Intentionality and morality are not needed to form a despotic hierarchy, one in which strong dispositions to competitively dominate inevitably push certain individuals to the top. The despotic social order of chickens, for example, is basically mechanical, with the pyramid of power pointing upward toward a few dominant individuals (Schelderup Ebbe 1922). Nor are complicated intentions or a sense of ethics needed to form an egalitarian society like that of squirrel monkeys (Boinski 1994), in which innate dispositions to compete through dominance are so weak that much of the time little sign of hierarchy is apparent. Their relaxed social order is equally mechanical.
With chimpanzees something rather different is involved. Fundamentally, there is a linear social order for males and a looser hierarchy for females (Goodall 1982, 1986). In this sense chimpanzees are similar to chickens: their intentions are individualistic and fairly immediate as they compete for status, females, and food. When they join in dyadic coalitions to enhance their competition for status, their intentions remain individualistic, and on that basis their community remains far from being an intentional society. It is when a very large group combines to play kingmaker, or routinely curb the power of the alpha male, that a similarity to humans is visible. We have just seen that large coalitions of captive females exhibit something similar to human public-opinion formation—in a context of angry defiance, which leads to a consensus that interferes with the alpha’s dominant behavior. The Gombe males have acted quite similarly, and on a smaller scale comparable behavior has been observed at Mahale. Including Arnhem Zoo and Yerkes, collectively based kingmaker behavior has been reported at four sites; it would be foolish to deny intentionality where the goal is so unambiguous and the actors are obviously collaborating. It would seem that both wild and captive chimpanzees are able to arrive at essentially agreed-on political strategies, sometimes long-term ones, and shape their societies on that basis. Thus, at least a modest element of intentionality is incorporated into their group behavior (Boehm 1991a).
In its outward appearance, this rebellious manipulative behavior of large groups, with attendant waa calls, has the earmarks of what Trivers (1971) refers to as moralistic aggression. Is this behavior actually moral in some sense? Like chickens, chimpanzees have no ethos. Therefore, their society cannot be deemed an intentional one like the moral community of the Hutterites. There the rank and file take over definitively as a group, define their standards with a very strong sense of “ought,” and all but eliminate the group-leadership role (Wilson and Sober 1994). Chimpanzees do exert significant control from below, and more generally de Waal (1996) has attributed to them the possibility of protomorality. What they do not do is put their antiauthoritarian feelings to use in radically redesigning their society on the basis of a morally based political vision. Human morality makes possible such redesign, for once the egalitarian blueprint is in place, a fully unified moral community can dominate or eliminate any individual, no matter how strong, who tries to oppose this vision. Decisive domination from below is not merely episodic, for in small-scale human societies sustained rule by the entire rank and file is quite predictable.
If a small group’s ethos changes in the direction of accepting hereditary personal authority and marked social differences, the reversal of dominance order will be lost: a socially accepted orthodox hierarchy asserts itself instead, as with the Kwakiutl. Even if the ethos does not change, small societies that are stalwartly egalitarian may suffer despotic episodes in which a freedom-loving rank and file become intimidated to the point that the only recourse is assassination. Egalitarian societies are durable, yet at the same time they are vulnerable. In the face of predictable challenges, only a vigilant commitment to an egalitarian lifestyle keeps them equalized.
Was There an Egalitarian Revolution?
How did prehistoric foragers begin intentionally to exchange their orthodox hierarchies for definitively reversed ones? Whallon (1989) has suggested (and I am inclined to agree) that symbolic culture permitted orthodox hierarchies to be replaced by egalitarian hierarchies based on cultural rules. Egalitarian society was a cultural invention, one that put a distinctly competitive, ethologically despotic human nature to radically new political uses.
Another question arises with respect to cultural provenance. Did egalitarianism arrive very quickly, on a revolutionary basis, or was it an instance of very gradual cultural evolution? With the degree of political tension I have documented in Chapters 3 to 5, and with the high predictability of upstarts arising, the origin of such societies might not have been at all gradual. Indeed, to eliminate the alpha role decisively, the rank and file may have needed to use force to displace a specific alpha, and further force to keep his would-be replacements sufficiently cowed to allow an egalitarian situation to stabilize. This hypothesis is speculative, for one can also imagine large, stable coalitions similar to those at Arnhem and Yerkes moving gradually in the direction of increasing their power over the alpha types, until finally they were in a position to eliminate the alpha role entirely. With either scenario, the political tool used by rebellious subordinates would have been the ability to operate in large coalitions that had specific and sophisticated political objectives.
To understand how this type of political capacity managed to develop to the point that stable egalitarian societies were formed by humans, we must consider a series of hypotheses about likely preadaptations. In Vehrencamp’s terms, the purpose is to explain, at the level of phenotype, how a species innately given to despotism could have changed its behavior from despotic to egalitarian. Additional preadaptations to be considered are the invention of hunting weapons, the advent of large-game hunting, and—more basically—the development of a large brain and the linguistic, cognitive, and cultural capacities that accompanied it. For each of these preadaptations, I shall try to specify the window of time during which it is likely to have become available.
Political Preadaptations
Basic Political Dispositions
Let us review some basic characteristics of the political animal in question. To reverse a social dominance hierarchy, “hierarchical tendencies” are needed as a foundation: it is dispositions to dominance and submission that generate human hierarchies (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971, 1989; Masters 1989). Also needed is a shared motivation to rebel against the alpha-male system (Boehm 1993), motivation that is provided by an innate aversion to subordination (Boehm 1994b). This aversion can be considered a third basic political disposition (Boehm 1997a), or as an important but little-examined side effect of the disposition to dominate.
These basic dispositions produced a species likely to engage in direct competition based on dominance and submission. Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1971) makes the point that most primate competition of this type is by bluff, which is in the genetic self-interest of the principals. But he also says that bluffing is coupled with fighting ability, and that sometimes competition in chimpanzees and humans comes down to a physical encounter. It took a species given to competition, bluffing, and fighting to manage to reverse its own hierarchies.
