We evolved in little hunting/gathering groups; how did we leap to big societies?

I've written on this subject many times here. The human forebrain is uniquely large and gives us the unique ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior on a large scale.

The change you speak of did not happen quickly or all at once, giving us time to adapt.

The Agricultural Revolution marked the transition from the Paleolithic (early stone age) to the Neolithic (late stone age) era. Agriculture, the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry, was the first step. It both permitted and required us to stop being nomadic hunter-gatherers. "Permitted" because we now had plants growing and animals grazing in our backyards, and "required" because we had stay home to tend those gardens and herd those animals.

The social consequence of this came about because this Paradigm Shift to an agricultural economy put pressure on our ancestors to exploit division of labor (more specialized tasks than in hunting and gathering) and economies of scale (larger farms and herds are more productive per unit of labor). This suggested that a larger community than the traditional extended-family clan, measured in the low dozens, would be advantageous. Clans who were formerly warily indifferent or openly hostile (in a bad year there's not enough food to go around so sheer survival dictated invading the neighboring clan's territory or even killing them to steal their food) now had a reason to learn to live in harmony and cooperation, in order to take advantage of the first food surplus the planet had ever seen, and moreover to increase the size of that surplus.

At this point people were living in villages where they at least knew each other, even if not intimately since birth. I'm sure some of them couldn't handle the transition and ran off into the wilderness, perhaps hooking up with some still-Paleolithic clan that had been ravaged by disease or disaster and needed some new blood. But the rest stayed, and survival of the fittest gradually selected for the DNA that programmed synapses with instincts more favorable to living in larger groups.

This started only twelve thousand years ago, and a few hundred generations is not long enough for a massive reprogramming of our instincts. There is still a caveman lurking inside each of us. We placate him with pizza, air conditioning, rock'n'roll and rides in the car, but he is still not totally content with this new world in which most of the people he has to interact with are not close family members. So occasionally he has a bad day, takes control, and does something which to us is "antisocial" but to him is "normal." As long as this is individual cavemen doing it on random days, we can deal with it.

Unfortunately sometimes an entire community's cavemen are synchronized into antisocial behavior, and they make war on some other community, just as they did in the Stone Age.

During the Neolithic Era villages continued to grow (some archeological sites reveal hundreds of dwellings) and the individual villages linked into trading networks. Division of labor and economies of scale continued to make life more prosperous for the communities. They could now afford to have a few full-time professional musicians, teachers, brewers, storytellers, explorers, inventors, etc.

Eventually the first Stone Age cities were built. This was the next Paradigm Shift. Cities provide even more prosperity, security and sheer fun than villages, but people had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. This required the new institution of government. They once again used their massive forebrains to adapt to this tradeoff: even more goods and services, at the price of less connection to their "extended-clan-mates." Predictably their inner caveman was even more stressed, and we begin to see "antisocial behavior" in the earliest reliable histories.

But it wasn't until the technology of metallurgy ushered in the Bronze Age that the inner cavemen became a serious problem. Bronze blades and armor were the first "weapons of mass destruction," allowing an armed person to kill off quite a few victims so long as they were not also so armed. War as we know it became part of history.

Bronze is an alloy of tin and copper, two ores which are very rarely found in close proximity. So in order for there to even be a Bronze Age, cities had to forge alliances so they could trade ore and make bronze. This put a bit of a damper on their bellicose tendencies... until they found a way to build hotter fires and melt iron ore, a metal that requires no alloying and is found almost everywhere. The Iron Age was noted for the fact that every "barbarian" tribe could make their own iron weapons, becoming a "kingdom" overnight and challenging the civilized kingdoms for dominance--or simply rushing in, killing everybody, and taking their stuff.

So we see this steady pattern. People congregate in larger and larger communities: clan, village, town, city, state, nation, empire, the EU, and you younger people may live to see the tentative beginnings of the One Global Civilization that we hippies dreamt of. But at the same time our Inner Cavemen feel more and more stifled. There's no one left to hate, except on the opposite side of the planet!

And even those people now have names, faces, families, hopes and dreams thanks to the Internet. Americans wept over the real-time cellphone videos of Neda Agha Soltan dying in the street of the capital city of a country that we claim to not even like very much! The only wars the American government feels that it can get away with any more are against countries that are not very well wired yet. They'll bomb Afghanistan, but (mark my words) not Iran!

What's a poor Inner Caveman to do? Are people who aren't comfortable living among strangers going to rebel, start a nuclear war, and literally "bomb us all back into the Stone Age" where they will feel more comfortable?

Or will we all be inspired and shamed by our dogs? As I have also noted in those same posts, during those same 12,000 years, the wolves we tamed have gone through something like 15,000 generations, with their faster reproductive cycle. That is long enough for some major genetic reprogramming. Notice the difference between dogs and wolves. Dogs are highly gregarious, enjoy hanging out together in large packs, don't fight for dominance very much except as a social ritual, and are even quite happy to let a member of another species run the place, so long as he brings home a dead cow every month.

