I'd be interested to read more about that, but it doesn't align with the research that I've seen. Many, many anthropologists believe that transcending our primate cousins dominance hierarchies was the central adaptation of human beings - one that allowed us to not only survive but to thrive. This is kind of further bolstered by the belief that we survived when Neanderthals (who had bigger brains) did not because we were friendlier, more cooperative, and more likely to accept people from outside our band who were otherwise similar as being one of us.
Small bands of 20-50 people that are centered around leaderless (often related to each other) bands would be putting their own survival and that of the entire band in jeopardy to do something so foolish as to fight each other. As primatologist Frans de Waal notes, “Destabilization of the social resource network decreases group stability and efficiency and lowers the average fitness benefit derived from cooperation.
When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.”
And if there are no leaders, there is no dominance hierarchy to fight over. That sounds to me like patriarchy justifying itself by assuming that the ancient past must've been a lot like the today, when there's all sorts of indication that it really wasn't.
“Nearly all of those who are claiming that warfare was commonplace in the Paleolithic era, rely on two types of supports for their claim from the same limited examples — rock art and skeletal remains. The rock art comes from 3 caves in France, consisting of all of four figures punctured by spears. However, two of the figures have tails and one appears to be half man and half bird. This is in shocking contrast to the thousands of depictions of the hunting of animals and a greater depiction of human violence found in cave art from 8000 BC on. (Nash 2005)
The skeletal remains are also few in number — one individual each found in two separate sites in Italy with embedded tool points, as well as two in the Ukraine. One Czech site had three people in a mass grave, but there was no indication of violence to the remains and they more likely died of disease."
The quote below refers to why war was unlikely until the recent past, but it would also speak to intergroup fighting - something that is strictly forbidden in modern forager tribes.
“According to cultural anthropologist and ethnographer Raymond C. Kelly, the earliest hunter-gatherer societies of Homo erectus population density was probably low enough to avoid armed conflict. The development of the throwing-spear, together with ambush hunting techniques, made potential violence between hunting parties very costly, dictating cooperation and maintenance of low population densities to prevent competition for resources. This behavior may have accelerated the migration out of Africa of H. Erectus some 1.8 million years ago as a natural consequence of conflict avoidance.”Paleolithic peoples had little or no reason to make war and every reason to maintain peace, including a social structure that was based in maintaining order and cohesion rather than being based in conflict. We do not see the arrival of dominance hierarchies until about 6 K years ago.“And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.” New Scientist
We know of many, many egalitarian, leaderless towns and even cities in the ancient world. If humans had always fought each other for dominance, how exactly would those have come about? For me, it doesn't add up. It makes a lot more sense that well into the early part of the agricultural revolution, the prevailing social dynamics of our forager ancestors continued — until they were eventually replace by patriarchal dominance hierarchies about 5k years ago.
“For much of our history, humans have valued their personal autonomy so completely that we did not tolerate anything else. Often chiefs or even kings only had theoretical power or wielded power more substantively only in their immediate vicinity. Out of sight, people continued to do what they wanted and to make decisions communally amongst themselves. In fact, there are even places where hierarchy and centralized authority did begin to arise, only to be later dismantled.
But, as I’m finding out, there are also innumerable other examples of settlements, cities, and even kingdoms from around the world where there was little to no top-down hierarchy or centralized political administration. From 300-hectare settlements in China’s Shandong Province that predate the earliest royal dynasties by 1000 years, to enormous ceremonial centers of the Maya which also predate the rise of the kings by 1000 years, we have evidence of many large communities with no evidence of central government or top-down hierarchy. Although Bali is a notably densely populated island historically governed by a series of kingdoms supported by wet-rice production, the management of that was overseen by a complex system of consensual decision-making by the farmers themselves — not the kings. These are only a few examples and there are many more.”
So, I’d be open to reading more on this, but I’m also quite skeptical.
Sounds like I've got the makings of a story here...lol.
