Egalitarianism made us the symbolic species

Abstract

‘The world of hunter-gatherers […] was one of bold social experiments’ say Graeber and Wengrow, ‘a carnival parade of political forms’. But did the boldest social experiments of our ancestors – language and symbolic culture – constrain these possibilities? Aspects of our anatomy, psychology and cognition that were necessary preadaptations to language – cooperative eyes, intersubjectivity, large brains, a ratchet effect of cultural accumulation – required stable sociopolitical contexts of significant egalitarianism to evolve among our Middle Pleistocene ancestors. This implies political strategies for minimising and periodically nullifying dominance relations, through dynamics of day-to-day individualistic counter-dominance with occasional displays of collective reverse dominance. Because of the very high costs for mothers who had to provide high-quality nutrition and reliable allocare for large-brained babies, the most telling aspect of this would be gender resistance, establishing gender egalitarianism. Middle Pleistocene populations with more hierarchical tendencies were least likely to have become language-speaking, larger-brained ancestors of Homo sapiens .