Egalitarian Hierarchy in Locke's Hunting-Gathering State of Nature: A Response to David Graeber, David Wengrow, Manvir Singh, and Luke Glowacki

I have often argued that scientific studies of the hunting-gathering way of life as the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (EEA) confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature as the original condition in which human beings were naturally free and equal, in that no adult was under the coercive authority of anyone else, although they consented to the leadership of some people in organizing their social life.  In particular, I have said that studies of the San !Kung people living in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa show that these hunter-gatherer people have lived in Locke's state of nature.

Recently, however, some evolutionary anthropologists have claimed that this is a false origin myth, because there is plenty of archaeological and ethnographic evidence against the assumption that the early human societies of hunter-gatherers were all mobile, small-scale, and egalitarian.  We have good reasons to believe that many of these earliest societies in the Pleistocene era (2.5 million to 12,000 years ago) were sedentary, large, and hierarchical, and that this happened long before human beings turned to farming and agrarian civilization near the beginning of the Holocene era (12,000 years ago).  Therefore, the San !Kung should not be taken as a model of what our human ancestors in the Pleistocene era looked like.

David Graeber and David Wengrow have argued for this in their big book--The Dawn of Everything.  A few years ago, they summarized their reasoning in an article.  A similar position has been recently developed by Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki in an article published in Evolution and Human Behavior.  Singh has written about this in two essays for Aeon.  The appearance of the article in Evolution and Human Behavior is significant because this is the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which has been dominated by the evolutionary psychology of John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and others who identify the EEA with hunting-gathering societies in the Pleistocene that were small, nomadic, and egalitarian bands.  Singh and Glowacki are challenging this fundamental assumption of evolutionary psychology.

Now, of course, we might wonder why it should it matter to us what human societies in the Pleistocene looked like.  Well, it should matter a lot because since most of our evolutionary history was spent in the Pleistocene, those prehistoric societies shaped our evolved human nature, which constrains and enables, although it does not precisely determine, our cultural history and individual history.

Graeber, Wengrow, Singh, and Glowacki present both ethnographic and archaeological evidence for their claims.  They contend that the ethnographic studies of hunting-gathering societies show great social diversity: some of these foraging societies have been small, mobile, and egalitarian; but some have been large, sedentary, and hierarchical.  They don't all look like the San !Kung.  In fact, there are good reasons to consider the San !Kung to be atypical because for centuries the San were forced into the resource-scarce environment of the Kalahari desert by the Bantu agro-pastoralists who claimed the resource-rich land for themselves.  By contrast, when foragers have access to areas with a high concentration of plants and animals that can be a rich source of food, they can settle into sedentary or semi-sedentary societies with large populations in which complex social hierarchies can emerge.

Consider, for example, the Calusa, a fisher-hunter-gatherer society, with no farming, who were discovered by the Spanish explorers and conquistadors in Florida in the early 16th century.  The Calusa had as many as 20,000 people living in towns scattered across the west coast of Florida from Tampa Bay to the Keys.  They were ruled by a King in a capitol town, who demanded tribute from the chiefdoms in his territory.  He enforced his rule through military force and through his claim to sacred authority sanctioned by a priesthood.  Under the King was a nobility, and under them all other people were commoners.  

Anthropologists have often assumed that a monarchic state like this was impossible without agriculture to create the economic surplus that would allow the emergence of such a complex social structure.  But the Calusa produced a surplus of food primarily through fishing.  They lived around coastal estuaries where there was an abundance of fish that could be held in artificial ponds and caught with nets.  The fish could then be smoked or dried for storage.  The King and his nobles controlled the production and distribution of this food to support their coercive rule over the commoners.  William Marquardt and other archaeologists working in southwestern Florida have confirmed the accuracy of what the Spanish reported about the Calusa.

Graeber, Wengrow, Singh, and Glowacki see evidence like this for large societies of sedentary and hierarchical hunter-gatherers as refuting the "nomadic-egalitarian model" of anthropologists like Christopher Boehm and others who assume that hunter-gatherers must be egalitarian, and that our hunter-gatherer ancestors must all have been egalitarian.  Singh and Glowacki have proposed a new "diverse histories model" for explaining the EEA of our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene.  Singh and Glowacki accept the "nomadic-egalitarian model" as only partially true--that is, true for those hunter-gatherer societies that were small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian.  But their "diverse histories model" would also recognize some of our ancestral hunter-gatherer societies were like the Calusa in being large-scale, sedentary, and hierarchical.

If this were correct, this would deny my claim that the evolutionary psychology of hunter-gatherers as shaped in an egalitarian EEA confirms the truth of Locke's account of the state of nature as a condition of equal liberty.  But I would suggest some arguments for why this is not correct.

First, we should notice that there is no clear archaeological evidence for coercive hierarchies in the hunter-gatherer societies in the Pleistocene--that is, before the Holocene era began about 12,000 years ago.  If you look carefully at Table 1 in the article by Singh and Glowacki, which presents 34 examples of sedentary or semi-sedentary foragers, you will notice that only two of the examples come before the Holocene, and only one of these two is said to show evidence of inequality.

Number 11 on the Table is located on the "Russian Plain" and dated at "18,000-12,000 BP," which would place it at the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene.  If you go to the Supplementary material for the article online, you will see that the reference for this case is the work of Olga Soffer (1985), who is famous for her work on archaeological sites in the area of what is now Ukraine, where she has uncovered artifacts dated to the "Upper Paleolithic"--18,000 to 12,000 BP.  She found evidence that the ancient people here lived by hunting large mammals--mammoths, bison, and horses.  She also found storage pits and dwellings made from mammoth bones.  Singh and Glowacki say there is evidence of inequality in this society, which they describe as "dwellings vary in size and number of storage pits and elaborate goods."  That looks dubious to me.

