Prehistory and the Selection of Gods

Every people that reaches the historical record arrives carrying a story about itself: where it came from, what its dead are owed, who counts as kin, what may be done to a stranger, and what happens to a man who takes more than his share. We are used to treating those stories as arbitrary: folklore, decoration, the local colour of a culture. They are not arbitrary. They are load-bearing. And the ones we can still read are, without exception, the ones that did not get their carriers killed.

This chapter is about that filter. It is the foundation of everything that follows in this chronicle, because the religions that later justified slavery, conquest and racial caste did not appear from nowhere. They were assembled out of much older material by the same process that assembled everything else: a long, brutal, wasteful selection in which some narratives kept their communities alive and others did not.

Two warnings before we start. First, this is a chapter about a period that left no written testimony at all, and the honest scholarship is full of live disputes; where the evidence is thin, this chapter says so. Second, "what survived" is not an argument that what survived was good. Selection is not a moral endorsement. Smallpox survived very well.

The filter has two blades

Consider the problem facing any human group of a few dozen to a few hundred people, anywhere between the emergence of behaviourally modern humans and the first cities. It faces two kinds of threat at once, and they pull in opposite directions.

The outward threat. Other groups exist. They want the same water, the same game, the same valley bottom. A group whose narrative forbids all violence, forbids the training of young men, forbids the holding of a boundary, or treats every arriving stranger as automatically entitled to hospitality is a group whose stores, women, children and territory are available at low cost to anyone who thinks differently. It will be raided, absorbed, or displaced. Its story dies with it, not because the story was wrong about how people should live, but because it was disarmed.

The inward threat. But now consider the mirror image: a group whose narrative licenses unlimited predation on its own. A cosmology in which the strong may take from the weak without limit, in which the chief may kill at will, in which no one owes anything to anyone. That group does not need enemies. Its members will not store food that can be stolen from them, will not cooperate on anything that takes more than a season, will not raise more children than they can personally defend, and will defect at the first opportunity. It rots from the middle. An evil society is not internally happy, and unhappy societies do not hold together long enough to leave descendants who remember them.

What passes through both blades is narrow: stories that are ferocious at the boundary and restrained in the interior. In-group solidarity plus out-group licence. That combination is the recurring shape of ancient moral systems, and it is not a coincidence or a moral failure of our ancestors. It is what was left after everything else had been removed.

The mechanism, and the fight about it

The technical name for the filter described above is cultural group selection: the claim that competition between groups, where groups differ in their socially transmitted norms, can favour norms that make groups more cohesive and more effective, even when those norms are individually costly.¹ Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson are the main architects of the formal version; Joseph Henrich has done the most to connect it to the ethnographic and experimental record.²

The idea has an ugly history: it was used in the nineteenth century to rank "races" and justify empire, which is precisely the story chapters 13 and 14 of this chronicle tell, and modern proponents are careful to separate it from that. The claim is not that surviving cultures are superior, or that the people carrying them are biologically different. The claim is narrower and better evidenced: practices spread and die according to what they do to the groups that carry them, and this happens fast, within centuries, by imitation, migration, conquest and prestige, not by genes.

It is also genuinely contested. Critics point out that group selection arguments are dangerously easy to tell after the fact: any surviving institution can be narrated as functional. The rejoinder in the serious literature is to look for the pattern prospectively, in coded cross-cultural datasets, and it is here that the argument gets interesting, and messy.

How small societies policed the inward threat

The most striking finding in the anthropology of mobile foragers is that they are not merely equal by accident of poverty. They are aggressively, deliberately equal, and they work at it.

