Hunter-gatherer Bands Research Articles

A review of Dr Wrangham’s book, ‘the Goodness Paradox . . . ‘, and insights into the evolution of human language, aesthetics, and free will

Dr Richard Wrangham’s book and YouTubes are helping to explain our evolved psychology as primarily occurring in African hunter-gatherer bands before the end of the last ice age. This perspective is supported by the exquisite cave paintings and tool artifacts from this ancient time. The most important evidence about our origins, however, comes from recent anthropological studies of current bands that represent the earlier age. Results showed that 5-psychosocial-behaviors produced both the environment and the natural selection for our psychology. These are: 1) language, coalitional activities and egalitarianism organization, 2) problems of bullies for egalitarianism, 3) management of the problems by gossip, ostracism and executions, 4) those targeted by the management had shorter lives and fewer children demonstrating strong natural selection, 5) reduced targeting occurred for those showing high-quality activities or high status, which increased the complexity of the selection to include all of our psychological abilities. The evolved psychological abilities include those highlighted by Dr Wrangham: emotions, intelligence, conscience and personality, as well as those with only supporting evidence: developmental and social learning, theory of mind, language, aesthetics, and free will. Further support for the importance of the 5-psychosocial-behaviors is provided by evidence from the domestication syndrome, natural selection pressure, and a positive feedback model. In addition, these perspectives can explain issues such as why 50% of our thoughts and behaviors comes from our environment and development as demonstrated in identical twin studies, and why we experience life with agency and free will. Dr Wrangham’s work is producing a new explanation of our nature that can help us all to understand why we are the way we are.

Camelids in the hyperarid core of the Atacama desert 12,000–11,000 years ago? A stable isotope study and its consequences for early human settlement

How did hunter-gatherers initially settle and move across extreme environments? We conducted a multi-disciplinary study to tackle this question, focusing on how Paleoindigenous populations inhabited the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert. Particularly, we examined the stable isotopic values of ∼12,000–11,200-year-old camelid and rodent bones and hair samples retrieved from low-elevation archaeological sites (Pampa del Tamarugal basin - PdT, 800–1200 masl). By integrating novel and existing data into a regional stable isotope ecology, we offer a baseline for interpreting our results. δ13C and δ15N values on archaeological remains show animals with different geographical origins. A first group includes camelids and rodents with lower δ15N values and δ13C values indicating a dominantly C3 diet, corresponding to animals either local to the PdT or from the Andean Steppe, at least ∼80 km away and between 4000 and 4500 masl. Most of these remains, however, come from residential sites and belong to young camelids, indicating a local origin. A second group presents a higher δ15N signal and δ13C values indicative of a mixed C3–C4 based diet. These animals were not local but source to the Puna at least ∼60 km away between 3200 - 4000 masl. We hypothesize that the first would correspond to animals associated with hunter-gatherer bands settled around a wetland and grove environment in the PdT. The second group could correspond to remains brought by humans from the Puna to the PdT. Our results demonstrate that during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene the Atacama was very different than today, supporting life that included large and mid-size game. These results also show that the core of the Atacama attracted animals and people and counters the notion of this ecosystem as a barren passageway from the Andes to the coast.

Study of Religion and the Dawn of Everything

Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything takes on the West’s entwined and taken-for-granted histories of the state and of capital. Just as Freud insisted that the libido had to be sacrificed on the altar of civilization, so following Rousseau and Hobbes, freedom had to be sacrificed on the altars of order, population density and societal complexity. If early humans lived in egalitarian, mobile bands of hunter gatherers, that early freedom evaporated as soon as they became farmers and urbanites, obligated stage by historical stage first to chiefs, monarchs and priests, then to politicians and bureaucrats (and today to debt and the algorithm). It is precisely these origin myths, these linear just-so-stories for which inequality is natural and inevitable, that Graeber and Wengrow seek to unravel. What follows derives from a roundtable organised by Paul-François Tremlett for BASR 2022 that brought together Graham Harvey, David G. Robertson and Carole Cusack for a lively and critical engagement with The Dawn of Everything and its significance for religious studies.

