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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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When we were simple hunter gatherers, these people weeded themselves out as they are doing now. Hunter gatherers also had "socialist" lifestyles. Working together, looking after each other, the injured, the weak and the old. Quite remarkable
That view may be outdated. I'm reading David Graeber's and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" where they review anthropological and archaeological evidence and argue that human societies were always very varied.
E.g. they show that this idea you cited came from contact with just three hunter-gatherer societies who already have had contact with western societies and at least one of them was started by a group of runaway slaves. Their egalitarianism was probably a reaction to western authoritarianism.
On the other hand they look at two indigenous societies on the north american west coast. Thos in today's california were very individualist, valued personal wealth (when achieved through hard work and frugality) but hated slavery and had no rulers. Those more to the north were notorious slavers, had an aristocracy and a member of that aristocracy was considered superior if he organized the most wasteful parties.
A point they made at that point was that not only are hunter-gatherer societies not all the same, they might actually have developed important parts of their culture, including egalitarianism vs. authoritarianism in an attempt to be as different as possible from their neighbors they don't like.
In the following chapter they then go on that the first cities in the middle east show no signs of hierarchy, including a patriarchy, and that patriarchy and a warrior aristocracy developed in that region as an answer to these egalitarian, rich cities widening their influence (trade networks, but also colonies). :(
I think there is a mixed picture. Certainly sufficient evidence to show individuals with significant injuries living to older age. Across all the primates and apes. However, not sufficiently specialist to debate the point with fine detail.
Also we struggle to create a ground level understanding of how these cultures behaved. We have lots of snapshots that we can composit into something cohesive but finer details tend to be lost.
A weird example of this is a site in Germany with direct evidence of cannibalism to such a large degree that it's bizarre and doesn't match up quite well with models of the cultures in the region at that time. That is until some folks remembered that these are in fact still just people so there's a growing idea that this site may very well represent a cult that emerged from a time of struggle possibly famine.