Political Egalitarianism During the Last Glacial

Are human beings naturally egalitarian or naturally hierarchical?

On the one hand, for most of human evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in foraging communities that were probably very egalitarian, with no one exercising despotic dominance over others.

On the other hand, for the past 5,000 years, most political communities have had rigid hierarchical structures, with those at the top exploiting those at the bottom.

Modern liberal democratic republics are officially based on the principle of human equality, with governmental authority based on the consent of the governed. But, obviously, these democratic states are hierarchical in that those at the top have more power, privilege, and property than those below them.

A little over ten years ago, I was excited to read a book manuscript by Christopher Boehm for Harvard University Press that helped me to think through this problem. The book was published in 1999 as Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. As suggested in the title, Boehm makes a complex--but persuasive--argument for human beings as combining hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies as shaped by their evolutionary history.

"My thesis," Boehm says, "is that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy, as is commonly assumed. Rather, egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is based on antihierarchical feelings" (9-10). A society can have an "egalitarian hierarchy" in which the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or execution--to restrain "politically ambitious individuals, those with special learned or innate propensities to dominate." In every society, there will be leaders in some form. But an egalitarian society will allow only "a moderate degree of leadership" (154).

Against the "visionary democrats" like Marx and Engels who believed that hierarchical leadership could be totally abolished in the future withering away of the state into a classless society, Boehm defends the position of the "realistic democrats" who believe that a formal or informal system of checks and balances can allow for moderate leadership without exploitative rule of dominants over subordinates (256-57). There is, Boehm argues, "a universal drive to dominance." But that natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates not to be dominated (39).

Boehm supports his argument primarily through two types of evidence--primatological studies of chimpanzees and ethnographic studies of human foragers and tribesmen--which he uses to infer that the "Common Ancestor" of human beings as evolved in the Paleolithic was shaped for a foraging society of "egalitarian hierarchy."

While chimpanzees have a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male at the top, they show what Frans de Waal has called "egalitarian dominance" as opposed to the "despotic dominance" of rhesus monkeys. The rhesus alpha male is rarely challenged by his subordinates. But the chimp alpha male can be challenged by subordinates who create alliances to resist the alpha male who becomes too despotic. (Doesn't this sound like how Hobbes and Locke describe equality in the state of nature?)

Similarly, human foragers in small nomadic groups that live by hunting and gathering have ways to punish ambitious people who become too assertive. Individuals who become too proud and aggressive can be ridiculed or ostracized. Others in the group can simply refuse to obey their orders. Or, in extreme cases, those who become aggressively dominant can be killed.

Richard Lee, in his study of the Kung! San nomadic foragers in the Kalahari Desert, writes:

"Egalitarianism is not simply the absence of a headman and other authority figures, but a positive insistence on the essential equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the authority of others, a sentiment expressed in the statement: 'Of course we have headmen . . . each of us is headman over himself.' Leaders do exist, but their influence is subtle and indirect. They never order or make demands of others, and their accumulation of material goods is never more, and often much less, than the average accumulation of the other households in the camp." (1979:457)

Boehm concludes from this that human beings evolved in the Paleolithic for a social life of "egalitarian hierarchy" in which leaders would be strictly limited by vigilant subordinates ready to punish any overly assertive upstarts. But, then, beginning 10,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture, human beings formed sedentary communities with growing populations, which led to the first urban agrarian states. In these novel circumstances, it became ever harder for subordinates to organize themselves to resist the despotic dominance of their leaders, who now ruled through elaborate military, religious, and administrative bureaucracies.

The profound meaning of this move in human history is captured well in the Old Testament, in First Samuel 8, where the people of Israel want to give up the informal leadership of judges and have a king, so that they can compete with all the other powerful agrarian states around them. Samuel warns them of the despotic oppression that will come from this. But they refuse to listen. Later, modern republican thinkers--John Milton, John Locke, and others--cite this as Biblical support for their rejection of monarchic absolutism and embrace of limited republican government.

Boehm sees modern republican government as a new form of the "egalitarian hierarchy" that once prevailed in the foraging groups of our Paleolithic evolutionary history. The universal dominance drive will express itself in the ambition of individuals who want to rule over others, but in a republican system of governance, their ambition is channelled and checked in ways that protect their subordinates from despotic dominance. If Boehm is right about this, then we can say that the cultural evolution of republican politics has produced a system of rule that conforms to the evolved natural desires of human beings as shaped in the Paleolithic.

But some people would say that this is only a highly speculative "just-so" story that cannot be supported with scientific evidence, because we have no scientific way to study human social behavior in prehistoric time. We can study the prehistoric evolution of human anatomy through the evidence of skeletal fossils. But how do we study the prehistoric evolution of human politics, considering that political behavior doesn't fossilize?

The answer to this question is provided in a recent article--Doron Schultziner, et al., "The Causes and Scope of Political Egalitarianism During the Last Glacial: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective," Biology & Philosophy, June, 2010, 25: 319-346. One of the authors is Rebecca Hannagan, one of my colleagues in political science at NIU.

Here's the abstract: "This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further explored. Viewing social and political organization in the Last Glacial in a much wider, multi-disciplinary context provides the footing for coherent theory building and hypothesis testing by which to further explore human political systems. We aim to overcome the claim that our ancestors' form of social organization is untestable, as well as counter a degree of exaggeration regarding possibilities for sedentism, population densities, and hierarchical structures prior to the Holocene with crucial advances from disparate disciplines."

The Last Glacial is the last ice age, a climatic period that by radiocarbon dating began about 74,000 years ago and ended about 11,500 years ago. The Holocene epoch is the climatic period that stretches from about 11,500 years ago to the present. During the Last Glacial, climatic conditions were colder, more arid, and more unstable than during the Holocene.

