All through human history, prehistory, and all the way back to the origin of Homo, around three million years ago, there was a pattern [1] of social structure formation driven by political conflict that repeated itself persistently at every level.
In this article I will describe the stages of social structure formation through political conflict.
1. Family Formation
The transition from late Australopithecus to early Homo is marked by brain growth. Australopithecus afarensis had an average brain size between 400 and 600 cc, and Homo erectus between 900 and 1100 cc. This doubling in volume in the course of approximately 1.5 million years is a strong indication of group growth, which must have been the primary evolutionary pressure in humans, as the majority of volume growth was focused on the neocortex, which is the layer of the brain that enables more complex and varied social relationships [2].
Brain growth created a secondary evolutionary pressure which produced the formation of the human family unit. The growing and costly human brain meant babies were born with larger heads, causing a widening in female hips, and the need for the offspring to be taken care of for longer periods of time. Before, maturity was reached at the age of six or seven, but, in Homo, children had to be taken care of until they were at least eleven or twelve.
Family unit formation in humans was driven by the fact that evolutionary personal and inclusive fitness [3] for both males and females was increased if both committed to monogamy for extended periods of time. Monogamy and teamwork in raising their kids, as a distinct unit within the general group, was an innovation that significantly changed social dynamics in humans.
Before family unit formation, group format in Australopithecus, or previous to it, was likely divided in males and females, with alpha [4] leaders in each side, and ranks and privileges according to social position. This format had two layers; the individual and the group. With the new family unit, as a more efficient organizational intermediate component, the layers rose to three; the individual, the family, and the group.
The underlying evolutionary drivers of gene replication, food procurement, and securing shelter, which created competition and thus conflict, were always the same. The difference was that, now, there were three layers of political sovereignty; the base individual, the new family leadership, and the traditional general group alpha ruling style, which was likely assumed by one of the family leaders.
2. Clan Formation
By the time of Homo erectus, around 2 to 1.5 million years ago, it is very likely that group sizes were, on average, around 100 to 200 hundred individuals, divided in 6 to 12 families. These groups could be described as clans.
The reorganization of the internal group structure into family units, who then formed clans, where the leadership was one of the family heads, was foundational for human organizational structure in all subsequent higher forms of organization. Before, rank belonged and was passed between or emerged individually. In the new format it stayed more and was relatively stable with or within families.
The conflict at the intra-clan level likely centered around resource management, division of labour, leadership, and external security. This kind of conflict must have been relatively standard and less aggressive than external conflict because the members of the clan were, in different degrees, related.
External conflict had always existed at the previous group level and that wouldn’t change with the formation of the intermediate family unit. However, the conflict was now between organized clans of families. This kind of conflict may have been more aggressive and systematic as the family unit probably enabled more genetic fitness, physical fitness, smarter individuals, better technology in the form of stone tools, and larger group sizes.
The underlying evolutionary drivers of conflict were the same, but the resulting violence must have been higher in the form of evolutionary costs: Death and injury.
3. Tribe Formation
Family fitness formed better family unit leaders, and these leaders were good clan leaders. The value added of clan leaders, which justified their additional individual privileges, was to minimize conflict and maximize resources and security for the constituent families, if not they were deposed. This drove them to think of innovative forms of relationship with other clans, rather than constantly incurring in the persistent cost of conflict.
Amongst the tools that they developed to turn rivalry into as much cooperation as possible, were inter-clan trade, marriage arrangements, beliefs in ancestral kin relationships, economic specialization of clans, and verbal agreements about territory, hunting and water rights, and other conflict resolution devices.
This tribe formation and relations brought the sort of political structure of clans into the larger inter-clan polity. Charismatic clan leaders became tribe leaders. Internal tribe conflict became more similar to internal clan relations.
The tribe model was not without its conflicts, though. It is very likely that internal family, clan, and tribe tensions have always persisted. Escaping from this state of affairs must have been the main driver for the expansion of archaic Homo across Africa and Eurasia in the last 2 million years. However, expansion space eventually tended to run out in some regions, so new conflicts and higher structures emerged.
