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The Sustainability and Development of
Ancient Economies
Drawing on modern economic theory, this book provides new insights into
the economic development of ancient economies and the sustainability of
their development. The book pays particular attention to the economics of
hunting and gathering societies and their diversity. New ideas are presented
about theories of the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture,
including Childe’s theory of this development. The Agricultural Revolution
was a major contributor to economic development because in most cases,
it generated an economic surplus. However, as shown, income inequality
was a necessary condition for the use of this surplus to promote economic
development and to avoid the Malthusian population trap. This inequality was
evident in the successful operation of the palatial economies of the Minoan and
Mycenaean states. Nevertheless, some post-agricultural economies proved to
be unsustainable, and they “mysteriously” disappeared. This happened in the
case of the Silesian Únětice culture and population. Economic and ecological
reasons for this are suggested. The nature of economic development
altered with increased trade, the use of barter, and subsequently the supply
of money to facilitate this trade. These developments are examined in the
context of the palatial economies of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Elsewhere,
multinational business made a substantial contribution to the economic
growth of Phoenicia, where international trade was not determined by its
natural resource endowments. Thus, Phoenician economic exchange and
development provides a different set of insights. The book makes an important
contribution to the understanding of the evolution of human societies and will
therefore be of interdisciplinary interest including economists (especially
economic historians), anthropologists and sociologists, some archaeologists,
and historians.
Clement A. Tisdell is Professor Emeritus of the School of Economics at the

University of Queensland, Australia.
Serge Svizzero is Professor in the Faculté de Droit et d’Economie at the

Université de La Réunion, France.
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The Sustainability and Development of Ancient Economies
Analysis and Examples
Clement A. Tisdell and Serge Svizzero
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Explorations-in-Economic-History/book-series/SE0347
The Sustainability and
Development of Ancient
Economies
Analysis and Examples
Clement A. Tisdell and Serge Svizzero

First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Clement Tisdell and Serge Svizzero
The right of Clement Tisdell and Serge Svizzero to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-27799-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-27800-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-29414-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294146
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
1 An Overview of Our Perspectives on the Economic

Development and Sustainability of Ancient Societies 1
PART I
Economics of Hunting and Gathering Societies 19
2 Early Economic Development: The Diversity of Societies

and Their Economic Evolution 21
3 Traditional Economies of Australian Aborigines – Their

Sustainability, Desirability, and Sahlins’ Hypothesis 41
4 The Sustainability and Economic Development Options of

Foragers: New Economic Analysis 57
5 The Lengthy Endurance of Hunting and Gathering Economies 70
PART II
The Agricultural Revolution: The Transition to and the
Establishment of Agriculture 91
6 A Reconsideration of Theories about the Commencement of

Agriculture and New Suggestions 93
7 How Well Do Models of Rational (Economic) Optimizing

Behaviour Explain the Transition to Agriculture? 112
8 Contemporary Thought and Childe’s Theory of Economic

Development and the Agricultural Revolution 130

vi Contents
PART III
Evolution of Early Economies after the Commencement of
Agriculture 147
9 Analysis of Why Some Agrarian Societies Avoided the

Malthusian Trap and Developed 149
10 Economic and Ecological Reasons Why the Silesian Únětice

Population Disappeared 173
11 The Palatial Economic Development of Minoan and

Mycenaean States 192
12 Barter and the Origins of Money: Insights from the Ancient

Palatial Economies of Mesopotamia and Egypt 208
13 Phoenicia: Its Economic Development before Its Use

of Coinage 226
Index 243
1 An Overview of Our Perspectives
on the Economic Development and
Sustainability of Ancient Societies
1.1 Introduction
This book considers some economies and societies that existed from the
Mesolithic period (approx. 12,000 BC) to the first millennium BC. Most cases
that are studied belong to southwest Asia, Europe, and Australia, but examples
from other regions and continents (North America, Africa, Asia) are also pro-
vided. The book is structured from a chronological point of view. It is centred
on the Neolithic revolution, i.e. the advent of agriculture, that started around
10,000 BC and so it analyzes what happened before, during, and after this
revolution. For this purpose, the book is organized according to three parts.
The first part is about hunting and gathering economies, i.e. economies in
which the diet was exclusively based on resources foraged from the wild by
means of hunting, gathering, fishing, and collecting. Obviously, before the
Neolithic revolution, all the people were hunter-gatherers (hereafter HG) and
so only predation economies existed. However, with the advent of agriculture,
hunter-gatherers did not completely disappear, even if their number shrank.
So, some attention is given in order to study the persistence of these hunting
and gathering economies.
The second part of the book is about the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition, or
the neolithization process, i.e. to the switch from an economy where food was
predated from the wild to an economy where it was produced. Several reasons
have been provided in the academic literature to explain this transition; some
are global (e.g. the role of climate change) while others rely on individual
behaviours (e.g. what happens when people behave as optimisers). Beyond
these reasons is the domestication process of plant and animals that finally led
to the advent of agriculture. This process included, chronologically, cultiva-
tion (e.g. planting morphologically wild plants) and then farming (i.e. plant-
ing genetically domesticated plants), and spanned from 1,000 to 4,000 years
according to the species and the regions considered. So, agriculture is defined
as the situation in which farming is the majority of the diet and, implicitly,
when most plants and farm animals are already domesticated.
In the third part of the book, some of the main consequences associated
with the commencement of agriculture are studied. Indeed, some of these
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294146-1
2 An Overview of Our Perspectives on the Economic Development
early agrarian economies were more developed than others, some were sus-
tainable, while others collapsed after few centuries. The role of social hier-
archy and surplus extraction by a dominant class is especially considered.
Another feature of these economies is the development, besides agriculture,
of an industrial sector (including e.g. metalworking), as a consequence of
the division of labour allowed by the increased productivity of agriculture.
These now multisectoral economies were, most of the time, palatial econo-
mies, i.e. most economic activities were managed, planned, and monitored by
a dominant class and its administration. Under such situations, the attention
is focused on some new consequences such as the development of trade with
abroad as well as the various means (i.e. barter, credit, money) that were used
in order to perform these market exchanges.
1.2 Economics of Hunting and Gathering Societies

