Origins of society

The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology.^[1][2] While little is known for certain, debates since Hobbes^[3] and Rousseau^[4] have returned again and again to certain key questions. Do animals have 'society'? If not, on what grounds should we exclude their social arrangements? Does 'society' presuppose religion and morality? Does it presuppose explicit social contracts? When our prehistoric ancestors began establishing society, was it by modifying the principles of nonhuman primate social organisation? Or — as anthropologist Christopher Boehm^[5] suggests — did they have to confront and overthrow those principles, turning the world upside down? If potentially anti-social propensities such as primate competitiveness and sexuality had to be curbed — as many believe — was this achieved through collective pressure from below, or in response to intensified constraints from above?

Social origins in nature

Robert Trivers

I consider Trivers one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that he has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.

— Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers. 

In his 1985 book, Social Evolution,^[6] Robert Trivers outlines the theoretical framework used today by most evolutionary biologists to understand how and why societies are established. Trivers sets out from the fundamental fact that genes survive beyond the death of the bodies they inhabit, while copies of the same gene may be replicated in multiple different bodies. From this, it follows that a creature should behave altruistically to the extent that those benefiting carry the same genes — 'inclusive fitness', as this source of cooperation in nature is termed.^[7] Where animals are unrelated, cooperation should be limited to 'reciprocal altruism' or 'tit-for-tat'.^[8]

Where previously, biologists took parent-offspring cooperation for granted, Trivers predicted on theoretical grounds both cooperation and conflict — as when a mother needs to wean an existing baby (even against its will) in order to make way for another.^[9] Previously, biologists had interpreted male infanticidal behaviour as aberrant and inexplicable or, alternatively, as a necessary strategy for culling excess population.^[10] Trivers was able to show that such behaviour was a logical strategy by males to enhance their own reproductive success at the expense of conspecifics including rival males. Ape or monkey females whose babies are threatened have directly opposed interests, often forming coalitions to defend themselves and their offspring against infanticidal males.^[11]

Human society, according to Trivers, is unusual in that it involves the male of the species investing parental care in his own offspring — a rare pattern for a primate. Where such cooperation occurs, it's not enough to take it for granted: in Trivers' view we need to explain it using an overarching theoretical framework applicable to humans and nonhumans alike.^[12]

Everybody has a social life. All living creatures reproduce and reproduction is a social event, since at its bare minimum it involves the genetic and material construction of one individual by another. In turn, differences between individuals in the number of their surviving offspring (natural selection) is the driving force behind organic evolution. Life is intrinsically social and it evolves through a process of natural selection which is itself social. For these reasons social evolution refers not only to the evolution of social relationships between individuals but also to deeper themes of biological organization stretching from gene to community.

— Robert Trivers, 1985. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummings, p. vii. 

Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar originally studied gelada baboons in the wild in Ethiopia, and has done much to synthesise modern primatological knowledge with Darwinian theory into a comprehensive overall picture. The components of primate social systems 'are essentially alliances of a political nature aimed at enabling the animals concerned to achieve more effective solutions to particular problems of survival and reproduction'.^[13] Primate societies are in essence 'multi-layered sets of coalitions'.^[14] Although physical fights are ultimately decisive, the social mobilisation of allies usually decides matters and requires skills that go beyond mere fighting ability. The manipulation and use of coalitions demands sophisticated social — more precisely political — intelligence. Usually but not always, males exercise dominance over females. Even where male despotism prevails, females typically gang up with one another to pursue agendas of their own. When a male gelada baboon attacks a previously dominant rival so as to take over his harem, the females concerned may insist on their own say in the outcome. At various stages during the fighting, the females may 'vote' among themselves on whether to accept the provisional outcome. Rejection is signalled by refusing to groom the challenger; acceptance is signalled by going up to him and grooming him. According to Dunbar, the ultimate outcome of an inter-male 'sexual fight' always depends on the female 'vote'.^[15]