Coetzee's Carcer[e]al State: Michael K as Hunter-Gatherer

In Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee appears thoroughly persuaded by those anthropological theories—still emerging at the time of the novel's publication—that were reconceiving hunter-gatherer bands as happier, healthier, better-fed, more leisured, and less socially stratified communities than the permanent settlements of agriculturalists. By depicting Michael as a nutritionally and spiritually satisfied forager upon the karoo and by figuring the labor camps in which he is intermittently confined as epitomes of the Neolithic (and subsequent) grain state, Coetzee endorses those intellectual currents that have now supplanted the optimistic narrative of the Agricultural Revolution with that of the Agricultural Trap. In short, the novel figures the adoption of farming as a hedonic catastrophe for the great mass of humankind. Thus, critics who register their disappointment with the novel's supposed political quietism have failed to grasp the text's longue durée concerns or to realize that Michael refuses to aid the guerillas because their victory would only impose upon him a different version of agro-culture. By the same token, many critics' insistence that Michael is a vaguely allegorical figure offering some unrealizable alternative lifeway is refined into sharper focus by the revelation of his anthropological specificity.

Big History and the Principle of Emergence

Life is a raucous carnival, full of “games” and “rides” whose ongoing interactions continually surprise us. Yet thinkers are too often tempted to treat it as a machine that spits out linear time lines of events, one leading deterministically to another. By its interdisciplinary nature, big history is inclined to treat the world as a carnival; yet the temptation to treat it in the more linear way sometimes prevails. This essay treats one key dynamic that governs life’s carnival—the principle of emergence. Emergence is the process by which a relatively simple entity interacts with its environment to become structurally complex, often in ways that seem impossible to anticipate. In this way, a seed becomes a fruit tree, a small community becomes a vast city, or a shamanic religion in a hunter-gatherer band evolves into a system of belief and practice shared by a billion people. By defining emergence and exploring religion as an extended illustration, this paper makes the case for more fully incorporating the principle of emergence into the study of big history.

Intra-Site Structure of the Early Ahmarian Site of Al-Ansab 1, AH 1 (Jordan)

The Early Ahmarian represents an Early Upper Palaeolithic cultural unit, which spans throughout the Levant to the Sinai Peninsula. At least 40 sites belong to this unit. Both open-air and cave sites provide different amounts of archaeological material at various spatial resolutions. The team of the Collaborative Research Centre 806 “Our Way to Europe” excavated the site of Al-Ansab 1, Wadi Sabra, since 2009. The site provides one of the largest lithic assemblages of the Early Ahmarian. Analysis of intra-site distributions and patterns has been conducted for a small number of sites, providing scarce information on the spatial makeup of Early Ahmarian occupation layers. The internal structure testifies to repeated settlement without task specialisation. While this has been described for the sites on the Sinai Peninsula, the situation has been unclear for locations placed in the escarpments of the Transjordanian Highlands. At Al-Ansab 1, we can observe the repeated, relatively ephemeral occupation of a specific location in the Wadi Sabra for the execution of various tasks such as processing of faunal elements and raw material exploitation. Our results correlate to a pattern of mobility observable at other Early Ahmarian sites such as Abu Noshra II. These sites are usually attributed to relatively small and highly mobile bands of hunter-gatherers. Analysing these patterns of intra-site and regional spatial behaviour in the context of environmental patterning highlights potential external drivers to the expression of human occupation at sites such as Al-Ansab 1, archaeological horizon 1.

Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology.

Traditional evolutionary theory invoked natural and sexual selection to explain species- and sex-typical traits. However, some heritable inter-individual variability in behaviour and psychology - personality - is probably adaptive. Here we extend this insight to common psychopathological traits. Reviewing key findings from three background areas of importance - theoretical models, non-human personality and evolved human social dynamics - we propose that a combination of social niche specialisation, negative frequency-dependency, balancing selection and adaptive developmental plasticity should explain adaptation for individual differences in psychology - 'specialised minds' - explaining some variance in personality and psychopathology trait dimensions, which share various characteristics. We suggest that anthropological research of behavioural differences should be extended past broad demographic factors (age and sex) to include individual specialisations. As a first step towards grounding psychopathology in ancestral social structure, we propose a minimum plausible prevalence, given likely ancestral group sizes, for negatively frequency-dependent phenotypes to be maintained as specialised tails of adaptive distributions - below the calculated prevalence, specialisation is highly unlikely. For instance, chronic highly debilitating forms of autism or schizophrenia are too rare for such explanations, whereas attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and broad autism phenotypes are common enough to have existed in most hunter-gatherer bands, making adaptive explanations more plausible.

