more than 10,000 mammoth-ivory beads.

Still, for Pettitt, the burials overturn any assumption of simple, hyper-egalitarian bands. They indicate societies of specialists. They indicate status-minded, conspicuous consumption. Even if people were chucking deer canines and mammoth-tusk lances into the graves of people who died strange deaths, they still had the time and motivation to craft such fancy knick-knacks. ‘It’s inconceivable that Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were egalitarian,’ Pettitt said. ‘It just doesn’t work.’

I would suppose that if humans are hard-wired for anything at all, they are flexible enough that culture can override innate behaviour to almost any degree. The past would be to be a mixture of hierarchies and strictly egalitarian networks, from small-scale bands to enormous pan-national groups. Though specialisation doesn't necessarily equate to hierarchy, much less centralised control, still sometimes clear centralised hierarchies did emerge, with or without farming, and could be extraordinarily successful. Yet at the very least, stable egalitarian societies, if not bona fide egalitarian civilizations, were also equally a part of the story, also lasting for enormous periods. While we do have animal natures, perhaps how we arrange ourselves just isn't part of that. Maybe there is no "natural tendency" for human societies to be like anything in particular at all.

If, however, we evolved in both mobile bands and large hierarchical communities, then, by nature, we are much more psychologically flexible. We’re egalitarian, yes, but also predatory and hierarchical. We’re prepared to interact with familiar people, yes, but also ready to cooperate with strangers. The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies. The world today is unlike anything humans have experienced, yet in terms of their hierarchy, sedentism and political complexity, the societies we’ve built might still be deeply familiar.

Not all early human societies were small-scale egalitarian bands

Beyond the !Kung : A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale