He takes no pause to consider what this might imply. Were this actually the case, we could quite happily throw #anthropology in its entirety out the window with few consequences; eschew the full, uncut archive of human experience and social/political experimentation, in favour of a few shelves, and say, "Well, it looks better this way, and it makes more sense.*" I find that quite myopic.

There's a brief section in Chapter 3 of #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow's #DawnOfEverything where they argue starting from a common evopsych claim: hierarchy-seeking behaviour after groups pass a certain number is an adaptation from our simian ancestors. Social inequality, therefore, is an effect of genetic destiny. Some erudite Pleistocene archaeologists, "forced to confront" recent evidence of royal burials and commons areas, propose no alternatives. Open and shut case, right?

The Davids bring in the work of #ChristopherBoehm, an evolutionary anthropologist and specialist in primate studies, who writes that yes, we inherited dominant and submissive behaviours from the simians we descended from, but what separates humans - and human societies - from other primates is that not only can we consciously choose not to act in a certain way, we also understand how our society is impacted if we do not act to keep bullies in check (see next post):

> "Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, #Boehm identifies a whole panopoly of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth - ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination) - none of which have any parallel among other primates."
- pp. 174-5

Emphasis my own here:

> While gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is *NOT*: it's a well-thought-out *STRATEGY*, and forager societies who engage in it… understand what their society might look like if they did things differently…
- Ibid.

> So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged.
- Ibid, pp. 177

👆 That's Graeber's trademark irony, by the way. Our genetic nature, #Boehm writes, is hierarchy-seeking, yet our poiltical history is egalitarian. Boehm's argument, even though it shrugs and says, "I dunno guys, I'm just spitballing here," opens a plothole between the Middle Paleolithic and Neolithic Revolution that evolution can't explain alone.

That our prehistoric ancestors were not as equally capable of organising themselves into different political structures beggars belief. That this was *purely* down to evolution, doubly so. If future anthropologists only have sparse archaeological evidence from the past 40 years to judge us, they'd be as absurd to claim we, and our ancestors, were hardwired to organise our economies based on capitalist principles.

But what about that threshold, the magic number that explains why everything went to shit when we started building cities? In Chapter 8, the Davids repeat that the conventional, "textbook" version of human history posits "our capacity to keep track of names and faces, [is] largely determined by the fact that we spent 95 per cent of our evolutionary history in tiny groups of at best a few dozen individuals."

For hunter-gatherer societies, new and old, it goes like this: pair-bonded families (you, your siblings, and your parents) were the basic unit; they would form bands with five or six related families (your aunties, uncles, cousins) to hunt together; during rituals, bands would join with other bands to form bigger clans, but these were no larger than 150 members. This estimate is taken from comparing the size of our brain to other primates.

VERY small-c, mark you: "This is a brilliant and important argument – but, like so many authors, Boehm seems strangely reluctant to consider its full implications."