Dunbar points out that in a primate social system, lower-ranking females will typically suffer the most intense harassment. Consequently, they will be the first to form coalitions in self-defence. But maintaining commitment from coalition allies involves much time-consuming manual grooming, putting pressure on time-budgets. In the case of evolving humans, who were living in increasingly large groups, the costs would soon have outweighed the benefits — unless some more efficient way of maintaining relationships could be found. Dunbar argues that 'vocal grooming' — using the voice to signal commitment — was the time-saving solution adopted, and that this led eventually to speech. Dunbar goes on to suggest (citing a speculative suggestion by Darwinian anthropologist Chris Knight^[16][17]) that distinctively human society may have been evolved under pressure from female ritual and 'gossiping' coalitions established to dissuade males from fighting one another and instead cooperate in hunting for the benefit of the whole camp:

If females formed the core of these early groups, and language evolved to bond these groups, it naturally follows that the early human females were the first to speak. This reinforces the suggestion that language was first used to create a sense of emotional solidarity between allies. Chris Knight has argued a passionate case for the idea that language first evolved to allow the females in these early groups to band together to force males to invest in them and their offspring, principally by hunting for meat. This would be consistent with the fact that, among modern humans, women are generally better at verbal skills than men, as well as being more skilful in the social domain.

— Dunbar, R. I. M. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber, p. 149. 

Dunbar stresses that this is currently a minority theory among specialists in human origins — most still support the 'bison-down-at-the-lake' theory attributing early language and cooperation to the imperatives of men's activities such as hunting. Despite this, he argues that 'female bonding may have been a more powerful force in human evolution than is sometimes supposed'.^[18] Although still controversial, the idea that female coalitions may have played a decisive role has subsequently received strong support from a number of anthropologists including Sarah Hrdy^[19], Camilla Power^[20] and Ian Watts.^[21]

Social origins and the state

Thomas Hobbes

Frontispiece of "Leviathan," by Abraham Bosse, with input from Hobbes

Arguably the most influential theory of human social origins is that of Thomas Hobbes, who in his Leviathan^[22] argued that without strong government, society would collapse into Bellum omnium contra omnes — "the war of all against all":

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

— Leviathan XIII "Chapter XIII.: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.", Leviathan, http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=585&layout=html#chapter_89842 Leviathan XIII 

Hobbes' innovation was to attribute the establishment of society to a founding 'social contract', in which the Crown's subjects surrender some part of their freedom in return for security.

Colin Renfrew

If Hobbes' idea is accepted, it follows that society could not have emerged prior to the state. This school of thought has remained influential to this day.^[23] Prominent in this respect is British archaeologist Colin Renfrew (Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn), who points out that the state did not emerge until long after the evolution of Homo sapiens. The earliest representatives of our species, according to Renfrew, may well have been anatomically modern, but they were not yet cognitively or behaviourally modern. For example, they lacked political leadership, large-scale cooperation, food production, organised religion, law or symbolic artefacts. Humans were simply hunter-gatherers, who — much like extant apes — ate whatever food they could find in the vicinity. Hunter-gatherers to this day, according to Renfrew, forage, think and socialise along lines not radically different from their nonhuman primate counterparts. In particular, they do not 'ascribe symbolic meaning to material objects' and for that reason 'lack fully developed "mind"':

For does it make sense to speak of the full development of 'mind' if we are not yet in the presence of complex notations, and the sort of argumentation, for instance in the field of mathematics and astronomy, which only writing permits?^[24]

'It would seem, then', concludes Renfrew, 'that the arrival of our species over much of the surface of the globe did not produce any very remarkable consequences for several tens of millennia'. During the Palaeolithic period 'nothing very much of interest happened' — nothing, in any event, that would interest 'the perceptive extra-terrestrial observer casually visiting out planet.' He continues:

If, on the other hand, one surveys the products of the past six or seven thousand years in different parts of the world, one is impressed by a whole range of notable achievements which evidently place our species in a different class from the rest of the animal kingdom: by temples and pyramids in Egypt, early cities and ziggurats in the Near East, great cities of the Indus, and the complex societies and technologies documented in China already from the Shang period of about 1600 BC. In the Americas we may draw attention to the spectacular accomplishment of the Incas of Peru and the Aztecs of Mexico....' ^[25]

Distinctively human 'mind, 'culture' and 'society', in short, did not emerge until farming, sedentism, megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge, armies and legally demarcated property rights emerged during the 'Neolithic revolution'. This momentous development, according to Renfrew, was the true 'human revolution', giving rise to social institutions, symbolic systems such as writing — and therefore to distinctively human 'mind'.