The key point here is that the unusually stable climate of the Holocene epoch has provided the necessary conditions for human agrarian civilization over the past 11,500 years. Prior to that, the climate of the last ice age made sedentary, agrarian life impossible for our evolutionary ancestors, who could only live in small, nomadic foraging bands as they moved in search of sufficient food from wild plants and wild animals. The authors of this article argue that in the climatic conditions of the Last Glacial, human beings must have lived as egalitarian foragers, and thus our human ancestors during this prehistoric environment of evolutionary adaptation must have evolved for an egalitarian social and political life. The implication of this is that human beings are naturally egalitarian, despite the cultural evolution of hierarchy over the past 11,500 years.

Although I generally agree with the reasoning in this article, I see a fundamental ambiguity in the argument that is never cleared up by the authors. I should say that when I read an early draft of this paper, I pointed out this ambiguity in the paper. The authors made some revisions in response to my comments, but the ambiguity is still there.

Here's the problem. On the one hand, the authors adopt Boehm's reasoning, which suggests that they agree with him that the evolutionary adaptation of ancient human foragers was for "egalitarian hierarchy" with "a moderate degree of leadership." On the other hand, the authors contrast "political egalitarianism" to "political hierarchy" in a way that suggests that the ancient human foragers had no hierarchy at all, which would deny Boehm's position.

I think Boehm's right. I think human beings are naturally evolved for "egalitarian hierarchy," but they are not evolved for an absolute egalitarianism with no hierarchy at all. I detect a faint Marxist (or Rousseauean) propensity in this article--a wish to find a utopian egalitarianism in our evolutionary past to support the possibility of such utopian egalitarianism in our socialist future. The authors never come out and actually say this. But I can smell it.

They write: "Political egalitarianism is a social organization in which decisions are reached through deliberation and consensus, individuals do not command authority over, or coerce, other group members; social status, honor, and positions (if and when they exist) are voluntarily granted or withdrawn, and not inherited; and individuals can freely leave their group peers or residence. Political hierarchy is a social organization with opposite characteristics" (320).

Notice the dualistic opposition they set up--"political egalitarianism" is the opposite of "political hierarchy." This contradicts Boehm's claim that egalitarianism does not result from the absence of hierarchy, because human beings have never lived without at least some leadership. As Boehm says, "We always live with some type of hierarchy, which suggests that our behavior is constrained by human nature" (237).

Notice also the ambiguity of the parenthetical phrase about social positions of status in an egalitarian society--"if and when they exist"--which leaves the reader wondering whether they think positions of leadership can be totally eliminated or not. Later in the article, they repeat this odd phrasing--"leaders (if they exist) have little authority over group members" (326). Well, do they exist or not? We are not told, but we are left with the impression that egalitarian societies could have no leaders at all, which, again, would contradict Boehm, Lee, and others who argue that even the most egalitarian foragers have some form of leadership.

Another way in which this ambiguity is conveyed in the article is that the authors say that foragers use "levelling mechanisms" that "keep the political system as close to flattened as possible" (326). Well, how flat is it? We are never told. But the suggestion is that it could be completely flat. If that's the claim, then the authors would have to defend that radical assertion of complete equality without any hierarchy at all, which they never do.

Despite this disagreement, I can agree with everything in this article if it's interpreted as providing evidence and argumentation for Boehm's "egalitarian hierarchy."

The reasoning moves through six steps corresponding to the six parts of the article.

(1) They survey the data for global climatic change during the Last Glacial, and they infer that the dry, cold, and unstable climate would have forced human beings to live in small, foraging groups that roamed in search of plants, animals, and water. This would have made agriculture impossible. And this would have severely limited group size and forced the groups into a nomadic way of life.

(2) Ethnographic studies of foraging groups shows a "foraging spectrum" (Kelly 1995) that includes semi-sedentary foragers that show some hierarchical structure, and some anthropologists have concluded from this that our foraging ancestors in the Paleolithic could have been hierarchical (Hayden 1995). But the authors of this article argue that the climatic conditions of the Last Glacial would have forced Paleolithic foragers into a nomadic life, which would have limited the accumulation of personal property, forced food sharing, and restricted the size of the group. Consequently, they would have looked like the nomadic foragers of the Kalahari studied by Richard Lee.

They write: ". . . These limitations on group size make internal group affairs easier to maintain and hence reduce or eliminate the need to concentrate power in the hands of individuals who can resolve conflicts by coercive authority. . . This fluidity of band composition makes the domination of others very difficult, and arguably irrelevant" (327).

Notice, again, their ambiguous language: "reduce or eliminate" and "very difficult, and arguably irrelevant." But if they agree with Boehm and Lee, then they should say that hierarchy--at least moderate forms of leadership--cannot be eliminated or made irrelevant.

(3) Employing the logic of evolutionary biology, the authors argue that if having high rank in hierarchical societies conferred fitness advantages--reproductive success and better access to food and other valuable resources--then we can infer that natural selection would favor an innate desire for dominance. But at the same time, we can infer that there would also be an evolutionary pressure favoring an innate desire of subordinates not to be exploited by dominants. This would create two countervailing tendencies--the natural desire for dominance and the natural desire to be free from exploitative dominance.

This is in fact what we see in nomadic foraging bands. "One the one hand, the fact that foragers need leveling mechanisms means that there is an innate tendency of some individuals to exaggerate their rank and status. On the other hand, there exists an innate tendency to thwart others' attempts to gain power because it may beecome dangerous and harmful to oneself and one's peers" (329). What this means is that dominance behavior is never completely lost, but it can be balanced by the natural tendency of subordinates to resist dominance. This required subordinates to find ways to form coalitions to check dominants. The evolution of language could have made coalition-formation easier. And the invention of projectile hunting weapons could have increased the power of subordinates to challenge dominants.

But then, with the cultural evolution of farming and agrarian states, the innate disposition to dominance created ruling elites who could escape the leveling mechanisms used by subordinates in foraging societies.

Notice here that the authors of this paper clearly concede that dominance behavior is innate in all human societies, and therefore they implicitly concede that equality with no hierarchy at all is impossible.