4. City State Formation
The problem of expansion and all the innovations in family, clan, and tribe political management was that they brought more fitness, thus continued population growth. This meant that larger tribes who were once distant, and sometimes even unknown, now started to get closer and eventually became neighbors as occupying new lands became less of an option.
As anatomically modern humans eventually reached the confines of continents, islands, and peninsulas, they inexorably started overlapping in territory, engaging in increasingly more aggressive resource competition. This increased competition may have fostered even further logical and social intelligence development in later Homo.
In the last 75 thousand years, Homo sapiens reached all the confines of all the continents, and cooperated with, fought, and eventually assimilated all [5] the different remnants of archaic Homo everywhere, creating what are now called anatomically modern humans with an average brain size of 1350 cc.
Once these roving clans and tribes started to overlap, as had been the long term pattern, conflict increased. In the meantime, some tribes could finally organize themselves to secure patches of land [6] where they developed agriculture, and other more stationary or less mobile living strategies, depending on the area, such as pastoralism and fishing.
Once more sedentary tribes were established, they built larger settlements, with fortifications, and more complex social constructs and technologies, such as law, religion, counting mechanisms, writing, and social strata, to manage resources, food, and shelter.
However, the fortifications observed in settlements; such as Tel-Jerico [7] 12 thousand years ago, and ever increasing centralized walled or hardened structures, such as granaries, temples, palaces, and pyramids; show that not only internal tensions were rising, but that external conflict with overlapping settlements were increasing as well.
All regions of the six pristine original civilizations [8]; Mesoamerica, Andes, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, and Yellow and Yangtze River; showed the same pattern as before. In order to secure replication, food, and shelter, they formed around desirable and suitable territories. Then, as territories started to overlap, due to population growth and expansion, competition between families, clans, and tribes increased. This latest competition was between even larger polities: City states.
City states were collections of tribes with charismatic leaders who had to organize themselves to be able to provide for security and resources to their constituents. Many internal formats were tried in these times. Aristotle summarized them [9] well. They were monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, with their three deviant forms, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.
These were functional innovations that brought some conflict minimization to the city states. The problem was that, outside of that, conflict between city states rouse sharply, with ever worse violence, as they continued to grow, develop new technologies, overlap, and thus fight for territory and resources for their people.
5. Nation State Formation
The family unit was an innovation borne inside the larger secure container that was the primitive group. The bigger conflict was always external. This became the norm as polities became more complex, from clans to tribes to city states.
Inter-city-state external costs of conflict were very well recorded in history, which comprises the written records and accounts of the last 5 to 6 thousand years in places such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Yucatan peninsula, the Andes, Greece, the Italic Peninsula, the Mediterranean, Persia, Central Asia, and other places.
Much of this type of conflict was also observed and very obvious in the archeological record of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic as well. The important thing to notice is that, by this time, the underlying patterns and sources of conflict were always the same for millions of years.
Therefore, the pattern was the same at the national level. Charismatic leaders of city states, after incurring in countless wars and evolutionary costs for their peoples, eventually formed more general political organizations, where they extended the concepts of monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, together with their deviant forms, to inter-city-state organization. This gave rise to the modern nation state.
However, the size and complexity of nation states only expanded the problems of scale of the city states. The human brain, aided by some tools such as counting, writing, law, and religion, could easily manage group formations with populations between 150 and 1500 [10], even with the growing conflict as these numbers increased. With the larger populations of city states, which could reach between 40,000 and 200,000 [11] or more, starting from the later Neolithic through the Iron Age and beyond, depending on the region, the problems of scale were more pronounced.
This was even worse at the nation state level, so stronger leaders with national superstructures had to evolve to keep the nation state together, which was already a very difficult task. The nation state’s innovations were the larger and perhaps standing military presence across national territories, and, typically, the general imposition of common language [12], writing, law, religion, cultural norms and customs, measuring systems, monetary systems, and taxation.
6. Empire Formation
However, as the long term pattern continued, inter-nation-state, or international conflict, started to become a common feature in the Bronze Age, continuing through Antiquity, and all the way to Modernity.
The attempted solution was a new superstructure on top of all other superstructures, the Empire, presumably originated by Sargon of Akkad [13] in Mesopotamia 4.4 thousand years ago, but very likely also present in the other civilized regions, or at least rapidly evolving, at around the same time.