The first part of the book is almost completely dedicated to hunter-gatherers.
This seems logical since, from a chronological point of view, the first men on
earth were HG. Even though we restrict our analysis to modern man, i.e. to
Homo sapiens who appeared at least 200,000 BC, and given that agriculture
emerged in the Near East around 10,000 BC, then it nevertheless means that
for more than 95% of his existence on earth, man was a hunter-gatherer.
Even after the commencement of agriculture, hunting and gathering did
not disappear even though the number of HG decreased. Around 1500 AD,
HG represented only 1% of the world population, but they occupied about one
third of the globe. By 2000, they only accounted for 0.001% of the global pop-
ulation (Zvelebil and Pluciennik, 2003). Most contemporary HG are living in
very marginal areas such as arid deserts, deep tropical forest, or the Arctic.
This is so because all the remaining areas have been colonised by humans
for other purposes, such as agriculture, industrial activities, mining, or cities.
However, pre-farming HG were present on all continents, living under almost
all bio-geographic conditions, as a consequence of the amazing adaptability
of human to his environment. Although studies of the prehistoric record place
great emphasis on the intellectual development of humans – brain size, tool
use, control of fire, spoken language – their prowess as HG was likely also due
to their physical superiority over other animals. As stressed by Smith (1993),
only man can swim a mile, walk 20, and then climb a tree. Because HG were
and are still present in very different places, living under various bio-geo-
graphic conditions, one may expect that HG societies and their associated
economies to be very diverse from one place to another. Since HG societies
were also present for millennia, one may also expect an important diversity
across time when HG groups of a given region are considered. This twofold
diversity, spatially and across time, leads us to wonder how to properly define
these populations, especially those who were living during the pre-Neolithic
period. The label “hunter-gatherer” has been used in the academic literature
for decades and even centuries. This shows that it has rapidly been decided
An Overview of Our Perspectives on the Economic Development 3
to use an economic criterion, namely the mode of subsistence, to define these
populations. Once the latter are defined as HG, it remains to place these HG
societies within the history of human evolution, from the beginning to nowa-
days. Of course, such choice implicitly depends on how is conceived such
evolution. It can be either unilinear, i.e. viewed as a succession of stages, or
multilinear, i.e. diverse.
The study of HG economies itself is rising several important queries
(Morgan et al., 2017). Some groups of HG had a pleasant life within a sustain-
able economy. In other words, even though they did not invent agriculture, or
they did not adopt it once it was invented elsewhere, this should not necessar-
ily be considered as a failure. Indeed, it also could be the consequence of their
cultural and economic sustainability. In fact, the HG had various options in
order to develop their economy. They could decide how much time dedicated
to labour and leisure. This choice had an influence on several aspects of their
life such as the available food resources, the surplus generated and its distri-
bution, the social structure. Finally, even though the number and percentage
of HG living on earth has shrunk, especially after the advent of the Neolithic
revolution, the HG have not completely disappeared. Nowadays some peo-
ple are still HG; in addition, many people who are not HG per se still adopt
part of their time the behaviour of HG, namely foraging (Svizzero, 2016).
Such observation naturally leads to another important query: Why have some
HG economies persisted while most of the others have vanished?
Pre-Neolithic societies, studied in Chapter 2, are usually defined as hunt-
ing and gathering societies, i.e. they are defined according to an economic
criterion, namely the mode of subsistence. This choice results from the fact
that for many scholars, it is the economy that determines the social structure.
However, this criterion presents several shortcomings; for instance, the border
between foraging and farming is blurred because many foraging activities can
be considered as proto-agriculture. Other criteria could be utilized, such as
the geographical mobility, i.e. whether people are nomad or have a sedentary
life. Another criterion could be about the nature of property rights; do they
exist, and if they do, are they public or private? These other possible criteria
are useful complements, but they also have their limits and so the mode of
subsistence remains the most convenient criterion.
Beyond these difficulties for defining HG societies, another problem is how
HG societies should be considered within the whole history of humankind’s
evolution? Many scholars, including Adam Smith, assumed until the mid-
twentieth century that the historical evolution of human societies was linear,
or the “ladder” form. According to this view, HG societies were the first ones,
and so the less developed, a view already presented by Hobbes (1651[2010])
when he claimed that before the appearance of modern government and states,
life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. In other words, HG were
considered as primitive savages associated with the first age or stage of human
evolution, namely the Age of Savagery. Such a stepladder approach presents
several shortcomings. For instance, the transition from one stage to the next
one is not and cannot be explained. Moreover, the diversity of socio-economic
structures in each stage is not accounted. To avoid these limits, the evolution
of human societies must be considered as a multilinear (or diverse) sequence
of stages of development. So, divergent lines of evolution were occasioned
by distinctive local environments and subsistence patterns. According to this
approach, called Cultural Ecology, the focus is now on the interaction of spe-
cific cultures with their environments. Therefore, the diversity of HG societies
is taken into account and is largely explained as a consequence of the diversity
of natural resources situations HG societies faced and relied on for their sur-
vival in different geographical locations. On this basis, it is therefore possible
to define different types of HG societies, such as the “affluent societies of
HG” (Sahlins, 1972). Another distinction is between simple versus complex
societies of HG, the latter having all the features of agrarian societies (social
hierarchy, sedentary life, food storage) except that food resources are not pro-
duced but predated from the wild.
This diversity of HG societies is, for a large part, due to the influence of
bio-geographic conditions. This influence decreased with the development of
agriculture because the latter fostered the development of institutions (e.g.,
property rights) which in turn influenced the social structure and the eco-