Displacement of Displays by Weapons
In this context we must ask why it is that humans lost dangerous canine teeth and their cloak of bodily hair, both of which were extremely useful to fighting and bluffing, and why sexual dimorphism in human body size has been reduced over the past several million years. Dunbar (1996) points out that in primates, pronounced dimorphism like that of Australopithecines is associated with either harem arrangements or with open, promiscuous mating competition by males, as opposed to permanent pair bonding. The long-term shift suggests to Dunbar a movement from strongly polygamous mating arrangements to mild polygamy. This type of hypothesis began with Darwin, who judged sexual selection to be an extremely powerful force in evolution. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, he posits that men are larger and stronger than women because men must compete for women. He was correct, for we have seen that the one form of dominance behavior that egalitarian hunter-gatherers cannot seem to suppress is the violence that accompanies male competition over females.
In The Origin of Species Darwin suggests that jaws, jaw muscles, and teeth diminished in size after weapons were introduced into human life; people no longer needed powerful natural tools to fight each other or dispatch animals they hunted, a theory also entertained by Washburn (1960). Darwin also considers radical hair loss, which essentially took place everywhere except on the head and where the extremities join the body. He does not link hair loss to lack of intimidation displays, as I shall. While mentioning climate as a possible cause, he favors the theory that the loss of body hair was mainly a function of sexual selection (see also Pilbeam 1972): in effect, aesthetically inclined women were choosing as mates men with less hair on their bodies. This hypothesis has obvious merit.
Wheeler (1985) has a different perspective. He sets aside gross factors of climate, because African apes and many other quadrupedal species that are adapted to tropical settings have retained their body hair. Instead, he proposes that it could have been human bipedalism that led to elimination of bodily hair. Because the human body largely shields itself from the sun with upright posture, hair loss made cooling of the body more efficient, while retention of hair on the head afforded protection from the sun. This environmental hypothesis also may have some merit.
One must keep in mind that such arguments need not compete: natural selection can operate on a multidimensional basis. A politically based hypothesis is possible as well. The arrival of lethal hunting weapons can explain more than the reduction of dimorphism and canine size. Ancestrally, exuberant intimidation displays genetically coevolved with long erectile hair, which is found virtually over the entire bodies of the three African great apes and vestigially with humans. As Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1971) demonstrates, bristling displays were useful to reproductive success because they enabled individuals to exhibit (and exaggerate) their power without having to fight at close range. In this way they could make expedient moves up the social dominance hierarchy, yet usually avoid fights that might hurt their reproductive success. Humans have departed far from African apes in this respect. Except as vestiges, we have neither the innately well-prepared displays nor the profuse bristling bodily hair that accompanied those displays.
When lethal weapons were developed by humans, they could have had profound effects not only on display behavior, but on the quantity of hair. Weapons made possible not only killing at a distance, but far more effective threat behavior; brandishing a projectile could turn into an instant lethal attack with relatively little immediate risk to the attacker. This potent new extrasomatic means of fighting and threatening reduced the natural-selection pressures that for millions of years had been keeping in place apelike canines, innately disposed intimidation displays, and long, erectile body hair.
To consider the immediate effect of weapons, one need only compare chimpanzee killings with human homicides in bands. A hunter can kill another hunter with a weapon in relatively short order, even though weapons are far from being totally efficient (Lee 1979). By contrast, it is likely to take an individual chimpanzee some time to kill another, and lethal outcomes are rare in one-on-one combat. Indeed, it takes a group of several male chimpanzees ten to twenty minutes of ferocious gang attack to do in a stranger they catch while on patrol (Goodall 1986).
In Homo erectus and Anatomically Modern Humans, weapons are likely to have been used in defending against predators, scavenging, hunting, seeking dominance in one’s own group, and threatening other groups; preadaptations for such behavior definitely existed. Wrangham and Peterson (1996:180) tell about watching a chimpanzee displace a large male baboon from a tree by hitting him from a distance with his fist, which kept the chimpanzee out of range of the baboon’s very dangerous canine teeth. They connect this behavior with the chimpanzee’s adaptation to swinging with powerful arms, and point out that chimpanzees thus are preadapted for weapons use. They feel that use of wooden clubs is within the behavioral possibilities of extant chimpanzees, and with respect to human evolution they make the case that sexual selection would favor increased upper-body strength because it made males better able to fight by boxing, or to grasp and use weapons.
Wrangham and Peterson do not carry their analysis to the point of emphasizing the importance of weapons invention for human dominance, competition, and aggression more generally, but it does seem likely that the mutual ancestor was well preadapted physically for weapons use. Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1971), arguing similarly, demonstrates that chimpanzees engage in a variety of behaviors involving found objects in their agonistic contests. Behaviors range from throwing pieces of vegetation or stones into the air while displaying, to aiming projectiles, and (under Kortlandt’s filmed situation of contrivance) to clubbing a stuffed leopard as flailing displays turned into direct attacks. Calvin (1983) has emphasized throwing ability as a factor in human evolution, but it is significant that chimpanzees do not use clubs or aimed projectiles in their fights within the group, or in attacking strangers, or in hunting. Weapons of whatever variety do not level differences of physical strength, gymnastic ability, and dentition when chimpanzees fight.
McGrew (1992) discusses weapons at some length, pointing out that some “lithic technology” is present in nonhuman species. He cites the use of stones as defensive weapons by baboons in three different regions, even though these “instruments” are found, rather than fabricated, objects. At four out of eight sites he surveyed (McGrew 1992:180), chimpanzees throw missiles but they are used in conjunction with display and bluffing behavior or at very early stages of attack, rather than as tools for disabling or killing. Indeed, even to one who has carefully watched Kortlandt’s remarkable film of the stuffed leopard experiment, the chimpanzees’ aggressive use of found objects (sticks) seems to be much more an extension of bluffing behavior than a mode of serious physical attack. When Byrne and Byrne (1988) observed Mahale chimpanzees who had cornered a leopardess, they did not use weapons, even though a chimpanzee was able to capture one of her cubs and kill it. Nor were objects used in my videotaped python-mobbing episode at Gombe, aside from swaying branches high in trees as an enhanced bluffing behavior.
Thus, a preadaptation for weapons use appears to have been present in the mutual ancestor but was not highly developed. Nor were lethal weapons necessarily present with early hominids. Ardrey (1966), stimulated by Dart (1959), had Australopithecines going to war with weapons, but Montagu (1976) argued forcefully, with the help of Brain’s (1972, 1981) interpretations, that Australopithecine-fashioned stone tools were used for purposes other than killing.
