Abstract
We present evidence that people in small-scale mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts and constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, formed enduring alliances, and established trading networks. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small-group interactions. Instead, large-scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 175-198 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Evolutionary anthropology |
Volume | 31 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 1 2022 |
Keywords
- collective action
- communal foraging
- cooperation
- foragers
- hunter-gatherers
- mismatch hypothesis
- public goods
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Anthropology