nomic development. Even though the environmental conditions have for sure
influenced the evolution of HG societies, one should not think that the latter
evolved according to the Darwinian theory of evolution. Indeed, the social
diversity of HG societies is not random but due to conscious adaptation of
HG to the changes of their environments, and also to their ability to transform
their environments in order to satisfy their needs. These are the conclusions
currently reached by the Extended Evolution Synthesis (Zeder, 2017).
Some authors (Gowdy and Krall, 2013) go even further by assuming that
the evolution of human societies depends only on social structures, i.e. con-
sider that these societies are “ultrasocial”. In such situations, the evolution
is no more under the control of any individual, as it is also under Darwinian
evolution, and so because individual behaviours are completely determined
by the social structures to which these individuals belong to.
The traditional economies of Australian Aborigines are studied in Chapter 3.
Aborigines have been present in Australia for around 65,000 years and their
societies were preserved from external influence until the British settlement in
1788. Compared to other societies present elsewhere in the world, one of the
most significant features of Australian Aborigines societies is that they relied
entirely on hunting and gathering for their existence; it is only after the contact
with Europeans that they reduced their reliance on foraging. However, even
today, foraging still provides an important supplement to the diet of some
Australian tribal groups. Even though they did not practice agriculture, they
managed some natural resources for their advantages, for instance by using
fire, a practice that can be considered as proto-agriculture.
One central query about their society is whether their economic develop-
ment was sustainable? In fact, they consumed only small amounts of material
goods and they regulated the level of their population according to the varia-
tions of the carrying capacity of the environment in which they were living.
So, their economic systems proved to be highly sustainable since they coped
with major environmental changes and also because there is little evidence
of conflict. Moreover, the well-being of the succeeding generations remained
approximately stationary because of the balance they achieved with the use
of their natural resources. The traditional Aborigines’ tribes exhibited a high
degree of social and environmental sustainability which helped to ensure their
economic sustainability and their long-term survival. This is because they had
a low level of motivation to acquire material goods which, moreover, were
not suited with their nomadic way of life. They were also reluctant to engage
in violence and warfare. To some extent, it is therefore possible to claim that
most, or at least many of them, were affluent (in Sahlins’ sense, 1972); this
is so because their wants were limited while their means were very abundant
compared to their needs.
The reasons why agriculture did not develop in Australia are multiple.
First, there was no species – animal or plant – that was suitable for rearing
and cultivation, and a fortiori for domestication. Second, with the rise of the
sea level at the beginning of the Holocene, the Australian continent became
remote, i.e. without any contact with the other centres around the world where
agriculture emerged. It was therefore impossible to exchange genetic mate-
rials (e.g. seeds) or any information pertaining to agriculture. Nevertheless,
Australian Aborigines were quite ingenious in adapting to their local environ-
ments, thereby increasing their chances of survival. The changes they induced
were slow and did not transform natural environments to such an extent as to
threaten their long-term existence. In that respect, they maintained a state of
approximate equilibrium with their natural environments during the lengthy
period of the existence of their culture.
In Chapter 4, production functions, a traditional element of the microeco-
nomic toolbox, are used to explain the diverse nature of HG economies and
their economic characteristics. Under some economic conditions, a dominant
group or an elite can emerge. In other words, this analysis explains why in
some HG societies, socio-economic inequalities appeared (for instance in
Indian tribes located in parts of the northwest coast of North America) but not
in others (for instance among Australian Aborigines tribes).
The relationships between leisure–income possibilities and population
levels are explored, especially when a Malthusian population equilibrium is
reached. This throws light on the scope for regulating population levels and
the amount of effort expended in utilizing natural resources in order to enjoy
higher levels of per capita income and leisure.
It is obvious that following the advent of agriculture, the number of HG
decreased as well as the intensity of foraging activities, though, neither HG nor
foraging have completely disappeared, i.e. they still exist, even nowadays. This
persistence of HG economies studied in Chapter 5 can be explained accord-
ing to several reasons (Morgan et al., 2017). First, under some circumstances
related to the local abundance of wild resources, foraging can be more produc-
tive than farming and so is an optimal alternative to the latter. In other words,
as long as the productivity of farming remains below that of foraging, then the
latter still exists and some people remain full-time foragers. Second, once agri-
culture started and spread to other territories where only foraging previously
existed, then some contact zones between foragers and farmers were created.
In these zones, some exchanges of merchandise, information, and people were
performed between these two groups; despite the influence these exchanges
could have had, some HG did not give up their traditional foraging activities.
So, a dual economy emerged, with two separated sectors, agriculture on one
side, foraging on the other. It is because the foraging sector was complemen-
tary to the agricultural sector that it persisted; indeed, it was the only one able
to provide some merchandise (e.g. shells, furs, nuts, salt) because the latter
were only present in the wild. Under some circumstances, HG adopted farm-
ing without abandoning foraging. When the latter provided the majority of the
diet, the associated economies have been labelled as “mixed economies” or
economies with “low-level food production” (Smith, 2001). Third, foraging
persisted after the advent of agriculture even though it was less efficient than
agriculture, and even if it was not complementary to agriculture. In fact, it
could have persisted owing to the values, beliefs, and institutions of some HG
groups. For instance, some groups of HG could have been satisficers rather
than maximisers. Then, they did not adopt agriculture even though it was more
productive than foraging; they kept foraging as their economic activity simply
because it was sufficient to satisfy their needs.
1.3 The Agricultural Revolution: Transition to