(4) As the fourth step in their argument, they show how the fossil records of hominid brain-size, skeletons, and teeth supports the evolution of political egalitarianism in the Paleolithic. The increase in brain-size and the associated evolution of language allowed subordinates to cooperate in socially complex ways to check dominance behavior. The evolutionary reduction in sexual dimorphism (males being larger than females) and in the size of canine teeth is associated with egalitarianism, because males are less able to build and protect large harems.

(5) Archaeologists can see various kinds of empirical evidence for social and political hierarchy. If some people have been buried with signs of wealth, if some people have had larger or more elaborate housing, if there is monumental architecture, or if there are other signs of unequal resources, then we can infer that some people had more wealth, power, or status than others. The authors argue that there is very little evidence of this kind for hierarchy in the Paleolithic.

They do concede that Paleolithic cave art might be interpreted as evidence for shamans, who would have had superior status. But while this does suggest differences of social status, they argue, it does not require rigid hierarchy. Ethnographic studies of foragers shows that "social esteem is granted to shamans and other individuals who benefit the group (i.e. successful hunters) only by group members' consent, and shamans who abuse their role are constrained or even killed" (335).

(6) The authors conclude by explaining the transition from the political egalitarianism of the Paleolithic era to the political hierarchy of the Neolithic era. The transition to a sedentary life allowed the accumulation of wealth, which supported economic inequality. They observe: "some individuals are better than others at hunting, gathering, herding, cultivating land and so on, and those differences can translate into economic inequality if the ecological setting is stable enough" (337). The transition to larger and more dense populations with a greater division of labor favored political hierarchy as power was centralized and concentrated in a bureaucracy of specialists who coordinated the collective activity of the agrarian state.

For me--as a political theorist with an interest in biopolitical theory--what is most interesting about this article is how it provides scientific evidence and argumentation that supports the account of political evolution found in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith. The political history of humanity turns on the shifting balance between authority and liberty, between the natural desire of the few for dominance and the natural desire of the many to resist dominance. This shifting balance underlies the three-stage movement of political history: the egalitarian hierarchy of Paleolithic politics, the despotic hierarchy of agrarian-state politics, and the modern emergence of commercial republican liberalism based on a new kind of egalitarian hierarchy combined with high civilization.

The Evolution of Equal Liberty Through Capital Punishment: Boehm's Egalitarian Hierarchy in Locke's State of Nature

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.

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.

The Lockean Political Rhetoric of Chimpanzees: Dominance, Deference, and Counterdominance

Although chimpanzees do not  have language, they do communicate with one another through sounds, postures, and facial expressions that convey information.  Often that information is about social rank.  An alpha male might engage in a loud display of intimidation that asserts his dominance over the group.  Other chimps might respond to this by signaling their submission to him.  Or they might respond with signs of resistance and defiance.  And some might even signal that they want to overthrow him.  Thus chimps engage in political rhetoric, because they try to persuade one another as to how their social order should be organized.  

We could also identify this chimpanzee political rhetoric as Lockean insofar as subordinate chimpanzees can protest against despotic dominance by the alpha male and thus limit his power, which moves towards the egalitarian social arrangement seen in human hunter-gatherer bands with an egalitarian style of hierarchy in which the leader is only primus inter pares ("first among equals").  This is what Locke saw in the state of nature in which all men are by nature equally free.  Not that all are absolutely equal, because some will have higher status than others, and some will become leaders of their social groups.  But that all adults have the natural right to be free from being unduly subordinated to anyone else without their consent, and that they have the natural right to punish those who threaten their life, liberty, or property (Second Treatise, pars. 4-10, 54, 94, 105).  

To explain the Darwinian evolution of this human state of nature, we should expect to find precursors of this human egalitarianism in our pre-human primate ancestors.  And if we assume that the common ancestor of humans and the African great apes was similar to a chimpanzee, then we might expect to see evolutionary preadaptations for an egalitarian style of dominance in chimpanzee groups.  In fact, as Christopher Boehm has argued, we can see in chimpanzees similarities to the ambivalent political nature of human hunter-gatherers that shows a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1993, 1999).  

Dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  The political life of primates is organized around dominance hierarchies in which the old tend to have dominance over the young and males tend to have dominance over females, although females can also have a dominance hierarchy, and sometimes coalitions of females can resist male dominance.  This is a political universal for chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity; and for human beings throughout history.  Winning or losing dominance is determined by patterns of coalition formation that depend on shifting circumstances and individual decisions.

Deference is the natural propensity of individuals to submit to those who are dominant.  As political universals, deference is the correlative of dominance.  Among the various species of political primates, there are distinctive behavioral cues, both verbal and nonverbal, by which subordinates defer to dominants.

Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

The variation in this behavior creates differences in dominance style across species.  As Frans de Waal has observed, rhesus monkeys show a "despotic dominance style" in which subordinates cannot challenge dominants; but chimpanzees show an "egalitarian dominance style" in which subordinates can restrain dominants (de Waal 1996).  Dominant chimpanzees are expected to mediate conflicts within the group and to lead the group in conflicts with other groups.  Dominant chimpanzees can be challenged or even deposed if they do not properly carry out their conflict-mediation role.

Like chimpanzee politics, human politics shows a dominance hierarchy that can be egalitarian in style, based on the principle that leaders are only first among equals.  This egalitarianism is most evident among human hunter-gatherers who use various kinds of sanctions (from ridicule and disobedience to ostracism and execution) to punish leaders who become too despotic in their dominance.  This resistance to dominance was probably a crucial part of human evolutionary history in the Paleolithic era (from about two million years ago to 10,000 years ago).  But with the establishment of large bureaucratic states based on agricultural production, which began more than 5,000 years ago, many states have been more despotic than egalitarian.  The emergence and spread of Lockean liberal democracies over the past three centuries is in some ways a return to the egalitarian dominance of the foraging way of life in which subordinates limit the power of dominants.

