The conventional narrative of early human cooperation is that, for most of human history, people lived in small, isolated bands. Social bonds were based on kinship, and the ability of people to personally keep track of relationships limited the size of functional social groups. Dunbar’s number, which is that this limit is about 150 people, is a frequently cited estimate. Only in the Neolithic—recently when considering the full scope of human history—did the demands of a sedentary lifestyle induce societies to develop mechanisms to enable cooperation at a larger scale. Such mechanisms include governance hierarchy, trade, currency, legal codes, and writing, and this process continues to the present day.
An implication of this narrative is that large groups are, in some sense, unnatural to the human condition. It would be more natural, and thus more conducive to human wellbeing, to structure society in a way that maximizes human relations with small, kin-like groups and minimizes interaction on inter-group scales.
This narrative is, at best, a gross oversimplification of how Paleolithic societies functioned. However, our knowledge of the nature of Paleolithic societies is very patchy. There is very little surviving architecture, partly because we are looking tens of thousands of years in the past and partly because Paleolithic societies were much more mobile than later societies. There was no written language, and only nonperishable goods have survived for archeologists. Putting together a coherent picture of the nature of Paleolithic societies from such fragmentary evidence is a great challenge, and much of the content of this post deals with open questions and the broadest of broad brush portrayals.
We draw heavily from Boyd and Richerson (2022), who argue that large-scale cooperation in foraging societies was much more widespread than is generally supposed.
Cooperation in Hunting
One of several lines of evidence from Boyd and Richerson (2022) is from communal hunting. Without firearms or hunting dogs, hunting large animals was a group activity, as individuals or small groups would have been unable to hunt safely (Morin et al. 2024). As evidence for communal hunting dates back at least to 780 thousand years ago, Morin et al. (2024) argue that communal hunting is not only evidence of large-scale human cooperation, but in fact an evolutionary driver of cooperation.
One strategy for communal hunting was a buffalo jump, as explained by the U.S. National Park Service. A buffalo jump is a hunting tactic that lures a herd of buffalo to a cliff. While a single buffalo is smart enough not to jump over the cliff, it won’t be able to stop when it is followed by a stampede. More hunters would wait at the base of the cliff, killing the buffalo that fall off. A single hunt might yield 50 bison, for up to 20,000 pounds of meat.
Jensen (2007) (figures in Boyd and Richerson (2022)) cites ethnographic surveys of five communal hunts and finds that the number of participants in them were 12-24, 96, 40-50, 47-50, and 90-120. It is reasonable to suppose that no more than a third of the population of a band would consist of able-bodied adults that are able to participate in a communal hunt, and so the larger of these figures imply that the band(s) that contribute to hunts consist of at least 300 people, exceeding the limits for the size of a single functional band. Zedeño (2017) confirms that multiple bands participated in large communal hunts among the Blackfoot in North America.
Ethnographic surveys are one tool we have at understanding Paleolithic societies. Since hunter-gatherer societies persisted into the colonial era and even, to a limited extent, to the present day, it is possible for anthropologists to observe them directly, with interviews and/or direct observation. What we observe about current or recent hunter-gatherers can then tell us about prehistoric life. But this approach has many weaknesses. Testart et al. (1988) observe that we simply cannot assume that modern hunter-gatherers are “living fossils” of the Paleolithic past. They too have changed over the past 10,000 years, driven in large part by contact with sedentary societies, climactic changes, and other forces. Researchers often mislabel behavior, such as activities that constitute labor in analyzing working hours, and give a misleading impression of the nature of these societies. In an analysis of gendered division of labor, Venkataraman et al. (2024) show that small and biased samples are often a major problem in generalizing the findings of ethnographic surveys. However, given how little evidence we usually have, we have to accept these shortcomings.