and the Establishment of Agriculture
This second part of the book focuses its attention mainly on the transition
between two epochs, the Mesolithic and the subsequent Neolithic. On the
one hand is the Mesolithic, a period that coincides with the beginning of the
Holocene and is therefore defined by a global warming, the melting of ice
sheets, the rise of the seas level, and an amazing development of terrestrial and
aquatic biodiversity, vegetal as well as animal. During the Mesolithic period
people were hunter-gatherers, meaning that they got their food by means of
foraging wild resources. On the other hand, is the Neolithic, a period starting
with the beginning of agriculture, i.e. a situation in which the majority of the
diet is produced and not predated from the wild. Even though agriculture is
the central feature of the Neolithic, the latter is also defined by some other
strong features that, associated with agriculture, consist of what is usually
called “the Neolithic package”. This set of technical and social innovations
includes the use of polished-stone tools, especially for farming and deforesta-
tion. It also includes the fact that farmers were constrained to have a sedentary
way of life in order to manage and monitor the fields they cultivated. This
sedentary life allowed these farmers to have a larger population, which in turn
implied an increase of the agricultural production. It also resulted in major
social and institutional changes, compared with the pre-farming world, such as
the introduction of private property rights (North and Thomas, 1977). Finally,
because agriculture provides a more stable source of food, while foraging is
more seasonal and then risky, part of the Neolithic population could have
been devoted to economic activities other than agriculture. With such division
of labour between sectors, new economic activities emerged such as potter,
weaver, tradesman, etc. The development of these new economic activities,
realised now by specialists, led these activities to agglomerate spatially in the
most appropriate location (usually close to the sea or navigable rivers, to ease
transportation of commodities); such agglomerations correspond to the advent
of urban centres. In other words, the Neolithic revolution, i.e. the transition
from foraging to farming, has naturally led to the urban revolution, the second
major revolution of that epoch (Childe, 1936, 1950).
This Mesolithic–Neolithic transition has been studied in the academic lit-
erature according to two subsequent approaches (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011).
Until the 1980s, the attention was focused on the main differences between
food predation and food production. Then, the purpose was to find a unique
and global cause able to explain the foraging–farming transition. Even though
some explanations were quite convincing (e.g. the role of climate change and
the associated “oasis theory”), none was fully confirmed by archaeological
records related to this period. The difficulty in finding a unique and universal
explanation of the agricultural revolution can be explained by the fact that the
latter occurred in 7–24 centres (according to the considered authors) located
in different places around the world, and at different epochs.
From the 1980s, the attention is therefore less focused on this neolithization
process, i.e. on the foraging–farming transition. Indeed, foraging and farming
are now considered as the polar cases of a large spectrum of situations in which
foraging and farming coexisted. The study of these mixed economies (Smith,
2001) has therefore changed the focal point of research activities. The causes
of the Neolithic transition are now secondary and what becomes central is to
study the why and the how of the domestication process. This process is central
in order to reach an agrarian economy; it is not especially gradual and depend-
ent of a unique and macro cause, as was thought before. On the contrary, the
domestication process involves several causes, which most of the time are pre-
sent at the micro level, meaning that they are directly related to human behav-
iour. This process is not gradual but punctuated, i.e. defined by a succession of
periods featured by rapid and important changes, followed by long periods of
stasis, and leading finally to the full domestication of plants and animals.
In this second part we critically analyze both approaches, the one based on
the neolithization process, and the other centred on the domestication process.
Then, by considering the work of V. G. Childe (1892–1957), who is consid-
ered as the most influential archaeologist of the twentieth century, we analyze
the impact of the beginning of agriculture on Neolithic economic develop-
ment and its socio-economic consequences.
Chapter 6 starts with the presentation and analysis of theories that try to
explain the foraging–farming transition by means of a unique and global
cause. These theories have been split in two groups in the academic literature:
“push theories” and “pull theories”.
One group gathers the “push theories”, i.e. theories explaining that the
Neolithic revolution is the consequence of some constraints facing pre-
Neolithic hunter-gatherers, especially constraints such as food deprivation.
The latter could be the result of various causes, such as a decrease of the
food resources supplied by nature to hunter-gatherers, and due for instance
to some episodes of climate change. It could also be the result of an excess
of food resources demanded by hunter-gatherers, and due for instance to the
increase of the human population level. These “push theories” are based on
(Darwinian) standard evolutionary theory: there is an exogenous shock (e.g.,
climate change) and then a process of natural selection or adaptation leads
to the emergence of agriculture, i.e. to the emergence of a new society, more
developed than the previous one. However, none of these “push theories” has
been confirmed by archaeological evidence, especially because agriculture
emerged in different centres around the world, under various bio-geographic
conditions, and at different epochs. Either climate change or population pres-
sure have surely played a role in the emergence of agriculture, but not the
central one.
The other group gathers “pull theories”; they assume that the transition
from foraging to agriculture does not result from any constraint but from the
deliberate choice of hunter-gatherers. The latter could have lived in a land of
plenty featured by abundant food resources provided by the wild; under such
circumstances, they had plenty of time to experiment with various activities,
including taming wild species. Throughout these experiments, they realized
that plant cultivation and animal rearing could be very productive, and finally
they decided to adopt farming and to progressively give up foraging. Even
though this explanation seems to be convincing, several pieces of archaeo-
logical evidence demonstrate that in its early age agriculture was not more
productive than foraging. Indeed, farming was initially a trial and error pro-
cess; the agricultural production and productivity were surely quite low and
very unstable. Moreover, the first farmers didn’t know how to domesticate
plants and animals, and a fortiori they didn’t know that plants and animals
could evolve and be domesticated. In addition, the farming way of life was not
so attractive; farming was a harsh task and living in close proximity of farm
animals increased the prevalence of zoonotic diseases.
Since “push” and “pull” theories were not sufficiently convincing for
