Prehistory and the Forager proxy wars
Three essential opinions, plus a reckless Proxy-ism [Christopher Boehm, Robert L. Kelly, Ian Morris, and those who failed the test [Lucio Vinicius et al.]..
[#1 VIEWPOINT 2012 Anthropology/Primatology by Boehm]
[It] will be necessary to use today’s foragers to reconstruct the group life of their predecessors. Past attempts to do so have met with major objections from scientists who deal in human prehistory, so we’ll have to get technical here. For doubters like the influential late political anthropologist Elman Service or more recently archaeologist and hunter-gatherer expert Robert Kelly, a main problem is that most of today’s foragers have been “marginalized” by aggressive tribal agriculturalists and, eventually, by civilizations and then empires that took over our planet’s more desirable areas. In contrast, Pleistocene foragers had their pick of world environments, and, so the theory goes, they didn’t have to cope with the not-so-productive semideserts, arctic wastes, and other marginal habitats that often limit subsistence possibilities today. Thus, there’s no telling what they were up to.
Service made his persuasive marginalization argument more than three decades ago, and it made sense at the time. Unfortunately, it has become almost a truism in archaeological and evolutionary circles that Pleistocene foragers must have been living in a fat city situation because unmarginalized small populations could pick their rich environments at will. However, the available prehistoric information has changed since then, and changed dramatically. What’s new is our understanding of Late Pleistocene climates and their all but unbelievable instability. Frequently, and cyclically, rapidly changeable weather patterns could have led to two kinds of prehistoric “marginalization” that, roughly speaking, would have been comparable to what we see today.
One was purely ecological marginalization. This was likely when areas with adequate patterns of rainfall became drier and only smaller populations could be supported in widely scattered bands. Such climatic downturns could have created localized-drought challenges directly comparable to those arising in the capricious Kalahari Desert area that people like today’s !Kung and !Ko Bushmen have to cope with, or challenges faced by desert Aborigines in Australia or Great Basin foragers in North America. The second type of marginalization would have been political. As cyclically better conditions allowed Pleistocene groups to multiply, competition could have intensified as more aggressive hunter-gatherer groups began to monopolize the better resources, marginalizing other foragers just as today’s foragers have been marginalized by territorially aggressive farmers …
Using today’s nomadic hunter-gatherers as models for their nomadic predecessors must be further justified here because Service’s “marginalization taboo” still enjoys such wide adherence. Of course, when archaeologists show their unreadiness to reconstruct the social life of “prehistoric foragers”, often this involves a legitimate fear of projecting modern human behaviors on to much earlier types of humans who had smaller brains and, in all likelihood, had a significantly different behavioral potential. With respect to smaller-brained humans who had not yet developed culturally modern tool kits, such conservatism has been and still is quite appropriate. Here, however, I am considering only the more recent prehistoric humans who matched us in brains and cultural capacity.
My theory is that the main outlines of their social and ecological life can be reconstructed quite straightforwardly simply by identifying behavior patterns that similarly nomadic foragers share very strongly today … focusing only on those carefully selected contemporary foragers whose ecological lifestyles would have been likely 45,000 years ago.
[#2. VIEWPOINT 2013 Anthropology/Archeology by Kelly]
[A]lthough archaeology may not be able to see the material effects or cultural musings of a lone forager, to understand large-scale changes in foraging strategies – changes from dependence on meat to dependence on plants or from foraging to farming – we must understand how that lone forager makes decisions. Coarse as it may be, the archaeological record was nevertheless produced by the behavior of individuals. Human cultural evolution is the outcome of millions of decisions involving food, mates, kin, non-kin, land, prestige, reputations, spirits, and the cosmos. Ethnographic research provides archaeology with an understanding of the daily, on-the-ground, decision-making behavior that is the ultimate source of the archaeological record. Our task is to ask what role do ecological, social, biological, and cultural variables play in decisions. How do foragers decide to rank foods in terms of calories, protein, or something else? How do they decide to share with someone, to let someone into their territory, to move, or to raise a newborn? How do they decide whether to participate in a feast that will garner prestige for someone else?
And this is where ethnographic data become useful to archaeology. If interaction with the environment exerts any kind of influence over foragers’ lives, then how living people make decisions relative to their environment should bear some resemblance to how people in the past made decisions as well. This is nothing more than geology’s principle of uniformitarianism: living foragers are not identical to those of the past, but living foragers do operate under the same principles as did prehistoric hunter-gatherers, albeit under different conditions and constraints generated by their technology, historical circumstances, and cultural environments.
