For a long time, humans have been opting for permanent communities, with all their inherent pros and cons, instead of brief alliances. Scholars still wonder who came up with this idea, when, and why.
According to the pioneering sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, insects are so different from us in terms of anatomy and physiology that they seem to be from an alien planet. Their evolutionary path diverged from ours six hundred million years ago, yet aspects of their existence are perfectly familiar. African termites unite in large, organized communities, inhabit common territory, and cooperate. They are divided into castes, with workers capable of building five-meter mounds, and others engaged in agriculture. In special chambers, using vegetable matter, they raise fungi on which their life depends. Their nests are not built at random, and they form a complex network of chambers and galleries. The termites communicate with one another at various stages of construction, implementing each phase precisely. If they come across an unfinished section, they will work to complete it, according to plan.
All the insects and their body heat ought to cause overheating and a shortage of air in the nest, but termite mounds are built to eliminate this risk. According to Wilson, the construction acts somewhat like our air conditioners, ensuring that the queen and king’s chamber is kept at an even temperature, with a constant CO2 level (rarely deviating more than 0.1 percent).
From the outset, sociobiology has been criticized for various reasons, such as its tendency to anthropomorphize the non-human world. A fair complaint: we should always consider if we are judging incomprehensible phenomena by our own standards. But there are striking similarities between animals’ lives and our own. To its credit, sociobiology has raised awareness that communal living, based on rules and common goals, is not unique to humanity. For example, wolf packs, flocks of birds, and swarms of locusts are communities akin to ours: organized groups of individuals of the same species who cooperate and communicate.
Wilson believes that, in some ways, insects are superior to us. Our society is much worse at showing traits such as altruism or the ability to sacrifice oneself for the greater good. A colony is a type of superorganism. We come across as a selfish species who use other community members to satisfy our own needs, usually reserving altruistic behavior for our close family. Nevertheless, Wilson maintains that humans are the only vertebrates to have surpassed insects in terms of social organization. Moreover, we often transcend the mammalian “selfishness rule” by being generous toward unrelated individuals (but we normally expect them to reciprocate later).
According to Wilson, our intelligence has led us to create complex organizational and behavioral forms, which brings us to an issue that requires further discussion.
I Think You Feel . . .
Contemporary evolutionary psychologists have another hypothesis to complement the common-sense assumption that intelligence was a precondition for complex organization—namely, that social life was the determining factor in primate brain evolution. This idea implies that societies preceded the development of intelligence and, in fact, were the cause of it. Moreover, this may have applied not only to primates, but to all other mammals and birds, too.
New theories suggest that the basis for social life is “the mind” or, more precisely, possessing a “theory of the mind.” One condition for group life is the ability to recognize our own and other people’s mental states; to imagine that another individual thinks and feels as we do and has similar perceptions and intentions. This theory assumes, for instance, that door handles have no mind, so we do not communicate with them or treat them as members of our community.
In this respect, the British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar describes various orders of intentionality—a word he uses to mean the ability to reflect on what we or others are thinking, feeling, wanting, etc. Every self-aware being attains level one. Level two is the ability to have opinions about another individual’s consciousness. Subsequent levels are endless strings of various mind states, embedded inside one another like Russian dolls. The first order might be expressed in the statement “I know that I’m bad.” The second as “I know (1) that he is bad (2).” The third as “I think (1) he thinks (2) Andrzej is bad (3).” The fourth as “It seems to me (1) that he thinks (2) Andrzej thinks (3) that Ewa is bad (4)”—and so on.
Understanding this rather abstract theory is vital to comprehending human social life and its influence on intellectual development. Dunbar’s research has shown that behaviors related to mentalization (a collective term for thought processes such as “I believe that,” “I think that,” “I imagine that,” “I want,” and “I suppose”) require more brainpower than remembering facts, for example. Experiments have also confirmed that tasks requiring higher “levels of intentionality” trigger increased neural activity in certain areas of subjects’ prefrontal cortexes and temporal lobes.