How do these insights affect egalitarianism? When killing becomes both easy and rapid, the balance of power between two combatants becomes more a matter of skill in tool use than a matter of canine size, jaw strength, and body size and strength. As will be seen through some vivid ethnographic examples, a strong element of chance is involved in who strikes the first lethal blow. Furthermore, while a larger individual may still have an advantage over a smaller in wielding a weapon such as a spear, he also presents a larger target when it comes to spearing, clubbing, or throwing a projectile.
Woodburn (1982) has made the point that, with hunting weapons, it is possible to take out one’s adversary by ambush or during sleep. Thus, after weapons arrived, the camp bully became far more vulnerable. Such political equalization could have had meaning as a preadaptation for an egalitarian cultural revolution, particularly if one considers the combined weaponry of a group of rebellious subordinates being directed at a single too-aggressive alpha. The latter could be readily dispatched at a safe distance or driven from the group, with little immediate physical risk to the rebels.
In exemplifying the effect of weapons on the political life of extant foragers, we turn again to Lee’s (1984:93–95) excellent ethnography. He describes in detail a conflict among a number of Kalahari forager band members, in which the basic issue is two males fighting over a female one of them intends to take as a second wife.
Two men, Debe and Bo, were fighting for the hand of a woman, Tisa. This is a composite account of two participants, Debe and Kashe, men now in their fifties. Debe reported:
Bo started it by refusing me a wife. I wanted to marry Tisa, and her mother and father gave me permission, but Bo had already married Tisa’s older sister and he wanted to take her as a second wife, so he refused me.
There was a big argument, and fighting broke out. Bo yelled at my younger sister, “What is your brother doing marrying my wife? I’m going to kill you!” He shot an arrow at her and missed. Then Bo came up to me to kill me, but my father came to my aid. Then Samkau came to Bo’s aid. Samkau shot at me but missed; my father speared Samkau in the chest under the armpit. Samkau’s father, Gau, seeing his own son speared, came to his aid and fired a poisoned arrow into my father’s thigh. I was shooting at Bo but missed him.
The narrative continues with the account of Kashe, the brother of Tisa.
Then Debe’s father, Hxome, stabbed at Gau with his spear. Gau put up his hand to protect himself and the spear went right through it. Samkau rushed at Hxome with his spear and tried to spear him in the ribs. At first the spear jammed, but then it went through.
In the meantime several side fights were going on. My older brother dodged several arrows and then shot Debe’s sister in the shoulder blade (she lived). I dodged arrows by two men and then hit one of them in the foot with a poisoned arrow.
After being hit with a poisoned arrow in the thigh and speared in the ribs Hxome fell down, mortally wounded. Half-sitting, half-lying down, he called for allies. “I’m finished, my arms are stilled. At least shoot one of them for me.”
But no more shooting happened that day. We went away and came back the next morning to see Hxome writhing in his death throes. He had been given cuts to draw off the poison, but the poison was in too deep, and he died. We left N=/=wama.
This account makes it clear that foragers do form political coalitions (primarily male), and that their weapons make them lethal fighters in spite of all the times their arrows miss as others dodge them. Lee discusses a number of strings of retaliatory killings that have taken place after !Kung homicides, then returns to the quarrel we are examining. (Keep in mind from here on that there are two men named Debe, who are allies.)
The !Kung do have one method of last resort, a trump card, for bringing a string of homicides to an end. I listened with amazement to my informant Debe as he unfolded an incredible tale of passion and revenge. This is a continuation of the case discussed above.
After my father’s murder, Debe, a man who was my !kun!a [older namesake] complained, “Now my namesake Debe has no father, but Samkau still has a father. Why is this?”
I said, “You are right. I am going to kill Bo, who started it all.”
“No,” Debe said, “Bo is just a youngster, but Gau is a senior man, a n!ore [waterhole] owner, and he is the one who has killed another n!ore owner, Hxome. I am going to kill him so that n!ore owners will be dead on both sides.”
One evening Debe walked right into Gau’s camp and without saying a word shot three arrows into Gau, one in the left shoulder, one in the forehead, and a third in the chest. Gau’s people made no move to protect him. After the three arrows were shot, Gau still sat facing the attacker. Then Debe raised his spear as if to stab him. But Gau said, “You have hit me three times. Isn’t that enough to kill me, that you want to stab me too?”
When Gau tried to dodge away from the spear, Gau’s people came forward to disarm Debe of his spear. Having been so badly wounded, Gau died quickly, but made no further move to harm Debe. However, fearing more trouble, some of our people brought in the Tswana man Isak to mediate the dispute (Lee 1984:95–96).
Gau’s group made no move to defend him, so what took place was perhaps a socially sanctioned execution. In the absence of manufactured weapons the outcome would have been far less certain, for Debe would have been matching his ability to fight tooth and nail or to pick up and use objects like stones, against Gau’s ability to do the same.
Gau’s political history was sufficiently checkered that his group might have been happy to get rid of him, for he was prone to conflict. He already had started a lengthy feud by killing a man with a spear, then killed a man in the group who attempted to retaliate. He killed a third man when his enemies attacked again. Several others were also killed or wounded in these fights (Lee 1984:94). Gau may well fit the tribal profile we saw earlier, of an incorrigible aggressor who dominates his group sufficiently that they cannot easily take care of the problem, and who essentially is given over to his enemies because his own group wants to be rid of him.
Of three other !Kung instances of killers being executed, one is worth citing for details of how hunter-gatherers as a group go about using weapons to execute someone who is overaggressive.
In the most dramatic case on record, a man named/Twi had killed three other people, when the community, in a rare move of unanimity, ambushed and fatally wounded him in full daylight. As he lay dying, all the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until, in the words of one informant, “he looked like a porcupine.” Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death. (Lee 1979:00)
This group execution involved the entire moral community that made the decision, and active participation by each person obviated the possibility of precisely targeted revenge. It may seem puzzling that the females participated, but remember that they were full members of the moral community.
