> "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.

#Boehm argues this is the 'essence' of politics, and it's not a 20th-century idea - the Davids trace it back to #Artistotle's description of humans as 'political animals.' Despite the evidence, however, Boehm still concludes that, until around 12,000 years ago, all human settlements that came and went followed the exact same egalitarian social arrangements. Suddenly, hierarchy! Talk about conservative* cognitive dissonance.

> 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.

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.

What evopsych claims here is that our best shot at total solidarity and efficient decision-making is with our closest blood relatives. Except when it's not:

> "Many humans just don't like their families very much... Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them."
- Ibid., pp. 543-44

The #Martu clans of Australia are often cited as living proof of the arrangements just described - yet, as far as quantitative data can be gathered for modern hunter-gatherer societies, natal kin make up less than 10% of their population. In other words, they are predominantly populated with metaphorical kin:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199071

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004724841830157X

As recent genomic research suggests, it'd be accurate to say the same of prehistoric hunter-gatherers:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aao1807

Another plothole yawns open. People who lived during the Upper Paleolithic were as capable of identifying themselves as being part of larger imaginary structures beyond their homes. They could imagine solidarity with countless people of whom a majority they would never meet, well before the first cities emerged.