Quotes from “Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model”

By Manvir Singh & Luke Glowacki (2022)

• If, until the last 10,000 years, group sizes were in the dozens and individuals cooperated on a small-scale and rarely with strangers, then predispositions to cooperate with strangers based on arbitrary markers seem unnecessary, even costly. Under the diverse histories model, however, such psychological predispositions become more understandable. If humans lived in villages of more than a thousand individuals… then prosocial predispositions towards in-group strangers make more evolutionary sense, especially if groups developed markers of group membership.#
  AnthropologyCooperationSignaling
• The longstanding view that low-mobility foragers are exceptional and that “social complexity” emerged with agriculture is no longer viable… As anthropologists have long appreciated, low-mobility and non- egalitarian foragers tend to emerge in environments with dense, rich, and predictable resources#
  Anthropology
• Many forager societies seem to have lost corporate group structure in recent historical memory. The Eastern Pomo, Copper Inuit, and !Kung are all coded in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample as lacking kin-based corporate groups, yet each group seems to have lost more elaborate social structure following interactions with states and other agricultural societies.#
  AnthropologyHistory
• Given that Late Pleistocene humans likely lived in both poor- and high-quality habitats, researchers argue, recent forager societies are not representative of the total social diversity that likely characterized the Late Pleistocene#
  HistoryAnthropology