To summarize, weapons made men more dangerous to one another and thereby mitigated differences of size or strength in fighting. Bluffing behavior as well was transformed. Brandishing a spear conveys an immediate and lethal threat, one that can be carried out at a distance. By contrast, jumping around on the ground and bristling one’s hair merely telegraphs an attack that often is avoidable through flight. Weapons not only made the outcomes of dyadic fights far less predictable; as we have seen, they also made it much easier for a group to implement extreme sanctions against a powerful or overaggressive deviant. If a deviant was truly intimidating (as human serial killers are), capital punishment would be unlikely in the absence of reasonably efficient killing tools. It is for this reason that use of efficient hunting weapons was critical to the definitive reversing of hierarchies in prehistoric bands.
My hypothesis is that weapons appeared early enough to have affected dentition, body size, hair loss on the body, and display loss, and that they helped to ready humans for egalitarian society by making fights less predictable and by enabling groups collectively to intimidate or eliminate even a dominating serial killer. When was this possible? Brace (1995), with a particular interest in Neanderthals, points out that the hafted spear point was present in the Middle Pleistocene epoch in Africa (see also Brooks 1988; Shea 1988), and he feels that the thrown hunting spear, as opposed to spears used for jabbing, could have radically changed the natural-selection forces that determined bodily robustness. This thesis accounts neatly for the first appearance of reduced robustness being in Africa, and it also provides a conservative time frame for the appearance of hunting weapons that could have helped to equalize human males, politically speaking. (Brace does not mention the political consequences I have discussed above, nor does he link the advent of projectile spears with formidable hafted stone heads to loss of apelike body hair or displays.)
Thrown spears could have been present much earlier than the Middle Pleistocene, for a wooden spear is light to carry yet heavy enough to do serious damage. Such weapons are likely to have preceded large-game hunting for two reasons. One is that humans on savannas may have needed to carry weapons constantly to repel predators; this could have been a factor in the development of advanced bipedality, with body size becoming smaller as a useful trade-off. The other reason is that if humans scavenged actively, they had to cope with competing scavengers. Wooden spears would leave no trace in the archaeological record, but as readily carried weapons, they could have changed the nature of fighting and bluffing within the group early in human evolution. A more conservative estimate is that weapons were in a position to transform political behavior by 500,000 years ago, a figure that provides fully 20,000 generations for weapons to affect the genetic selection of body size and build, display behavior, canine size, distribution of hair on the body, and possibly bipedal efficiency.
Cognitive Preadaptations
Political Intelligence
To reverse the direction of dominance definitively in a social hierarchy, substantial cognitive ability is required. Otherwise humans could not strategize politically in the context of alliance formation. Coalitions are prominent among primates and other highly social species (Harcourt and de Waal 1992); surely the Common Ancestor possessed an adequate ability to strategize that evolved in the context of limited coalition behavior. The mutual ancestor not only engaged in small, dyadic coalitions of females or males, but also acted in larger coalitions. We have seen that the contexts would have included not only territorial interactions, mobbing of predators, and hunting, but rejection of certain alpha-male candidates. Sufficient political intelligence was present, preadaptively, that large numbers of subordinates were able to engage in effectively rebellious activities that took significant power from those at the top of the hierarchy—an ability that required a relatively large brain.
Dunbar (1996) has an interesting theory in this regard. He believes that as neocortical size increases, more subtle social and political strategies, such as tactical deception, come into play. As a result, lower-ranking individuals are able to find loopholes in the social dominance hierarchy. Their special cognitive capacity enables them to improve their reproductive success in spite of low rank. This thinking is directly in line with the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis (Whiten and Byrne 1988, 1997), but let me stress that the political invention of egalitarian society enabled subordinates to forgo or supplement strategies of tactical deception. Instead of tricking dominants into losing reproductive success, subordinates ganged up on their superiors and advanced their reproductive interests by aggressively bluffing, and by employing brute force if necessary.
Banding together in this way, on a long-term, stable basis, can be viewed as a special product of political intelligence (Boehm 1997a). It leads to a type of calculation that involves complicated assessments of power situations. Chimpanzees already have this ability, as de Waal (1982) and Goodall (1986) have demonstrated, and bonobos too use power coalitions with sophistication (Kano 1992). But when the mutual-ancestor type of political intelligence is enhanced by a very large human brain, the result can be the formation of huge, stable, purposeful coalitions that create new patterns of group behavior.
Morality, egalitarianism, and warfare are three special products of this political capacity. In humans, it seems safe to assume that the larger the brain, the greater the degree of political intelligence and the higher the probability that subordinate coalitions could definitively suppress alpha-type behavior. Humans were ready to form moral communities and reverse their dominance hierarchies 100,000 years ago, and probably considerably earlier. The brain of later Homo erectus may well have provided such potential.
Actuarial Intelligence
A different application of human brainpower also is relevant. For lack of an established term, I refer to it as “actuarial intelligence” (see also Boehm 1999b). I mean the intuitive human capacity, seen abundantly in hunter-gatherers, to think stochastically and to understand rather complex systems on an intuitive but statistically valid, predictive basis. Regardless of what drove human brains to be so large, one product was the generalized capacity to understand and manipulate complex systems of various types.
An example is the natural environment. In dealing with human subsistence behavior, behavioral ecologists work with models borrowed from the analysis of other species, essentially considering humans as though they were reacting instinctively to their environments. At the same time, they know that extant hunter-gatherers are making conscious calculations about their environments, discussing them and arriving at common migration decisions as they make their often-precarious livings (Mithen 1990). Humans, with their complex ways of deciding how to shield themselves from hunger, thirst, and predators, come very close to approximating the subsistence strategies of other animals—innately well-prepared subsistence strategies that have the benefit of thousands of generations of natural selection. My point is that hunter-gatherers’ cognized strategies lead them to behavior that is quite close to that predicted by behavioral ecology, but that with humans the behavior is based on important (if limited) insight into environments and subsistence possibilities.
A capacity for understanding complex systems also comes into play in the socioeconomic sphere. It is ethnographically well established that meat in large packets is always shared, and that this reduces family-level variance in protein intake (Kelly 1995). Sharing meat does not always go smoothly, but mobile hunter-gatherers do manage to share their large-game meat at times when sharing is useful. It is reasonable to assume that band members understand why meat sporadically acquired in large packets needs to be shared, whereas plentiful small tubers should be consumed by households individually.