Society before the state

Colin Renfrew acknowledges how controversial it is to claim that hunter-gatherers lack 'fully developed "mind"'. His argument that social contracts necessarily presuppose enforcement by the state has also been challenged. Most social anthropologists would stress that all extant hunter-gatherers possess fully developed 'mind': distinctively human cognition presupposes not literacy (as Renfrew argues) but spoken language. Turning Hobbes' argument on its head, anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres views the state and society as mutually incompatible: genuine society is always struggling to survive against the state.^[26] Hunter-gatherer ethnographers generally emphasise that extant foraging peoples certainly do have social institutions — notably institutionalised rights and duties codified in formal systems of kinship.^[27] Elaborate rituals such as initiation ceremonies serve to cement contracts and commitments, quite independently of the state.^[28] Other scholars would add that insofar as we can speak of a 'human revolution' — a 'major transition' in human evolution^[29] — it must have occurred not in Eurasia during the Neolithic period but somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Stone Age, probably coinciding with the speciation of Homo sapiens.^[30][31]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Origins of society

Rousseau in 1753
Born	28 June 1712(1712-06-28)
Died	2 July 1778(1778-07-02) (aged 66)

Like Hobbes, Rousseau argued that society was born in a social contract. In Rousseau's case, however, sovereignty is vested equally in every member of the populace, who enter into the contract directly with one another:

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and ineffective… These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one — the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community…. Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has. If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will.

— Rousseau, J.-J. 1973 [1762]. The social contract. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New edition. London & Melbourne: Dent. Book I, Chapter 6. 

By this means, each member of the community acquires not only the capacities of the whole but also, for the first time, rational mentality:

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.

— Rousseau, J.-J. 1973 [1762]. The social contract. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New edition. London & Melbourne: Dent. Book I Chapter 8. 

Lewis Henry Morgan

Lewis H. Morgan
Lewis H. Morgan
Born	November 21, 1818(1818-11-21)
Died	December 17, 1881(1881-12-17) (aged 63)

In his influential book, Ancient Society (1877), Lewis Henry Morgan proposed that throughout the earlier periods of human history, neither the family nor the state existed.

It may be here premised that all forms of government are reducible to two general plans, using the word plan in its scientific sense. In their bases the two are fundamentally distinct. The first, in the order of time, is founded upon persons, and upon relations purely personal, and may be distinguished as a society (societas). The gens is the unit of this organization; giving as the successive stages of integration, in the archaic period, the gens, the phratry, the tribe, and the confederacy of tribes, which constituted a people or nation (populus). At a later period a coalescence of tribes in the same area into a nation took the place of a confederacy of tribes occupying independent areas. Such, through prolonged ages, after the gens appeared, was the substantially universal organization of ancient society; and it remained among the Greeks and Romans after civilization supervened. The second is founded upon territory and upon property, and may be distinguished as a state (civitas).

— Morgan, L. H. 1877. Ancient Society. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, p. 6. 

In place of both family and state, according to Morgan, was the gens — nowadays termed the 'clan' — based initially on matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent. This aspect of Morgan's theory, later endorsed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, is nowadays widely considered discredited (but for a critical survey of the current consensus, see Knight 2008, 'Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal'^[32]).

Frederick Engels

Frederick Engels
Frederick Engels
Born	November 28, 1820
Died	August 5, 1895

Frederick Engels built on Morgan's ideas in his 1884 essay, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in the light of the researches of Lewis Henry Morgan. His primary interest was the position of women in early society, and — in particular — Morgan's insistence that the matrilineal clan preceded the family as society's fundamental unit. 'The mother-right gens', wrote Engels in his survey of contemporary historical materialist scholarship, 'has become the pivot around which the entire science turns...' Engels argued that the matrilineal clan represented a principle of self-organization so vibrant and effective that it allowed no room for patriarchal dominance or the territorial state.

The first class antagonism which appears in human history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.