Another line of evidence is archeological excavation. Finding a large number of bones at a site is strong evidence of communal hunting. White, Pettitt, and Schreve (2016) examine several hunting sites in Neanderthal-era Europe. Of them, they conclude that the Mauran site shows strong evidence of communal hunting, showing that the practice was not limited to Homo sapiens. They note that the bone site at Salzgitter Lebenstedt–though they don’t say explicitly that it is the product of communal hunting–dates to 58 to 54 thousand years ago. Going back further in time, Rodríguez-Gómez et al. (2025) find evidence of communal hunting at the Gran Dolina site (north Spain) dating to 424 to 324 thousand years ago. Jenkins et al. (2017) find evidence of communal hunting at several sites in modern-day Kenya. Boyd and Richerson (2022) provide many other examples of communal hunting, mostly recent hunts from ethnographic studies.
Finally, according to Kehoe (1990) as relayed by Boyd and Richerson (2022), the Lascaux cave paintings in France show evidence of communal hunting. Those paintings are estimated to be around 17 to 22 thousand years old.
Moving on to fishing, McNiven et al. (2012) find that the fish traps around Lake Condah, in modern Victoria, Australia, date to around 6600 years ago. Such a structure would have required a large amount of work, spanning many bands, to complete. Lourandos (1980) describes eel traps in Australia that would have required large-scale water control engineering. Up to 800-1000 people would have participated in the eel harvest.
Overall, the research surveyed here provides evidence, though not necessarily decisive evidence, that communal hunting was a regular occurrence in Paleolithic societies. The evidence does have some problems. We cannot confidently extrapolate from recent hunter-gatherers to typical Paleolithic societies. We cannot be certain that prehistoric bone piles are the result of communal hunting. We cannot be certain in Kehoe’s (1990) interpretation of the Lascaux cave paintings. Perhaps more significantly, none of this gives us a good sense of how widespread communal hunting was. Even if we accept that it occurred, it is not clear that it was common enough to shape evolutionary pressure or to be a central part of the lives of Paleolithic people. Let us now consider some other lines of evidence related to large-scale cooperation.
Warfare
In an obvious sense, warfare is the opposite of cooperation. In another sense, conducting a major war, defensive or offensive, requires cooperation that may span many hunter-gatherer bands. The extent of hunter-gatherer warfare, and how it compares to warfare in Neolithic societies and in the modern world, remains a contentious issue.
Studying skeletal remains for signs of trauma, Orschiedt (2020) finds that rates of violence in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic eras were much higher than in modern times. That conclusion is with the caveat that it is difficult to distinguish violent deaths from traumatic accidents. He finds that the rate of violence generally did not change through the Paleolithic, and the apparent increase in violence in the Mesolithic (~15,000 to 5000 years ago in Europe) is due more to increased burials and preservation of skeletons than to an actual increase in violence. Gat (2015) finds that raids were prevalent in the Paleolithic. But what about mass warfare that would have required inter-group cooperation?
Boyd and Richerson (2022) observe that modern hunter-gatherers do not exhibit much large-scale warfare. However, in addition to the usual hazards of extrapolating data about modern hunter-gatherers to Paleolithic humans, they note that modern nation-states will generally not tolerate warfare among indigenous groups within their borders. Several other lines of evidence suggest that wars requiring inter-group cooperation did occur, though. For example, in North America around 1726, they note a battle between Shoshone and Blackfoot that involved 350 Blackfoot warriors.
Piezonka et al. (2023) discuss the Amnya defensive fortifications in Siberia from around 8000 years ago. Defensive fortifications would have required large-scale cooperation to build, and they also indicate a significant danger of attack.
One of the earliest known specific sites of mass violence occurred at Jebel Sahaba, in the north of modern-day Sudan, around 13,400 years ago. Traditionally, this has been seen as the site of a single massacre, but Antoine, Zazzo, and Friedman (2013) have since argued that many acts of violence occurred over time at this site.
Dolan (2003) finds that warfare is present in 27% of hunting and gathering societies, compared to 59% of horticultural societies and 83% of advanced horticultural societies.
