The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus
Authors: Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus
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social intelligence. Their classifications often include not only every living human they come into contact with but every ancestor, including some who were supernatural. The result is that foragers can create larger societies, larger networks of sharing and cooperating individuals, than those of any of their primate relatives. To underscore this, let us consider some of the data that have accumulated since Marshall Sahlins wrote his classic comparison of apes and early humans.
What Have You Done with My Dominance Hierarchy?
Chimpanzees, with whom we share 98 percent of our DNA, have strong social inequality. They display a dominance hierarchy or “pecking order” in which alpha individuals dominate all others, beta individuals dominate all but the alphas, and so on down the hierarchy to the lowliest omega.
It is not predetermined who the alphas will be. Chimps live in troops, and their social structure emerges from a series of interactions among individuals in the troop. These interactions, some confrontational, determine who the alphas, betas, and gammas will be. Nor is the hierarchy set in stone; betas have been seen forming alliances to overthrow an alpha by force. One of the victorious betas then takes over the fallen leader’s place.
According to primatologists John Mitani, David Watts, and Martin Miller, one of the ways that male chimps learn to create alliances is by hunting colobus monkeys together and sharing the meat. This food sharing could be seen as a precursor to the sharing of meat by human foragers. It does not, however, extend beyond the limits of the troop. No one has ever seen members of two chimpanzee troops meet at the border between their territories and exchange food. In fact, groups of males from Troop A have been observed ambushing and killing isolated males from Troop B. Thus when a troop of chimps has depleted the food in its territory, it cannot appeal for help to a neighboring troop. Chimps cannot do what human foragers do: accumulate social obligations with their neighbors as a hedge against lean times.
It was not the ability to hunt with spears instead of teeth that created the greatest differences between human foragers and apes. By giving humans the capacity for language and culture, natural selection enabled them to reach beyond their local group and make relatives out of strangers. Their use of words to create clan members, section members, gift partners, and namesakes, and to establish mutual obligations and systems of bride exchange, enabled human society to spread to every corner of the earth.
Our Ice Age ancestors temporarily put an end to leadership based on confrontation. As Christopher Boehm reminds us, the headmen of foraging groups were not bullies. They were generous, modest, and diplomatic, because their constituents were too skilled at alliance-building to put up with bullies. The fate of a bully was to be lured into the bush and shot with poisoned arrows.
Those who study apes, however, tell us that their dominance hierarchies provide stability to their societies. Without such a hierarchy, where was the stability in foraging society going to come from?
Some anthropologists argue that in the process of creating the first human beings, natural selection did away with the dominance hierarchies characteristic of our ape ancestors. Proponents of this view suggest that during the centuries since agriculture arose, some societies have done everything in their power to reinstate a social hierarchy.
While we understand why some would hold this view, we would like to play the devil’s advocate. We see other ways that the evidence can be interpreted.
When we look at hunters and gatherers, we see a dominance hierarchy as clear as that of chimpanzees. It is, however, a hierarchy in which the alphas are invisible supernatural beings, too powerful to be overthrown by conspiracy or alliance, and capable of causing great misfortune when disobeyed. The betas are invisible ancestors
What Have You Done with My Dominance Hierarchy?
Chimpanzees, with whom we share 98 percent of our DNA, have strong social inequality. They display a dominance hierarchy or “pecking order” in which alpha individuals dominate all others, beta individuals dominate all but the alphas, and so on down the hierarchy to the lowliest omega.
It is not predetermined who the alphas will be. Chimps live in troops, and their social structure emerges from a series of interactions among individuals in the troop. These interactions, some confrontational, determine who the alphas, betas, and gammas will be. Nor is the hierarchy set in stone; betas have been seen forming alliances to overthrow an alpha by force. One of the victorious betas then takes over the fallen leader’s place.
According to primatologists John Mitani, David Watts, and Martin Miller, one of the ways that male chimps learn to create alliances is by hunting colobus monkeys together and sharing the meat. This food sharing could be seen as a precursor to the sharing of meat by human foragers. It does not, however, extend beyond the limits of the troop. No one has ever seen members of two chimpanzee troops meet at the border between their territories and exchange food. In fact, groups of males from Troop A have been observed ambushing and killing isolated males from Troop B. Thus when a troop of chimps has depleted the food in its territory, it cannot appeal for help to a neighboring troop. Chimps cannot do what human foragers do: accumulate social obligations with their neighbors as a hedge against lean times.
It was not the ability to hunt with spears instead of teeth that created the greatest differences between human foragers and apes. By giving humans the capacity for language and culture, natural selection enabled them to reach beyond their local group and make relatives out of strangers. Their use of words to create clan members, section members, gift partners, and namesakes, and to establish mutual obligations and systems of bride exchange, enabled human society to spread to every corner of the earth.
Our Ice Age ancestors temporarily put an end to leadership based on confrontation. As Christopher Boehm reminds us, the headmen of foraging groups were not bullies. They were generous, modest, and diplomatic, because their constituents were too skilled at alliance-building to put up with bullies. The fate of a bully was to be lured into the bush and shot with poisoned arrows.
Those who study apes, however, tell us that their dominance hierarchies provide stability to their societies. Without such a hierarchy, where was the stability in foraging society going to come from?
Some anthropologists argue that in the process of creating the first human beings, natural selection did away with the dominance hierarchies characteristic of our ape ancestors. Proponents of this view suggest that during the centuries since agriculture arose, some societies have done everything in their power to reinstate a social hierarchy.
While we understand why some would hold this view, we would like to play the devil’s advocate. We see other ways that the evidence can be interpreted.
When we look at hunters and gatherers, we see a dominance hierarchy as clear as that of chimpanzees. It is, however, a hierarchy in which the alphas are invisible supernatural beings, too powerful to be overthrown by conspiracy or alliance, and capable of causing great misfortune when disobeyed. The betas are invisible ancestors
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