I am suggesting that intuitively these actors comprehend the overall, long-term effects of sharing, even though many may be unable to articulate their reasoning to an ethnographer. One need only consider the elaborate, highly contrived Netsilik Eskimo system of sharing seal body parts (see Van de Velde 1956) to realize that variance reduction is precisely what these people were seeking when they created the system. These hunters shared seal meat spontaneously within their nuclear and extended families; their elaborately specified system of redistribution applied only to households that were not connected by close kinship. They knew exactly what they were doing when they created an extremely rule-bound system that effectively equalized meat intake among unrelated families. The statistical effect is that total meat and blubber intake was equalized for the entire multifamily hunting camp.
Sharing selectively is widespread. Hawkes (1992:22) sums up some relevant findings on Ache foragers, saying that Kaplan, Hill, and others have
noted the wide variation in the extent to which different kinds of food resources are shared. They tested several hypotheses about this variation on observations of the foraging Ache of Eastern Paraguay. The data show the Ache to be notable sharers: on average three quarters of what anyone eats was acquired by someone outside the consumer’s nuclear family. Some resources are more likely to go to close kin, but other kinds of resources show no such kin-biased sharing. The extent of this sharing is positively correlated with the average package size of resources and the unpredictability of securing them. As Kaplan and associates noted, wide sharing of large and unpredictable resources reduces the variance in daily consumption, lessening the risk of a hungry day.
Hunter-gatherers use their actuarial intelligence to come up with other “insurance programs” as well (Boehm 1999b). Within the family people look out for one another in many ways, and kin selection helps them ultimately to arrive at nepotistic strategies of sharing and caretaking. Similar practices apply at the level of the band as a whole, and they are heavily based on actuarial sophistication. If I help an incapacitated nonkinsman to move when migration is necessary, I know that socially this is not an isolated act. Rather, it is a contribution to the long-range system of reciprocity by which nonkinsmen in the band may someday assist me if I become incapacitated. The implications are far-reaching, for this generalized helping behavior cannot be laid at the doorstep of something as simple as reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1971). The person I am helping may not be living when my turn comes, or I may have moved to a different band. Long-term, generalized reciprocity has been discussed by Alexander (1987), and it is characteristic of hunting bands. Ultimately, such altruism is difficult to explain in terms of sociobiology, and in the next chapter I shall demonstrate that political egalitarianism helped to change human nature in this respect.
Whatever their ultimate basis, band-wide sharing and cooperative systems depend heavily on actuarial calculations. This statement may be difficult to prove ethnographically, but I believe nonliterate people understand full well that anyone can experience a crippling hunting accident, or become seriously ill, or grow old—and that there is long-term individual advantage in participating in such a security net. I have not used the term “actuary” recklessly. These long-term safety nets are kept consistent with resources: when they must, hunter-gatherers quickly abandon the incapacitated (see, for example, Balikci 1970). As intuitive statisticians, they know when the system they have created is becoming too costly, and they adjust it accordingly. (Modern actuaries deal with similar problems in designing health care plans.)
To keep such systems operative and efficient requires a large brain, for future effects of present actions must be calculated in complicated ways. Similar modes of thinking take place in moral communities. People intuitively understand the social systems in which they are embedded, and they create and uphold moral rules because they can predict the long-term effects of the absence of such rules—that is, what would take place if they were not enforced. This imaginativeness involves not only an appreciation of small groups and their social and political dynamics, but an intuitive understanding of human nature—of the types of impulses and drives that are likely to cause trouble. Proscriptions against bullying and serious deception are universal precisely because of the conflict they bring (Boehm 1982b).
At the same time, people try to manipulate their social systems in prosocial directions: they regularly preach in favor of cooperation, generosity, and altruism, and they reward such behavior. I do not suggest that all positive social functions are the result of planning, or that such planning is anything like omnipotent. Obviously, rationality is bounded (Simon 1976). Also, humans may continue egregiously maladaptive behaviors even when they appear to possess adequate diagnostic information (Edgerton 1992). But in many cases, complicated social, political, and ecological outcomes are guided by our capacity to manipulate and plan (Boehm 1978, 1991a).
It is easy to overlook this unobvious and indigenous theorizing, precisely because in our own culture we are used to having academics make virtually everything painfully explicit—including even the workings of the subconscious mind! We devote substantial funds to studying our own systems formally, and we train actuaries for years before they begin to inform our insurance programs. The comparable actuarial accomplishments of hunter-gatherers may be difficult to document ethnographically, but they are extremely important to the way these people make a living and maintain social rules.
This actuarial capacity applies directly to egalitarian politics. I have suggested already that hunter-gatherers develop intuitive political blueprints as part of their group traditions. We have examined some of the product, in the form of predictable behavioral preferences and aversions that reveal the egalitarian ethos. It is because people are concerned with creating a special kind of political equilibrium, one that enables them to enjoy great personal autonomy, that we find them regularly placing generosity and humility on their list of desirable attributes. Because they want to keep in check domination tendencies that would impinge on their autonomy, they also proscribe behaviors likely to lead to ugly domination episodes. Such episodes are infrequent, yet the possibility of domination’s getting out of hand seems to be well understood even when an egalitarian political system is in place.
When the !Kung insult not only the meat but (in effect) the hunting prowess of skilled or fortunate hunters, they are not seeking merely an immediate suppression of domination tendencies. They are thinking about their group life as a whole, and about the possibility that if some stronger individual emerges, he may eventually try to boss other men—or turn into a menacing killer who is capable of despotism. We are fortunate that Lee is so adept an ethnographer, and that he had an unusually articulate informant who could make this fear of homicide explicit. Kalahari foragers understand the political dynamics of their bands all too well, and they shape political and social life accordingly. The same is true elsewhere, as we have witnessed in the case of the Utku.