To the old question in political philosophy as to whether human beings are naturally hierarchical or naturally egalitarian, the answer from biopolitical science is that human beings are both.  Niccolo Machiavelli was right to see that human political nature is torn by the tension between the propensity of the few to dominance and the propensity of the many to submit to dominance while also resisting oppressive dominance.  The history of political practice and political thought turns on this natural ambivalence interacting over time with particular political circumstances and decisions.

As an illustration of this political ambivalence among chimpanzees, here is Jane Goodall's description of an incident she observed in July of 1964 in Gombe:

"Mike, the new alpha, rests in the shade of a tree.  A sudden crashing in the undergrowth heralds the arrival of Goliath, recently deposed from the top position.  Mike does not move as Goliath charges flat out toward him, dragging a huge branch.  At the last moment Goliath turns aside, swings into a nearby tree, and sits motionless.  Only now does Mike begin to display, swaying the vegetation, hurling a few rocks, then climbing into Goliath's tree and swaying branches there.  When he stops, Goliath displays again, leaping ever closer to his adversary until Mike responds.  For a few moments both are wildly swaying foliage within 2 meters of each other; but there is no fight.  They swing to the ground and charge off through the undergrowth, running parallel, then sit staring at each other.  Goliath stands upright and rocks a sapling; Mike hurtles past, throwing a large rock.  For the next twenty-three minutes the performance continues, and during the whole episode the only physical contact between them is when one is hit by the end of a bough swayed by the other.  Finally, after a three-minute pause, Goliath moves rapidly toward Mike, crouches beside him with loud, submissive pant-grunts, and begins to groom him vigorously.  For half a minute, Mike ignores him, then turns and grooms his vanquished rival with equal intensity.  For more than an hour, they groom until both are relaxed and peaceful" (Goodall 1986, 409).

Notice the ambivalent political rhetoric in this incident.  The male dominance hierarchy is determined by the directionality of displays and pant-grunting among the adult males.  Goodall has kept a quantitative record of this for many years so that she can track the ever-changing history of the dominance hierarchy. If an alpha male is secure in his dominance, he displays towards the others in the group, and he receives pant-grunts from the others; but he never pant-grunts toward any of them.  When Goliath displays towards Mike, Goliath is challenging him, attempting to take the alpha position.  Both are feeling aggressive and fearful at the same time.  Each is trying to bluff down the other.  But while Goliath wants dominance, his fear of Mike finally drives him to signal his submission through pant-grunting; and Mike accepts his submission by reconciling with him.

Displays are more common than physical attacks, because chimps would rather avoid the danger of serious physical injuries that come from attacks.  Charging displays are threats that serve to maintain or challenge the existing order of dominance.  But reversals in rank among the males are usually the result of physical fights.  And while size and strength are important for success in displays and fights, psychological traits--such as intelligence, ingenuity, boldness, persistence, and shrewdness in forming coalitions--are crucial for success.  Mike was actually one of the smaller adult males when he overthrew Goliath, but he figured out how to use empty kerosene cans in his noisy charging displays to shock the other males and throw them into confusion until they submitted to him.  As I indicated in a previous post, Boehm and Goodall have compared Donald Trump's bombastic rhetoric to Mike's displays.

The vocal rhetoric of chimpanzees is complex.  Goodall and other primatologists have identified at least 32 distinct calls that convey particular emotions or feelings (Goodall 1986, 127; Arcadi 2018, 116-23).  One of them is the pant-grunt that Goliath uttered to signal a feeling of social apprehension and submission.  Another is the waa-bark that signals anger and defiance.  Dominant individuals can use waas as a warning to subordinates.  But from his careful study of chimp videotaped vocalizations, Boehm has concluded that most waas are used by subordinates to express their defiance of dominants (Boehm 1999, 164-69).

Boehm has seen this illustrated by what de Waal reports in his studies of the chimps in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia.  When new adult males were introduced into the community, the Yerkes females acted as a power coalition that rejected males seeking the alpha male position.  Finally, they accepted Jimoh as the alpha male.  But when he acted as a bully, the females punished him.  

For example, one day Jimoh saw that Socko, an adolescent male, was mating with one of Jomoh's favorite females.  Jimoh chased Socko around the enclosure and refused to stop.  Socko was screaming and defecating in fear.

Several females nearby began to waa bark.  They looked around to see the reaction of others.  When others began to join in the waa barking, the intensity of their protests became deafening.  Finally, Jimoh got the message.  He broke off his attack to avoid any further attacks from the females.  It was as though the chimps were taking a vote, and Jimoh had lost the vote.  If Jimoh had not stopped his attack, he might have been overthrown and even killed.

Here are the evolved primate roots of Lockean political rhetoric, in which we see the political ambivalence in the tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.

REFERENCES

Arcadi, Adam. 2018. Wild Chimpanzees: Social Behavior of an Endangered Species. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34:227-254.

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

Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

"Makers" and "Takers" in the Paleolithic

Libertarians and classical liberals have long argued for defending the makers who produce wealth from the takers who expropriate it (Contoski 1997; D'Amato 2018).  The makers need protection because for most of recorded human history over the past 5,000 years, most societies have been ruled by a few takers (kings, princes, nobles, and high priests) who coercively exploited the great multitude of people who were the makers of wealth that was stolen from them by the takers.  In these societies, there was little incentive for the makers to produce more than they could consume since most of what they produced would be taken from them, and consequently the general standard of living was low.  

But then, beginning about 300 years ago in northwestern Europe and North America, there was a shift in social conditions that made the life strategy of making--producing wealth for use and exchange--more successful than the life strategy of taking--extracting wealth from others.  That shift in favor of making over taking came with the establishment of modern liberal constitutionalism and free-market capitalism.  Over the past 100 years those institutions of liberal democratic capitalism have spread around the world.  As a consequence of that, most of the 8.3 billion people alive today live longer, healthier, safer, richer, and freer lives than human beings have ever lived previously.  Previously, I have written about this as the "evolution of human progress through the liberal enlightenment.