Children can grasp basic “theory of mind” around the age of five and begin to understand higher levels later. Interestingly, the average adult can easily manage five orders of intentionality. They would have no problem understanding “I think you want Andrzej to want Ewa to think that Antoni wants Marta to do something,” but anything more complex would be hard to follow. Everyday life normally only requires two orders of intentionality at most.
Computers have no intentionality—they are unaware of the data they process. Possibly, some insects may also lack self-awareness, and most mammals only experience level one, though apes, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, can reach the second level. According to Dunbar, it takes each individual many years to socialize because grasping societal rules is so tough and demanding. He believes that the average Homo sapiens brain requires up to twenty to twenty-five years. If both theories are correct, those who understand others ought to be called brainy, rather than those who are good at math.
The “social brain” hypothesis is supported by physical analysis of brain dimensions. Insect species living in larger groups (e.g. bees and ants) have larger mushroom bodies (corpora pedunculata) than solitary insects. Modern dogs who interact regularly with a range of people have larger brains than their biological ancestors. Research on neuroimaging of apes and humans also clearly supports the hypothesis that neocortex size is proportional to social network size.
Unlike other mammals, apes (but not prosimians) have new prefrontal cortex areas, which are associated with complex cognitive abilities, such as planning and behavior evaluation—also crucial social skills. Dunbar writes that the prefrontal cortex may help to inhibit impulsive reactions. This is a vital skill in community-building: the selfishness mentioned by Wilson can only be overcome if an individual can quell the urge to take an apple, for instance (so that someone else may have it).
One-Hundred Fifty Friends
Primates are often assumed to join groups for one basic, practical reason: more effective defense against predators. Otherwise, group life is not really an ideal solution, as problems can arise like competing for food or places to relax. The larger the group, the more food it requires, but migrating in search of it heightens the risk of encountering predators. The major problem observed in ape groups tends to be internal strife, to which females fall victim—stress can cause their menstrual cycle to be disrupted, or even lead to infertility. To survive, alliances must be formed within the group, which help them stand up to belligerent individuals.
Notably, individuals in larger groups are more likely to establish fewer contacts, as if prioritizing relationship quality over quantity. A minor digression: monogamy would seem to be more taxing for the brain than polygamy. Living as a monogamous couple also requires problem-solving due to internal conflicts of interest, and the inevitable threat of alternative male or female partners within the group. During breeding season, a couple have to tolerate each other while not tolerating others on the same territory (a rare behavior among other non-monogamous mammals). Choosing monogamy also seems to permanently reprogram the brain—when animals shift over to monogamous relations, they never return to the old model.
All these difficulties involved in achieving high levels of intentionality lead us to conclude that the number of individuals with whom reasonably stable bonds can be maintained (known professionally as Dunbar’s number) is not infinite. This is true for animals and humans alike. The author theorizes that humans are able to manage 150 stable, close relationships. This may sound incredibly low, but being part of larger groups is actually not so easy for us. Relations in groups of over 150 people are superficial, unstable, awkward, lack trust, and are hard to remember, often requiring numerous rules to sustain them. Communities that transcend the brain’s “natural” cognitive abilities require “artificial” assistance.
The hypothetical existence of Dunbar’s number is confirmed, for example, by demographic data of hunter-gatherer societies, the documented size of old English villages, and even the size of military units. Dunbar and his team tested the number’s accuracy in many ways. In one experiment, participants were asked to write down everyone from their phone contacts who was important to them. In another, they were asked how many Christmas cards they had sent out. Dunbar mentions a spectacular survey of contemporary social media and online relationships. From a sample of ten million people, it was discovered that the average number of contacts with whom we can exchange e-mails is somewhere between one- and two-hundred. These figures always gravitate around that same Dunbar’s number.
The British anthropologist’s theory has fascinating implications for research into “sociology and prehistoric culture.” Since 150 is a natural number for Homo sapiens with our specific brain type, we can calculate how our primeval ancestors’ communities may have looked based on cranial size (and the brains they contained). Larger brains suggest life in larger groups; smaller ones in smaller groups. For example, according to Dunbar, religious beliefs entail certain levels of intentionality. Therefore, if a prehistoric skull was too small to accommodate a brain seemingly capable of such intentionality, then religion was out of the question.
