More on Chimpanzee Politics by Christopher Boehm: political intelligence, individualistic upward mobility [my question: too 'differentiated' to have evolved into an 'undifferentiated' human 'horde'?]
Egalitarian behaviour and the evolution of political intelligence
The common ancestor of humans and the African great apes was a non-monogamous ape, one that lived in a closed social network and exhibited hostile relations between groups with stalking and killing of conspecifics by males. [Some have] deduced these ancient traits conservatively by tallying behaviours that humans share with all three African apes. However, the presence or absence of social dominance hierarchy was left in abeyance — even though hierarchies are all too apparent in chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and Neolithic and modern humans. The problem, presumably, was that human foragers, being egalitarian, have been taken to exist without any significant hierarchy; this erroneous assumption has seriously confused the assessment of our own political nature.
More recently, our political evolution [had been likened] to a 'U-shaped curve'. [This approach assumes] our common ancestor lived hierarchically, but points out that this approach to social life disappeared for a long span of evolutionary time until it returned with chiefdoms, civilisation and modern nations. Focusing on the 'simple-foragers' in whose bands evolved the genes we now carry, [the author] characterises them as largely lacking hierarchy in the form of dominance relations or stratification among the males, and as exhibiting little or no leadership and very low levels of inter-group violence.
Recent work of my own (Boehm, 1993) has questioned the first of these assumptions. I have suggested that among foragers hierarchical behaviour did not actually disappear but rather it assumed a radically different form. The hypothesis, tested successfully against a large number of world societies, was that the direction of domination was redirected so that the group as a whole kept its alpha-male types firmly under its thumb, instead of vice versa. Thus, humans did not lose the great ape dispositions to dominance behaviour, but rather as nomadic prehistoric foragers they put them to a very different use, a pattern continued by the sedentary, tribal egalitarians who emerged with agriculture. By examining a large sample of extant foragers and tribesmen, I have documented that moral sanctioning is the specific vehicle for keep- ing dominance tendencies neutralised, and this ability of subordinates to influence the degree of hierarchy in their groups has been aptly characterised as 'counter-domination'. I emphasise that foragers' suppression of individualistic, hierarchy-forming tendencies is essentially conscious and deliberate; it is just one of many possible expressions of human political intelligence.
Political intelligence can be defined as the decision-making capacity that enables social animals to further their self-interest in situations that involve rivalry and questions of power and leadership. Many species act mainly as individuals; bluffing, backed up by fighting, is the tool of the confidently ambitious, while flight, deference and gestures of appeasement are the tools of the fearful subordinate. In various species the result can be either a non-linear dominance order or a linear one, with an alpha male or female on top. For humans, I shall explore the poorly understood evol- utionary transition from hierarchy to equality by comparing the political intelligence and behavioural dispositions of egalitarian humans with those of Pan troglodytes. In this instance chimpanzees serve as a particularly useful (if referential) proxy for our common ancestor because of their exceptionally well-studied coalition behaviour.
Chimpanzee politics
Chimpanzees learn about power by watching adults, and through play that is largely social and agonistic: young chimpanzees sharpen their fighting and bluffing skills as they learn to inhibit their aggressive behaviour within the group. Such 'training' stimulates the growth of 'political IQ', and it is heavily involved with innate dispositions for dominance and submission. Years of practice prepare adults to be politically fluent in behaviours such as bluff, threat, attack, defence, avoidance and appeasement. The result is a territorial community in which the females have rough dominance rankings but males have a predictably linear hierarchy that regulates access to mating opportunities, desirable food sources, and position during travel, and provides leadership roles on patrol and in resolving conflicts.
Wild chimpanzees live in male hierarchies that can be determined by studying the emission of pant-grunts by subordinates. These submissive signals are unidirectional for any stable adult male dyad, and are used by all adult females greeting adult males. If neither male uses this greeting, the two are engaged in a dominance instability. Such a contest can be protracted, and it ends only when one party decides to enter into a subordinate role by pant-grunting, or dies. As with humans who live in stratified societies with strong leaders, chimpanzees work politically as individuals but also in small groups: they form political coalitions that compete for privileged access to resources or power. De Waal's pioneering work on captive chimpanzees at Arnhem Zoo provides a psychologically convincing description of their political machinations as they vie for higher rank and more breeding partners.