explaining the foraging–farming transition, one has to consider that both
modes of food procurement could have coexisted, according to a mix prevail-
ing at various degrees, and for a very long period of time. This new centre of
interest for mixed economies led us to focus the attention on the domestication
process, the latter being central in the advent of agriculture. The study of bio-
logic and phenotypic differences between wild and domesticated species led
to two main observations. On the one hand, these differences are numerous
and vary from one species to another; this is why domestication is defined by
a syndrome rather than by a strict definition (Hammer, 1984). On the other
hand, these differences did not occur at once; rather they occurred at a vari-
able speed, and even with a specific order, according to the species considered
(Fuller, 2007). In other words, the domestication process was punctuated and
protracted. This implicitly implies that most of the time the domestication
was the result of unconscious selection, i.e. the non-expected by-product of
some agronomic practices. Thus, there has been co-evolution between the first
farmers and the species that they were cultivated and reared. Such interaction
between human and his environment has been recently described by Niche
Construction Theory (Smith and Zeder, 2013). This theory, which is derived
from the developments of Behavioural Ecology, centres on the issues of direc-
tionality and intention in evolution. Adaptation is considered as being sym-
metrical, i.e. humans adapt to environmental changes (as in the Darwinian
approach), but humans also adapt the environment to their needs. According
to this new approach of evolution, it is possible to identify three different path-
ways leading to the domestication of plants and animals. These are the “prox-
imity pathway”, the “prey or harvest pathway” and the “direct pathway”.
These pathways differ according to the directionality in the human–environ-
ment interaction as well as to the degree of intention in humans’ actions.
Some approaches presented and analyzed in Chapter 7 try to explain the
Neolithic transition through a micro lens, i.e. through the study of individual
behaviour. More precisely, it has been assumed that the rational economic
behaviour of optimization, usually assumed in most modern economic analy-
sis (the neo-classical approach), could also be used in order to explain the
foraging–farming transition (Weisdorf, 2005). Some anthropologists have
also decided to use these microeconomic concepts in order to explain vari-
ous events of the past, including the Neolithic revolution; their approach is
labelled Human Behavioural Ecology and the Diet Breath Model is used to
explain the foraging–farming transition (Winterhalder and Kennett, 2006).
According to these approaches – that are grounded on microeconomic tools
and concepts (e.g. the mean value theorem) – the Neolithic transition could be
explained through the comparison of the relative productivity of foraging and
farming. As long as foraging provides a higher productivity, there is no farm-
ing. However, the marginal productivity of labour engaged in foraging activi-
ties is decreasing; indeed, in a given location, once some wild resources have
already been gathered, it requires more effort to gather the same amount of
resources in the future. On the contrary the marginal productivity of farming
is assumed to be constant; such an assumption is relevant for the considered
period since arable land was plenty. Once the marginal productivity of forag-
ing becomes less than for farming, then some resources (mainly labour force)
are transferred from foraging to farming and so the latter can start.
This explanation of the Neolithic transition presents several shortcomings.
For instance, it was not very likely that foragers were able to assess the marginal
productivity of foraging activities, and a fortiori of farming activities since they
didn’t know what could be farming. Moreover, sharing was the social norm in
most if not all hunter-gatherer societies. This implies that the microeconomic
criterion used by foragers to decide how to allocate their labour force is not the
marginal productivity but rather the average productivity of labour.
As highlighted by Polanyi (1944), the occurrence of economic changes
depends on the way in which individuals and economic functions are embed-
ded in social structures. While modern microeconomic models are capable of
capturing the nature of economic change in modern market economies, they
may be of limited or no value for doing this when applied to tribal situations
that were associated with pre-farming societies.
It is also often claimed that in societies of hunter-gatherers, the assump-
tion that individuals are optimizers is not relevant because they act more like
satisficers. Under such a satisficing behaviour, hunter-gatherers may have
displayed a high degree of social inertia, i.e. they might have had no incen-
tives to switch to agriculture even if it could raise their productivity. In other
words, the main problem with the use of microeconomic theory to explain the
Neolithic revolution is that it fails to take into account the diversity of human
behaviour between different groups of hunter-gatherers, but also within indi-
viduals belonging to any of these groups. This diversity is related to the degree
of social embeddedness, to the importance of sharing considered as a rule
within the group, to which extent people are satisficers rather than maximis-
ers. Furthermore, this diversity should also be extended to the time-horizon
and preferences of people living in these ancient societies.
Chapter 8 assesses the impact of the commencement of agriculture on
Neolithic economic development and its socio-economic consequences. For
such purpose, we have considered the work of V. G. Childe (1892–1957) who
applied socio-economic models to archaeological data concerning the major
transformation in the evolution of human society. Childe coined the term
“Neolithic revolution” which, in his view, combined technological break-
throughs (e.g. plant domestication) with major social transformations (e.g. the
introduction of private property rights) (Childe, 1936). He also demonstrated
that the Neolithic revolution had naturally led to the urban revolution, the lat-
ter being almost entirely a transformation of social institutions and practices
(Childe, 1950).
Beyond both revolutions he had studied, Childe assumed that the prime test
of successful economic development was the extent to which it resulted in an
increase in human population. Such criterion of successful economic devel-
opment is unlikely to be widely accepted nowadays. Nevertheless, Childe
applied this criterion to both revolutions. He found the second phase of the
agricultural revolution, namely the urban revolution, to be less satisfactory
than the first phase because in this period population increase was hampered
by the economic exploitation of the masses by the dominant class. He stressed
that in the first phase, societies were more egalitarian and technological pro-
gress was more rapid.
Even though the empirical details provided by Childe have not stood the
test of time, his discussion of the basic nature of the Neolithic and its key
distinguishing features remain completely relevant in order to explain this
pivotal turning point in human history. It encompasses the full range of eco-
nomic, social, and ideological transformations found in more recent treat-
ments of Neolithic emergence in the Near East.
1.4 Evolution of Early Economies after the

