Disasters of Mysticism by Roberto Matta, Chile (no date)
The physical setting
Because discussion meetings were so important to the development and maintenance of prehistoric societies we have to establish a few basic facts about differential voice projection and the visibility of physical bodies before considering how these variables are likely to have interacted with age/sex personality and intelligence contrasts in the highly competitive processes for ‘influence’ in primitive natural conditions. In fact, two further digressions are required beforehand (below). We must revisit the question of group size, and contemplate the reasons why egalitarian groups proved unable to maximise political profits from potentialities of personality projection around a fire.
Firstly, we must visualise variable natural environments of flat or sloping ground. In the later prehistoric settings (e.g. advanced Type 3 ancient Near East circa 9000-8000) there were in some places constructed buildings and monumental arenas where stages might have been erected. But for the most part we should assume mobile groups and an outdoor campfire, or an exceptionally large cave such as Natufian circa 15,000.
We should also note that in the years 50,000 or 5000 there was nothing on the scale of a year 500 Roman or Greek amphitheatre. The ruin of a 60 meter wide amphitheater on a Greek island is usually recorded historically as evidence of the existence of an active polity with popular assemblies. Even in the legendary 5th century Athenian Agora (2400 square meters) “people sat in a semicircle directly on the rocky surface, where the worst unevennesses had been smoothed out, and on the north side there was a low wall which must have been the place of the speakers’ platform”.1
Many of us have experience of the campfire setting, which, I assume, was the near-universal location and model for prehistoric discussion within mobile groups of anatomically modern humans who (by 50,000) had well and truly mastered fire. By providing warmth and illumination fire extended the time available for production, play, and politics. In theory, daytime group discussions could have worked just as well without fire. In late Pleistocene Ice Age conditions people had warm stitched clothes. However, a campfire has a special way of focusing and maintaining attention. All eyes are turned toward the centre. Fire also creates a ‘special’ atmosphere. Moreover, it has been convincingly calculated that prehistoric people had very tight time budgets.2 Logically, play and politics tended to be left until after the day’s productive activity.
In my teens I went camping once or twice a year with Forest School Camps (FSC). These were often in remote islands and highlands. On arriving we dug the communal latrine and pegged hessian sheets around it. The photo (below) seems to have been taken during the advance group set up before the arrival of the masses, and the latrine is correctly located at the lowest point in the field. Then we set up the campfire circle. Then the cooking area. All labour was communal. The shelters were army-issue tents. The size of the largest ‘sedentary’ camp (as distinct from a smaller ‘mobile’ one) was typically 70-80 persons including adults. In 2025, the maximum number of children in the largest FSC camps is still 70. FSC has operated for over a hundred years. I suspect the maximum number of 70 (plus staff) evolved according to the need to accommodate all persons around a daily campfire. Campfire was the place for story telling, comedy, and songs. However, it was also for discussions about divisions of labour, social order, and group organisation. In other words, our campfire was the group planning forum. FSC still prefers a “primitive approach” with “deep commitment to democratic ideals”.
In fact, the evidence I have now seen points in the direction of 80. This week I twice asked my Artificial Intelligence —“What is the probable maximum number of people who could sit around a campfire, be seen and be heard in good weather for a group meeting on flat ground?”. Twice the AI came up with the median answer of 80 on the basis of “well-established principles in acoustics and visibility”. The AI’s technical calculations were far too complicated for me to understand, but they amply covered the two basic criteria of ‘speech intelligibility’ over distance and ‘visibility in ambient firelight’. Prompted further, AI also concluded that ‘outdoor voice propagation’ over campfire distances would be stronger for low-pitched male voices than for high-pitched female voices. It showed evidence that older voices would be less audible.3
Group size
On the basis of this small experiment I suggest the maximum size of the first (individualistic) and second (communalistic) prehistoric society was 80. My rationale is that these societies were defined by their mode of governance. Their governance was defined by the need for competitive discourse with whole-society participation and/or visibility. The campfire scenario is amply sufficient to accommodate the assumptions I have made about prehistoric governance. The 80 is a slight but politically significant increase on my previous estimate of 15-50, which was based on sizes of contemporary hunter gatherer groups. What I will clarify now is the fact that not all hunter gatherer groups conform to our definition of society. The discussion of numbers helps to reveal why this is so. The reasons are reduced to the presence or absence of ‘governance’.
Speculation about group size in prehistory usually relies on proxies — the primitive pre-leadership (pre-chieftain) group sizes of contemporary hunter gatherers. In a typical sample of such groups across the world today we find that there is a variation of between roughly 10 and 60 individuals for each group.4 Most analysts incline to the low numbers.5 With the discontinuous prehistoric human processes of society’s first formation in mind, I have no need for assumptions about egalitarianism or scattered tribal groupings. I visualise gradually increasing group size up to 80, which allows for the permanence of interaction and learning to cope with imperatives for governance.