Singh and Glowacki define "inequality" as "substantial differences in material wealth, institutionalized status hierarchies, and/or coercive political authority."  Why is it "and/or"?  Does that mean that a society can have inequality in wealth and status without coercive political authority?  If so, that would be what Boehm calls "egalitarian hierarchy":  even when some people in a hunting-gathering society have a little more wealth and status than others, no one can coercively order people to do what they don't want to do.  Even if "dwellings vary in size and number of storage pits and elaborate goods," that's not necessarily evidence for "coercive political authority."

Number 12 on Singh and Glowacki's Table is the only other example from the late Pleistocene.  It's dated at 29,000-22,500 BP.  Here they are referring to the archaeological evidence for the Pavlovian culture, with sites in Moravia (in the east of the Czech Republic), northern Austria, and southern Poland.  The economy of these people was based on hunting mammoth on the tundra at the southern edge of the glacier covering northern Europe at the time.  They had a sophisticated stone age technology, which included weaving, elaborate dwellings, figurines carved from ivory, religious art, and ritualistic burials.  Notably, Singh and Glowacki see no evidence of inequality here.  There is some evidence, however, that some people took on the role of shaman, which presumably meant that they had a special status.  But there is no evidence here for anything like the coercive political authority of the king ruling over the Calusa.

So while Singh and Glowacki stress the importance of finding inequality in societies of "hunter-gatherers during the Pleistocene," because that was the long period of human evolution in which human nature was shaped, they actually present no evidence for despotic political authority in the Pleistocene.

Singh and Glowacki do see evidence for inequality in Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies as suggested by elaborate burials:  "These burials, many of which are of juveniles, were accompanied by lavish grave goods, such as perforated deer canines and objects made of mammoth ivory.  Such goods were often rare or exotic and appeared to require time and mastery to produce--indications of wealth and inequality among ethnographically observed foragers. . . . Importantly, however, all of these sites appear at the very end of the Pleistocene and are subject to ongoing debates over their interpretation" (426).

As an illustration of the "ongoing debates over their interpretation," some archaeologists have suggested that this funerary evidence for Pleistocene social inequality could be interpreted as showing what Boehm has called "egalitarian hierarchy."  Singh and Glowacki assume a strict dichotomy between "equality" and "hierarchy," so that any evidence of hierarchy denies equality.  But as I have indicated in some previous posts, Locke and Boehm see that absolute equality of condition is impossible in any society.  But it is possible to have a society with an egalitarian ethos that allows for some moderate leadership and hierarchy while prohibiting coercive dominance of some over others.  Evolutionary anthropologists who study leadership across human societies have found that leadership is a human universal--it is found in some form in all societies--but that hunter-gatherers tend not to have leaders with coercive authority (Garfield, Syme, and Hagen 2020).

In one of the best articles on the question of whether Pleistocene burials show evidence of social inequality, Mircea Anghelinu (2012) concludes:

"For powerfully adaptive reasons, strong egalitarian practices (e.g. collective food sharing and redistribution, reciprocity), coupled with short-lived alliances among individuals (Runciman 2005) were probably at work quite early in the Lower Palaeolithic.  Strong kinship ties and group selection (Boehm 1999; Richerson and Boyd 2001) provided additional support for the emergence of cooperation and of an easy to monitor egalitarian social contract.  This collective social control was occasionally challenged in the Upper Palaeolithic, when both technological and demographical accretion and local affluence allowed several gifted individuals a more boastful behavior.  These changes, nothing more than opportunistic circumventions of egalitarian rules, were far from general and clearly reversible, but left behind some of the most spectacular prehistoric burials" (39).

Apparently, Anghelinu sees in the Pleistocene EEA what Boehm calls a "reverse dominance hierarchy": 

 "When the subordinates take charge to firmly suppress competition that leads to domination, it takes some effort to keep the political tables turned.  For the most part, the mere threat of sanctions (including ostracism and execution) keeps such power seekers in their place.  When upstartism does become active, so does the moral community: it unites against those who would usurp the egalitarian order, and usually does so preemptively and assertively.  This domination by the rank and file is so strong that useful leadership roles can develop without subverting the system.  The rank and file, watching leaders with special care, keep them from developing any serious degree of authority" (Boehm 1999: 10).

The Calusa failed to enforce this egalitarian hierarchy in their society.  But there is no clear evidence that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers failed to do this.

REFERENCES

Anghelinu, Mircea. 2012. "On Palaeolithic Social Inequality: The Funerary Evidence." In Raluca Kogalniceanu, Roxana-Gabriela Curca, Mihai Gligor, and Susan Stratton, eds., Homines, Funera, Astra: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Funerary Anthropology, 31-43.  Oxford, UK: Archaeopress.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 

Garfield, Zachery H., Kristen L. Syme, Edward H. Hagen. 2020. "Universal and Variable Leadership Dimensions Across Human Societies." Evolution and Human Behavior 41: 397-414.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2018. "How to Change the Course of Human History (At Least the Part That's Already Happened)." Eurozine (March 2).

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawin of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Marquardt, William H. 2014. "Tracking the Calusa: A Retrospective." Southeastern Anthropology 33: 1-24.

Singh, Manvir. 2021. "Beyond the !Kung." Aeon (February 8).

Singh, Manvir, and Luke Glowacki. 2022.  "Human Social Organization During the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the Nomadic-Egalitarian Model." Evolution and Human Behavior 43: 418-431.

Soffer, Olga. 1985. The Upper Paleolithic of the Central Russian Plain. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Stewart, Tamara Jager. 2020. "Investigating the Calusa." American Archaeology 24 (Fall): 1-10.