Yes, Our Ancient Ancestors Were Egalitarian

No, they weren’t ‘noble savages’

Our society is overly focused on the binary: male and female, gay and straight, black and white, win and lose. In such a world, there is little room for nuance, which is I suppose why it’s so difficult for some people to understand that a culture could choose to be actively egalitarian, not because they are “noble savages” but because non-hierarchical cooperative enclaves offered the best chance of survival.

In the past year or so I’ve researched and written around 19 stories about how around 5K years ago cultural class stratifications of various kinds came into being for the first time. Each of my stories contrasts the onset of these domination hierarchies with the egalitarian societies that preceded them. I’ve read dozens of books and scholarly articles from a wide variety of sources, and the conclusions are really inescapable, based not only in the archeological record but in the way that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies function.

A story in New Scientist entitled Why Egalitarian Societies Died Out, has this to say:

“FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*

Decision-making was decentralized and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organized conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defense.”

Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist and primatologist who is currently the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California. He believes that suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution. Enhanced cooperation lowered the risks of Paleolithic life for small, isolated bands of humans and was likely crucial to our survival and evolutionary success.

Organisms that work well in groups tend to have an evolutionary advantage. We have evolved as a highly social species, in part, because it kept us alive. Paleolithic hunter-gather tribes shared their resources amongst the members of their clan and most likely engaged in cooperative breeding as well. In addition, they also traded members with clans nearby in order to prevent inbreeding.

“Small family bands are likely to have interconnected with larger networks, facilitating the exchange of people between groups in order to maintain diversity,” said Professor Martin Sikora, from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. This appears to have been done purposely and with the understanding that genetic diversity was desirable. It was a cooperative strategy undertaken by a highly social species. Science shows us that working together feels good and strife or disconnection feels bad in the same ways that physical pain does. Not only did cooperation and egalitarianism help us to stay alive, but it was self-reinforcing because it also felt good too.

Gender equality in modern hunter-gatherer tribes is highly variable, with some demonstrating quite a bit of true equality and many others where egalitarianism primarily applies only to the men of the tribe. Several factors seem to be a part of this dynamic, including how much the tribe relies on big game for sustenance.

The more that a tribe is truly nomadic and eats for the day (not storing food for several days use) the more gender equity seems to be in evidence. Meat was a relatively small part of the Paleolithic diet and women, therefore, played an important part in the ability of the tribe to feed itself. In fact, it’s been hypothesized that humans became bipedal, not in order to carry weapons but to allow foraging mothers to hold their babies and still carry what they found home to the tribe.

Traditionally, especially among Juǀʼhoansi ǃKung, women generally collect plant foods and water, providing 60%–80% of the group’s sustenance, while men hunt. However, these gender roles are not strict and people do all jobs as needed with little or no shame.

Women generally take care of children and prepare food. However, this does restrict them to their homes, since these activities are generally done with, or close to, others, so women can socialise and help each other. Men are also engaged in these activities.

Bonvillain, Nancy (2001). Women and Men: Cultural Constructs of Gender

Both men and women of the Agta tribes of the Philippines hunt wild boar using dogs.

What is interesting relative to the Agta is that women also have high status in the society in general, and they have a major say in decision-making (Peterson 1978; Barbosa 1985; Goodman 1985). This counterexample is very important. It suggests that human reproductive physiology, in combination with human nature, makes it possible for women to play a major political role in the band — if ecological and cultural arrangements are favorable. For hunter-gatherers in general, it also suggests that it may be primarily the hunting of large game that helps to boost the power of males beyond whatever they are gaining through sexual dimorphism and an exceptional motivation to control females.

Boehm, Christopher (1999–11–30T22:58:59). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior . Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

Up through the Neolithic period, when early agricultural settlements like Çatalhöyük were flourishing, enforced egalitarianism was still the norm. It wasn’t until near the end of the settlement’s existence that more hierarchical societal mechanisms are in evidence. Ian Hodder, who leads the Çatalhöyük Research Project believes that it was a highly developed system of beliefs and rituals that helped the society be cohesive in the absence of leaders.