The Creative Neurons.

Creativity generates novel solutions to tasks by processing information. Imagination and mental representations are part of the creative process; we can mull over ideas of our own making, and construct algorithms or scenarios from them. Social scenario-building can be viewed as a human cognitive “super-power” that involves abstraction, meta-representation, time-travel, and directed imaginative thought. We humans have a “theater in our minds” to play out a near-infinite array of social strategies and contingencies. Here we propose an integrative model for why and how humans evolved extraordinary creative abilities. We posit that a key aspect of hominin evolution involved relatively open and fluid social relationships among communities, enabled by a unique extended family structure similar to that of contemporary hunter-gatherer band societies. Intercommunity relationships facilitated the rapid flow of information—“Culture”—that underpinned arms-races in information processing, language, imagination, and creativity that distinguishes humans from other species.

Our Prehistory as Egalitarian Nomadic Foragers with Antiauthoritarian Leadership: What These Nomads Can Teach Us Today

ABSTRACT Our species has deep prehistoric roots in egalitarian and antiauthoritarian bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. As large agricultural societies develop after the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago, despotic rulers, social hierarchies and brutal social inequalities begin to emerge. Through the immensely long arc of the history of our species the pendulum has swung between authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, egalitarianism and hierarchy, cooperation and competition, collective solidarity and individual selfishness. Recognizing these oscillations is a key to understanding the political and social nature of our species. As I show, our capacity to control bullies and tyrants and our longing for autonomy and freedom have deep roots in the egalitarian ways of life of nomadic foragers that prevailed during 100,000 years of the prehistory of our species or perhaps much longer. A better understanding about what is known about this prehistory gives us reasons to believe that “the better angels of our nature” are not just historical products, but are indeed rooted in human nature.

On prehistoric psychology: Reflections at the invitation of Göbekli Tepe.

The Neolithic Revolution has been heralded as the most significant sociocognitive change in human history, yet it is all but ignored by psychology. This gives rise to a reconsideration of the question "Where should the history of psychology begin?" Using the Neolithic archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe as a concrete case study, the advent of writing, organized religion, and our transition from being egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers to socially stratified and specialized builders of "civilization" all stand as salient, but prehistoric, psychological topics. Such matters seem clearly crucial to understanding the full story of psychology, but nevertheless this vital segment of prehistory manages to be passed over by even evolutionary psychologists as well as historians of our discipline. How this problem is best addressed remains an open question. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Status does not predict stress: Women in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society.

It is widely believed that there is strong association between physiological stress and an individual's social status in their social hierarchy. This has been claimed for all humans cross-culturally, as well as in non-human animals living in social groups. However, the relationship between stress and social status has not been explored in any egalitarian hunter-gatherer society; it is also under investigated in exclusively female social groups. Most of human evolutionary history was spent in small, mobile foraging bands of hunter-gatherers with little economic differentiation - egalitarian societies. We analysed women's hair cortisol concentration along with two domains of women's social status (foraging reputation and popularity) in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza. We hypothesized that higher social status would be associated with lower physiological indicators of stress in these women. Surprisingly, we did not find any association between either foraging reputation or popularity and hair cortisol concentration. The results of our study suggest that social status is not a consistent or powerful predictor of physiological stress levels in women in an egalitarian social structure. This challenges the notion that social status has the same basic physiological implications across all demographics and in all human societies.