So how do we explain this pattern in human history--5,000 years of oppression by the ruling elites of takers and then the sudden emancipation of makers that has promoted unprecedented material and moral progress recently for most of humanity?  And if we can explain the causes of that modern progress, how might that help us to prevent any weakening or even reversal of that progress that would allow the takers to regain their dominance over the makers?  Does the recent rise of the "illiberal state"--like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example--show the return of the illiberal "taker state"?

One of the best attempts to answer those questions is in the work of Stephen Balch (a scholar at Texas Tech University).  In an article (Balch 2014) and in a book that is soon to be published, he puts the history of the struggle between takers and makers within a Darwinian "big history" that integrates the history of life and the history of humanity into a universal evolutionary history of all life.  It is an exhilarating display of expansive multidisciplinary scholarship that weaves insights from the life sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities into a dazzling intellectual tapestry that will forever change the way you think about life.

I have not yet fully thought through everything he has written about what he calls his "naturalist interpretation of history."   But I understand enough of it to say that I find almost all of his arguments persuasive.  I do disagree with him, however, about four points. 

First, Balch fails to see that most of what he says about the universal history of politics--from Paleolithic stateless societies to Neolithic agrarian states to modern liberal constitutional states--confirms John Locke's account of the universal "history of mankind." 

Second, Balch also fails to see that the struggle between takers and makers arose first among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, although he is certainly right in saying that that struggle was dramatically intensified by the invention of agriculture, which created an economic surplus that allowed takers to accumulate great wealth in the form of expropriated crops.  

Third, in his account of the first agrarian states, such as those in Mesopotamia, Balch tends to exaggerate the invincible dominance of the ruling takers, while minimizing the power of the makers to resist or evade exploitative dominance.

Fourth, I don't agree with Balch's claim that classical liberals like Locke have been mistaken in understanding property rights as an outgrowth of the personal rights of self-owning individuals.  Balch wants to separate economic freedom from personal freedom because he worries that personal freedom can include maladaptive behavior such as pursuing sexual pleasure in ways that do not lead to reproduction, which lowers reproductive fitness.  But here he fails to see that a low birth rate can be an adaptive reproductive strategy for people in wealthy societies who want to make a large parental investment in a few children, so that those children will be more likely to succeed in a modern bourgeois society.

Here I will elaborate my second point of disagreement.  In my next post, I will take up the fourth point.

PALEOLITHIC MAKERS AND TAKERS

Among hunter-gatherers, the takers are people who take without giving.  They take what they want from the social resources of their group without contributing anything to those resources: they are free riders or social parasites.  The takers are either cheaters who take what they want by deception, or bullies who take what they want by force.  

The makers respond to this by consenting to moral rules against taking and enforcing those rules with reputational and forcible punishments of those who violate the rules.  Reputational punishment includes ridicule, ostracism, and shunning.  Forcible punishment--including execution--is directed against the worst bullies, particularly murderers (Boehm 2012, 64-74).

Balch does not see this conflict between makers and takers among hunter-gatherers because he thinks that conflict arose only after the invention of agriculture.

"Taking" only came fully into its own when there was some real "take" to be had, when there was a redistributable surplus over and above what was required for individual survival.  The invention of agriculture set the stage.  Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived egalitarian lives.  There was marginal advantage to be had through superior hunting/gathering/fighting/nurturing/negotiating and seduction skills, but--with only so much to go around--rarely big genetic jackpots.  Once, however, there was a possibility of massive wealth accumulations in the form of expropriated crops, all this changed (2014, 12).

"Genetic jackpots" are important for Balch because he believes that the evolution of human nature by kin selection favors what biological theorists call "inclusive fitness": we are naturally inclined to behaviors that advance the reproductive fitness of ourselves, our offspring, and our collateral relatives.  Although we experience some genetic conflicts of interest with our relatives because they are not genetically identical to us, our conflicts of interest with non-kin are much deeper.  We fight with non-kin over scarce resources as we try to take as much as we can for ourselves and our relatives.  But prior to the invention of agriculture, there wasn't much to fight over, and so it was impossible for the takers to accumulate great wealth that they had taken from the makers.  Consequently, Balch argues, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands were egalitarian in that there was no dominant elite of a few takers ruling over a multitude of exploited makers.

But this ignores the fact that while hunter-gatherers have always been egalitarian, their societies have achieved not an absolute equality but rather--to use Christopher Boehm's term--an "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, hunter-gatherers 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 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 their consent.  

A few human beings have a natural desire for dominance--to be the alpha male who rules over others--and these are those whom Balch identifies as the takers.  And while human beings in subordinate positions are naturally inclined to defer to the dominant few, the subordinates are also naturally inclined to resist being exploited by those dominant few.  Thus, Boehm observes, the political nature of human beings is ambivalent in showing the tension between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  The natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates not to be dominated.

In an egalitarian hierarchy, the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or even execution--to restrain politically ambitious individuals, those with special innate or learned propensities to dominate.  In every society, there will be leaders in some form.  But an egalitarian hierarchical society will allow only a moderate degree of leadership.  Here the power of the takers is checked by the resistance of the makers.

In a few passages of his book, Balch seems to recognize this.  In speaking about how Boehm and Richard Wrangham describe the hunter-gatherer "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA), Balch sees “a strain of oligarchy” and “targeted conspiratorial killing," which points to egalitarian hierarchy and the conditions for some taker/maker conflict.  He suggests that when he says that the worst bullies had to be eliminated (59, 126-27), and “the tension between hierarchical power and leveling morality has been a constant of human history” (129).

Moreover, what Balch calls “primal morality” in the EEA corresponds to what Locke calls the “law of nature” in the hunter-gatherer state of nature (60, 126-29, 218-19).  Locke’s law of nature is enforced by the “executive power of the law of nature”—the right of everyone to punish transgressors through reputational and forcible punishment, which would be supported by Boehm and Wrangham.  What Boehm and Wrangham say about killing bullies in the EEA confirms Paul Bingham’s argument about the importance of “killing from a distance” in enforcing cooperation.

