Aristotle long ago dubbed humankind “zoon politikon” – the political animal – and political theorists ever since have used this evocative term as a touchstone. What Aristotle was referring to is the fact that humans, like a number of other species, engage in organized cooperative activities that entail collective decision making, coordinated behaviors, and leadership.
The traditional view among the students of animal behavior has been that the political systems in social mammals – say baboons – normally involve an authoritarian dominance hierarchy maintained by physical threats and coercion. However, more recent research and theoretical work on the subject paints a much more complex picture. Leadership is at once more common than we thought in other socially organized mammals and is more varied and complex, with numerous examples of a more consensual, cooperative pattern.
It seems that our own ancestors developed a leadership system that is unique. In a series of landmark studies many years ago, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm documented the fact that modern hunter-gatherer societies are not only egalitarian but also exhibit what Boehm called a “reverse dominance hierarchy” – a social coalition that actively contains and suppresses aggressive individuals. It appears that a more democratic political system may be a deep-rooted trait in our species.
More recently, the evolutionary economist Herbert Gintis, together with Boehm and the anthropologist Carel van Schaik, have proposed that this distinctively human behavioral pattern first evolved among Homo erectus. They argue that the emergence of a more consensual leadership style in our ancestors was related to the adoption of cooperative big game hunting and confrontational scavenging with the use of “lethal weapons,” perhaps as far back as 2 million years ago. Gintis and his colleagues believe that these weapons also provided important political “equalizers” for H. erectus that facilitated a more egalitarian social structure.
In my new book, Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind, I argue that the shift to a more egalitarian and consensual leadership pattern – one that is based on “prestige” rather than dominance – might in fact be traced back even to the australopithecines. The intense social interdependence required for a cooperative foraging strategy and the evidence of tool/weapon use and meat consumption as early as 3.3 million years ago, suggests that zoon politikon first emerged among these very early ancestors. The incessant daily demand for group decisions and actions related to foraging, nesting sites, water holes, opportunistic hunting and scavenging, dealing with threats, and, not least, migrations to new locations, all involved political processes. Competent leadership was vitally important, and there is much evidence that cohesive groups often make better collective decisions than individuals alone. The synergies derived from good decisions and effective social action may even have served as a potent selecting agency among different hominin groups (Synergistic Selection) – as Gintis, Van Schaik, and Boehm also note in their paper, following Darwin’s lead.
It seems likely that the most powerful check against dysfunctional dominance behaviors in australopithecines was the potential for collective resistance by the group – the power of superior numbers (another synergy of scale) – in the same way that bonobo females gang up to thwart aggressive males. It may well be that the development of big game hunting and scavenging with advanced weapons in Homo erectus led to a further elaboration of our unique political system, but it seems likely that consensual leadership was already a well-established social pattern among our more remote ancestors. (The question of how this system was ultimately subverted in modern human societies, and the ominous consequences of this political regression is also addressed in my book.)