— Engels, F. 1940 [1884] The origin of the family, private property and the state. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 

Sigmund Freud

Charles Darwin pictured early human society as resembling that of apes, with one or more dominant males jealously guarding a harem of females.^[33] In his myth of the 'Primal Horde', Sigmund Freud later took all this as his starting point but then postulated an insurrection mounted by the tyrant's own sons:

All that we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up…. One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde.

— Freud, S. 1965 [1913]. Totem and Taboo. London: Routledge, p. 141. 

Following this, they were about to take sexual possession of their mothers and sisters when suddenly they were overcome with remorse. In their contradictory emotional state, their dead father now became stronger than the living one had been. In memory of him, the tumultuous mob of brothers revoked their deed by forbidding the killing and eating of the ‘totem’ (as their father had now become) and renouncing their claim to the women who had just been set free. In this way, the two fundamental taboos of primitive society – not to eat the totem and not to marry one’s sisters – were established for the first time.

Emile Durkheim

In order to exist, any human social order must counteract the natural tendency for the sexes to conjoin. Order presupposes sexual morality, which is expressed in prohibitions against sex during certain periods — in traditional societies particularly during menstruation. The incest taboo, wrote Durkheim in 1898, is an example of the ritualistic setting apart of 'the sacred' from 'the profane'. 'The two sexes', as Durkheim explains, 'must avoid each other with the same care as the profane flees from the sacred and the sacred from the profane.' Women as sisters act out the role of 'sacred' beings invested 'with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the masculine population at a distance.' Their blood in particular sets them in a category apart, exercising a 'type of repulsing action which which keeps the other sex far from them'. In this way, the earliest ritual structure emerges — establishing morally regulated 'society' for the first time. ^[34]

Marshall Sahlins

A less dramatic version of Freud's 'sexual revolution' idea was proposed in 1960 by American social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.^[35] Somehow, he writes, the world of primate brute competition and sexual dominance was turned upside-down:

The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species.

— Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76-87. 

Christopher Boehm

Once a prehistoric hunting band institutionalized a successful and decisive rebellion, and did away with the alpha-male role permanently…. it is easy to see how this institution would have spread.

— Boehm, C. 2000. Conflict and the evolution of social control. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, 1-2 pp. 79-101; p. 97. 

If we accept Rousseau's line of reasoning, no single dominant individual is needed to embody society, to guarantee security or to enforce social contracts. The people themselves can do these things, combining to enforce the general will. A modern origins theory along these lines is that of evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Boehm argues that ape social organisation tends to be despotic, typically with one or more dominant males monopolising access to the locally available females. But wherever there is dominance, we can also expect resistance. In the human case, resistance to being personally dominated intensified as humans used their social intelligence to form coalitions. Eventually, a point was reached when the costs of attempting to impose dominance became so high that the strategy was no longer evolutionarily stable, whereupon social life tipped over into 'reverse dominance' — defined as a situation in which only the entire community, on guard against primate-style individual dominance, is permitted to use force to suppress deviant behaviour.^[36]

Ernest Gellner

Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the world. Yet in any given society, the range of permitted behaviours is quite narrowly constrained. This is not owing to the existence of any externally imposed system of rewards and punishments. The constraints come from within — from certain compulsive moral concepts which members of the social order have internalised. The society installs these concepts in each individual's psyche in the manner first identified by Emile Durkheim, namely, by means of collective rituals such as initiation rites. Therefore the problem of the origins of society boils down to the problem of the origins of collective ritual.

How is a society established, and a series of societies diversified, whilst each of them is restrained from chaotically exploiting that wide diversity of possible human behaviour? A theory is available concerning how this may be done and it is one of the basic theories of social anthropology. The way in which you restrain people from doing a wide variety of things, not compatbile with the social order of which they are members, is that you subject them to ritual. The process is simple: you make them dace around a totem pole until they are wild with excitement, and become jellies in the hysteria of collective frenzy; you enhance their emotional state by any device, by all the locally available audio-visual aids, drugs, music and so on; and once they are really high, you stamp upon their minds the type of concept or notion to which they subsequently become enslaved.