There is no doubt that all living and recent hunter-gatherer societies today are structured in part, perhaps in large part, by interaction with non-hunter-gatherer societies. It would be foolish to apply a model drawn from these societies in a wholesale fashion to prehistory. But it would be equally foolish for archaeologists to ignore these societies because contact allegedly casts a shadow over them. Despite living in the midst of agrarian and industrial societies, sometimes for hundreds of years, modern hunter-gatherers still make decisions about where to move; when to move; whether or not to work for wages; whether or not to store food; whether to give something away or hoard it; to arrange a marriage or not; to eat this, that, or something else; to buy food or forage for it; to stay near a village or move away from it; to have children or not; or to compete for prestige. Whenever they make these decisions, they provide archaeology with food for thought. Ethnology should help archaeologists construct more accurate models of the past, models whose success or failure will not depend on ambiguous or inappropriate assumptions, and which therefore will be more accurate tests of hypotheses about prehistory. To borrow Lévi-Strauss’s phrase, ethnological data are “good to think” …
… [The] construction of methods to make inferences from archaeological remains is inextricably linked to an understanding of variability in behavior. One cannot reconstruct the past without simultaneously tackling an explanation of human behavior. So, it is best to make the theoretical bias explicit. We need to study hunter-gatherer prehistory in terms other than broad typological categories such as generalized versus specialized, simple versus complex, storing versus nonstoring, or immediate versus delayed return. Our approach must allow us to continually expand our knowledge of the diversity of human behavior, for ethnographic data undoubtedly do not record the full range of ways that prehistoric foragers lived. We should approach archaeology not with the goal of assigning a site or time period to a particular typological pigeonhole but rather with the intention of reconstructing different cultural elements – diet, mobility, demography, land tenure, social organization – as best we can, then assemble them, like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box.
If this sounds difficult, it is; but it frees us from the error of uncritical analogy, from the error of seeing the most ancient hunter-gatherers through the lens of some imaginary original human society. An evolutionary approach helps us discover unanticipated organizational forms associated with prehistoric hunting and gathering, forms that may be related to ecological conditions that no longer exist, or to interaction with kinds of societies that no longer exist, or, for premodern humans, to cognitive capabilities that were unlike those of humanity today. In approaching the study of modern and prehistoric hunter-gatherers from an evolutionary framework, we will continually add to our knowledge and understanding of the development and diversity of humanity. And that, after all, is the reason we do anthropology.
[#3. VIEWPOINT 2015 Archeology/History by Morris]
[A]nthropologists overwhelmingly agree in seeing “foragers” as a fairly coherent analytical category. We might even call foraging the natural way of life, in that virtually all animals are foragers, and each species has its own distinctive version of foraging …
… Scholars of foraging societies have three main sources of information: archaeological evidence for prehistory, a handful of accounts of foragers (going back to Herodotus in fifth-century BC Greece) encountered by literate societies in the past few thousand years, and ethnographic analyses from the last hundred or so years. Each class of data has its own problems, but when brought together, they reveal strong patterns.
Archaeology is the only direct source of evidence for most of the foraging societies that have ever existed, but it has one great drawback — stones and bones are mute … No matter how sophisticated our fieldwork and theorizing get, interpreting the archaeological finds always depends on drawing analogies between the finds and historical or ethnographic accounts …
… Modern ethnographers, writing in the last hundred years, have developed … more sophisticated methods and have built up an impressive body of knowledge about foraging societies. The main difficulty in deploying these data as proxy evidence for prehistoric foragers, though, is that contemporary foraging societies are, in at least some ways, very different from ancient or prehistoric ones. Twenty thousand years ago, everyone on earth was a forager. By five hundred years ago, well under one person in ten still practiced this way of life, and these few had been pushed back into just one-third of the planet, and today, foragers make up much less than 1 percent of the world’s population. The few survivors are mostly penned into extreme environments that farmers do not want, such as the Kalahari Desert and Arctic Circle, or have not yet penetrated, such as parts of the Amazon and Congo rainforests …
… Making comparisons between twentieth-century foragers in very tough environments and prehistoric foragers in kinder, gentler ones obviously presents problems. In the mid-twentieth century, several anthropologists and archaeologists responded by coming up with very useful typologies of foragers, but since the 1980s others have gone much further and suggested that analogies of any kind must be misleading. Far from being relics of an ancient way of life, these anthropologists claim, modern foragers are the products of distinctly modern historical processes, above all European colonialism — which, they conclude, means that contemporary foragers tell us little about prehistory …
… These claims have generated intense debates, often with strong political overtones. However, not even the nastiness of some of the exchanges [MGH: i.e. the ‘proxy wars’ I refer to in the title of this collection] can obscure the fact that a century of archaeological and anthropological scholarship has produced effective middle-range theories linking excavated remains via ethnoarchaeological analogies to prehistoric behavior. Some of these methods, to be sure, are little more than refined common sense, and were already obvious to archaeologists a century ago. Despite the ebbs and flows of academic fashion, many of the conclusions that the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe reached in the 1930s, for instance, still seem to be broadly correct (one of my Stanford colleagues likes to press graduate students taking their general exams in anthropology until they admit that our main ideas about prehistoric life have not really changed since 1877, when Lewis Henry Morgan published Ancient Society). While many pitfalls confront the incautious analyst, the overall shape of the world of prehistoric foragers does seem fairly clear … [then follows a literature review]
[#4. Extreme PROXYISM 2020 Anthropology by Vinicius et al.]