Overall, while the evidence for widespread Paleolithic violence is strong, the evidence for large-scale conflicts that rise to the level of warfare is thin. It is hard to conclude that warfare shows the commonality of cooperation in Paleolithic societies.
Cultural Diffusion
The Gravettian culture was a major, apparently unified culture that dominated Europe from about 33 to 22 thousand years ago, a duration four times as long as the time that separates the rise of the Roman kingdom and present day. A common stylistic element of the Gravettian was the Venus statues, including the well-known Venus of Willendorf.
Cultural homogeneity across such a large region would suggest the kind of large-scale cooperation necessary for the diffusion of ideas. That is the conclusion of Gamble (1982). However, the mechanism of homogenization is unclear. Kozłowski (2015) offers three hypotheses:
- Monocentric origin: the Gravettian began from Danubian (central European) centers and spread outward.
- Polycentric origin: there were several centers of Gravettian culture that adopted similar cultural practices.
- Convergent evolution: environmental conditions of the time lead to many independent cultures adopting similar practices.
Although data can be mustered in support of each of these hypothesis, Kozłowski (2015) finds that none of the explanations are adequate in themselves, and the truth is likely a combination of them.
Patterns of trade can be reconstructed from the appearance of artifacts in the archeological record. If a seashell is found hundreds of miles inland, for instance, then that is clear evidence of long-distance trade. Davis (1974) reconstructs trading networks spanning the tribes that lived in pre-contact California and finds a unified network that spans the full extent of the modern state.
While there is clear evidence of cultural and economic exchange on scales that vastly exceeded an individual band in the Paleolithic era, it is not so clear that this translates to large-scale cooperation being central to everyday life.
Niche Construction
“Niche construction” is a general term in ecology for a situation in which an organism modifies its environment for its own needs. A beaver dam is an example of niche construction by a nonhuman animal. Smith (2011) offers several classes of examples of niche construction by small-scale human societies:
(i) general modification of vegetation communities, (ii) broadcast sowing of wild annuals, (iii) transplantation of perennial fruit-bearing species, (iv) in-place encouragement of economically important perennials, (v) transplantation and in-place encouragement of perennial root crops, and (vi) landscape modification to increase prey abundance in specific locations.
These may be large projects that might indicate large scale cooperation, but there is no proof of that.
Wilman (2013) conducts an economic analysis of Australian fire-stick farming. This is a practice that, much like controlled burning in contemporary times, entails setting low-intensity fires as a resource management tool. Fire-stick farming required principles of land ownership and long-term planning, highly suggestive of large scale cooperation, though again, not proof.
Conclusion
We have considered several purported examples of large-scale cooperation before the Neolithic Revolution. Such cooperation might overturn the popular view that the hunter-gatherer era, which comprises the vast majority of human history, is one in which large-scale cooperation was rare or nonexistent.
While it is good to challenge the oversimplified view that large-scale cooperation was essentially non-existent in the Paleolithic, Boyd and Richerson (2022) overstate their case and provide many examples of cooperation that do not in fact unambiguously demonstrate Paleolithic inter-group cooperation. More to the point, though, since surely there were examples of inter-group cooperation between 70 and 12 thousand years ago, the more relevant question is how widespread such cooperation was. In particular, was it enough to shape humanity’s evolutionary trajectory, was interaction with people outside the band a normal feature of the typical person’s life, and is large-scale cooperation “natural” or something that is imposed on people through artifices of the Neolithic age and beyond and whatever the Paleolithic equivalents would have been? Unfortunately, Boyd and Richerson (2022) does not allow us to answer these questions.
A related paper is Singh and Glowacki (2022), which also argues that the “nomadic-egalitarian” lifeway was not universal among Paleolithic peoples. They argue that large, semi-sedentary, and stratified forager societies may have existed even by 130 thousand years ago, which is before some estimates of behavioral modernity. Such a claim would be an even more drastic revision of our understanding of the distant human past than Boyd and Richerson (2022).
References
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