Three Group Societies
Written by Michael Heller
Having explained what I mean by human society, its governance, and the concepts I will use to identify the evolutionary forces at work in society’s creation, preservation and progress or degeneration, I can now turn to the histories themselves.
Three ‘Group Societies’
To govern a group in the pre-government 40,000-8000 BCE context means to develop and approve the changing customs and conventions for carrying out the imperative action routines relating to work, nourishment, reproduction and child care, rest, play, and—in multiple senses—the ‘protection’ of the group. Among the actions will be choice of locale, the specification and division of tasks, the instrumental management of daytime and nighttime activities, decisions about behavioural codes for intra- and inter-group interaction, and the acceptable sanctions for rule-breaking.
One of the instinctual rationales for whole-society rules stems from an inescapable fact of life in society. Even if anatomically modern humans have sufficient socio-calculative intelligence to speculate with great imagination and rationality (through five or six layers of relationships) about the nature and patterning of action-related intentions among people they encounter and interact with, they nonetheless a) cannot ever know the actual intentions of their social counterparts, b) may deceive themselves about their own intentions, and c) will encounter unintended consequences that cannot be easily reconciled with their initial theorisation of intentions.
An evolutionary consequence of there not being an evolved cognitive capacity to mind read inside another mind in order to decipher ‘real’ intentions is the falling back on behavioural codes and rules which can easily be known and which most persons in society are likely to accept and follow (e.g. “the best policy is honesty”, “though shalt not ...”). Governance can introduce predictability by accordingly employing intra-group codes and rules to mitigate otherwise inevitable and potentially paralysing ‘contingencies of interaction’. The universally comprehensible ultimate purposes of behavioural coding are the wellbeing of the group and the harmonisation of available means with instrumental ends in order to survive adversities and thrive as a group. As will be revealed in the distinction between three group types that follow, governance within the group may be a grouped activity as well as an individualised activity.
It is of particular relevance to the study of the earliest societies to recognise preconditions for the building of ‘human’ as opposed to ‘large ape’ societies. In developing the conscious behavioural rules that would regulate their functionally fundamental interactions, human societies are uniquely reliant on collaborative rationalities and the creation and dissemination of collective knowledge.
They cannot achieve these qualities without having the capacity of language, the control of fire, and the manipulation of time which enables the making of optimal connections between the factors of production and consumption in terms of the provisioning of shelter, safety and subsistence. Governance within the archaic group societies thus presupposes attained levels of human anatomical, psychological and biological development. At a minimum it requires these specific post-animalistic capabilities: precise intra-group communication; conception, conceptualisation, and communication of considered collective truths; a consciously instrumental orientation to group rules and time management; routine utilisation of campfires for expressive interactions; an ability to learn how to control the natural inherited emotions; and, a shareable perception of the potential to purposively shape materials and environment for the benefit of collections of unique selves within uniquely ‘closed’ groups.
Before agriculture all societies were ‘foraging’ (hunting and gathering). In these conditions only three types of human society were possible. At this point humans already possessed the anatomy, brain size and cognitive function for language. Language development had been underway for between 40,000 and 200,000 years. Language is the most important precursor for the creation of bordered-bonded-bound [BBB] human societies. Language gave humans the ability to select and negotiate their preferred form of society, i.e. how it was to be governed. In the broadest terms they had three options, though variety and change remained possible within a single unit.
The three types of society that coexisted alongside each other on the eve of the Neolithic transition to ‘core’ governance in parts of the ancient Near East are classified as ‘group societies’. They may be distinguished as follows:
[1] The person-over-person society is ‘individualistic’. For its governance the group relies on preexisting biological markers of decision making influence — sex, age, intelligence, physique, personality — to carry through the ‘imperative action routines’. Group size might be determined by the average size of the most opportune shelters. The usual and best shelter in the Near East was a cave or rock overhang with nearby access to food (shelter-safety-subsistence). These groups were small, with needs simple enough not to require communal decision making or explicit leadership by one individual. With a group size of just six individuals it is possible to encompass the full range of sex, age, intelligence, physique, and personality differentiations. Six persons is the minimum with which to achieve the defining border-bond-bind conditions.
