Hierarchy and Climate
= "You need a stable territory and a good amount of time in order to establish a proper stratified hierarchy".
Discussion
Daniel Bitton:
"temperature was fluctuating wildly throughout the palaeolithic. Not just in Europe but all over the world. Waters rising and falling within a generation or two, ice caps moving back and forth. Habitable territories expanding and contracting. Deserts growing and shrinking. Given these conditions it would have been extremely unlikely that you would be able to have societies with chiefs and commonners and nobilities and slaves, like you see in the Pacific Northwest Coast indians or the Calusa in Florida – nor would you be likely to find many larger scale settlements.
This is probably a big reason why homo sapiens is such a big brained jack of all trades species – for all of the extended 2 million year or so period of our evolution into homo sapiens, we lived in the crazy palaeolithic where our environments were changing every couple of generations and we had to change our subsistence strategies each time to adapt – which is what culture is all about.
You need a stable territory and a good amount of time in order to establish a proper stratified hierarchy. Like I mentioned in an earlier episode, it took 800 years for the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples to develop hierarchy – but in the Paleolithic an analogous society would have likely have had to move and shift their subsistence strategies something like 10 or 20 times over that period – and in squeeze times you might have a lot of competition and nowhere to escape to, but in times where habitable environments expanded you would have all sorts of places to expand and escape to. This is one of the reasons why many archaeologists and skeptical of claims of any kind of intergenerational hierarchy in upper palaeolithic europe.
I suspect that we were moving back and forth from hyperegalitarianism in growth times, to relative egalitarianism with some male dominance and gerontocracy like the Australians have in squeeze times and sometimes more hierarchy in exceptional circumstances – maybe like upper palaeolithic europe
This is why Boehm – and most people with knowledge – believe that we were mostly organized into small egalitarian bands for most of the palaeolithic – which the evidence seems to say as well until we get towards the end of the paleolithic where we start to see more semi sedentary foraging in various places around the world. But even if we were organized into small bands, they weren’t just isolated bands, these bands fissioning and fusing inside a web of enormous communities thousands of miles wide, as we’ll talk about in another episode, and which I believe Wengrow and Graeber talk about later in the book. And people in many places were surely agglomorating into larger groups seasonally as the authors will be talking about in this chapter. Even today every nomadic and semi nomadic society goes from smaller to larger camp sizes seasonally – which the authors forget to mention, they make it seem like changing social structure seasonally is some kind of lost art, forgotten or suppressed by anthropologists. Almost everyone changes structure seasonally, but that doesn’t always lead to changes in terms of dominance hierarchy.
Now the conditions that favoured equality changed significantly with the advent of the Holocene 12 000 years ago where the climate became much more stable. This made sedentary and semi sedentary living possible for much longer periods of time. And along with increased carbon in the atmosphere this made long term dependence on agriculture possible, both of which in turn make hierarchy much more possible by making criteria #1 possible – but these phenomena alone are not sufficient on their own to explain the explosion of hierarchy which happens when criteria #2 starts to get fulfilled more and more around the world, as we’ll discuss in the future. "