ABSTRACT: Although multilevel sociality is a universal feature of human social organization, its functional relevance remains unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of multilevel sociality on cumulative cultural evolution by using wireless sensing technology to map inter- and intraband social networks among Agta hunter-gatherers. By simulating the accumulation of cultural innovations over the real Agta multicamp networks, we demonstrate that multilevel sociality accelerates cultural differentiation and cumulative cultural evolution. Our results suggest that hunter-gatherer social structures [based on (i) clustering of families within camps and camps within regions, (ii) cultural transmission within kinship networks, and (iii) high intercamp mobility] may have allowed past and present hunter-gatherers to maintain cumulative cultural adaptation despite low population density, a feature that may have been critical in facilitating the global expansion of Homo sapiens …
… To investigate the effect of multilevel sociality on the dynamics of cultural evolution in humans, we (i) mapped inter- and intraband social networks of Agta hunter-gatherers, (ii) designed agent-based simulations to model the virtual creation of a complex medicinal drug across the real Agta social network, and (iii) compared results of these simulations to similar simulations run across social structures lacking the unique features of hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality.
… [We] mapped interactions among all adults in two multicamp Agta communities in the Philippines (seven forest camps over 36 km2, 53 adults, 28 females, and three coastal camps over 5 km of coast and 25 km2, 37 adults, 17 females …
… We ran 1000 simulations across the real multicamp networks of forest and coastal groups. The forest group required, on average, 177.3 (SD 250.5) trial rounds to find the crossover drug, and the coastal group required 516.7 (SD 506.2) rounds (Fig. 3A and table S3). Next, we ran the same experiment over size-matching fully connected networks, where all individuals are network neighbors and hence any innovation is immediately transmitted to all network members. Crossovers took significantly more rounds in both the forest group (509.5, SD 399.6; Wilcoxon rank test, W = 825,400, P < 10−15) and coastal group (698.7, SD 569.2; Wilcoxon rank test, W = 620,870, P < 10−15). Therefore, the sparsely interconnected social structure of hunter-gatherer multicamps accelerates cultural evolution …
… Of the 32 medicinal plants used by the BaYaka, 9 are used by gorillas and 6 are used by chimpanzees. However, no BaYaka [hunter-gatherer] individual in the sample had knowledge of all the 32 plants. This difference in knowledge breadth mirrors differences in social structure among the species and suggests a redefinition of the ratchet effect in humans:
DISCUSSION: … Cumulative culture involves not only the impossibility of recreation of cultural features by isolated individuals but also the emergence of knowledge specialization within populations. Accordingly, in our simulations across real networks, no individual ended up in possession of all innovations. This illustrates why cumulative culture is a product of human populations rather than individuals and suggests that the origin of knowledge specialization in humans took place in hunter-gatherer multilevel societies. We propose that the multilevel structure observed in extant hunter-gatherers may explain the cultural dynamism of H. sapiens since its origins and its worldwide expansion. We believe that multilevel structuring already characterized Middle Stone Age populations emerging as early as 320,000 years ago …
… MATERIALS AND METHODS: Collection of network data using motes. We have previously described the technology in detail, so here, we provided a shorter description. Motes are wireless sensing devices that store all between-device communications within a specified distance …. sealed into wristbands and belts (depending on size and preference), labeled with a unique number, and identified with colored string to avoid accidental swaps. We checked for armband swaps and made adjustments before data processing. Individuals wore motes uninterruptedly for 4 weeks and received a small compensation (thermal bottle and cooking utensils).
[MGH: I was lucky to come across the Agta forager paper (#4) which nicely illustrates why it is “foolish to apply a model drawn from these societies in a wholesale fashion to prehistory” (#2). The extrapolations are foolishly disproportionate to the research.]
The Sources:
[in order of appearance]
Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame, New York Basic Books 2012 [pp. 76-77]
Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge 2013 [pp. 273-275]
Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, Princeton 2015 [pp. 26-29]
Andrea B. Migliano, Federico Battiston, Sylvain Viguier, Abigail E. Page, Mark Dyble, Rodolph Schlaepfer, Daniel Smith, Leonora Astete, Marilyn Ngales, Jesus Gomez-Gardenes, Vito Latora, Lucio Vinicius, Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution, SCIENCE ADVANCES | American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sci. Adv. 2020; 6: eaax5913, 28 February [file pseudoscience]