[2] The group-over-person society is ‘communalistic’. The whole group participates in the decision making that deals with the organisation of imperative action routines, though the weight of influence and the allocations of positions for labour and the dissemination of collective truths rely heavily on the biological differentiations of sex, age, intelligence, physique, and personality, as in [1]. There is no explicit ‘leader’ except while hunting and in the conduct of violent conflicts with other groups.
[A guide to the size of this group is the ‘Dunbar Number’ thesis of social stress tolerance and layered numerical limits to brain-optimal social networking. Here brain size predicts group size. The sizes of hunter-gatherer or tribal societies today, and villages in the Near East of 6500–5500 BCE, range from 150-200. The optimal or ‘natural’ community size is calculated to be 150. It should be noted that even Dunbar’s fullest account [2015] does not treat group governance proportionalities and intra-group decision making variables relating to leadership influence in socio-political networks. If I presuppose a Palaeolithic or Neolithic environment and adequate levels of anatomical, psychological and biological development (with time allocated for the imperative action routines listed above) and the physical limitations of the campfire setting for frequent and regular communalistic consultation (seasonal assembly is clearly insufficient for true communalism), then 20-50 individuals (within Dunbar’s scale for a small scale “band” or “community”) would be a more realistic ‘natural’ limit. It is obvious (to me) that human development could not proceed in pristine conditions without the post-communalistic tolerance of leadership differentiation, which entirely removes any size limitations on BBB societies. On the other hand, Dunbar’s number thesis can continue to explain sub-societal network groupings.]
[3] The person-over-group society is ‘coordinated’ through a leader or chief. There is reciprocal cooperation between group members and one kin subgroup which takes a leadership role. Consent is given for as long as the group benefits. Timothy Earle has shown in the course of a lifetime studying this phenomenon that chiefdoms come in many shapes and sizes but are usually an agreement between a community of families with cooptation and limitation of power: “The evolutionary dynamics responsible for political institutions in chiefdoms should be considered as a mediator between top-down (chiefly) and bottom-up (community) interests and balance of power” (2021).
The fact that types 2 and 3 remain with us today in many parts of the world almost in their original form is not really a demonstration of evolutionary fitness. Yet we will see that habituation to both of their two core principles was important in enabling the evolution of advanced organisation in type 4 administered households and estates.
Individualist, communalistic, and coordinated societies are ideal types. Yet it may well have been the case that within the lifetime of any fit and flexibly-minded Palaeolithic or Neolithic individual there could have presented real opportunities to experience all three types of society. These early societal models patterned all human shelter-safety-subsistence for as long as 50,000 years. Though enduring they were never set in stone. They could not yet invest in physical and institutional constructions which later lent permanence to type 4 societies with organisational cores. People were mobile, their preferences fluctuated, and the alternate options of exit, voice, and loyalty converged with ever-changing conditions of coercion, cooperation, and ecological pressure.
Enduring conformance with any one of these ideal types was not guaranteed. Individualistic preferences combined with communality and leadership among differently sized groups. Rational choices to leave or stay could have persisted at all times when there was knowledge of nearby alternatives. Going a step further I believe that the symbols and codes of all three ‘model’ types could have been simultaneously on display even within the single ‘sextet’ group. The distinctions between them may then be regarded as a latent force in the human social psyche. The second and third types have been studied closely. They are extant, so convenient proxies for societies that left almost no archeological trace. If the explicanda are unsatisfactory this may be because the early ‘individualistic’ society (in toto) remains virtually untheorised.
Neey Too Gulpa (Ngalia Tribesman) by Albert Namatjira (Date: c.1937)