Surface Stone Artifact Scatters, Settlement Patterns, and New Methods for Stone Artifact Analysis

Movement and mobility are key properties in understanding what makes us human and so have been foci for archeological studies. Stone artifacts survive in many contexts, providing the potential for understanding landscape use in the past through studies of mobility and settlement pattern. We review the inferential basis for these studies based on archeological practice and anthropological understanding of hunter-gatherer bands. Rather than structured relationships among band size, composition, and mobility, anthropological studies suggest variability in how hunter-gatherer groups were organized. We consider how stone artifact studies may be used to investigate this variability by outlining a geometric approach to stone artifact analysis based on the Cortex Ratio. An archeological case study from Holocene semi-arid Australia allows consideration of the potential of this approach for understanding past landscape use from stone artifact assemblage composition more generally.

Pacifying Hunter-Gatherers.

There is a well-entrenched schism on the frequency (how often), intensity (deaths per 100,000/year), and evolutionary significance of warfare among hunter-gatherers compared with large-scale societies. To simplify, Rousseauians argue that warfare among prehistoric and contemporary hunter-gatherers was nearly absent and, if present, was a late cultural invention. In contrast, so-called Hobbesians argue that violence was relatively common but variable among hunter-gatherers. To defend their views, Rousseauians resort to a variety of tactics to diminish the apparent frequency and intensity of hunter-gatherer warfare. These tactics include redefining war, censoring ethnographic accounts of warfare in comparative analyses, misconstruing archaeological evidence, and claiming that outside contact inflates the intensity of warfare among hunter-gatherers. These tactics are subject to critical analysis and are mostly found to be wanting. Furthermore, Hobbesians with empirical data have already established that the frequency and intensity of hunter-gatherer warfare is greater compared with large-scale societies even though horticultural societies engage in warfare more intensively than hunter-gatherers. In the end I argue that although war is a primitive trait we may share with chimpanzees and/or our last common ancestor, the ability of hunter-gatherer bands to live peaceably with their neighbors, even though war may occur, is a derived trait that fundamentally distinguishes us socially and politically from chimpanzee societies. It is a point often lost in these debates.

Back to prehistory: the quest for an alternative IR founding myth

Searching for an alternative founding myth for international relations (IR) entails going back long before the 1648 Westphalian milestone. Drawing from a world historical approach, this article makes the case for investigating the origins of the subject matter of IR in the pre-state era: its founding moment may be traced back to a first encounter between two distinct bands of nomadic Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers in the Palaeolithic period. As the outcome of this interaction was not predetermined, four scenarios are considered: absence of relations by retreat and isolation; conflict triggered by self-preservation (birth of war); cooperation, barter or other types of exchange; and merging together. Following the initial engagement, intergroup relations became much more intertwined. Once the stranger was no longer unknown, the original distinction between Us and Them began to fade away. The ensuing relationship shaped their co-constructed social reality, in a long process of extending trust beyond the family circle.

SCALING THE SIZE, STRUCTURE, AND DYNAMICS OF RESIDENTIALLY MOBILE HUNTER-GATHERER CAMPS

Short-term hunter-gatherer residential camps have been a central feature of human settlement patterns and social structure for most of human evolutionary history. Recent analyses of ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer data show that across different environments, the average size of hunter-gatherer bands is remarkably constant and that bands are commonly formed by a small number of coresident families. Using ethnoarchaeological data, we examine the relationship between the physical infrastructure of camps and their social organization. We compiled a dataset of 263 ethnoarchaeologically observed hunter-gatherer camps from 13 studies in the literature. We focus on both the scale of camps, or their average size, structure, and composition, and the dynamics that governed their variation. Using a combination of inferential statistics and linear models, we show that the physical infrastructure of camps, measured by the number of household features, reflects the internal social organization of hunter-gatherer bands. Using scaling analyses, we then show that the variation among individual camps is related to a predictable set of dynamics between camp area, infrastructure, the number of occupants, and residence time. Moreover, the scale and dynamics that set the statistical variance in camp sizes are similar across different environments and have important implications for reconstructing prehistoric hunter-gatherer social organization and behavior from the archaeological record.