The difference between the empire and the nation state was that the nation state seemed to last longer, and, within nation states, cities lasted even longer, even through the history of several occupying nation states.
In other words, as seen in history, empires were not stable [14] formations.
7. Conclusion
The sequence of components and events that form the pattern of what is currently observed as political conflict is as follows:
- The basic drivers of all life forms are replication, procurement of food, and the security of shelter. These drivers naturally cause competition in environments with scarce resources.
- In social animals, individuals were already organized in groups, with alpha-beta-omega dynamics, as observed in species such as lions, orcas, chimpanzees, meerkats, zebras, and many more. This basic social organization had two layers, the individual and the group, and political conflict focused primarily on resource management, security, group leadership, and alpha privileges.
- As Homo groups grew, their brains had to grow to manage ever more complex social interactions. This brain growth demanded anatomical and behavioral adaptations in human males and females that induced them to pair in long term monogamic relationships forming the family as a new social unit. The social organization of humans now had three layers; the individual, the family unit, and the clan of families; which improved on the old group organization, with new and more complex internal relations, but more aggressive external political conflict due to continued population growth.
- Accelerating growth transported the basic competitive drivers, and internal and external political conflicts of humans, present for millions of years, to the scales of clans, tribes, city states, nation states, and empires. This pattern is observed in paleoarcheology, the archeology and history of the cradles of civilizations, the Bronze and Iron Ages, Classical Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern Period.
All levels of human organization have political conflict, albeit more aggressive in the external than internal context at every level. This provides incentives to constantly innovate by creating higher social superstructures.
The family unit was foundational in humans because it enabled brain growth and improved on the primitive group dynamics with family style structure and leadership at the new clan level, while preserving alpha group dynamics. All higher social organizational levels mimicked the structure of family based leadership, patriarchal or matriarchal, forming familial social strata based on status that served as the model for royalty, nobility, and economic and political elites in general all through human history.
The modern constitutional, contract based [15] type of organization in many nations seems to blur the lines of alpha group and family unit dynamics, but the reality is that they coexist, preserving the economic household and the family unit at their core, as individual and inclusive fitness are, and will always be, the main driving forces [16] of biological evolution.
As to political conflict, the smaller and the less organizational levels in polities, the more manageable they are. Although cities are conflictive, they seem to last longer, followed by nations. Empires are not stable so they tend to decay back to the nation state level.
References
[1] Evidence of Sophisticated Social Structure in Archaic Homo – by Donald McIntyre: https://etherplan.com/2020/11/25/evidence-of-sophisticated-social-structure-in-archaic-homo/13807/
[2] The Social Brain Hypothesis – by Robin I. M. Dunbar: https://etherplan.com/the-social-brain-hypothesis.pdf
[3] The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior II – by W. D. Hamilton: http://etherplan.com/the-genetical-evolution-of-social-behavior-ii.pdf
[4] Alpha – Ethology – by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)
[5] Modeling How Homo Sapiens Prevailed Against Archaic Humans – by Donald McIntyre: https://etherplan.com/2018/06/02/modeling-how-homo-sapiens-prevailed-against-archaic-humans/6970/
[6] History and the Security of Property – by Nick Szabo: https://archive.is/dRXEK#selection-21.0-8.13
[7] Tel Jerico – by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_es-Sultan
[8] Cradle of Civilization – by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization
[9] Aristotle’s Political Theory – by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-politics/
[10] Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language – by Leslie C. Aiello and R. I. M. Dunbar: https://etherplan.com/neocortex-size-group-size-and-the-evolution-of-language.pdf
[11] Historical urban community sizes – by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_sizes
[12] Book consciousness – by Nick Szabo: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/08/book-consciousness.html
[13] Sargon of Akkad – by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad
[14] British Empire Decolonization and Decline – by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#Decolonisation_and_decline_(1945%E2%80%931997)
[15] From status to contract – extract from “Ancient Law” – by Henry Sumner Maine: https://www.panarchy.org/maine/contract.html
[16] The Individual vs The Collective Fallacy – by Donald McIntyre: https://etherplan.com/2020/07/04/the-individual-vs-the-collective-fallacy/11957/
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