Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

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Human Origins

If you look at the long term, I think you can make a good case that we are humans, because we use our abilities to communicate symbolically, to organize collective action. Our primate ancestors were pretty helpless. They came out of the trees, where they were protected, onto the savannah, where they were surrounded by predators. They were pretty small things, about 30 kilograms, about a meter tall, and no fangs, no claws, they couldn’t fly, they couldn’t run very fast, but they were able to organize collective defense and collective food gathering.

In fact, one of the interesting, I think probably a side-bar to this, one of the interesting findings recently was that one of the advantages that homo sapiens may have had over the Neanderthals was that the homo sapiens had some gender specialization. The men went out and hunted, the women took care of the children and gathered, and that gave the species a broader selection of food. The Neanderthals all hunted together, so when the hunt failed they went hungry. Certainly, for the 100-150,000 years that we have existed as a species shows the vast majority of that time extended family groups wandered as hunters and gatherers.

That is pretty much how humans have populated the planet. Although we don’t have a lot of physical evidence of how that came about, we know that more recently in that history those extended family groups started to band together into larger groups and to hunt larger game.

We don’t know exactly what kind of arrangements they made, but I think we can make a couple of assumptions. One, they must have solved some kind of collective action problems. It’s not easy, and in fact probably downright dangerous, to be hunting something this big while you’re squabbling with the other hunters. I also think that a new form of wealth must have forced new kinds of social arrangements, which must have been mediated by some communication form.

Humans need proteins, which is a problem for hunters and gatherers. You can only pick up so many rabbits and squirrels if you are in a small group, and since we can’t store protein it is a constant hunt for protein. If you bring down a mastodon, you have more protein than the hunter and a hunter’s family can eat before it rots. So the question arises, “Is this a public good?” If everyone had access to it, did the people who ate but didn’t hunt pose something to the hunter and the hunter’s family.