Christopher Boehm's survey of the ethnographic record calls this the reverse dominance hierarchy: the many coordinating to suppress the ambitious few.⁴ The toolkit is consistent across continents: mockery, gossip, refusal to cooperate, shunning, and, in the last resort, execution of the persistent bully by consensus of the band. Richard Lee's classic account of the Ju/'hoansi describes the ritual "insulting of the meat," in which a hunter who brings in a large animal is systematically belittled for it, precisely so that a good hunter cannot convert food into standing.⁵

Read that again as a design solution. These are societies that have identified the internal-predation failure mode and built a cultural immune system against it, not out of sentiment, but because a band that lets one man accumulate coercive power over the others stops functioning as a band. The moral narrative and the survival mechanism are the same object.

The Ju/'hoansi are also the source of the other famous finding: Marshall Sahlins's "original affluent society," built on Lee's data showing subsistence work of roughly twenty hours a week.⁶ The figure has been contested for fifty years; later work argues the accounting excluded food processing, tool maintenance and childcare, and that the study period was unusual, and the responsible position is that forager labour was variable and often far below the agricultural norm, not that it was uniformly light.⁷ The point that survives the criticism is the important one: subsistence societies were not living at the edge of starvation by default, and the assumption that they were is a colonial inheritance, not a finding. We will meet it again in chapter 9, when English settlers describe as "wilderness" a landscape that was being farmed.

Was the outward threat real?

This is the hardest empirical question in the chapter, and it is worth being precise, because both extreme answers are propaganda.

The "prehistory was a bloodbath" position rests on Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization and was popularised by Steven Pinker: high per-capita violent death rates in the ethnographic and archaeological samples, an order of magnitude above modern states.⁸ The counter-position, argued most forcefully by R. Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry, is that the samples are contaminated: that many of the "primitive war" cases were societies already deformed by contact with expanding states, slave raiding, and the fur and gun trades, and that the deep archaeological record of mobile foragers shows violence but not organised war until sedentism and storage appear.⁹

The sites everyone argues about are worth naming. Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, c. 13,400 years old, contains dozens of individuals with projectile injuries; recent re-analysis found many had healed wounds, indicating repeated raiding rather than one massacre.¹⁰ Nataruk in Kenya, c. 10,000 years old, produced twenty-seven bodies, some bound, some with embedded obsidian, reported as the earliest evidence of inter-group conflict among foragers, and immediately disputed on taphonomic grounds.¹¹ Talheim and Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Neolithic Germany are not ambiguous: mass graves of farming villagers, skulls broken from behind, lower legs deliberately shattered.¹²

The defensible synthesis: lethal inter-group violence is old, widespread, and patchy. It is not universal and not constant, and it intensifies sharply where there is something worth taking: stored grain, herds, a fishery, a trade route. Which is exactly what the argument of this chapter requires. A group does not need to be raided every year for the disarmament failure mode to be fatal. It needs to be raided once.

Against the ladder

There is one more correction to make before this chapter can do its job, and it comes from David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.¹³ Their target is the standard staircase (band, tribe, chiefdom, state) in which each rung is more complex, more unequal, and inevitable. The archaeological record, they argue, shows nothing so tidy: societies that built monuments and then abandoned hierarchy, cities without palaces (Ukrainian mega-sites, Teotihuacan's social housing), peoples who ran a chiefly hierarchy in one season and a fiercely egalitarian assembly in the other.

Some of their specific readings are disputed by specialists, and this chronicle does not need all of them.¹⁴ What it needs is their central negative claim, which is well supported: hierarchy was not the automatic price of complexity, and political forms were chosen, argued over, and reversed. Human beings experimented, and some experiments were deliberately undone.

This matters enormously for what follows. If domination is the natural terminus of social development, then empire, slavery and caste are regrettable but expected. If it is not, if the record shows people repeatedly building and dismantling hierarchies, then the specific hierarchies of the last five centuries are the outcome of specific decisions by identifiable people, which is exactly what the rest of this chronicle documents.