“He cautions, however, that it may not have been an egalitarian utopia. We believe people in Çatalhöyük were quite equal, but it might not have been the nicest society to live in,” he says. Residents had to submit to a lot of social control — if you didn’t fit in, you presumably left. What Çatalhöyük may show is that such a society only works with strong homogeneity. For many generations, it was very unacceptable for individual households to accumulate [wealth]. Once they started to do so, there is evidence that more problems started to arise.”

Current hunter-gatherer groups enforce egalitarianism through teasing, shunning, banishing, and in very extreme cases, by executing the offender.

When (anthropologist Richard) Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice (of insulting the meat from a kill), the response he received was the following: ‘When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.’ How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways

Our ancestors evolved from small hunter-gatherer tribes of about 20–50 to proto-agricultural societies like that of Çatalhöyük, which had about 10,000 inhabitants at its peak. At about 6–9 thousand years ago, hierarchy and class stratification eventually begins to creep in. Some have theorized that hierarchy was more efficient and productive, which is why it eventually took hold around the world and edged out most egalitarian cultures. In truth, it was just the opposite.

“In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments. This was true whether we modelled inequality as a multi-tiered class society, or as what economists call a Pareto wealth distribution (see “Inequality: The physics of our finances“) — in which, as with the 1 percent, the rich get the lion’s share.

Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies — exactly what we see as we look back in history.

In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural — or physical — extinction of egalitarian societies.”

Read more about this here.

When there are few personal possessions, and ample natural resources are being consumed by a low population density, there is no reason for war. It is only as the population grew and natural disasters impacted the availability of resources that any kind of large scale violence took place.

Lethal group attacks, according to these arguments, emerged only when hunter-gatherer societies grew in size and complexity and later with the birth of agriculture. Archaeology, supplemented by observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, allows us to identify the times and, to some degree, the social circumstances that led to the origins and intensification of warfare.

Many social arrangements impede war, such as cross-group ties of kinship and marriage; cooperation in hunting, agriculture or food sharing; flexibility in social arrangements that allow individuals to move to other groups; norms that value peace and stigmatize killing; and recognized means for conflict resolution. These mechanisms do not eliminate serious conflict, but they do channel it in ways that either prevent killing or keep it confined among a limited number of individuals.

People are people. They fight and sometimes kill. Humans have always had a capacity to make war, if conditions and culture so dictate.

But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10,000 years — and, in most places, much more recently than that. The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe. (emphasis mine). Scientific American

Our ancestors were not noble savages, and modern science has never claimed that they were. They were human beings just like we are, but they kept relative peace and egalitarianism in their communities by the active enforcement of social mores that kept behaviors that were disruptive to those states in check. This reverse dominance hierarchy is still practiced by contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes all around the world. Anthropologist Dr. Peter Gray sums it up nicely:

“There are some variations from culture to culture, of course, and not all of the cultures are quite as peaceful and fully egalitarian as others, but the generalities are the same. 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.”

We know about the lives of our ancient ancestors, not just because of the social systems of modern hunter-gatherers, but also through what the archeology and ancient anthropological study of those societies tells us. We can study tools, and the absence of weapons, as well as cave art, and later on, pottery and other artistic works that depict their way of life. We can study the places where early humans settled, once they did stop roaming and what the properties were of not just the land (open plains vs. a defensive spot on a hill) but also the dwellings themselves and what they contained.

Egalitarianism is a social choice, not an inherent condition that early peoples embraced out of the purity of their hearts. It was an evolutionary strategy that helped us to evolve beyond our primate cousins and helped us to survive a harsh and dangerous world long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation. In fact, it’s becoming more and more clear that it was not Darwinian “survival of the fittest” that propelled our species forward, but instead cooperative strategies such as egalitarianism. Our ancestors weren’t noble savages; they were using the best methods available to them to survive.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.