Emerging evidence from the study of human societies past and present reveals a “staggering kaleidoscope of social experimentation”, says at University College London. It is tempting to fit societies into neat categories such as hunter-gatherer versus complex, egalitarian versus hierarchical and democratic versus authoritarian. It turns out to be not that simple. What’s more, a society can change drastically if its members choose.
One such transition took place on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, in the south-east Pacific. The first settlers established sub-chiefs, each with power over one region of the island and all subordinate to an overall chief. “The chief would have been hereditary,” says at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “It’s an ascribed position like a monarchy, where you are born into gaining that title.” However, this centralised system proved unstable, so . In its place they . Every year, warriors competed by swimming through shark-infested waters to a small islet where they collected a bird’s egg and swam back. “The first one that arrives with their egg unbroken becomes chief for the year,” says Kahn. “It’s an achieved position… that warrior could even be somebody from a low rank.”
Admittedly, shifts in governance usually happen gradually. What is remarkable, though, is how much these power structures vary from one group to another – even when, superficially, they look similar. Take the US and Mongolia, both of which are headed by an elected president. “The US has a very specialised hierarchy, but you go to Mongolia and it’s much more level,” says at Utah State University. “Yes, there’s a president, but they have this steppe ethos that comes from Chinggis [Genghis] Khan of ‘everyone can have a say’. ” Egalitarianism is generally seen as a , with hierarchies emerging as societies become more complex. This shows that idea to be simplistic: some forms of hierarchy are more egalitarian than others.
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Evidence from past societies upends another assumption about hierarchies – that men are always in charge. The majority of complex societies are indeed patriarchal, but patriarchy isn’t inevitable. “Actually, some of the earliest societies to adopt farming seem to have accorded a high or at least equal status to women,” says Wengrow. He points to Çatalhöyük in Turkey, the remains of one of the oldest examples of densely populated “urban” living supported by agriculture. “There is nothing to suggest a patriarchal system. [Research] suggests and enjoyed . And much of the art and symbolism at Çatalhöyük and other Neolithic sites , by no means subordinate to men.”
Beyond patriarchy
Even powerful empires weren’t all patriarchies. Between about 200 BC and AD 100, the east Eurasian steppe was controlled by a nomadic empire called the Xiongnu. There is archaeological evidence of Xiongnu women riding horses and doing archery. Furthermore, a study published in April described and found that the highest-status graves contained women. One woman was buried in a decorated wooden plank coffin with six horses, Chinese bronze chariot pieces and a bronze pot. The implication is that women held elite political and military roles in the Xiongnu society.
We also need to rethink another defining characteristic of complex societies – urbanisation. We tend to think it means thousands or even millions of people living in a small area, sometimes literally on top of each other in skyscrapers. However, even in today’s world, the process of urbanisation is far from homogeneous. A 2020 study examining how large cities changed between 2001 and 2018 found : some cities expanded their populations far faster than their built-up areas, while rates of urban greening also varied enormously. Furthermore, archaeological evidence reveals that cities can take radically different forms.
Read more: Where was the first city in the world?
One dramatic example is the that existed in the Amazon rainforest before the arrival of Europeans. Each of these cities may have had a population of millions, but they . Instead, a city comprised many villages, each surrounded by a mix of crop fields and managed rainforest where residents tended dozens of types of domesticated plants and animals. Crucially, the by a vast network of roads made of compressed earth, spanning hundreds of kilometres. These were cities without a centre.
What all this shows is human ingenuity. The societies we create vary depending on the ecological, social and political environment. For hundreds of thousands of years, all humans were hunter-gatherers, now most live in complex societies. Just as we are revising our ideas of how this transition happened (see main story), we also need to rethink this simple dichotomy. The forms that a human society can take are far more exuberant than most people realise. And there is no reason to stop innovating now. “When we begin to see all the possible pathways that weren’t taken,” says Wengrow, “it allows us to think more freely and creatively about alternatives in the present.”