In other words, dogs are civilized. Maybe some day we'll be as good as they are. Meantime I'll continue hanging out with them. They make a great clan.

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I tried to make the point that this unnatural evolution is gradual and still has a long way to go.

Nonetheless, our progress from a instinctive pack-social culture (like wolves, lions and elephants) toward a reasoning-and-learning-inspired herd-social culture (like cattle: tolerating each other's company, offering minimal courtesy such as not stepping on each other's feet absentmindedly, protecting each other's young, uniting in the face of danger, etc.) has been steady, if not monotonic.

• The murder rate in 21st century USA, the world's murder capital, is about one one-hundredth of the rate in European cities 500 years ago.
• The percentage of the human race killed deliberately by government violence reached its peak in the era of Genghis Khan (10% of the people reachable by the transportation technology of the time), then fell to 3% in WWII (by then everyone was reachable and the war was intercontinental), the most recent high-water mark. Since then only a handful of strictly regional wars have killed more than one million, and today even body counts of six digits are rare enough to be headline news (four digits if they're our own people). Worldwide, we have just about reached the point at which more human beings are killed in motor vehicle accidents than by deliberate violence, individual or governmental.
• Violence is not, and never was, the only major cause of death. Life expectancy has increased from 25 in the Roman Empire (and that ignores 80% infant mortality!) to around 80 in the developed world today, including newborn babies! Even in places where civilization appears to be breaking down, the average person still lives past 50!

So we haven't completely eradicated war. Then how about giving us credit for the progress that we have made: sewers, plumbing, vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, wrapped food... all the public health and safety measures. Aggregating all causes of death, you are enormously safer than your ancestors. If you're over 25, the odds are 50/50 that you have already outlived your counterpart in Ancient Rome!

Good thing, since there was no food storage technology in the Paleolithic! They weren't "free" to move about, they were required to do so. They had to follow their game around to their new grazing areas, and they had to find the edible plants wherever they were ripe. This meant that everything they owned had to be carried with them, and BTW they had no sealed containers and no domesticated herbivores to carry packs or pull sledges. The best they came up with was the travois, a three-cornered sledge with two points strapped to their shoulders and the third dragging on the ground. Without roads the going was pretty tough so there was a limit to how much weight a person could drag this way--including their weapons and other tools, and of course the younger children. As soon as dogs were domesticated, they were drafted into hauling smaller travois.

Once people settled down in agricultural villages, which produced surplus food, technologies were invented for preserving and storing that surplus. Of course simply having live tame animals on the pasture outside the village was a perfectly fine way to store meat. It was also pickled, dried and smoked, and milk was made into cheese. Ceramics were invented around this time so food could be stored in reasonably airtight, bug-proof and stackable containers.

Yes, many anthropologists regard Çatalhöyük as the first true city. Others nominate Jericho, which is certainly the oldest walled city. Damascus may be the oldest continuously-inhabited city, although evidence of that continuity is disputed.

 

You must have written that book twenty years ago. I hope you plan to revise it and publish an updated edition. Around 1980 the second derivative of population went negative, and the first derivative is universally predicted to go negative toward the end of this century, with population peaking just barely into eleven digits. In other words, at that point it will start to drop.

We will then be facing a totally different problem: Every economic system since Adam Smith relies on a constantly expanding population of producers and consumers as its engine of prosperity. The last time our species experienced a drop in population was tens of thousands of years ago in the Paleolithic Era, when the "economy" was: find food, eat food, sleep, do it again tomorrow.

To continue to trumpet the so-called population explosion as mankind's biggest problem does a fatal disservice to us. It distracts our attention from the problem that our greatgrandchildren will have to solve: How to maintain prosperity in a shrinking population. Especially one that will have an even more lopsided old-young ratio than the one that is currently straining the U.S. economy to the breaking point!

If you consider yourself an elder in this global community and would like to help your people adapt to the future, you need to use the right model of the future!

Yes, we do need to exercise a little more wisdom than is currently on display in order to get through the rest of the century with a still slightly-expanding population. But the underpopulated Western Hemisphere will still be able to feed the whole human race four times over, so food won't be the problem. As for energy, when people start running out of petroleum you can be sure that the opposition to nuclear power will vanish overnight.

The main problem will be what it has been throughout my life: despots not caring about the welfare of their people, and selling the food our charities ship to them by the boatload on the black market, so they can use the money to buy more weapons. And we're even making progress on that. Every decade sees a stunning increase in the ratio of democracies to despotic governments. For the first time since anybody's been keeping track, less than 50% of the people in Africa live in poverty.

When I was in college millions of Chinese were dying because they didn't have enough food. Now they have TVs and cellphones.

That's a bit of a simplification. We call this Greco-Roman civilization for good reason, and both the Greeks and the Romans were polytheists. Rome didn't adopt Christianity until the 4th century CE, after it had already Romanized most of Europe, and that also happens to be when the empire started to collapse.

Coincidence?

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