Commencement of Agriculture
The commencement of agriculture can be defined as a situation in which most
food resources consumed in a given society are produced by means of plant
cultivation and animal rearing. In other words, agriculture occurred long after
the beginning of farming; it is usually assumed (Larson et al., 2014) that a
period of 1,000 to 4,000 years spanned between the beginning of cultivation
and the advent of agriculture. Indeed, initially wild plants were cultivated (e.g.
wild barley, Hordeum spontaneum) during a period called pre-domestication
cultivation. During that period these plants were modified by conscious and
unconscious artificial selection, as well as by natural selection, and after mil-
lennia they became fully domesticated, i.e. they were featured by morphologi-
cal and physiological traits defining the “domestication syndrome” (Hammer,
1984; Fuller, 2007). Once these plants, as well as farm animals, were fully
domesticated, the agricultural productivity as well as the agricultural output
increased markedly. Then it was therefore possible for the whole human pop-
ulation to be fed almost exclusively by produced food resources. Foraging
wild resources to get food, i.e. food predation, was still possible but became
secondary or even marginal. Indeed, mixed economies combining balanced
contributions of farming and foraging (Smith, 2001) were sustainable only
when they included marine resources locally abundant (e.g., anadromous
fishes, sea mammals, shells) (Ahedo et al., 2021).
Once the agriculture was clearly implemented and dominant in ancient
economies, one may wonder which consequences this change has had on the
socio-economic development? The five chapters of the third part of this book
provide some answers to this important query.
First of all, it seems obvious that the commencement of the agriculture, and
so the increase of the agricultural production, led to a strong increase of the
human population level. The latter provided more labour force for the agricul-
tural activities and thus an autocatalytic process, or a cumulative causation, link-
ing food production and human population, was triggered. Even though such
an autocatalytic process seems obvious, its long-term dynamic is not obvious,
as we demonstrate in Chapter 9. Indeed, at each period, the agricultural sur-
plus increases but if this surplus is integrally consumed by the increase of the
human population level, then nothing is saved. Without saving, capital accu-
mulation is not possible and then there is no economic growth. In other words,
and according to this dynamic, the income or the food resources per capita
remain at their lowest possible level, namely the level of subsistence. Then
the development of the agriculture allows an increase of the human popula-
tion, but the economic growth is lacking: In other words, these economies are
caught in the Malthusian trap.
If such a situation has surely occurred, another issue has also been possible.
Indeed, under certain circumstances, as illustrated by some prehistorical and
historical records, some economies have been able to escape the Malthusian
trap (Friedrichs, 2019). For such a purpose, two successive conditions should
have been met. On the one hand, it was necessary – but not sufficient – that a
significant part of the agricultural surplus was not consumed directly by the
population. This part of the surplus was extracted by a small group of people
usually called the elite or the dominant class. The latter used its power, pro-
vided by various means that could be religious, politic, or military, in order
to extract the surplus. Such extraction prevented the increasing population
from dissipating this surplus and curtailing the economic development. On
the other hand, it was also necessary that this extracted surplus be used for
financing productive expenses, i.e. public expenditures that were able to sup-
port the economic growth. Several productive possibilities existed, such as
the use of this surplus to advance knowledge, to build public infrastructures
(e.g. dykes, canals, dams, bridges), or to build public buildings. According
to this previous description, the use of the extracted surplus could have led
to the increase of the agricultural productivity (e.g., by the implementation
of irrigation devices), and then to support economic growth. These uses of
the extracted surplus have also had other consequences, mainly they have
fostered the division of labour between agriculture and non-food specialists
(Weisdorf, 2003). Thus, some new economic activities belonging to the hand-
craft or industrial sector have been triggered and fostered. In addition, these
new non-agricultural economic activities have contributed to the increase of
the productivity in the whole economy, and also to the development of trade.
The Únĕtice culture presented in Chapter 10 was located in Central Europe
during the Early Bronze Age (2300–1550 BC); it illustrates some short and
long-term, positive and negative, consequences of the agricultural devel-
opment, including the emergence and development of an industrial sector.
Indeed, this culture was the first to introduce and develop bronze-making in
Central Europe; it is commonly known and associated with Nebra Sky Disk.
The production of tin-bronze included various precious metal objects, such
as jewellery and weaponry; many bronze objects have been recovered from
graves and hoarding. This production of precious bronze objects provided
prosperity to this culture (Earle et al., 2015). Most of these precious objects
were exported to Europe, and sometimes beyond. On the other side, some pre-
cious items (such as amber) were imported as well as raw materials (copper
and tin ores or ingots) necessary for bronze production.
Initially, the development of the bronze-making sector has been allowed
by the high productivity of the agricultural sector. Indeed, only the latter can
foster the division of labour between sectors, allowing part of the labour force
as well as other resources to migrate from agriculture to the industry (Bogucki,
2011). However, this prosperity of the Únĕtice culture has suddenly collapsed,
leading to the relatively rapid disappearance of Únĕtice cultural populations
for two centuries, especially in Silesia. Several reasons have been proposed
in order to explain this societal collapse (Tainter, 1988): It could be either the
consequence of the depletion of materials for bronze-making or the disruption
of long-distance trade routes through which the Únĕtice culture exchanged
objects and materials with other cultures. Even though these events could
have occurred, they fail to explain why large areas formerly occupied by the
Únĕtice cultural population remained unoccupied for so long after their aban-
donment. So, we propose another explanation more consistent with archaeo-
logical evidence, namely the long abandonment of these territories could be
the result of an unsustainable ecological development. Indeed, the agriculture
was already very productive when the bronze sector emerged. Once the latter
grew large, it was necessary for the agricultural sector to provide more food
resources in order to feed a growing population in which the fraction of non-
food specialists was also increasing. In other words, the pressure on the agri-
cultural sector, and so the anthropogenic pressure on the natural ecosystems,
was so high that it finally damaged the ecosystems. This led to a reduction
of the agropastoral productivity and therefore to a reduction of the stand-
ard of living of the populations involved and resulted in the abandonment of
their settlements. The extent and nature of ecological damage was such that
it took a considerable amount of time (two centuries) for natural ecosystems
to recover sufficiently before the affected areas were economically suitable
for resettlement. What the fate of the Únĕtice culture illustrates is that even
though the agricultural development has positive consequences, such as the
increase of human population and economic growth, it is also a risky strategy.
When the agricultural pressure on ecosystems becomes too high, there is a
tipping point beyond which a global crisis can occur.
Nevertheless, the development of agriculture and of the industry can also
lead to long-term prosperity as is illustrated by the Aegean societies of the
Late Bronze Age, Minoan (1900–1400 BC) and Mycenaean (1600–1050 BC),
