Excerpt

Archaeologists attempting to understand our non-literate ancestors often disagree on the appropriate sets of constraints to impute on ancient societies. Why, for example, don’t we see farming, cities, writing, and other complex technologies earlier than we do? (Or later, for that matter?) Of course for pre–Homo sapiens sapiens, where cognitive constraints must also be considered, the task is more daunting still, but even when we are considering just the last 50,000 years, where it’s safe to endow our predecessors with modern cognitive and linguistic abilities, what really sets the limits on what people could accomplish and how they organized themselves? For example, is it mainly ecological constraints such as climate and how people harvest energy and materials from their environment that set limits on population size (with downstream effects on everything else), or is it a specific failure to accumulate and effectively transmit knowledge, skills, and technology that regulates the rate by which human societies increased in size and complexity?

Of course a reasonable position is that there is a co-evolution among how we make our livings, the technologies available, the knowledge and skills applied by members of a society, and how we organize ourselves. Specialized technologies that are highly effective for specific tasks require accumulated skills and depend on divisions of labor, all of which require larger group sizes and low-friction ways of passing the fruits of one’s labor to other group members in exchange for their outputs from applying different specialized technologies. This morass of dependencies is not easy to analyze over the long term, where each variable is both subject to evolutionary change but also constrained by its socio-ecological matrix.

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