Abstract:
This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further explored. Viewing social and political organization in the Last Glacial in a much wider, multi-disciplinary context provides the footing for coherent theory building and hypothesis testing by which to further explore human political systems. We aim to overcome the claim that our ancestors’ form of social organization is untestable, as well as counter a degree of exaggeration regarding possibilities for sedentism, population densities, and hierarchical structures prior to the Holocene with crucial advances from disparate disciplines.
The article's authors are Doron Shultziner, Thomas Stevens, Martin Stevens, Brian Stewart, Rebecca Hannagan, and Giulia Saltini-Semerari.
Originally published in Biology & Philosophy on 10 March 2010. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9196-4
ResearchGate page for the article (has links to the authors' ResearchGate pages): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225901618_The_causes_and_scope_of_political_egalitarianism_during_the_Last_Glacial_A_multi-disciplinary_perspective
The transition to sedentary and semi-sedentary life has had far reaching effects on human subsistence economies which impacted the spectrum of forms of social organization and the frequency and magnitude of hierarchical forms. Sedentary economy of food storage allows the accumulation of wealth both in the sense that it is physically possible to gather food in one location for long durations and to manipulate delayed-return subsistence economy and food sharing.
reject bourgeois hegemony, return to nomad
The stability of resources enables sedentary life and a whole new mode of competition and costly signaling for status characterized by harvest methods and prime-resource defense
primitive accumulation but instead of being during the 1700s its the ice age