REFERENCES

Balch, Stephen H. 2014. "On the Fragility of the Western Achievement." Society 51:8-21.

Balch, Stephen H.  Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Progress.  Book manuscript.

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

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Contoski, Edmund. 1997. Makers and Takers: How Wealth and Progress Are Made and How They Are Taken or Prevented. Minneapolis, MN: American Liberty Publishers.

D'Amato, David. 2018. "'Makers' and 'Takers' in Libertarian Thought."  https://www.libertarianism.org.

"No Kings!" Is the Waa-Bark of America's Chimpanzee Politics of Resistance to Trump

Last Saturday, we saw a massive display of chimpanzee political rhetoric.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  The five million people in the "No Kings" protests against Trump were shouting their waa-barks.  The people at Trump's military parade celebrating his birthday were pant-grunting their submission to Trump.  But reporters noticed that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings" protests.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.

Although chimpanzees do not have language, they do communicate with one another through sounds, postures, and facial expressions that convey information.  Often that information is about social rank.  An alpha male might engage in a loud display of intimidation that asserts his dominance over the group.  Other chimps might respond to this by signaling their submission to him.  Or they might respond with signs of resistance and defiance.  And some might even signal that they want to overthrow him.  Thus chimps engage in political rhetoric, because they try to persuade one another as to how their social order should be organized.  

We could also identify this chimpanzee political rhetoric as Lockean insofar as subordinate chimpanzees can protest against despotic dominance by the alpha male and thus limit his power, which moves towards the egalitarian social arrangement seen in human hunter-gatherer bands with an egalitarian style of hierarchy in which the leader is only primus inter pares ("first among equals").  This is what Locke saw in the state of nature in which all men are by nature equally free.  Not that all are absolutely equal, because some will have higher status than others, and some will become leaders of their social groups.  But that all adults have the natural right to be free from being unduly subordinated to anyone else without their consent, and that they have the natural right to punish those who threaten their life, liberty, or property (Second Treatise, pars. 4-10, 54, 94, 105).  

To explain the Darwinian evolution of this human state of nature, we should expect to find precursors of this human egalitarianism in our pre-human primate ancestors.  And if we assume that the common ancestor of humans and the African great apes was similar to a chimpanzee, then we might expect to see evolutionary preadaptations for an egalitarian style of dominance in chimpanzee groups.  In fact, as Christopher Boehm has argued, we can see in chimpanzees similarities to the ambivalent political nature of human hunter-gatherers that shows a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1993, 1999).  

Dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  The political life of primates is organized around dominance hierarchies in which the old tend to have dominance over the young and males tend to have dominance over females, although females can also have a dominance hierarchy, and sometimes coalitions of females can resist male dominance.  This is a political universal for chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity; and for human beings throughout history.  Winning or losing dominance is determined by patterns of coalition formation that depend on shifting circumstances and individual decisions.

Deference is the natural propensity of individuals to submit to those who are dominant.  As political universals, deference is the correlative of dominance.  Among the various species of political primates, there are distinctive behavioral cues, both verbal and nonverbal, by which subordinates defer to dominants.

Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

The variation in this behavior creates differences in dominance style across species.  As Frans de Waal has observed, rhesus monkeys show a "despotic dominance style" in which subordinates cannot challenge dominants; but chimpanzees show an "egalitarian dominance style" in which subordinates can restrain dominants (de Waal 1996).  Dominant chimpanzees are expected to mediate conflicts within the group and to lead the group in conflicts with other groups.  Dominant chimpanzees can be challenged or even deposed if they do not properly carry out their conflict-mediation role.

Like chimpanzee politics, human politics shows a dominance hierarchy that can be egalitarian in style, based on the principle that leaders are only first among equals.  This egalitarianism is most evident among human hunter-gatherers who use various kinds of sanctions (from ridicule and disobedience to ostracism and execution) to punish leaders who become too despotic in their dominance.  This resistance to dominance was probably a crucial part of human evolutionary history in the Paleolithic era (from about two million years ago to 10,000 years ago).  But with the establishment of large bureaucratic states based on agricultural production, which began more than 5,000 years ago, many states have been more despotic than egalitarian.  The emergence and spread of Lockean liberal democracies over the past three centuries is in some ways a return to the egalitarian dominance of the foraging way of life in which subordinates limit the power of dominants.

To the old question in political philosophy as to whether human beings are naturally hierarchical or naturally egalitarian, the answer from biopolitical science is that human beings are both.  Niccolo Machiavelli was right to see that human political nature is torn by the tension between the propensity of the few to dominance and the propensity of the many to submit to dominance while also resisting oppressive dominance.  The history of political practice and political thought turns on this natural ambivalence interacting over time with particular political circumstances and decisions.

As an illustration of this political ambivalence among chimpanzees, here is Jane Goodall's description of an incident she observed in July of 1964 in Gombe:

"Mike, the new alpha, rests in the shade of a tree.  A sudden crashing in the undergrowth heralds the arrival of Goliath, recently deposed from the top position.  Mike does not move as Goliath charges flat out toward him, dragging a huge branch.  At the last moment Goliath turns aside, swings into a nearby tree, and sits motionless.  Only now does Mike begin to display, swaying the vegetation, hurling a few rocks, then climbing into Goliath's tree and swaying branches there.  When he stops, Goliath displays again, leaping ever closer to his adversary until Mike responds.  For a few moments both are wildly swaying foliage within 2 meters of each other; but there is no fight.  They swing to the ground and charge off through the undergrowth, running parallel, then sit staring at each other.  Goliath stands upright and rocks a sapling; Mike hurtles past, throwing a large rock.  For the next twenty-three minutes the performance continues, and during the whole episode the only physical contact between them is when one is hit by the end of a bough swayed by the other.  Finally, after a three-minute pause, Goliath moves rapidly toward Mike, crouches beside him with loud, submissive pant-grunts, and begins to groom him vigorously.  For half a minute, Mike ignores him, then turns and grooms his vanquished rival with equal intensity.  For more than an hour, they groom until both are relaxed and peaceful" (Goodall 1986, 409).