The shape that got through

Pull the threads together and a rough profile emerges of the moral narrative that survived the deep past. It tends to include:

• Strong internal obligation: kinship duty, reciprocity, hospitality within the group, a real cost for freeloading and a serious apparatus for humbling the ambitious.
• A defensible boundary: a category of "us", initiation and training for the young, and an explicit account of when force is legitimate.
• Limits on internal predation: homicide taboos, restraint on chiefs, redistributive feasting, blood-price systems that stop feuds from cascading.
• Wider licence at the boundary: the enemy, the stranger, the non-person. This is the cost of the whole package, and it is where the rest of this chronicle's horrors are eventually located.
• Ecological restraint that is enforced as sacred: closed seasons, sacred groves, taboo species, rotation. Communities that ate their own resource base disappeared with it.¹⁵

Notice what this profile is not. It is not gentle, and it is not the "noble savage", a stereotype invented in Europe for European arguments, and one this chronicle rejects as firmly as it rejects its mirror image. Precolonial societies were societies: they had politics, factions, coercion, cruelty and war. What they had that later empires did not was a bounded scale of extraction. You cannot strip-mine a valley you have to live in next year, and you cannot brutalise a neighbour whose sister your son will marry.

Why this is chapter one

Everything that follows in this chronicle is a story about that boundary: where a moral community draws its edge, and what it permits itself to do beyond it.

The Roman empire of chapter 2 is what happens when a society finds a way to make the boundary mobile, so that extraction can be exported indefinitely and the costs never land at home. The invention of race in chapter 8 is what happens when a society needs a boundary that will hold at a distance of four thousand miles and three generations, when the people being brutalised are neither neighbours nor enemies but permanent, inheritable non-persons. The colonial mission of chapter 10 is what happens when a religion carrying an ancient in-group/out-group architecture is handed a global logistics system. And the identity card of chapter 24 is what happens when a colonial state decides, with a printing press and a ruler, exactly where the boundary in Rwanda will fall.

Racism is not an inexplicable moral failure that appeared in the fifteenth century for no reason. It is the oldest machinery in human culture, the line between the people you owe things to and the people you do not, re-engineered at industrial scale by men who had a precise commercial reason to need it. That is the argument of chapter 8, and it starts here.

Footnotes

1. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and their earlier Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago, 1985). For a compact statement, Peter Richerson et al., "Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39 (2016), e30, with the substantial peer commentary that accompanies it. ↩
2. Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). ↩
3. Harvey Whitehouse et al., "Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history," Nature 568 (2019), pp. 226–229; the critique in Bret Beheim et al., "Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods," Nature 595 (2021), E29–E34, and the authors' reply. See also Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods (Princeton, 2013), for the position under test. ↩
4. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. chs. 3–4. ↩
5. Richard B. Lee, "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari," Natural History 78 (December 1969), pp. 14–22; and Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge, 1979). ↩
6. Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society," in Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), pp. 1–39. ↩
7. David Kaplan, "The Darker Side of the 'Original Affluent Society'," Journal of Anthropological Research 56:3 (2000), pp. 301–324, is the standard critique. ↩
8. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford, 1996); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011), ch. 2. ↩
9. R. Brian Ferguson, "Pinker's List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality," in Douglas P. Fry (ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature (Oxford, 2013), pp. 112–131; Douglas P. Fry and Patrik Söderberg, "Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War," Science 341 (2013), pp. 270–273. ↩
10. Isabelle Crevecoeur et al., "New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene based on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba," Scientific Reports 11 (2021), 9991. ↩
11. M. Mirazón Lahr et al., "Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya," Nature 529 (2016), pp. 394–398; and the critical exchange with Christopher M. Stojanowski et al., Nature 539 (2016), E8–E10. ↩
12. Christian Meyer et al., "The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe," PNAS 112:36 (2015), pp. 11217–11222. ↩
13. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). ↩
14. For a representative specialist critique see the review symposium in Cliodynamics 13 (2022), and Chris Knight's extended critique, "Wrong About (Almost) Everything," Focaal Blog (2021). The disagreements are mostly about specific site interpretations and about how much political intention to read into the record. ↩
15. Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018), collects the case material on taboo-enforced resource management. ↩