The Origins of Multi-level Society
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The Origins of Multi‑level Society Kim Sterelny1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract There is a very striking difference between even the simplest ethnographically known human societies and those of the chimps and bonobos. Chimp and bonobo societies are closed societies: with the exception of adolescent females who disperse from their natal group and join a nearby group (never to return to their group of origin), a pan residential group is the whole social world of the agents who make it up. That is not true of forager bands, which have fluid memberships, and regular associations with neighbouring bands. They are components of a larger social world. The open and fluid character of forager bands brings with it many advantages, so the stability of this more vertically complex form of social life is not difficult to explain, once it establishes. But how did it establish, if, as is likely, earlier hominin social worlds resemble those of our close pan relatives in the suspicion (even hostility) of one band to another? How did hominin social organisation transition from life in closed bands, each distrustful of its neighbours, to the much more open social lives of foragers? I will discuss and synthesise two approaches to this problem, one ecological, based on the work of Robert Layton and his colleagues, and another that is organised around an expansion of kin recognition, an idea primarily driven by Bernard Chapais. The paper closes by discussing potential archaeological signatures both of more open social worlds, and of the supposed causal drivers of such worlds. Keywords Multi-level society · Evolution of human kinship · Evolution of open social networks · Evolution of human cooperation · Bernard Chapais · Robert Layton
1 Open and Closed Social Worlds This paper aims to explain and approximately date a transition in hominin social organisation from the closed social world of chimp residential groups (and to a lesser extent, of bonobo groups) to the much more open social world of even the simplest human societies. In pursuit of this aim, the paper begins with the contrast between open human groups and closed pan societies, and with the great importance of that difference. That contrast poses a puzzle. Once established, the relative stability of open human social organisation is not difficult to explain. However, it is challenging to see how an open organisation could originate if the ancestral form of social life was one of distrust and suspicion towards those outside the band. This paper combines two existing proposals to sketch a response to this puzzle, while also * Kim Sterelny [email protected] 1
School of Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, Coombs Bld (Bld 9), Fellows Rd, Acton, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
reflecting on the methodological challenges of identifying changes in hominin social organisation over deep time. First, the pan-human contrast, and the idea of a “simple” human society. My notion of simplicity is borrowed from Ray Kelly, who draws an important distinction bet
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