Timothy Earle
Abstract Humans built societies with transgenerational permanence, culturally discriminating identities, and defense of territories. These characteristics are shared with some other animals, suggesting that humans as social animals have a comparable biological basis. As an analog for early human social ability, modern foragers provide a model of elemental, small-scale units often called bands, which organize cooperative groups of @ 25 individuals. In these elemental groups, people knows each other intimately, but membership was not based on genetic closeness and so not a result of simple genetic selection. Rather, reciprocal cooperation favored an opportunistic association with selective advantages to the group in resource defense, social mobility, and cooperation. Early in human history, the marking of membership in such groups likely became culturally distinctive with distinguishing behavior, personal adornment, and material culture. The capability to form groups based on culture ultimately allowed humans to form societies of very large scales as represented by the modern age. Band-size units became embedded in village-size groups that could then be culturally embedded within regional polities and so forth. Human societies evolve as multi-scalar formations with each level retaining characteristics of societies– permanence, culturally discriminating identities, and defense of resources. In essence, human societies formed as societies (bands) within societies (villages) within chiefdoms, states, and empires.