Human degrees of political and actuarial intelligence are functions of an outsized brain. Because the human brain was enlarging significantly over a period of more than a million years, we must assume, in the absence of very specific information, that these two types of cognitive capacity also were increasing along something like a continuum. They surely were becoming fully developed 100,000 years ago, and probably were already quite highly developed 200,000 years ago. This preadaptation aided in the formation of egalitarian communities, for these two closely related types of intelligence made it possible for social dominance hierarchies to be definitively, and stably, reversed. To create such systems, humans had to understand them systematically, and they also required morality.
Communication Capacity
Morality is inextricably entangled with language, a fact that has strong relevance to the moralistic suppression of alpha types and other upstarts by human egalitarian communities that deal with deviance. The profiles of respectable versus deviant main political actors are readily communicated. Furthermore, gossiping provides an information network that enables an entire group to respond to transgressions on a well-informed and collective basis. Foragers dealing with dispersed resources cannot stay together all day, so the issue of specific and detailed communication is highly pertinent to building a moral consensus. If a cunning dominator begins to act the bully by picking on isolated group members one at a time, the entire band quickly learns about such behavior and grasps the pattern.
At Arnhem Zoo and the Yerkes Research Center, female chimpanzees managed as subordinates to undermine alpha-male power quite thoroughly. We have seen that their affectively expressive vocalizations helped them to arrive at decisions to unite and collectively stop a bullying incident. This type of communication does not, however, permit the sharing of detailed behavior profiles, or the exchange of specific information in tracking individuals and watching for incipient signs of deviance, or the discussion of what constitutes a desirable political milieu.
A definitive reversal of the flow of power in bands requires some kind of vision of the kind of political society that is desired. Such a vision is based on the sort of political and actuarial intelligence we have just discussed, but also on a culturally based capacity to communicate in specifics. The very fluid, emotionally focused systems of communication in the great apes, although effective, are limited to a rather immediate context. Yet I do not underestimate these other hominoids. In chimpanzees, a substantial cultural capacity makes possible group behavioral traditions (Goodall 1985, 1986; Nishida 1987; see also Wrangham et al. 1994), and collective problem-solving is a part of such traditions. The Yerkes females made an urgent decision on the basis of increasingly consensual defiant vocalizations, which emboldened them to act as a group and sanction their own leader. When wide social disapproval of this type takes place in captivity or in the wild, as it did at Gombe, with vocalizations playing an important part, is this not close to what we see in small moral communities of our own species?
Let us look again at the waa call. In the Yerkes incident (de Waal 1996), at first the scattered waas of a few females could be classified contextually as defiant but subordinate. As the vocal consensus grew, contextually the hostile defiance became dominant, assertive enough to make the alpha male take notice. If we set aside the issue of ethics, this episode could be considered an analogue to human deviance and social control. Collective outrage over the bullying behavior is identifiable, and the collective aggression of the females was used strategically to manipulate the behavior of the alpha male. Functionally, this behavior can be likened to the ostracism directed at Briggs by the Utku. Her band used its own brand of moralistic aggression to deal with a social transgression, but at the same time it was willing to have her remain as a member of the group and even reinstate her if her behavior changed. By contrast, the intervention of the Gombe males on behalf of Wilkie to head off Goblin’s comeback as alpha male is similar to very strong ostracism in humans—that is, to temporary expulsion from the group.
These functional analogies are suggestive. Still, one must ask whether the chimpanzee sanctioning is merely immediate, as opposed to human operations in a morally based context that looks to the future. The well-described female coalition at Arnhem Zoo can contribute here, for this female rebellion is highly routinized and stable. The Arnhem females may be inferior to the males in fighting power, just as members of a human band are individually afraid of their more aggressive deviants. Yet these female chimpanzees have enough confidence in their coalition partners to control certain aspects of alpha-male behavior, in a routinized pattern that has been going on for years.
De Waal’s (1982) analysis suggests that the Arnhem females are operating on an intentional basis, so they may be said to have goals—perhaps even “values” insofar as the goals seem to be shared. They regularly cut down the power of males and circumscribe their roles, a pattern reminiscent of egalitarian sanctioning and social control. However, their behavioral preferences remain implicit in their behavior; in the absence of spoken symbolic language, they can neither formalize their behavioral preferences into a “moral code” nor exchange detailed information about the deviant behavior of which they disapprove.
It seems, then, that a definitive step in the direction of moral behavior cannot be taken in the absence of communication with displacement (Hockett 1963). In this context, “displacement” means that a subordinate who wants to combine forces with other subordinates to limit alpha power can communicate about something that does not exist in the here and now. For example, one can speak (pejoratively) about the past actions of a bully when he caught someone off by himself. One can even look to the future and discuss the likelihood of an individual’s unchecked domination behavior turning into despotism that will be unbearable to the group.
The capacity of wild chimpanzees to communicate with displacement appears to be limited (Boehm 1991b; Clark and Wrangham 1993). Chimpanzees are so competent at reading behavioral contexts that often this deficiency is not important, but an anecdote from a videotaped episode at Gombe illustrates the limits of chimpanzee communication. Alpha male Goblin returns to a small subgroup of his community after an absence. An adult female, recently bothered by a male, begins to scream, gesticulate, and posture in a way that eloquently enlists the alpha’s help and clearly indicates her adversary by the direction in which she faces. With aggressive gestures and agonistic vocalizations, she alternates her attention between Goblin and the male chimpanzee, and it is not extreme to suggest that Goblin is reading the context well enough to know that there has been some kind of prior grievance. Obviously, such communication would be more effective if the precise nature of the prior offense could be conveyed—and more effective still if it were verbally verified by a reliable third party.
The period of gruesome intragroup cannibalism at Gombe is similarly instructive (Goodall 1982, 1986). Adult female Passion with her adult daughter Pom systematically hunted the infants of other mothers, eating them as they would consume any prey, and perhaps took nearly a dozen infants in this way. With a high-ranking male present, these two females certainly could not have achieved their captures in the face of fiercely resisting mothers; but because chimpanzee mothers so often forage alone, plenty of opportunities arose. There were incidents in which victimized females enlisted male support long after the fact, but the males behaved as though they had no idea as to what was going on—and probably did not. On the basis of these and other behaviors, Goodall (1982) judged “law” to be absent in chimpanzee communities. In effect, she says, chimpanzees’ social order results from the fact that a social dominance hierarchy automatically channels aggressive behavior, and does so quite efficiently.
