Meeting of the Brig Mercury with the Russian Squadron After the Defeat of Two Turkish Battleships (1848) by Ivan Aivazovsky
In honour and memory of Brian Fagan (English-American mariner, archeologist and loyal subscriber to Social Science Files), who died last month aged 88, I will give the ‘First Society’ a birth date and birth place — the mid-40,000s in Western Europe.
In 2021, Brian and his coauthor Nadia Durrani wrote :
About 50,000 years ago—the date is uncertain—anatomically modern humans moved from the Middle East into southeastern Europe, probably in small numbers. They settled in landscapes that were a far cry from the semi-arid landscapes of southwestern Asia. The lands north of the Mediterranean were environments of dramatic seasonal contrasts—short, fairly warm summers, and lengthy winters, often with weeks of sub-zero temperatures. The last glaciation was in full swing … After the extinction of the Neanderthals by 30,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnons had western and Central Europe to themselves. They developed elaborate and sophisticated societies marked by significant technological innovations. Their cultures also witnessed a flowering of ritual and social life, reflected by one of the earliest art traditions in the world. Cautious, innovative, and remarkably versatile, diverse Cro-Magnon societies thrived from as early as the mid-40,000s.
Brian M. Fagan and Nadia Durrani, World Prehistory: The Basics, Routledge 2021
This approximate 50,000 year mark for consolidated capability to form ‘society’ still leaves open the reasoning for there being three distinct prehistoric societies (T1 individual, T2 communalistic, T3 coordinated), and for the transition to a fourth historically recorded society (T4 administered). Later, in order to illustrate these transitions, I will ignore the migration route northwards into Europe. Type 4 spread from the Near East into Europe, not vice versa. The evidence is much better if we follow the trajectory of people who remained in the ancient Near East, where the first transitions to the Fourth Society occurred, in ancient Mesopotamia. Circa 10,000 there existed First and Second Society cave-living peoples in mountain ranges of the Near East, and Third Society household settlements in the Fertile Crescent. It is in this geographically integrated zone that human evolution was most dynamic and rapid. Type 4 administered society consolidated in Mesopotamia between 5,000-1,000.
Like various other subscribers to Social Science Files — such as Robin Dunbar, David Reich and Steven Mithen — Brian Fagan dated language’s origins among anatomically modern humans to 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Fagan considered language to be:
… our greatest asset: articulate, fluent speech. We communicate, we tell stories, we pass on knowledge and ideas, all through the medium of language. Consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, foresight, and the ability to express oneself and one’s emotions are direct consequences of fluent speech. They are also linked to our capacity for symbolic and spiritual thought. We’re concerned not just with subsistence and technology, but also with the boundaries of existence, and the relations between the individual, the group, and the universe.
Scholarly accounts of the initial purposes and incentives of language development discuss obvious factors such as non-violent sexual selection, the exchange of factual information, simultaneous communication with multiple individuals. The emphasis, however, is on methods of social ‘bonding’ through story-telling, songs, jokes, gossip, and creations of tribal myths about supernatural beings. Language is also the medium by which subjective efforts are made to discover motives, intentions and truthfulness.
I have tried to shift the stimulus for language toward the exigencies of decision making, which were practical and materialistic priorities of life in the first societies. My emphasis has been on the formation of ‘society’ defined as a governed social unit. I view the evolution of governance as the main impetus for progressions in language. Governance 50,000 years ago was a process of discussion in the context of decision making. It prioritised facts about effective subsistence and methods of social order.
Group discussion was the most effective means of synthesis by which intentionality could be reliably revealed. The witnessing and judgement of action in participatory decision making processes about means of economic action or rules of social action was the only objective means of collating knowledge about the average possibilities and probabilities of people’s intentions. Real intentions are opaque ‘black boxes’ that can only be made more transparent over time through repeated observation, analysis and synthesis of comparative multi-person based information. This required group-level dynamics (a natural mechanism that over time became an artificial structure) for exchanging knowledge and opinion. Language made governance possible. But, more than any factor, governance advanced the elaboration and dissemination of language.
We know that 200,000 years ago there was at least the capacity for human language acquisition. Basic language for discussion and decision making was cognitively and anatomically feasible. But, if our objective is to establish a meaningful link between language and governance, it is safer to use Fagan’s 50,000 year dating of “society”.
The initial advances in subsistence, as Fagan’s illustrations (below) clearly show, were very much concerned with the innovation and development of technologies.
Anyone capable of such technological advances was also cognitively capable of participation in governance with the purpose creating group-level conformity with the complex synthesis of knowledge that underlay decisions about allocations of time and energy to the prioritised means and ends of survival and improved prosperity.
There were, however, two factors that also affected the nature and efficacy of group level decision making in the First Society — the problems of audibility and group size. Many reasons are given for variable group sizes in society. One reason that has been neglected is the one of audibility and visibility during decision making processes.
The unity of a society is maintained by prioritising society over the individual. Tangible unity may be fostered by —
visible and audible representations of the ethereal aspect of society,
visible and audible calculable actions for the common good,
visible and audible rule enforcements,
common identities formed through the visible and audible resolutions of conflicts within and between societies.
In the next section, I will calculate how these prerequisites of governance may have dictated the quantitative limits and optimal size of a true ‘prehistoric society’ without dominance and with participation. I will then examine scientific evidence concerning ‘audibility’ and ‘visibility’ in relation to male-female and intrasex differentiations that to a significant extent predetermined leadership influence in group governance.
The ground will soon be cleared for the telling of the overall T1-T3 evolutionary story, from coupled divisions of labour to the successive rise and demise of three societies.