Notice the ambivalent political rhetoric in this incident.  The male dominance hierarchy is determined by the directionality of displays and pant-grunting among the adult males.  Goodall has kept a quantitative record of this for many years so that she can track the ever-changing history of the dominance hierarchy. If an alpha male is secure in his dominance, he displays towards the others in the group, and he receives pant-grunts from the others; but he never pant-grunts toward any of them.  When Goliath displays towards Mike, Goliath is challenging him, attempting to take the alpha position.  Both are feeling aggressive and fearful at the same time.  Each is trying to bluff down the other.  But while Goliath wants dominance, his fear of Mike finally drives him to signal his submission through pant-grunting; and Mike accepts his submission by reconciling with him.

Displays are more common than physical attacks, because chimps would rather avoid the danger of serious physical injuries that come from attacks.  Charging displays are threats that serve to maintain or challenge the existing order of dominance.  But reversals in rank among the males are usually the result of physical fights.  And while size and strength are important for success in displays and fights, psychological traits--such as intelligence, ingenuity, boldness, persistence, and shrewdness in forming coalitions--are crucial for success.  Mike was actually one of the smaller adult males when he overthrew Goliath, but he figured out how to use empty kerosene cans in his noisy charging displays to shock the other males and throw them into confusion until they submitted to him.  As I indicated in a previous post, Boehm and Goodall have compared Donald Trump's bombastic rhetoric to Mike's displays.

The vocal rhetoric of chimpanzees is complex.  Goodall and other primatologists have identified at least 32 distinct calls that convey particular emotions or feelings (Goodall 1986, 127; Arcadi 2018, 116-23).  One of them is the pant-grunt that Goliath uttered to signal a feeling of social apprehension and submission.  Another is the waa-bark that signals anger and defiance.  Dominant individuals can use waas as a warning to subordinates.  But from his careful study of chimp videotaped vocalizations, Boehm has concluded that most waas are used by subordinates to express their defiance of dominants (Boehm 1999, 164-69).

Boehm has seen this illustrated by what de Waal reports in his studies of the chimps in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia.  When new adult males were introduced into the community, the Yerkes females acted as a power coalition that rejected males seeking the alpha male position.  Finally, they accepted Jimoh as the alpha male.  But when he acted as a bully, the females punished him.  

For example, one day Jimoh saw that Socko, an adolescent male, was mating with one of Jomoh's favorite females.  Jimoh chased Socko around the enclosure and refused to stop.  Socko was screaming and defecating in fear.

Several females nearby began to waa bark.  They looked around to see the reaction of others.  When others began to join in the waa barking, the intensity of their protests became deafening.  Finally, Jimoh got the message.  He broke off his attack to avoid any further attacks from the females.  It was as though the chimps were taking a vote, and Jimoh had lost the vote.  If Jimoh had not stopped his attack, he might have been overthrown and even killed.

Here are the evolved primate roots of Lockean political rhetoric, in which we see the political ambivalence in the tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.

Last Saturday, we saw a great debate between the deference to Trump at his military parade and the counter-dominance of resistance to Trump at the "No Kings" protests.

Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump, has said: "The so-called No Kings protests have been a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance."  Of course, that is what he has to say--he has to tell those of us who attended one of the protests that we must not believe what we saw with our own eyes.

Like I say, that's chimpanzee politics.

(Some of the material in this post comes from a previous post.)

REFERENCES

Arcadi, Adam. 2018. Wild Chimpanzees: Social Behavior of an Endangered Species. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34:227-254.

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

Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lockean Meritocracy Satisfies the Evolutionary Natural Desire for Social Status and Egalitarian Hierarchy

There are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are rooted in human biology as shaped by evolutionary history.  If the good is the desirable, then these twenty natural desires provide a universal basis for moral judgment.  A Lockean liberal social order can be judged to be the best regime in so far as it allows for the fullest satisfaction of those natural desires.

For example, there is a natural desire for social status that was formed in the Lockean evolutionary state of nature.  And we can see how the meritocracy in a Lockean liberal society satisfies that desire for social status.

Human beings generally desire social status through comparative social ranking.  This is a human universal found in all human societies (Brown 1991).  Human beings' esteem for themselves requires they be esteemed by others whose judgments they respect.  Human beings attain high social status through prestige, fame, or honor within the groups to which they belong.  And they can be ranked differently in different groups.  Although some societies are much less hierarchical than others, all societies rank individuals as higher or lower based on age, sex, kinship, physical formidability, physical attractiveness, social competence, and practical skills.

Individuals become socially dominant through any trait or activity that elicits deference in others.  A few charismatic individuals become heroic leaders because of their extraordinary power to win the respect of the people around them.  

And yet, subordinate individuals can resist excessive or exploitative dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

Men generally (on average) have a stronger desire for dominance in social hierarchies than do women.  Men compete for mating opportunities, and dominant men are generally more attractive to potential mates.

In a recent article published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Noah Smith and Reuven Dukas have surveyed the evidence and arguments for the evolutionary psychology of social ranking in humans and other animals.  They identify five major dimensions of social ranking in humans and two subcategories for each dimension:  physical formidability (height and muscularity), social conventions (age and nepotism), physical attractiveness (symmetry and health), social competence (empathy and extraversion), and practical competence in complex skills (intelligence and perseverance).  Although I agree with them about these five dimensions, they have overlooked a sixth major dimension of social ranking--the counter-dominance of subordinates that can establish what Christopher Boehm called a "reverse-dominance hierarchy" or "egalitarian dominance," which corresponds to what Locke identified as the natural equality of human beings in the state of nature.

Let's consider each of these six dimensions of social ranking.