Both Wilson and Dunbar also remark that the best-developed societies grew out of family units. According to Dunbar, five or six families would unite into a tightly knit group. Naturally, larger societies were possible, but when they exceeded 150 members, they became more stressful and plagued by conflict (as in the case of the apes above).
This theory seems convincing, and also fits the current biological paradigm—the notion that life constantly strives to “replicate itself through individuals.” But ethnographic research has complicated our assumption that families were fundamental in forming the first Homo sapiens communities. Contemporary cultural anthropology provides a wealth of material to illustrate the sheer diversity of human communities, thus proving that one formula could never encompass them all.
Who Are Kin, Exactly?
Referring to Dunbar’s theory, the archaeologist David Graeber and anthropologist David Wengrow’s well-known book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity points out with disarming honesty that not everybody loves their family, and many people even steer clear of them. A somewhat obvious statement, but it should be taken into account in order to fully understand human cultures. Current research into modern hunter-gatherer groups and others who lived during the Ice Age allows us to assume that human communities have not necessarily been made up of biological relatives since the dawn of time.
Undoubtedly, the life of so-called primitive societies was determined by kinship bonds, but how they understood kinship is a separate issue. The importance of biological parents is relatively new in the history of ideas. Though characteristic to contemporary Western cultures, it remains incomprehensible to certain societies.
Here are a few examples by way of illustration. When a girl from the Nair caste of the Malabar Coast in southwestern India reaches puberty, she marries a mature man, and their nuptials are celebrated publicly. The young wife must then spend the next three nights with her ritually married husband, after which she may legally have other relationships, and even enjoy full sexual freedom. But her first ritual husband is still registered as the father of any child she bears (even if he is not the biological father). Does this imply that the genetic imperative to start a family, as described by sociobiologists, does not apply in that ethnic group?
It is also worth mentioning the famous anthropological controversy over whether the Aborigines (as described by early ethnographers and missionaries) ever noticed the cause and effect between the sexual act and conception. According to their system of beliefs, pregnancy was seen as the reincarnation of an ancestor’s spirit in a woman’s womb, so the connection might have been overlooked. Spirits would cunningly enter a woman by taking the form of an embryo (which could easily happen at religious sites because they were visited by totemic ancestors). Similarly, the Trobriand Islanders, studied by Bronisław Malinowski, neither considered themselves the biological fathers of children they took care of, nor saw any sense in castrating cattle.
In traditional societies, the concept of kinship also extends to the non-human world. The French anthropologist Philippe Descola observed that the Achuar people of the Amazonian forests treat plants and animals equally. In his book Beyond Nature and Culture, he stressed that the Achuar do not divide creatures into “human” and “nonhuman.” To them, spirits, plants, and animals are beings equal to humans. From our perspective, that implies a superhuman community (consisting of not only humans, but plants, animals and spirits, too), whose members all communicate with each other using incantations. Plants and animals understand them, but do not respond immediately, preferring to communicate through dreams or hallucinogenic visions.
Other Amazonian cosmologies offer similar views of the natural world. The Macuna people of the Amazon also regard animals and plants as individuals, with an even more fluid classification than the Achuar’s: people can transform into plants or animals, and vice versa, and all these beings participate in social life and rituals. The Macuna believe that animals conduct ceremonies and live in homes of their own. They only temporarily adopt the animal forms we perceive, but once out of sight, back in their homes, they revert to their natural forms. For Macuna hunters, prey is equated with their wives within the community.
Cities, the Masses, Religions
Nowadays, due to social stratification, kinship bonds have given way to other relations, such as economics and politics. In this context, historically the most important was the urban revolution, which has led to the multi-million-inhabitant supercities of today. However, the process has been under way since Neolithic times.
Robin Dunbar writes that no one knows how we made the transition to our stressful, conflict-inducing, settled lifestyle, but suggests it may have been for the same reason that other primates form larger groups: defense against predators. In the case of Homo sapiens, it also implies defense against one’s neighbors, but Dunbar feels that the archaeological furor over whether the oldest-known human settlements were fortified is irrelevant. He believes that the very fact of living in larger groups deters attackers, with every house playing a defensive role.