In the most important recent book about hunter gatherers, Robert Kelly favours 25 individuals as a guide to the average and optimal group size. 25 seems to be “a compromise between reproductive and economic needs”. Kelly claims “the realities of daily foraging govern the size of residential foraging groups”. Decision making concerns food choice, movement to a new camp, and choices about technologies. Beyond 25 decision making becomes difficult. Like most social scientists Kelly assumes that in their natural condition of life hunter gatherers are egalitarian. Like Boehm [f.5], he concludes that “on the strength of archaeological data, it is reasonable to assume that non-egalitarian society developmentally followed egalitarian society”. Whenever hunter gatherers exceed 25 people it becomes dramatically more difficult for them to make the required foraging decisions. At this precipitous point, Kelly suggests, groups either fragment or choose to be governed by chiefs. The underlying problem is that past a certain size (e.g. 25) “there is an exponential increase in the number of disputes and a decrease in the efficiency of decision making”. Individuals find it impossible to agree. Groups either fission or develop varieties of hierarchies and leadership structures: “When this happens, non-egalitarian society has formed”.6
The important theoretical contribution Kelly makes to the literature lies in his solid effort to ‘model’ individual choice making and individual efforts to maximize fitness. He correctly rejects previously influential functionalist theories of ‘group selection’, which had assumed populations as a whole could be naturally driven (e.g. genetically) by unthinking and altruistic means into collective fitness-maximising social actions that preserve entire populations against their environmental challenges regardless of individual preferences and actions. In Kelly’s argument “social-level phenomena are produced by individual decision making” and, therefore, “foragers make [the] choices about which foods to eat based on the costs and benefits of those foods – what it takes to procure different foods, and how much utility a forager gets from them”.7
Nevertheless, although Kelly refers throughout his book to choice making and decision making ‘processes’ he never examines decision ‘processes’ (e.g. in concrete terms of patterns or mechanisms of interaction between individuals). For example, Kelly never envisages what actually occurs when the foragers sit around their fire and discuss labour process, division of labour, a move to a new camp, the optimal tools for a task, or how to handle a new problem of social deviance. His argument is reductively based on an assumption of individuals calculating labour process variables in contexts of ‘egalitarianism’. This assumes that whenever economies of scale emerge it becomes unlikely that a group could survive intact without a decision to replace egalitarianism with a leadership hierarchy (the ‘decision’ is assumed, but not described or explained).
In effect, Kelly makes an assumption — on the basis of studies of underdeveloped peoples in regions that are the most remote from modern societies — that 30 or 40 people are too many to be accommodated in any non-hierarchical decision making.
I find that this argument about the difficulties that lie beyond 25 is untenable. There is no identifiable labour process, time budget or environmental constraint determined by ‘realities of daily foraging’ that could suggest an obstacle arising at 25. In my view, the constraint is a real one, but the cause of the constraint is the absence of governance in so-called ‘egalitarian’ groups. When Kelly writes “the larger a group, the harder it is to agree on a plan of action”, and “groups fragment as they grow beyond 25 persons” (so that leaders are required to coordinate foraging), he neglects to consider that these problems could alternatively have been rationally and routinely dealt with by a group decision making process of governance.8 It may well be true that ‘fission’ at 25 and over-25 is common among ‘egalitarian’ foragers. Yet, Kelly leaves the most interesting questions unasked. Why were decision making processes not created or reformulated in order to prevent fission, and what exactly is it that prevents a scaling-up of decision making processes to 60 or 80? One possible though discomforting answer is that even at 20 the foragers had no ‘process’ of decision making. If the latter was the case, then (by my definition) these were not ‘governed’ units. They certainly were not ‘societies’. They might just have been ‘families’ with access to societies for breeding purposes.
In recorded history, and in Type 3 prehistory, there does arrive an organisational point (a hundred, a thousand, a million) at which a hierarchical and/or representative system is needed in which delegates speak for groups within society. My argument contra Kelly (and most of the rest of the literature on foragers) is simply that sizes 60, 70, or 80 are perfectly manageable without representation. A great deal of dynamic tension and competition can develop among 60 or 70. If 30 are unable or unwilling to discuss matters of importance and reach amicable compromises it must be because they are unable or unwilling (emotionally or cognitively) to engage in disputatious reasoning. If their efforts fail, and a ‘decision’ is made to accept or appoint a leader, it has also to be assumed they are docile enough to give themselves over to the commands of a person.
The problems alluded to by Kelly when determining 25 as an optimal group size result purely and simply from the absence of decision making mechanisms that could scale up for larger participation. Since the analysts of ‘egalitarian’ forager groups draw such conclusions — and often apply the same calculus retrospectively to prehistoric forager groups — we must briefly and critically examine the premises of ‘egalitarianism’.
