I recently got into a chatroom debate with some very smart people about whether homosexual behavior was typical for humans [ not bonobos ] in the ancestral environment / Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness [EEA] [ i.e., ancestral hunter-gatherer society ] -- and, connectedly, how big was the social circle that the median ancestral human probably had occasional contact with [ not “Dunbar’s number”, but “how big is your meta-tribe ].
I felt like I knew what I was talking about . . . but not nearly as much as I would like to. For example, someone linked this study, which claims the egalitarian hunter-gatherer model is missing important pieces and stratified societies existed prior to agriculture. I doubt this, but I feel like the basis on which I doubt it is shakier than it needs to be.
Whereas the chimpanzee community is only partially a closed reproductive unit (Wrangham 2000), the larger size of hunter-gatherer communities (typically 250-500 in contrast to 40-150 among chimpanzees) renders it a more adaptive breeding isolate (cf. Wobst 1974) and intracommunity marriages play a crucial role in cementing relationships between bands.
This seems plausible, and would affect my framework for thinking about psychology greatly, but I’d never read about it before [specifically the “dating-pool communities tended to be 250-500 members big” part]! Who are the brilliant theorist-writers that I need to be looking to, to get caught up on the details of how human ancestral society worked?
[Question] What should I read to understand ancestral human society?
I recently got into a chatroom debate with some very smart people about whether homosexual behavior was typical for humans [ not bonobos ] in the ancestral environment / Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness [EEA] [ i.e., ancestral hunter-gatherer society ] -- and, connectedly, how big was the social circle that the median ancestral human probably had occasional contact with [ not “Dunbar’s number”, but “how big is your meta-tribe ].
I felt like I knew what I was talking about . . . but not nearly as much as I would like to. For example, someone linked this study, which claims the egalitarian hunter-gatherer model is missing important pieces and stratified societies existed prior to agriculture. I doubt this, but I feel like the basis on which I doubt it is shakier than it needs to be.
Then I found this article, which says:
This seems plausible, and would affect my framework for thinking about psychology greatly, but I’d never read about it before [specifically the “dating-pool communities tended to be 250-500 members big” part]! Who are the brilliant theorist-writers that I need to be looking to, to get caught up on the details of how human ancestral society worked?
Texts I’ve found useful for getting a picture of ancestral human society [ they all involve studies of living peoples and I suspect this is a load-bearing component ]: The Dobe Ju/’Hoansi by Richard B. Lee, Growing Up Yanomamö by Michael Dawson, and Primate Sexuality, ed. Alan Dixson.