Unfortunately, that portion of the British anthropologist’s arguments is neither convincing, nor in line with specialized works on human military conflicts. Dr. Keith F. Otterbein’s book, How War Began, emphasizes that a prolonged period of peace was a condition for adopting a settled, agricultural lifestyle. Crops cannot be grown while fighting or expecting a fight. Neolithic archaeology has also demonstrated that warfare did not develop during that period, and evidence of overt military activity only appeared long after the first settlements.
Dunbar’s explanation is also unconvincing for another reason. He assumes that the decision of Homo sapiens to give up the nomadic lifestyle was biologically sensible and “rational,” while in practical terms, many other human actions have been apparently meaningless. Philosopher Susanne K. Langer ridiculed the approach as characteristic to genetic psychology in her book Philosophy in a New Key, noting that no rat in a maze would try such patently ineffectual rituals to make the walls magically disappear. Yet humans do just that, and generally perform symbolic acts with no rational function whatsoever. In reality, only a few behaviors are linked to our survival, reproduction, and defense—the primal needs we share with other animals, around which all our activities seem to revolve. Langer even maintains that animals engage in more practical, common-sense behaviors than people do. Above all, humans create symbols and express ideas. The best example being speech itself, which we are still using (writing and reading this article are other examples).
Considering what is known about the oldest settlements of Homo sapiens, one can reasonably assume that people also started to band together for symbolic or—to be precise—purely religious reasons.
One example of such concerted effort is Göbekli Tepe—a complex of megaliths dating from around 9000 BCE; the oldest-known human site of religious worship. Its richly carved pillars weigh up to a ton. Building the entire complex must have involved the coordinated labor of huge numbers of people. Moreover, it was built by nomadic communities who only gathered at the site periodically for rituals, then dispersed and returned to their lifestyles. A lesser-known, but equally fascinating site is Poverty Point in Louisiana, a settlement clearly of religious significance, which stretches over two-hundred hectares of earthworks. The site is mathematically ordered and was built according to the rules of sacred geometry, also not by settled peoples, but nomadic hunters and fishermen.
Cities may be regarded as the most significant example of human social life. Their construction has certainly required the involvement of groups well in excess of Dunbar’s 150 individuals. For some reason, people managed to unite enough to be able to erect sky-high buildings and form the complex social relationships needed to sustain such a densely packed community.
According to conservative estimates, the oldest-known city—the Neolithic Çatalhöyük, founded circa 7400 BCE in what is currently Turkey—had around five thousand residents. Numerous animal skulls uncovered at the site were presumed to confirm the theory that it had been built by farmers and cattle herders. However, more recent archaeological research indicates that they were the bones of hunted game, kept as objects of worship. Murals, plus the fact that the residents buried their dead underneath their dwellings, are evidence that they enjoyed a rich religious life.
The emergence of urban civilization is often associated with the conquests of dynastic monarchies. But the oldest cities of Mesopotamia, which date back three to four thousand years, offer no archaeological arguments for the existence of kings, since none of the burials, palaces, inscriptions, or fortifications typical of monarchies have been found.
In his book, The City: A Global History, Joel Kotkin asserts that—apart from guaranteeing safety and enabling trade and services—every large city in human history has also served as a sacred space. Cities thrived when they developed in all three aspects. Kotkin proves that even the soaring towers of today’s secularized Western civilization are akin to ancient pyramids, ziggurats, or church steeples, for they capture the imagination and evoke quasi-religious associations.
People band together in small and large groups alike, even if their brains are ill-adapted to it. They do so for practical reasons, such as defending themselves from enemies, or efficiently producing and procuring food, but also for utterly non-pragmatic, symbolic reasons. They are able to consider flesh-and-blood humans as part of their society, as well as animals, plants, spirits, and the dead. They wish to pass on their genes, although sometimes it looks like they couldn’t care less.
So, as far as living together is concerned, Homo sapiens does it in all manner of ways.
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