This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE. Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia in an essay arguing for the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy (Boehm 2017). He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads. On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.
It's hard to know for sure what has happened. The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed. In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare. But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.
One study of the rock drawings in the inland regions of the Iberian Mediterranean basin identified 49 scenes of violent content (battles, ambushes, fights, and so on), which included 8 scenes of "execution squads" like the drawing above (Lopez-Montalvo 2015).
This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics. Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1999). Some human beings want to have dominance over others. Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones. But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them. (I have written a series of posts on the evolutionary theory of reverse dominance hierarchy.)
We can infer that this universal human nature was shaped in the environment of evolutionary adaptation of human foraging ancestors in the Late Pleistocene epoch. We can make that inference through what Boehm calls the "ethnographic analogy". Boehm has created a hunter-gatherer database of sixty-five foraging societies for which we have ethnographies, selected because they are most likely to resemble foragers in the Late Pleistocene. If we find a practice like capital punishment for bullies in all six of the world regions where foragers have lived--North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Arctic--then we can infer that this has been widespread throughout hunter-gatherer history since the Late Pleistocene (Boehm 2012).
These ethnographies of foraging bands show that they form moral communities through agreement on moral rules and then enforce those rules through the forcible and reputational punishment of deviants. Through gossip, ridicule, and shunning, those who violate the rules are punished with bad reputations, and people will refuse to cooperate with them. Today, we might call this "nonviolent resistance"--people withdraw their consent to a bully's dominance.
If reputational punishment is not enough to enforce obedience to the rules, then the community can use coercive force, such as expelling deviants from the group, or, in the worst cases, killing them. Nevertheless, foragers resort to capital punishment only rarely, and usually it's to punish a murderer.
Forcible punishment creates two possible problems. The group can be torn apart by conflict. Or an angry relative of a person killed can take vengeance on the executioner. To avoid these problems, the group must reach a consensus on the punishment and even persuade the close relatives of the victim to cooperate. In rare cases, the entire community might participate in the execution (as seems to have been the case in the Remigia drawing). Or, more commonly, the group will delegate a close relative of the victim to do the killing.
Executing a bully is often dangerous for the executioner, however, because bullies are often formidable and aggressive enough to fight back and harm the executioner. The solution to this problem, as I have indicated in previous posts, is killing at a distance. There is plenty of evidence that human beings are evolved for throwing and shooting projectiles--rocks, spears, arrows, and bullets--that can kill even the strongest opponent from a safe distance. In the Remigia drawing, we can see that it is easy for ten men armed with bow and arrow to bring down a bully without having to fight with him hand to hand.
In this way, hunter-gatherers enforce the moral norm that Boehm calls "egalitarian hierarchy." As that term suggests, they see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects. By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally different, naturally unequal, in any number of respects. But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without one's consent.
The Bushmen (or San) people of Southern Africa are regarded by many evolutionary anthropologists as the descendants of the earliest human ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers. Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has studied them, reports that "all adult members of the society are autonomous equals who cannot command, bully, coerce, or indebt others. There is a "strong egalitarian norm that no adult can tell another what to do." "All people as autonomous individuals are expected to stand up for their rights," and so everyone has the right to enforce the social norms of the group by punishing those who violate them (Wiessner 2005).
John Locke recognized this natural desire for equal liberty as emerging in the ancient hunter-gatherer state of nature in which human nature was originally shaped. He inferred this from his own "ethnographic analogy," because he studied hundreds of books by Europeans who had observed foraging and tribal societies around the world, particularly in the New World. In particular, he looked to the indigenous people of America as providing "a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe" (Second Treatise, 108). "In the beginning, all the world was America" (ST, 49).
Locke saw that in this state of nature, societies enforced moral norms through the "executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all human beings to use forcible and reputational punishment to punish those who violated the law of nature, which included capital punishment. Even after they entered civil society and formed a government to rule over them by their consent, human beings retained the natural right of self-defense, including defense against a despotic government that would deprive them of their freedom from exploitative dominance. The people can resist a despotic government through an "appeal to Heaven"--that is, an appeal to the God of battles to settle their dispute through war.
All of this manifested the principle that "all men by nature are equal in their liberty." Locke explained:
"I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of Equality: Age or Virtue may give Men a just Precedency: Excellency of Parts and Merit may place others above the Common Level: Birth may subject some, and Alliance or Benefits others, to pay an Observance to those to whom Nature, Gratitude or other Respects may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the Equality, which all Men are in, respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another, which was the Equality I there spoke of, as proper to the Business at hand, being that equal Right that every Man hath, to his Natural Freedom, without being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man" (ST, 54).
Thus, Locke saw in the state of nature the same egalitarian hierarchy that Boehm identified in the evolutionary state of nature that shaped the human nature of our foraging ancestors. But Boehm does not recognize that his account of the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy confirms Locke's view of the natural equality of liberty in the state of nature, because Boehm mistakenly identified Locke as a "blank slate" theorist who denied the reality of human nature (Boehm 1999, 128, 227).
Darrin McMahon makes the same mistake in his recent book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea in seeing Locke as "famously conceiving of the mind as a tabula rasa at birth, shaped by education and experience, not hardwired by iniquity or innate ideas" (168). McMahon also fails to see how Boehm's egalitarian hierarchy manifested in the execution scene at Remigia and in the ethnography of hunter-gatherers confirms Locke's conception of natural equal liberty in the state of nature (21-51).
McMahon does see that our foraging ancestors found a way to combine equality and liberty. "The two went together. Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others. Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).
And yet McMahon does not see how Lockean liberalism achieves this by affirming the natural right to equal liberty. McMahon passes over Locke's account of natural equality in a few pages without taking seriously Locke's concept of equality as equal liberty as the most intellectually defensible ground for justifying classical liberalism (163-166).
Nevertheless, since McMahon's book is the best history of the idea of equality, I will be writing a series of posts on the book, in which I will argue in defense of Lockean liberalism as showing the best understanding of human equality.
REFERENCES
Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Altruism, Shame, and Virtue. New York: Basic Books.
Boehm, Christopher. 2017. "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects." Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.
Locke, John. 1988. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lopez-Montalvo, Esther. 2015. "Violence in Neolithic Iberia: New Readings of Levantine Rock Art." Antiquity 89: 309-327.
McMahon, Darrin. 2023. Equality: The History of An Elusive Idea. New York: Basic Books.
Weissner, Polly. 2005. "Norm Enforcement among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen: A Case of Strong Reciprocity?" Human Nature 16: 117-135.
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