that are presented in Chapter 11. Both societies experienced economic growth
during half a millennium and had great economic and politic influence on the
eastern part of the Mediterranean basin. The main feature of these economies is
that they were palatial. In other words, the society was extremely hierarchical
with a dominant class or an elite associated with the palace. This elite organ-
ized and monitored most economic activities. For this purpose, it included
a numerous and hierarchical administration. The elite and its administration
organized the division of labour between and within economic sectors, the
collect of the extracted surplus, and the distribution of the collected surplus by
means of staple and wealth finance systems (Nakassis et al., 2011). As a corol-
lary, the extraction of the surplus by the elite allowed these economies to avoid
the Malthusian trap. The way this collected surplus was used led to sustained
economic growth. The management and the monitoring of the economy was
mainly focused on economic activities involved in international trade, namely
the production of craft products (textile, pottery, metalworking) and luxury
goods (jewellery, weaponry, textile, perfumed oil). For this purpose, the elite
controlled the division of labour between sectors, and all steps of the pro-
duction process within each sector. The development of trade, especially of
international or long-distance trade, was implicitly fostered because trade and
market exchanges are a necessary condition for the intensification of the divi-
sion of labour.
Since the development of agriculture leads to the development of industrial
activities through the division of labour, and that the latter necessitates market
exchanges, then one important query is how these exchanges were designed
in these ancient economies?
In Chapter 12, we start by recalling that for many scholars, especially among
past and contemporary economists, the development of market exchanges on
a large scale has been possible only once a medium of exchange was intro-
duced (see e.g. Clower, 1969). The latter could have taken various forms,
i.e. could have been materialized by any commodity or primitive money.
However, it also seems obvious for these scholars that a metallic money quite
rapidly appeared to be the most useful and convenient medium of exchange.
For the “Metallists”, i.e. the proponents of this previous vision, the other pos-
sible option was barter, defined as the direct exchange of commodities or ser-
vices between agents (Ingham, 2004). However, the Metallists consider that
even though barter has existed – and still exists – at a micro scale level, it is
not suitable to support exchanges at a macro scale level because it presents
two main shortcomings. On the one hand, barter necessitates the double coin-
cidence of wants and the latter is not easily obtained, especially if we restrict
the analysis to immediate – and not delayed – exchanges. On the other hand,
under a barter system, agents need to compute a very large number of relative
prices, a task beyond the abilities of most people. These drawbacks associ-
ated with barter can nevertheless be overcome. Indeed, the introduction of a
unit of account reduces the complexity of allowing the relative prices usually
associated with barter. Such unit of account can be any real or virtual (a sym-
bol) good; it cannot be considered as money since it does not satisfy the two
other required conditions to be a money, namely being a reserve of value and
a medium of exchange. Moreover, if the exchanges are not necessarily imme-
diate but can be delayed, then the double coincidence of wants can be easily
satisfied. Delayed exchanges, i.e. lending, are possible once a system of debt
and credit is introduced in the economy. Thus, with the introduction of a unit
of account and a system of debt and credit, the exchanges based on barter are
possible even at a macro scale.
In the Near East, the general history of Mesopotamian economic and social
development (especially from the Early Dynastic period [2990–2300] to Ur
third dynasty [2047–1940]) accords nicely with that of ancient Egypt (the Old
Kingdom 2700–2200). The palatial economies of Mesopotamia and ancient
Egypt show that during millennia the exchanges within each of these empires
were realised without the introduction of any money, but only through barter.
In fact, coinage was introduced in southwestern Asia for the first time in Lydia
around the seventh century BC. What is necessary for an economy in order to
have generalized barter, is the existence of a central authority able to register
all the debt and credit transactions, and to enforce the payment of these trans-
actions once they arrived at term.
Goods exchanges on a large scale and based on barter are possible only
in any economy in which most if not all exchanges are realised within the
domestic market. For economies that are more involved in foreign exchanges,
i.e. international trade, such as were the Phoenician city-states (1500–800 BC)
studied in Chapter 13, the barter system was not well tailored. These econo-
mies had an agricultural sector, but this one was secondary in importance. The
main economic activity was related to international trade: various raw materi-
als were imported from abroad, transformed locally by skilled craftsmen who
added value to these commodities (e.g. producing jewellery, textiles), and
the latter were finally exported (Cunliffe, 2017). Several media were used by
these Phoenician city-states in their pre-coinage period in order to trade goods
internationally. Indeed, these exchanges could have been based on either gift-
giving, barter, or later on the use of metallic money. However, it appeared
quite rapidly that metallic media, i.e. initially metal ingots and then metallic
coins, were more convenient, and so they became the dominant and then the
exclusive mean of exchange. One main reason is that it was almost impos-
sible to establish a system of debt and credit between countries (city-states
or empires) even though some exchanges between them have been punctu-
ally based on barter. The development of these industrial economic activi-
ties and of international trade has been allowed and supported by the elite.
Increased international trading possibilities provided both new challenges and
opportunities for the ruling elites. The latter no longer relied so much on col-
lecting grains and other physical commodities from their subjects in order
to appropriate the economic surplus. A greater economic surplus generated
by trade was potentially available and so the elite had to devise new ways of
collecting it. By doing so, it also had to give greater attention to the extent to
which trade and economic activity should be centralized or decentralized, as
well as to the way this decentralization should be allowed to occur. In fact,
international trade was initially monopolized by the elite but quite rapidly a
business class engaged in multinational business activities emerged (Moore
and Lewis, 2000). The Phoenician rulers had to adopt new measures to extract
a surplus from this more decentralized and “market-oriented” economic activ-
ity, such as duties on international trade and taxes, and then a form of nascent
mercantilism emerged.
The study of earlier societies and civilizations presented in this book is of
great importance; indeed, it can help us to understand and analyze our own
long-term economic prospects, and to better grasp the worth and nature of our
present socio-economic systems. Furthermore, it can enable us to appreciate
the extent to which many contemporary economic theories and hypotheses
reflect the values and perceptions generated by current socio-economic sys-
tems, that is, the extent to which a consequence of historically determined
social embedding. In addition, the study of ancient societies and their econo-
mies is of interest for another reason. Many of those societies experienced
major environmental changes (both due to human activity and natural causes),
such as periods of global warming and cooling. The effects of these changes
and the way in which earlier communities coped with these or failed to do so
could be useful in assessing our responses to the environmental challenges
which we and coming generations now face.
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Part I
Economics of Hunting and

