An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism

Abstract

The Neolithic was marked by a transition from small and relatively egalitarian groups to much larger groups with increased stratification. But, the dynamics of this remain poorly understood. It is hard to see how despotism can arise without coercion, yet coercion could not easily have occurred in an egalitarian setting. Using a quantitative model of evolution in a patchstructured population, we demonstrate that the interaction between demographic and ecological factors can overcome this conundrum. We model the coevolution of individual preferences for hierarchy alongside the degree of despotism of leaders, and the dispersal preferences of followers. We show that voluntary leadership without coercion can evolve in small groups, when leaders help to solve coordination problems related to resource production. An example is coordinating construction of an irrigation system. Our model predicts that the transition to larger despotic groups will then occur when: (i) surplus resources lead to demographic expansion of groups, removing the viability of an acephalous niche in the same area and so locking individuals into hierarchy; (ii) high dispersal costs limit followers' ability to escape a despot. Empirical evidence suggests that these conditions were probably met, for the first time, during the subsistence intensification of the Neolithic.

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

“…If hierarchical command is an efficient mode to solve economic problems as group size increases [25], then the voluntary creation of hierarchy and leadership is exactly what we expect to see in the long-run under the institutional-path hypothesis. The political game form can then subsequently change into one of dominance, where the new leaders take advantage of the costs of resisting or dispersing to create institutional rules that benefit themselves at the expense of others [65,66], paving the way to extractive institutions. However, coercive hierarchy seems to be inherently unstable [8] and costly to maintain, given the possibility for subordinates to form coalitions.…”

“…Despotic leaders that commanded surpluses of resources would then be able to influence institutions for their own good at the expense of other group members, in a way that they could not have done previously in an egalitarian structure. For example, leaders could dominate the political game form and skew the economic rules in their favour by enforcing (with coalitional support) what proportion of surplus resources from irrigation farming they could keep for themselves rather than share with the rest of the group [65,66]. Consequently, the shift to intensive food production heralded a transition to coercive and non-egalitarian institutions, or so-called extractive institutions [67].…”

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

“…the presence of a leader increases a group's productivity in collective action [41]. Leaders gain more of the reward than the remainder of the group, but they are tolerated because of increased absolute productivity.…”

“…Leaders are constrained by the fitness followers would gain from leaving the group; as a result, where leadership is efficient and costs of dispersal are high, leaders are able to claim unequal shares of production. This class of models [13,41] is analogous to those of reproductive skew [42][43][44].…”

Billions of impoverished people deserve to be better served

“…About 10,000 years ago, systems of inequality became prevalent and have persisted ever since (Pennisi, 2014). According to Powers and Lehmann (2014), the switch to agriculture from the hunter-gatherer era seems to have created the conditions for the evolution of leadership and especially of despotic forms of leadership based on coercive control of resources. They note that controlling surplus resources would have been a primary starting condition for despotism.…”