— Gellner, E. 1988. Origins of Society. In A. C. Fabian (ed.), Origins. The Darwin College Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.128-140; p. 130. 

Gender and origins

Feminist scholars

Feminist scholars — among them palaeoanthropologists Leslie Aiello and Camilla Power — take similar arguments a step further, arguing that any reform or revolution which overthrew male dominance must surely have been led by women. Evolving human females, Power and Aiello suggest, actively separated themselves from males on a periodic basis, using their own blood (and/or pigments such as red ochre) to mark themselves as fertile and defiant:

The sexual division of labor entails differentiation of roles in food procurement, with logistic hunting of large game by males, co-operation and exchange of products. Our hypothesis is that symbolism arose in this context. To minimize energetic costs of travel, coalitions of women began to invest in home bases. To secure this strategy, women would have to use their attractive, collective signal of impending fertility in a wholly new way: by signalling refusal of sexual access except to males who returned "home" with provisions. Menstruation — real or artificial — while biologically the wrong time for fertile sex, is psychologically the right moment for focusing men's minds on imminent hunting, since it offers the prospect of fertile sex in the near future.

— Power, C. and L. C. Aiello 1997. Female proto-symbolic strategies. In L. D. Hager (ed.), Women in Human Evolution. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 153-171; p. 159. 

In similar vein, anthropologist Chris Knight argues that Boehm's idea of a 'coalition of everyone' is hard to envisage, unless — along the lines of a modern industrial picket line — it was formed to co-ordinate 'sex-strike' action against badly behaving males:

....male dominance had to be overthrown because the unending prioritising of male short-term sexual interests could lead only to the permanence and institutionalisation of behavioural conflict between the sexes, between the generations and also between rival males. If the symbolic, cultural domain was to emerge, what was needed was a political collectivity — an alliance — capable of transcending such conflicts. ... Only the consistent defence and self-defence of mothers with their offspring could produce a collectivity embodying interests of a sufficiently broad, universalistic kind.

— Knight, C. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 514. 

In virtually all hunter-gatherer ethnographies, according to Knight, a persistent theme is that 'women like meat',^[37] and that they determinedly use their collective bargaining power to motivate men to hunt for them and bring home their kills — on pain of exclusion from sex.^[38][39] Arguments about women's crucial role in domesticating males — motivating them to cooperate — have also been advanced by anthropologists Kristen Hawkes,^[40] Sarah Hrdy^[41] and Bruce Knauft^[42] among others. Meanwhile, other evolutionary scientists continue to envisage uninterrupted male dominance, continuity with primate social systems and the emergence of society on a gradualist basis without revolutionary leaps.^[43]