Egalitarian equilibrium
Egalitarian behaviour, as commonly observed among modern hunter gatherers, really results from a ‘double-fear’ — fear of political competition and conflict of opinion, and fear of authoritarian one-man despotism. Egalitarianism does not arise from a thought-through idealism or ideology. It is not a belief system, and neither is it a philosophy or a body knowledge that is handed down through generations. Forager egalitarianism is simply the absence of mechanisms of governance, which can be sustained only in small numbers when the easiest and safest survival tactic is to share resources equally and thereby avoid conflict. It is rational in the short term for fatalistic and unambitious small groups. Furthermore, modern egalitarian foraging groups are competitive in other ways. They maintain various and intensive forms of non-political competition in order to be able to ‘earn’ their status and prestige. This satisfies the universal though individually differentiated human needs for sense of self-worth. Competition is thus witnessed in the labour process of hunting (men) and gathering (women), and in such downtime activities as story telling, superstition and shamanism, comedy and dance.
Forager social prestige is famously also gained by sharing meat that was obtained by means of exceptional skills and bravery. Primate-style sexual selection competitions to obtain mates may similarly remain intense. Nevertheless, forager egalitarianism firmly draws a line in the sand whenever political contestation begins to appear.
Two distinct types of prehistoric groups existed side by side by the year 50,000. Both consciously rejected the ‘hard’ primate model of alpha male dominance.
Size 10-80 dynamic emergent societies embraced discursive governance with cognitive and political competition around the fire.
Cautious or lethargic family-size groups embraced egalitarianism, repeatedly self-destructed and reverted to ‘soft’ primate domination on reaching the 25 threshold.
In evolutionary terms, egalitarian political behaviour is regressive. It stunts cognitive development. It does not challenge individuals to maximise their returns individually or through intellectual contestation with peers. When egalitarianism breaks down the evolutionarily instinctual alternative (implicit in Kelly’s account of the re-emergence of dominating leaders) is the soft ‘primate model’ of subservience to chiefs. A negative cycle then ensues. Headmen fight among themselves for power and, eventually, the disillusioned group returns to egalitarianism. This cycle, which is often reported, can be broken only by embracing disputatious reasoning with winners and losers in full public view. All discussion associated with the emergence of ‘governance’ inevitably entails disagreement. In so doing, it reveals the differentiations of lesser and greater individual competencies (inherited and/or cultivated). Egalitarian foragers prefer to maintain their methods of subsistence and social order rather than risk discontinuity and innovation that reveals differentiation between more or less capable individuals.
Egalitarianism is a strategy to escape from the discomforts of conflicts of opinion and to avoid competition between alternative persons or proposals. Because absence of conflict of opinion is a recipe for developmental stasis, the unintended consequences are the discomforts and dangers of poverty. Today, thousands of forager groups still live in such conditions. The fact that some still do not have a numbering system that proceeds past the number three to the number four is a correlation (if not a cause and consequence) of smothering the creative progressive human talent for disputation.9
As I conceive them Type 1 and Type 2 societies tolerated neither egalitarianism nor dominance. They were fiercely competitive. Any residual egalitarianism today is easily explained by the isolation/protection of actually-existing foragers from the advanced societies permeated with notions of meritocracy and shaped by competition routines. From this perspective, foraging now only makes sense as a cycle of underdevelopment.
To conclude, there exists no structural reason to justify a claim that decision making about food, labour processes and technology became more difficult beyond 25. The groups that interest us historically are those that went on to form the first societies and laid the groundwork for numeracy, writing, advanced technologies, economies of scale, and, most importantly of all, a classifiable series of advances in governance.
These were the positive and adventurous groups of prehistory. They experimented with political and economic discussion as far as the structural conditions would allow, while the laggards oscillated tragically between egalitarianism and domination. While the latter stagnated, the former generated cognitive advances and social complexity.
The only practical limitations were simple visibility and audibility at the campfire.
Yet, I must end with a significant caveat. ‘Chiefdom’ style dominance, as I will later show in a closer analysis of Type 3 coordinated societies, appears in more rational post-egalitarian forms that represent progressions far beyond the primate model (including householder organisation and Homeric-style distributions of power).
Author: Michael G. Heller in Social Science Files. This essay is free to read. Access to footnotes requires a paid subscription. This publication is recorded for referencing and copyright under the ORCID publications ID https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0935-0826
Go to the colourful website to peruse the after-I-read-that-email-I-sent-y’all edited versions of the essays. Send me feedback by replying to the email or HellerFiles@gmail.com
Note: The analysis of audibility, physique and male-female personality should follow next, but it is difficult to predict what will result from a further week of research.