Hunter-Gatherers Maintain Assortativity in Cooperation despite High Levels of Residential Change and Mixing

Widespread cooperation is a defining feature of human societies from hunter-gatherer bands to nation states [1, 2], but explaining its evolution remains a challenge. Although positive assortment of cooperators is recognized as a basic requirement for the evolution of cooperation, the mechanisms governing assortment are debated. Moreover, the social structure of modern hunter-gatherers, characterized by high mobility, residential mixing, and low genetic relatedness [3], undermines assortment and adds to the puzzle of howcooperation evolved. Here, we analyze four years of data (2010, 2013, 2014, 2016) tracking residence and levels of cooperation elicited from a public goods game in Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Data were collected from 56 camps, comprising 383 unique individuals, 137 of whom we have data for two or more years. Despite significant residential mixing, we observe a robust pattern of assortment that is necessary for cooperation to evolve; in every year, Hadza camps exhibit high between-camp and low within-camp variation in cooperation. We find little evidence that cooperative behavior within individuals is stable over time or that similarity in cooperation between dyads predicts their future cohabitation. Both sets of findings are inconsistent with models that assume stable cooperative and selfish types, including partner choice models. Consistent with social norms, culture, and reciprocity theories, the strongest predictor of an individual's level of cooperation is the mean cooperation of their current campmates. These findings underscore the adaptive nature ofhuman cooperation-particularly its responsiveness to social contexts-as a feature that is important in generating the assortment necessary for cooperation to evolve.

Moving things: Comparing lithic and bone refits from a Middle Paleolithic site

The refitting of both lithic and faunal remains is a basic field of research in Paleolithic archeology. In particular, the spatial dimension of lithic and faunal refitting is essential for resolving questions related to site formation processes and the organization strategies of hunter-gatherer bands. Unfortunately, although important insights can be gained by comparing the spatial patterns of faunal and lithic refits there are relatively few sites from which both types are available. Some processes causing the movement of archeological items are common to both bone and lithic remains, but others are specific to each. The similarities and differences between the lithic and faunal connections can be particularly informative when considering the type and timing of the archeological assemblage formation dynamics. This comparison may be especially useful for disentangling the roles of natural and cultural processes in these formation dynamics. To illustrate this, we will compare the refitting patterns of lithic and faunal remains in level M from Abric Romaní (Capellades, Barcelona, Spain), a Middle Paleolithic assemblage dated between 51 and 55kyrBP. The results of such a comparison provide new insights into various formation processes, including the intrasite movement of archeological items and the relationships between activity areas.

Ancient metalworking in South America: a 3000-year-old copper mask from the Argentinian Andes

Abstract

Camp stability predicts patterns of hunter-gatherer cooperation.

Humans regularly cooperate with non-kin, which has been theorized to require reciprocity between repeatedly interacting and trusting individuals. However, the role of repeated interactions has not previously been demonstrated in explaining real-world patterns of hunter–gatherer cooperation. Here we explore cooperation among the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter–gatherers, using data from both actual resource transfers and two experimental games across multiple camps. Patterns of cooperation vary greatly between camps and depend on socio-ecological context. Stable camps (with fewer changes in membership over time) were associated with greater reciprocal sharing, indicating that an increased likelihood of future interactions facilitates reciprocity. This is the first study reporting an association between reciprocal cooperation and hunter–gatherer band stability. Under conditions of low camp stability individuals still acquire resources from others, but do so via demand sharing (taking from others), rather than based on reciprocal considerations. Hunter–gatherer cooperation may either be characterized as reciprocity or demand sharing depending on socio-ecological conditions.

Hunter-Gatherers’ Self-Governance: Untying the Traditional Authority of Chiefs from the Western Toba Civil Association

The Integral Law for Aborigines (426/84) was the first legal instrument in Argentina systematically addressing indigenous peoples’ rights. It was modeled on the Paraguayan Law for Indigenous Communities (901/81). Both granted collective property rights. I discuss Article 9 of Decree 574/85 in Law 426, requiring that former hunter-gatherer bands would form civil associations, like those in the non-profit sector. The policymakers later amended the clause on governance inserting the authority of chiefs along that of democratically elected delegates. I describe the Western Toba’s journey to obtaining collective land title by introducing characteristics of traditional leadership, discussing local antecedents leading to the law, comparing it to the Paraguayan law, and analyzing the process through which the Toba complied with legal requirements.