(1)  Physical formidability.  Many animals live in social hierarchies in which higher ranking individuals can claim priority in access to scarce resources (such as food and shelter) and opportunities for sexual mating (Wilson 1975; Tibbets et al. 2022).  This ranking is mostly determined by physical formidability, which is the ability of an individual to win a fight.  Those who win a fight are more likely to win the next fight.  Those who lose a fight are more likely to lose the next fight.  Those with a reputation as winners can usually avoid costly fights by acting assertively and deterring challengers.  Those with a reputation as losers avoid costly fights with those who seem to be winners.  Consequently, actual fighting is usually rare, because conflicts are often settled through ritualistic displays of dominance and submission without the violence of real fighting.

Although physical formidability is not as important for human ranking as it is for nonhuman animals, it does have some influence in human social ranking.  For example, height is a cue for physical formidability, and height is correlated with high status and leadership positions (Cheng and Tracy 2014; Zeng et al. 2022).  One illustration of this is that the Presidents of the United States have been generally taller than the average for men.  But some of this correlation between height and high status could be explained by the correlation of height with intelligence and cognitive ability, because nutritional status during childhood affects both height and cognitive development in adults (Lindqvist 2012).

(2)  Social conventions.  Age and nepotism are two social conventions for determining social status that are important for both nonhuman animals and human beings.  Adults rank higher than children, and often older adults rank higher than younger adults (Redhead and Power 2022).  Nepotism (the tendency to favor one's kin) also shapes social hierarchies in which one's social ranking depends on the ranking of one's family (Bellow 2004).

(3)  Physical attractiveness.  Physically attractive people tend to have a high social status.  They have more friends, higher incomes, and better jobs.  This is true for both men and women (Frevert and Walker 2014).  Despite the variability in the perceptions of physical beauty, there are some general patterns that are universal, such as the judgment that the bodily signs of health and vigor, the youthful nubility of women, and facial and bodily symmetry are physically attractive (Jones et al. 2001).

(4)  Social competence.  In all human societies, people recognized for their social competence have high social status.  Social competence is the skill for performing social tasks and handling social interactions--such as leading a social group or mediating social disputes.  This requires a mixture of social intelligence, sociable personality traits, and social experience.  Socially competent people show cognitive sympathy (understanding other people's mental states) and affective sympathy (responding to people's mental states with appropriate emotion).  They also show sociable personality traits such as extraversion (Dukas and Bailey 2024; Smith and Dukas 2024).

(5)  Practical competence in complex skills.  In hunter-gatherer societies, people have high social status when they show competence in complex tasks such as hunting and toolmaking (Henrich 2016).  In modern societies, people gain high status when they show professional expertise in providing all kinds of goods and services (Anderson and Willer 2014).

(6)  Counter-dominance.  Smith and Dukas fail to recognize the importance of counter-dominance for subordinate individuals who need to resist exploitative dominance by socially superior individuals.  In their analysis of the traits necessary for social competence, Smith and Dukas (2024:164) include "the ability to control the impressions that other people have of an individual, and the ability to manipulate others for personal gain," and in support of this idea, they cite Niccolo Machiavelli's Prince and the writing of Richard Christie and Florence Geis (1970) on the "Machiavellian personality."

But they do not notice that the longest chapter in Machiavelli's The Prince--Chapter 19 on "Of Avoiding Contempt and Hatred"--is about how princes who become hated by the people they rule open themselves up to conspiracies leading to their assassination.  Although the people don't want to rule, they don't want to be exploited by those who rule them, and they will resist exploitative rule, sometimes violently.  Frans de Waal saw that political assassination was also part of the Machiavellian politics of chimpanzees, in which resistance to exploitative rule established an "egalitarian hierarchy" in chimpanzee communities as opposed to a "despotic hierarchy."  

Christopher Boehm saw this in both chimpanzees and in the foraging ancestors of human beings--a natural tendency to counter-dominance--the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

Locke saw this natural resistance to exploitative dominance in the evolutionary state of nature as the natural support for an egalitarian hierarchy, in which some have higher status and power than others, and yet all men are naturally equal in their liberty to live without being ruled by anyone without their consent.

REFERENCES

Anderson, C., and R. Willer.  2014. "Do Status Hierarchies Benefit Groups?  A Bounded Functionalist Account of Status."  In The Psychology of Social Status, eds. J. T. Cheng, J. L. Tracy, and C. Anderson, pp. 47-70.  New York: Springer.

Bellow, Adam.  2004.  In Praise of Nepotism: A History of Family Enterprise from King David to George W. Bush.  New York: Knopf Doubleday.

Brown, Donald.  1991.  Human Universals.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Cheng, J. T., and J. L. Tracy.  2014.  "Toward a Unified Science of Hierarchy: Dominance and Prestige Are Two Fundamental Pathways to Human Social Rank."  In The Psychology of Social Status, eds. J. T. Cheng, J. L. Tracy, and C. Anderson, pp. 3-27.  New York: Springer.

Christie, Richard, and Florence Geis.  1970.  Studies in Machiavellianism.  New York: Academic Press.

Dukas, R., and N. Bailey.  2024.  "Evolutionary Biology of Social Expertise." Biological Reviews https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.13115.

Frevert, T. K., and L. S. Walker. 2014. "Physical Attractiveness and Social Status."  Sociology Compass 8:313-323.

Henrich, Joseph.  2016.  The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jones, B. C., et al.  2001.  "Facial Symmetry and Judgments of Apparent Health: Support for a 'Good Genes' Explanation of the Attractiveness-Symmetry Relationship."  Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (November): 417-429.

Lindqvist, Erik.  2012.  "Height and Leadership."  Review of Economics and Statistics 94:1191-1196.

Redhead, D., and E. A. Power.  2022.  "Social Hierarchies and Social Networks in Humans."  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:20200440.

Smith, Noah M. T., and Reuven Dukas.  2024.  "Winner and Loser Effects and Social Rank in Humans."  The Quarterly Review of Biology 99:157-174.

Tibbets, E. A., et al.  2022.  "The Establishment and Maintenance of Dominance Hierarchies."  Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:20200450.

Wilson, Edward O.  1975.  Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zeng, T. C., J. T. Cheng, and J. Henrich.  2022.  "Dominance in Humans."  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:20200451.