Acoustically the pant-grunt is a bi-directional rough-sounding vocalisation that can escalate, along a continuum, from a quiet, barely-voiced grunting sound to a much louder rasping pant-bark, or to a high-pitched pant-scream. A pant-scream carries with it a high fear component, but even so the subordinate is desisting from flight and trying to greet his superior. The latter's level of arousal can be read by an observer attentive to hair erection, direction of attention, facial expression and postural com- ponents of display or impending attack. On the subordinate's part, there is an array of submissive gestures, postures and facial expressions that combine with sleeking of the hair to communicate submission and appeasement. An alternative tactic is avoidance, and at Gombe I have seen subordinates making risky leaps from the top of one tree to the lower branches of another to save themselves from active attacks. Subordinates tend to scream continuously when under attack.
Individuals engaged in dominating seldom vocalise, but they erect their hair, assume postures that can be read as being aggressive, often display and sometimes attack. At close range they also may use a soft-cough as a mild warning that seems to be equivalent to the arm-threat, and occasionally they use the waa-bark as a long-range warning from their position of dominance. Many dominance interactions are determined by 'shorthand', as it were. The dominant individual merely erects hair or stands up bristling, and an adequate message has been sent. Chimpanzee political intelligence includes the sending and reading of highly nuanced signals.
The usual result of these behaviours is a stable linear male hierarchy with an alpha individual having clear-cut pre-eminence over the others. However, there are always young males trying to move up through the hierarchy, and they create instabilities as they advance. Some males are very good at playing the political game; others seem less able, or less motivated. De Waal's captive data correlate with what is observed in the wild, with one major exception. Wild females forage alone or often with just one or two companions, fail to develop coalition partners, and are not major players in the male quest for power. Confined to a small piece of real estate, de Waal's captive females exhibit far more involvement. However, an alpha female ran the group at first, when there were no adult males, and subsequently the Arnhem Zoo females banded together to keep the alpha male they preferred in place. Such long-term control by a coalition of individually subordinate females has not been reported in the wild.
A solo male chimpanzee cannot compete for rank very effectively, for his competitors work through expedient power-coalitions. They do so on a basis that de Waal (1982) has called 'Machiavellian' because of similarities to cleverly expedient power-seeking in our own species. However, chimpanzee applications of power are not entirely competitive. One fascinating use of power is the quelling of disputes and active fights, and there is also reconciliation and reassurance behaviour.
In a typical power-intervention the alpha male displays toward the protagonists, scatters them, then sits ready to intervene again. However, a variety of substrategies and tactics may be used, and some minor conflicts are controlled just by vocalisations. In serious conflicts as many as three males have been reported to collaborate in breaking up a fight, and a Gombe intervenor may successively threaten each protagonist individually, directing his threats so as to move them away from each other. Other tactics are also used. I personally observed the number two male prying apart two adolescent combatants who were grappling and fighting with biting, and once a female was observed to remove an object, to be used in an impending display, from the hand of a male (Goodall, personal communication). After decades of research at Gombe there are just these two incidents, but the same behaviours are observed frequently at Arnhem. We are obviously dealing with a complicated, flexible and potentially innovative political intelligence here.
Large-group coalitions in the wild
Chimpanzee power-coalitions are not limited just to groups of two or three males seeking better positions. Elsewhere I have described how wild chimpanzees also form coalitions of all the males. They do this regularly to go on patrols to exploit the resources of strangers, protect their own resources, attack and kill neighbouring males or females with infants, acquire females ready to breed, and bluff against enemy patrols. Chimpanzees also go hunting as groups that collaborate in capturing and sharing prey, and this can be taken as 'political' behaviour insofar as bush pigs, male colobus and male baboons actively defend their groups. Likewise, chimpanzees occasionally mob or even attack predators such as leopards. At Gombe, we have 8 mm video footage of a large python being 'mobbed' by watchful chimpanzees. To drive it away, they issued alarm calls whenever it moved and engaged in branching displays. All of these behaviours involve calculations of power.