What about human degrees of egalitarianism as a result of moralistic social control? A semantically potent verbal language, combined with morality as we now know it, might not have been absolutely necessary to suppress alpha-male domination on a continuing basis. However, a more advanced medium of communication, with some degree of displacement, would have greatly facilitated the task of inventing—and maintaining—such an inherently precarious political arrangement. It is the verbally elaborated egalitarian ethos that serves as a social “gyroscope” in this respect, for the ethos provides a rather precise blueprint for group members to follow.
When a band is preoccupied with keeping down dominance behavior on a continuous basis, it is no surprise that the ethos reflects this concern. The manifestations of the ethos we encountered in earlier chapters were merely the tip of an elaborate cognitive and affective iceberg, a system of values based on symbolic culture as humans know it. As a practical matter, communication of specifics was vital in identifying behaviors that needed to be suppressed or rewarded. Indeed, if we turn from the ethos to gossiping and sanctioning behavior, displacement in communication is critical to these processes—particularly in a fission-fusion group. We have seen that people can report on factors removed from the here and now. Also, one group member can tell another something that was merely told to him or her. This is oral tradition, which informs the moral process. It incorporates past crises with present solutions, including knowledge about political domination episodes and executions. The closer our ancestors moved from protolanguage to language as we know it, the better their ability to form richly communicative moral communities, and to definitively reverse the flow of power in their bands so that individual autonomy could be maximized.
When was human language first up to this task? Recent works by Lieberman and Dunbar may help us here. Lieberman (1998) believes that vocal communication, rather than the gestural communication suggested by Hewes (1973), was crucial as the precursor to human spoken language. He has analyzed the attendant brain functions, particularly voluntary control of the acoustical productions that make human speech articulation both rapid and efficient. What is needed is vowels that can be decoded with little ambiguity, and a modern vocal tract that permits “stops” that form consonants. His emphasis is on the emergence of fully developed language as we know it, and his best date for its origin is about 100,000 years ago. The people involved were Anatomically Modern Humans, whose vocal apparatus appears to have been as modern as the rest of their anatomy.
Assuming general agreement on this date, we still face the problem that a staged series of increasingly potent “protolanguages” surely preceded spoken language. If an advanced protolanguage could have facilitated the permanent overthrow of alpha types, our window opens to a period of, say, several hundred thousand years. Lieberman allows Neanderthals a rather effective protolanguage and he suggests that Homo erectus, with its sizable brain, was also likely to have used some kind of protolanguage
Lieberman (1998) links language ability and cognitive capacity as coevolved features, both being tied directly to cranial capacity. Dunbar’s (1996) book on gossiping and the evolution of language focuses on the connection between language, social behavior, and the neocortex. He takes gossiping to be the functional equivalent of primate grooming, receiving positive selection pressure because the resulting social and political alliances are individually beneficial. Dunbar sees this as a force in language evolution, and he may well be right, but gossiping has other functions as well. In fact, it is curious that Dunbar wrote an entire book on the evolutionary role of gossiping without more emphasis on its role in the transmission of information about deviance in prehistoric human moral communities. He alludes briefly to the possibilities for controlling cheaters, but leaves it at that.
My own assessment is that once language permitted the transmission of detailed and specific information with displacement, a preadaptive readiness was in place for the invention of moral communities that could support egalitarianism. Such communities required not only an advanced type of communication, but the political intelligence needed to operate in large coalitions and actuarial intelligence sufficient to manipulate dominance hierarchies in ways that were radical.
Sharing of Large-Game Meat
A more specific preadaptation that could have further enhanced the chances of a band’s definitively suppressing alpha-male domination behavior is the vigilant sharing of meat (see Erdal and Whiten 1994, 1996). We have seen that such behavior is widespread among extant foragers when large or even medium-sized game is taken sporadically, and we have seen that chimpanzees at Gombe also share large packets of meat—at the whim of an adult male who controls it aggressively. In spite of bickering and emotional flare-ups among the “beggars,” meat is distributed to various adult chimpanzees, not necessarily to all of them at each event (Stanford 1998a; see also Teleki 1973). In the Tai Forest of West Africa, the chimpanzees appear to share meat more routinely, possibly because they are more dependent on cooperation in hunting. However, a selfish advantage still goes to the actual hunter and to those of higher rank (Boesch 1994).
The human hunter-gatherer approach is different, for the amount of large-game meat individuals receive is only moderately contingent on hunting ability (Kelly 1995). Indeed, a conscious and watchful orientation to equalization prevails, and a variety of cultural devices have been invented to ensure that all the households in a band share fairly evenly.
One interpretation is that the less productive hunters are forcing the more proficient to “pay tribute” to them (Hand 1986; see also Blurton-Jones 1984). Another explanation (which I favor) is that everyone realizes, first, that they must share to avoid feast or famine disadvantages and, second, that whoever is temporarily the killer of meat is likely to want to take a larger share because of selfish motives. The group anticipates such problems and sets up rules adequate to even out meat consumption. It makes sense that the better hunters and their families would be more ambivalent about this system than others; but during harder times, when kills become extremely sporadic for even the best hunters, the need to reduce intake variation over time becomes obvious indeed.
The meat-sharing habit of nomadic foragers is transformed by language and morality so that definitive rules exist. Stigmatized roles such as “cheater” or “selfish bully” are labeled (and sanctioned) to make the system work in spite of predictable conflicts. This moralistic approach works reasonably well in curbing individual selfishness or tendencies to dominate, precisely because the group knows how to become aggressive in dealing with those it labels as deviants. An armed group can be exceedingly dangerous to any deviant—even the most powerful and aggressive hunter in the group—and hunters are always armed.
If we think of large-game hunting as an activity that made bullies a special problem as meat-sharing became important, then hunting (or scavenging) could actually have triggered the invention of social control. During glacial episodes it is safe to say that dependency on large game, as opposed to small game and plant foods, became strong or possibly overwhelming—just as it is at many times of year for most Eskimos. If we take into account increasing brain size as a measure of actuarial ability, some means of socially regulated variance-reduction behavior becomes possible from the Middle Pleistocene on, and this capability could have been one factor in humans’ growing expertise in both political leveling (Erdal and Whiten 1996) and moral sanctioning (Boehm 1997a).
