Some Men Find Our Egalitarian History Highly Disturbing

Based on the comments I’ve gotten, it’s profoundly upsetting to some of them

For most of history, humans have lived in largely peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian communities. It’s only been in the past 7 thousand years or so that society has become highly stratified or that men have had any significant primacy over women. This is a topic that I’ve written quite a bit about this past year. You’d think that most people would find that kind of news interesting and eye-opening. Not so for some of the men that I’ve encountered. Many of them seem to find it very threatening.

I’ve come across responses that range anywhere from the incredulous to the disdainful, to the downright angry. I’ve even met men who claim to not be particularly comfortable with patriarchal gender norms, who nevertheless (based on nothing really) are completely sure that violent oppression by men of whomever they can find to dominate is just the way it’s always been. It's really destructive that our culture has come to equate those kinds of behaviors with the performance of masculinity.

“Men are just wired that way — it’s testosterone,” I’ve heard. Or maybe, “That’s just human nature.” They try to poke holes in my sources (scholarly articles and books from anthropologists and museums) or pretend I haven’t cited any at all, even though the citations are right there in front of them. They bring to me studies about violence and warfare that reflect data from only the past 12,000 years claiming that it’s valid for all of history or otherwise go into all manner of convolutions to try to prove that I am wrong about this. Why are these men so attached to a supposed history of belligerence, hierarchy, and cruelty?

It’s true that we don’t know for certain everything about Paleolithic life, but in between most current archeology, anthropology, and analogies to 20th Century hunter-gatherer societies, the overwhelming evidence points to the cooperative and egalitarian nature of Paleolithic tribes. This way of living carried into the early years of agriculture as well.

Anthropologist, Christopher Boehm, writes in his book, Hierarchy In The Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior

The three African great apes, with whom we share this rather recent Common Ancestor, are notably hierarchical. Reproductively fortunate are the high-ranking males or females, while those relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy fare less well. The same can be said of most human political societies in the world today, starting about five thousand years ago. At that time, people were beginning to increasingly live in chiefdoms, societies with highly privileged individuals who occupied hereditary positions of political leadership and social paramountcy. From certain well-developed chiefdoms came the six early civilizations, with their powerful and often despotic leaders. But before twelve-thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian (Knauft 1991). They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization, and no social classes.

Anthropologist, Peter Gray has said when talking about modern hunter-gatherer tribes, “One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied. When you read about “warlike primitive tribes,” or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band hunter-gatherers.”

It is only in the comparatively recent past when warlike northern tribes overtook the egalitarian communities that had existed for most of human history and patriarchy began to truly take hold. Patriarchy describes not just the coercive control of women, but a society-wide class system that privileges some people over others in a social hierarchy.

But by the fifth millennium B.C.E., or about seven thousand years ago, we begin to find evidence of what (English archeologist, James) Mellaart calls a pattern of disruption of the old Neolithic cultures in the Near East. Archaeological remains indicate clear signs of stress by this time in many territories. There is evidence of invasions, natural catastrophes, and sometimes both, causing large-scale destruction and dislocation. In many areas the old painted pottery traditions disappear. Bit by devastating bit, a period of cultural regression and stagnation sets in. Finally, during this time of mounting chaos the development of civilization comes to a standstill. As Mellaart writes, it will be another two thousand years before the civilizations of Sumer and Egypt emerge.

It (Indo-European peoples) characterizes a long line of invasions from the Asiatic and European north by nomadic peoples. Ruled by powerful priests and warriors, they brought with them their male gods of war and mountains. And as Aryans in India, Hittites and Mittani in the Fertile Crescent, Luwians in Anatolia, Kurgans in eastern Europe, Achaeans and later Dorians in Greece, they gradually imposed their ideologies and ways of life on the lands and peoples they conquered.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

The excavation of the Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic community of about 10,000 that was at its peak around 7000 BCE, has yielded further support for the idea that equality and cooperation were ways of life until the recent past.

Çatalhöyük has strong evidence of an egalitarian society, as no houses with distinctive features (belonging to royalty or religious hierarchy, for example) have been found so far. The most recent investigations also reveal little social distinction based on gender, with men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and seeming to have equal social status, as typically found in Paleolithic cultures. Çatalhöyük

So what’s the big deal here? Why all the outrage? Is it that a woman is telling them something that they haven’t heard of before, and so it can’t possibly be true? I don’t know about you, but I didn’t study ancient history before the time of the Greeks in school, and I’m guessing that is pretty common for all but anthropology majors. I’d never heard of some of this either until 15 years ago, but when I come across something new, it sparks my curiosity and a desire to find out more. Older archeology didn’t provide much real information about many cultures. It’s no wonder that much of our information is not common knowledge.

Prior to World War II, most archeology was essentially a form of fortune-hunting/tomb-robbing. It is only within the past 80 years that it has come to have the technology and focus to try to understand a civilization from a multi-disciplinary standpoint, including zoology, botany, climatology, linguistics, and paleontology as well as archeology and anthropology. Even sites that have been under investigation for many years began to yield new insights.

As the archaeologist Nicolas Platon, who by 1980 had been excavating the island (Crete) for over fifty years, put it: “Archaeologists were dumbfounded. They could not understand how the very existence of such a highly developed civilization could have remained unsuspected until then.”

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Scientific understanding is always growing and expanding. Why wouldn’t somebody reading one of these pieces say, “Huh, that’s very different from what I learned.” Or better yet, “I hadn’t heard that before, tell me more about it.” Instead, it’s all snark and condescension, and a desperate clinging to old beliefs that men have always been violent and always reigned supreme on earth. It’s as though being confronted with real evidence to the contrary simply upends their world. Perhaps they don’t know who they are if such a thing as pervasive equality and peace were to be accepted as the way for most of human existence. It is still the way of life of any hunter-gatherer tribes not infected with modern ideas, and I’m going to bet their testosterone levels are just fine.

There seems to be this strong desire amongst some of these commenters to affirm the naturalness and rightness of male domination. But even beyond that, the prospect that we have had equality and cooperation for most of the human history flies in the face of social Darwinism, where competition is laudable, cooperation is weak, and the fittest survive only by eating the dogs around them before they get eaten themselves. Even if this is the only model of masculinity you’ve ever known, why wouldn’t you want to embrace the possibility of one where you didn’t have to constantly compete for your status as a real man?

I’m inspired to know that the years that humanity has embraced inequality, the coercive domination of others, and warfare as integral parts of society are relatively few — only about 3% of history. It gives me hope that we can continue to build on the past 50 years and move even further in the direction of partnership, egalitarianism, and peace. If instead, you find that threatening and disturbing, that speaks to your own insecurities and the ways that our patriarchal culture has robbed you of some of your humanity.