To a field observer, an established alpha male seems a despot of sorts. However, this is far from being true in human terms. Our despots not only take a lion's share of resources, but execute their own policies by mobilising the entire group for action whether people like it or not. Those who disobey may be fined, killed, tortured, or otherwise punished because the despot has abundant coercive force at hand. A chimpanzee alpha male does gain special access to resources by means of threat or application of force, and he enjoys a similarly intimidating role. However, he lacks soldiers and policemen and he cannot impose his own decisions on the group coercively when it comes to collective activities such as going on patrol, hunting, or mobbing predators.
If the entire group wants to be led, the alpha male definitely can influence its behaviour. In a 'group decision' videotaped at Gombe by field assistant Yahaya Almasi, an enemy group spotted the study-group's patrol first and began to vocalise hostilely, at a distance. The study-group males were not all present and they were indecisive, showing both fear and some tendency to respond aggress- ively. As the alpha male moved forward and tensely scanned the valley other males directed their attention toward him and vice versa. Finally, alpha male Goblin took the lead in displaying across the hillside and vocalising, and the rest instantly followed suit. As will be seen, the ability of an entire group to reach unanimous political decisions will figure heavily in the evolutionary explanation of egalitarian society.
The power of subordinates
In many primate species subordinates have substantial power. At first blush a well-established chimpanzee alpha male dominates his group decisively. His routine intimidation displays are directed at all, and a chorus of screams is emitted as subordinates rapidly climb trees. However, having gained a safe distance they are prone to issue hostile waa-barks of protest. Fear gears them to submit or to avoid, but defiance leads them to protest vocally as individuals and in certain contexts they become actively defiant.
Coalitions of subordinate males regularly try to unseat the alpha male, and there is also an important unique observation from Gombe. When Wilkie displaced Goblin as alpha male, Goblin, largely recovered from serious wounds, returned to make his political comeback. A very large coalition of adolescent/young adult males ganged up on the former alpha and drove him away (J. Goodall, personal communication). This one-time behaviour in the wild also has a parallel at Arnhem, where the large coalition of captive females regularly manipulates the male hierarchy.
Individual subordinates also appear to 'control' dominants in certain limited contexts, as when reproductively available females gain a favoured position in meat-sharing groups or a low- ranking adult male makes a solo kill and this is not expropriated. However, the main route to political power for a subordinate is to enter into a small coalition directed at unseating the alpha male.
It appears, then, that subordinates may sometimes control those who would otherwise dominate them if their immediate motivation is exceptional or if they can find safety in numbers. I shall suggest that such aggressive types of subordinate behaviour, some of which are assumed to be present also in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, constituted a pre-adaptation for the emergence of human foragers with their egalitarian approach to political life. In explaining the human potential for egalitarian behaviour, tendencies to form subordinate coalitions will receive special attention. …
[The Chapter continues with the human evolutionary derivations and modifications, but we skip to the Conclusion.]
Conclusion
… Chimpanzee political intelligence is keen, and particularly in the case of males it is oriented to achieving upward mobility. The underlying 'drive' is basically individualistic, but chimpanzees very readily form small coalitions to advance their personal interests co-operatively. The political intelligence of humans is still better adapted to co-operation … they form a coalition of the entire group to deliberately sanction deviants. For political behaviour this introduces the need for a substantial element of 'lower level teleology' in our explanations, be the subjects monkeys, apes, or humans …
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The Source:
Christopher Boehm, ‘Egalitarian behaviour and the evolution of political intelligence’ in Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, edited by A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne, Cambridge University Press 1997
Further reading by this author at featured link:
Social Science Files displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
Pope and Chimpanzee, by Francis Bacon (1962)
‘The Heller Files’, quality tools and creative impressions for Social Science.