Small Worlds, Material Culture and Ancient Near Eastern Social Networks

The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups, relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This chapter examines how such individual face-to-face social interactions were ‘scaled up’ during human evolution to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern societies. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in human sociality occurred with the shift to sedentary and agricultural societies in the early Neolithic. The discussion presents the results of a focused study of the long-term development of regional social networks in the Near East, using the distribution of different forms of material culture as a proxy for the social relationships that underpinned processes of trade, exchange and the dissemination of material culture practices.

From Experiential-based to Relational-based Forms of Social Organization: A Major Transition in the Evolution of Homo sapiens

The evolutionary trajectory from non-human to human forms of social organization involves change from experiential- to relational-based systems of social interaction. Social organization derived from biologically and experientially grounded social interaction reached a hiatus with the great apes due to an expansion of individualization of behaviour. The hiatus ended with the introduction of relational-based social interaction, culminating in social organization based on cultural kinship. This evolutionary trajectory links biological origins to cultural outcomes and makes evident the centrality of distributed forms of information for both the boundary and internal structure of human societies as these evolved from prior forms of social organization.

Constraints on Social Networks

In both modern humans and non-human primates, time and cognitive constraints place an upper bound on the number of social relationships an individual can maintain at a given level of intensity. Similar constraints are likely to have operated throughout hominin evolution, shaping the size and structure of social networks. One of the key trends in human evolution, alongside an increase in brain size, is likely to have been an increase in group size, resulting in a larger number of social relationships that would have to be maintained over time. The network approach demonstrates that relationships should not be viewed as dyadic ties between two individuals, but as embedded within a larger network of ties between network members. Together with relationships based on kinship, this may have allowed for larger groups to be maintained among hominins than would be possible if such networks were based purely on dyadic ties between individuals.

Social Networks and Social Complexity in Female-bonded Primates

Most primates are intensely social and spend a large amount of time servicing social relationships. The social brain hypothesis suggests that the evolution of the primate brain has been driven by the necessity of dealing with increased social complexity. This chapter uses social network analysis to analyse the relationship between primate group size, neocortex ratio and several social network metrics. Findings suggest that social complexity may derive from managing indirect social relationships, i.e. relationships in which a female is not directly involved, which may pose high cognitive demands on primates. The discussion notes that a large neocortex allows individuals to form intense social bonds with some group members while at the same time enabling them to manage and monitor less intense indirect relationships without frequent direct involvement with each individual of the social group.

When Individuals Do Not Stop at the Skin

This chapter examines contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and elsewhere in light of the social brain and the distributed mind hypotheses. One question asked is whether African hunter-gatherers offer the best model for societies at the dawn of symbolic culture, or whether societies elsewhere offer better models. The chapter argues for the former. Theoretical concepts touched on include sharing and exchange, universal kin classification, and the relation between group size and social networks. The chapter offers reinterpretations of classic anthropological notions such as Wissler's age-area hypothesis, Durkheim's collective consciousness and Lévi-Strauss's elementary structures of kinship. Finally, the chapter outlines a theory of the co-evolution of language and kinship through three phases (signifying, syntactic and symbolic) and the subsequent breakdown of the principles of the symbolic phase across much of the globe in Neolithic times.

Fragmenting Hominins and the Presencing of Early Palaeolithic Social Worlds

This chapter introduces the fragmentation premise — the idea that the deliberate breakage of a complete object and the re-use of the resultant fragments as new and separate objects ‘after the break’ was a common practice in the past. It also summarizes the main implications of the fragmentation premise for the study of enchained social relations and of the creation and development of personhood in the past. Enchained relations connect the distributed elements of a person's social identity using material culture. These concepts of fragmentation, enchainment and fractality are used to think through some of the earliest remains of objects in the world. Following the philosopher David Bohm, the discussion supports the co-evolution of fragmentation in both consciousness and in objects, and compares Bohm's three-stage ideas to Mithen's model of cognitive evolution and Donald's model of external symbolic storage.

The Archaeology of Group Size

This chapter aims to summarize the results of recent research producing estimates of hominin range areas, population sizes, and land use patterns based on archaeological data. Estimates of such variables are essential to any geographic or demographic discussion of human evolution, yet at present no generally applicable quantitative method is available to link them to the often abundant data of the archaeological record. Such data offer a unique window onto the patterns of adaptation characterizing prehistoric human populations, and developing a generic method to describe trajectories of change will allow researchers to compare range areas, population sizes and land use patterns between different regions and periods from throughout the vast spatio-temporal range of human evolution. The discussion gives particular emphasis to estimating a trajectory of group size through time from shortly after 2 million years ago until approximately 14,000 years ago.

What is Cognition? Extended Cognition and the Criterion of the Cognitive

According to the thesis of the extended mind, at least some cognitive processes extend into the cognizing subject's environment in the sense that they are composed of processes of manipulation, exploitation, and transformation performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. In contrast, according to the thesis of the embedded mind, the manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of information-bearing structures provides a useful scaffolding which facilitates cognitive processes but does not, even in part, constitute them. The two theses are distinct but often confused. The extended mind has attracted three ostensibly distinct kinds of objection, all of which on further analysis reduce to the idea that the arguments for the extended mind in fact only establish the thesis of the embedded mind. This chapter argues that these three objections can all be resolved by the provision of an adequate and properly motivated criterion of the cognitive.

Some Functions of Collective Forgetting

Coerced forgetting — forgetting as repressive erasure — has been a hallmark of many of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. However, the act of forgetting is not always negative. This chapter discusses three kinds of forgetting: prescriptive forgetting, or forgetting as an act of common good; forgetting as constitutive of the formation of a new identity; and forgetting as annulment, a response to a surfeit of information. Far from representing failures, all of these processes may play significant roles in the establishment and enhancement of social bonds.

Social Networks and Community in the Viking Age

During the Viking Age, the use of private violence was a precondition for social power. Iceland, for instance, was a law-making community but had no executive power to put the laws into effect. Politics throughout the whole of Scandinavia was based on strong personal relations. This was not a society of uncontrolled violence, but, alongside the development of church and kingdom, the attitude towards a legal type of violence changed. The Icelandic sagas are preoccupied with networks; the alliance patterns described can shed light on the relations between both biological and social kin. This chapter describes competing loyalties through marriage, fostering, friendship, and pledges of support. Kin and marriage systems are the main organization form for people. The discussion also considers alliances and the need for strong bonds with both family and friends at a time when the political and social order was changing.