References

1. ^ Sahlins, M. D. 1960. The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76-87.
2. ^ Runciman, W.G. (ed.), The origin of social institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 235-54.
3. ^ Hobbes, T. (2010). Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. by Ian Shapiro. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
4. ^ Rousseau, J.-J. 1973 [1762]. The social contract. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New edition. London & Melbourne: Dent, pp. 179-309.
5. ^ Boehm, C. 2001. Hierarchy in the Forest. The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6. ^ Trivers, R. L. 1985. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings.
7. ^ Hamilton, W. D. 1964. The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I, II. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-52.
8. ^ Trivers, R. L. 1971. The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1): 35–57.
9. ^ Trivers, R. L. 1974. Parent-Offspring Conflict. American Zoologist 14 (1): 249–264.
10. ^ Wynne-Edwards, V.C. 1962. Animal dispersion in relation to social behaviour. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.
11. ^ Trivers, R. L. 1985. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, pp 79-85.
12. ^ Trivers, R. L. 1972. Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (ed.) Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971. Chicago, Aldine, pp. 136–179.
13. ^ Dunbar. 1988. Primate Social Systems. Chapman Hall and Yale University Press, p. 14.
14. ^ Dunbar. 1988. Primate Social Systems. Chapman Hall and Yale University Press, p. 106.
15. ^ Dunbar. 1988. Primate Social Systems. Chapman Hall and Yale University Press, pp. 166, 167, 243.
16. ^ Knight, C. 2011 [1989]. The origins of society. London: Radical Anthropology Group.
17. ^ Knight, C. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
18. ^ Dunbar, R. I. M. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber, p. 150.
19. ^ Hrdy, S. B. 2009. Mothers and others. The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
20. ^ Power, C. 1998. Old wives’ tales: the gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals. In J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert Kennedy and C. Knight (eds), Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111 29.
21. ^ Watts, I. 2009. Red ochre, body painting, and language: interpreting the Blombos ochre. In R. Botha and C. Knight (eds), The Cradle of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 62-92
22. ^ Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. by Ian Shapiro (Yale University Press; 2010).
23. ^ W. G. Runciman (ed.), The Origin of Human Social Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press
24. ^ Renfrew, C. 2001. Commodification and institution in group-oriented and individualizing societies. In W. G. Runciman (ed.), The Origin of Human Social Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 93-117.
25. ^ Renfrew, C. 2001. Commodification and institution in group-oriented and individualizing societies. In W. G. Runciman (ed.), The Origin of Human Social Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 93-117.
26. ^ Clastres, P. 1977. Society Against the State. Trans. R. Hurley in collaboration with A. Stein. Oxford: Blackwell.
27. ^ Lévi Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
28. ^ Van Gennep, A. 1960 [1909] The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
29. ^ Maynard Smith, J. and E. Szathmáry 1995. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford: W. H. Freeman.
30. ^ Mellars, P. A., K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef and C. Stringer (eds), 2007. Rethinking the Human Revolution: new behavioural and biological perspectives on the origin and dispersal of modern humans. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
31. ^ Knight, C., C. Power and I. Watts 1995. The human symbolic revolution: A Darwinian account. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 5(1): 75-114.
32. ^ Knight, C. 2008. Early human kinship was matrilineal. In N. J. Allen, H. Callan, R. Dunbar and W. James (eds.), Early Human Kinship. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 61-82.
33. ^ Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. London: Murray. Vol. 2, p. 362.
34. ^ Durkheim, E. 1963. [1898] La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines. L’Année Sociologique 1: 1-70. Reprinted as Incest. The nature and origin of the taboo, trans. E. Sagarin. New York: Stuart.
35. ^ Sahlins, M. D. 1960. The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76-87.
36. ^ Boehm, C. 2001. Hierarchy in the Forest. The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
37. ^ Biesele, M. 1993. Women Like Meat. The folklore and foraging ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'hoan. Witwatersrand: University Press.
38. ^ Knight, C. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
39. ^ Knight, C. 2010. The origins of symbolic culture. In Ulrich J. Frey, Charlotte Störmer and Kai P. Willfuhr (eds) 2010. Homo Novus – A Human Without Illusions. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 193-211.
40. ^ Hawkes, K. 1990. Why do men hunt? Some benefits for risky strategies. In E. Cashdan (ed.), Risk and Uncertainty. Boulder, Colarado: Westview Press, pp. 145-166.
41. ^ Hrdy, S. B. 2009. Mothers and others. The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
42. ^ Knauft, B. 1994. Comment on: On human egalitarianism: an evolutionary product of Machiavellian status escalation? by David Erdal and Andrew Whiten. Current Anthropology 35(2): 181-2.
43. ^ Kaplan, H., K. Hill, J. Lancaster and A. M. Hurtado 2000. A theory of human life history evolution: diet, intelligence, and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology 9: 156-185.

See also

• Behavioral modernity
• Prehistoric art
• Symbolic culture
• Origin of language
• Timeline of evolution
• The Human Revolution (human origins)
• Blombos Cave

Further reading

• Dunbar, R. I. M., C. Knight and C. Power (eds) 1999. The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Dunbar, R., C. Gamble and J. Gowlett, 2010. The social brain and the distributed mind. Proceedings of the British Academy, 158: 3-15.
• Gellner, E. 1988. Origins of Society. In A. C. Fabian (ed.), Origins. The Darwin College Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lévi Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
• Maynard Smith, J. and E. Szathmáry 1995. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford: W. H. Freeman.
• Steele, J. and S. Shennan (eds), 1996. The Archaeology of Human Ancestry. Power, Sex and Tradition. London: Routledge, pp. 47-66.