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The Origins of Multi-level Society

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Abstract

There is a very striking difference between even the simplest ethnographically known human societies and those of the chimps and bonobos. Chimp and bonobo societies are closed societies: with the exception of adolescent females who disperse from their natal group and join a nearby group (never to return to their group of origin), a pan residential group is the whole social world of the agents who make it up. That is not true of forager bands, which have fluid memberships, and regular associations with neighbouring bands. They are components of a larger social world. The open and fluid character of forager bands brings with it many advantages, so the stability of this more vertically complex form of social life is not difficult to explain, once it establishes. But how did it establish, if, as is likely, earlier hominin social worlds resemble those of our close pan relatives in the suspicion (even hostility) of one band to another? How did hominin social organisation transition from life in closed bands, each distrustful of its neighbours, to the much more open social lives of foragers? I will discuss and synthesise two approaches to this problem, one ecological, based on the work of Robert Layton and his colleagues, and another that is organised around an expansion of kin recognition, an idea primarily driven by Bernard Chapais. The paper closes by discussing potential archaeological signatures both of more open social worlds, and of the supposed causal drivers of such worlds.

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Notes

  1. That said, it is important to recognise the considerable variation in group size, in both the pan and the hominin lineages.

  2. Ritual connection can be surprisingly important. For example, in many Australian aboriginal cultures, connection through the same Dreamtime figure is an important social tie, for it counts as one way of being from the same place (Meggitt 1962).

  3. The far western Tai community seems to be a partial exception. Males patrol, but lethal violence between groups is much rarer. Patrols sometimes seem targeted on establishing an association with females from a neighbouring group, and there is just a hint of the bonobo practice of sex as a way of managing intercommunity tensions in these patrol to female encounters: see Stanford (2018, p. 78).

  4. Sometimes equally distant kin, with parallel cousins blocked, and cross-cousins preferred.

  5. In some cases in seasons of plenty; in other, more arid habitats, around permanent water and the resources that water supports.

  6. It should be noted though that these ideas remain controversial: (Collard et al. 2016; Vaesen et al. 2016).

  7. The Tiwi provide an example of this in miniature, as the large households of polygynous men provide those males with the opportunity to specialise in the production of elaborated carved ritual objects, and in the composition of new songs and dances (Hart and Pilling 1960).

  8. From a low of 10% (though only in one season) through to 87%.

  9. Somewhat counter-intuitively, such environments are often quite good for foragers, since plants invest more of their biomass in parts of the plant humans can consume, such as “USOs”; i.e. Underground Storage Organs like tubers and corms.

  10. Indeed, Opie and Power are rather sceptical about this possibility, because they do not see how paternity could be certain enough for this to be a reasonable deal for males. That, however, depends on the character of male foraging: if they forage in a single group, or a couple of groups, they automatically police one another. Moreover, despite the threat, at least some ethnographically known foragers keep the risks to within tolerable limits.

  11. This is true even if we accept Chapais’ elaboration of his model, with affine kin recognition leading to sister exchange between brothers-in-law. That might lead to stronger ties between nodes of kin in different bands. But it will still be true that while one affine-to-affine alliance links one kin node to the east, another will build links to the west. There is no mechanism that builds congruence in the out-connections of the different families in a single band.

  12. The same is true (as Ron Planer has pointed out to me) if there is evidence of regular repair on tools found far from their source materials.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Anton Killin, Ron Planer and the audience of the evolution of kinship workshop at the ANU for feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank the referees of the last version for their very constructive feedback. As always, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the Australian Research Council for their support for my research on human cognitive and social evolution.

Funding

Australian Research Council Grant FL13 130 100 141.

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  1. School of Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, Coombs Bld (Bld 9), Fellows Rd, Acton, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Kim Sterelny

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Sterelny, K. The Origins of Multi-level Society. Topoi 40, 207–220 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09666-1

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