Moral Communities and Moralistic Blueprints
Along the way I have discussed many aspects of morality as a human development useful to (and probably necessary for) the rise of stable, effective egalitarianism. Collectively creating and maintaining an egalitarian society requires a high degree of political intelligence and a systematic understanding of political dynamics and outcomes. It also requires a political capacity to operate in large coalitions and a cognitive capacity to arrive at a shared plan of action. Deciding to move vigorously against an aggressive deviant can be a politically risky act, so it is necessary for the rank and file to feel they are acting together, or at least for the leading “moralists” to sense the potential force of their group solidly behind them. A preexisting shared conception of group goals stimulates such solidarity, and that is where cognitive “blueprints” fit in.
I have chosen this term as a way of emphasizing that humans are able to communicate in great detail, and that groups can develop precise notions about the kind of society in which they wish to live. An extreme example would be the small modern “intentional communities” we have examined, while some Marxian socialist states have tried to implement egalitarian blueprints on a very broad scale. These will be discussed further, but their success has been limited when it comes to the state’s withering away. By contrast, a typical hunter-gatherer band succeeds extremely well in keeping its egalitarian blueprint in effect: if some are “firsts,” they must be firsts among equals.
Mobile hunter-gatherers agree that individual tendencies to compete and dominate must not only be countered where upstartism becomes serious, but must be suppressed continuously—on a preemptive basis. Certainly a shared goal is in place, for the emancipated subordinates who collectively keep this program going want to enjoy a high degree of individual autonomy. The underlying plan has the advantage of being believed in strongly. For one thing, at the level of human nature is the predictable individual resentment of subordinates toward those who would dominate them by taking more than they give. In this arena antiauthoritarian feelings, when expressed collectively, create group political intransigence. Then too, moral feelings of inappropriateness enhance these feelings even as they focus them in the direction of social sanctioning. Bullying intimidation is no longer a normal but resented aspect of daily life: it is singled out as a type of heavily proscribed deviance—just like lying, theft, murder, or incest. It is commitment to such a moralistically conceived blueprint that enables a stable coalition of potential subordinates to dictate the tenor of political life in the band, and thereby remain politically autonomous as individuals.
Elsewhere I have offered competing scenarios about how this egalitarian arrangement came into being. In the first scenario, I saw morality as an absolute prerequisite for the emergence of egalitarian bands (Boehm 1982b). The idea was that once groups of humans began to proscribe and control behaviors like incest, rape, adultery, cheating, and murder, they were in position to overthrow their alphas and permanently dispose of the alpha role by classifying it as deviant. In the second scenario, excessive domination was the very first behavior to be proscribed and sanctioned as early moral communities formed (Boehm 1997a), and this measure was the result of trying to institutionalize a popular revolt that succeeded. Once bands had coalesced to eliminate domination behavior, it was easy enough to expand the scope of sanctioning and suppress other troublesome behavior. There is no need to choose between these two scenarios, for either accounts for the origination of egalitarian political orders.
How Quickly Did Egalitarianism Appear?
Let us consider cultural variables. My conservative guess is that egalitarian society as we know it appeared, at the very latest with Anatomically Modern Humans. The preadaptations were solidly in place 100,000 years ago, and special stimulation from the physical environment may not have been necessary. Subordinate resentment of domination, the ability to form large coalitions, and the capacity of such coalitions to dominate or eliminate a bully with their combined weaponry were sufficient to momentarily eliminate an alpha-type individual, and the advent of moral communities made it possible to stabilize such episodes. In effect, egalitarianism could have arisen simply because humans became culturally able to form moral communities and were prone to rebel against dominant authority.
However, world environments were subject to dramatic climatic fluctuations between 128,000 years ago and 72,000 years ago, fluctuations that were unusually extreme and unusually frequent (Potts 1996). Two environmental hypotheses are possible with respect to this instability. First, hunting or active or passive scavenging of large game would have periodically caused meat to become dominant in the human diet, and second, population displacements would have been very frequent in many parts of the populated world, a topic I return to in the next chapter.
The hunting-dependency hypothesis is as follows. During a period when people were coping with environmental cooling, periodic tundra-like conditions may well have skewed the subsistence division of labor from a mixed foraging strategy to periods of heavy dependency on large-game hunting. At such times variance-reduction practices would have been particularly useful, and suppressing alpha-male behavior would have been a means of effectively equalizing the redistribution of meat. Once such political inventions were in place, they could have had staying power during milder climatic interludes as well. An invention stimulated by periods of cold would have continued to be attractive during interglacial periods when variation reduction was less critical, simply because subordinates had learned to enjoy their political autonomy.
Once one band, somewhere, invented an egalitarian order, this radical change in social ways of doing things would have become visible to its neighbors. The advantages would have been evident wherever subordinates were ambivalent about being dominated, particularly in bands with very aggressive bullies. Furthermore, the advantages of well-equalized variance reduction would have been obvious to members of despotic bands whose alpha types could be counted on to monopolize meat just when it was scarce. One would expect a gradual cultural diffusion to take place, with attractive egalitarian traditions replacing despotic ones locally.
During periods of scarcity-driven migration, bands surely were mixed around a great deal, as they followed their individual strategies in coping with climatic changes—a situation we shall consider in more detail. The statistical chances of a despotic band’s coming into contact with an egalitarian band would have increased, and as a result the rate of cultural diffusion would have been accelerated. Over time, migration patterns over longer distances could have fairly rapidly spread this political invention from one continent to another.
To summarize, I have favored a cultural saltation theory here. The political nature of the innovation we are discussing would appear to be “revolutionary,” in the sense that alpha types would not have readily given up their power and privileges. However, it is possible that egalitarianism advanced in stages, with subordinates gradually, over many millennia, gaining more control until the alpha role was effectively suppressed. In either event, the chances of cultural diffusion were maximized by the attractiveness of the invention to the dominated rank and file of a nonegalitarian group nearby. The process could have begun with Homo erectus, and conceivably even earlier, depending on when the linguistic and cultural thresholds were present for moral life to develop. But the highest state of behavioral and cultural readiness was reached by Anatomically Modern Humans.