Gathering Societies

2 Early Economic Development
The Diversity of Societies and
Their Economic Evolution
2.1 Introduction
The study of human societies and their evolution raises many unanswered
questions, even when these societies seem to be very simple as in the case of
hunter-gatherer societies and early agrarian societies, like those that existed in
the prehistoric period. The literature contains diverse and conflicting hypoth-
eses about the nature of hunter-gatherer (HG) societies. Despite this, many
authors have failed to recognize this diversity (Kelly, 1995 and Lee and Daly,
2004 being among the exceptions), and they have stereotyped HG societies
as having a very similar nature. At one extreme are stereotypes in which HGs
are portrayed as living an idyllic life in which they are fully satisfied and are
in harmony with nature. This viewpoint has, for example, been portrayed by
Gowdy (2004) and by Sahlins (1974). At the other end of the spectrum are
writers such as Hobbes (1651 [2010]) who see HGs as having societies in
which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short” and Service (1966) who
considered HGs to be poor, and forced to roam and live in small groups in
order to survive. Because of their lack of control over the environment, they
were at the mercy of nature.
In our opinion, the considerable diversity of HG societies needs to be
explicitly recognized. Furthermore, when account is taken of a wider range
of social attributes than has been previously emphasized in discussions of
HG societies, this diversity is even greater than is commonly recognized. We
analyze critically a variety of attributes that can be used to define HG societies
and point out the drawbacks and limitations of using their mode of subsistence
to define them. Theories of development of societies which portray this as a
linear process involving discrete stages of evolution are shown to be wanting.
We also consider factors that significantly determine the evolution and
development of HG societies, particularly their increased diversification with
the passage of time. Contrary to the view expressed by anthropologists (e.g.
White, 1959) as well as by economists (Easterly and Levine, 2003), downplay-
ing the role of ecological conditions and available natural resources in influ-
encing economic and social development, we contend that variations in these
features played a major role in the diversified development of HG societies
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294146-3
22 Economics of Hunting and Gathering Societies
and in determining the economic well-being of members of their societies.
While these factors seem to be much less important for the development of
contemporary societies, they were very important for the development of
early societies.
2.2 Criteria Used to Define the Economic Nature of

Human Societies: Adding Extra Dimensions
Since HG societies are assumed to be the starting point for the evolution of
human societies, it is interesting to consider how a hunter-gatherer society
can be defined. Broadly speaking, in such a society, people get their food
from activities such as hunting, gathering, fishing, fowling, and collect-
ing. HG societies have been remarkably persistent despite the fact that few
now remain who rely entirely on hunting and gathering for their livelihood
(Svizzero and Tisdell, 2015a). It has been estimated that they occupied about
one third of the globe in AD 1500, even though at that time their population
may have only constituted one percent of the global population (Zvelebil and
Pluciennik, 2003). Nevertheless, the aforementioned authors found that by
2000 they accounted for only 0.001% of the global population. In prehistoric
times, however, hunting-gathering societies were the only forms of societies
until the Neolithic period. In the Neolithic period, agriculture and pastoral-
ism began to develop. Some of the reasons why this occurred are explored in
Svizzero and Tisdell (2014a).
2.2.1 The Mode of Subsistence

Mostly HG societies have been defined by their mode of subsistence, i.e. by
the way people obtained their food (Morgan et al., 2017). Of course, several
variations of this definition exist in the literature (see Finlayson, 2009), but
without loss of generality, we can consider the following one provided by
Panter-Brick, Laydon, and Rowley-Conwy (2001):
Hunter-gatherers rely upon a mode of subsistence characterized by the

absence of direct human control over the reproduction of exploited spe-
cies, and little or no control over other aspects of population ecology such
as the behaviour and distribution of food resources.
Other relevant criteria – different from the mode of subsistence – could have
been used to define prehistoric societies (see e.g. Morgan et al., 2017). We
provide in the subsequent sub-sections two suggestions of alternative criteria.
A possible reason for concentrating on the mode of subsistence as a crite-
rion used to define and classify human societies is that this criterion is an eco-
nomic one; and many scholars consider (especially in the Marxist tradition,
e.g. Brenner [1976], but not exclusively) that social structures are determined
by the nature of the economy. An additional attribute of a society of potential
Early Economic Development 23
relevance to its social structure is its ability to produce a significant and stor-
able economic surplus (Testart, 1982). As suggested later, those societies
having a large storable economic surplus in prehistoric times tended to be
hierarchical whereas those with little or no surplus tended to be egalitarian.
This characterization of early HG societies – based on the mode of sub-
sistence – is too narrow because it fails to take account of other economic
activities related to non-food resources engaged in by HG societies such as
the making of tools, weapons, handicrafts, food containers, clothes, baskets,
the building of dwellings, watercraft, and the construction of dams, wells,
fortifications and pits (Svizzero and Tisdell, 2014b). It is therefore difficult to
deduce the social structure of the whole society from a criterion which applies
to only a part of the economy.
Moreover, the mode of subsistence definition is based on a hypothesized
dualistic criterion. Indeed, many activities developed by hunter-gatherers
constituted a form of proto-agriculture (Pryor, 2004) such as fire-stick agri-
culture, the tending of tubers, watering fields, soil aeration, semi-sowing. In
other words, a continuum exists between “pure foraging” and “pure farming”.
While, it is clear from archaeological records that foraging chronologically
preceded farming, for many millennia both systems were used simultane-
ously by many communities (Smith, 2001), and (to a limited extent) they still
are used simultaneously (Ahedo et al., 2021; Denham and Donohue, 2022;
Svizzero and Tisdell, 2015a). Given the presence of these mixed economies,
the standard dualistic definitions of societies based on their mode of subsist-
ence have serious limitations.
2.2.2 Geographic Mobility
A possible attribute that could have been used to define human societies is
their geographic mobility, i.e. the distinction between nomadism and seden-
tism. Whatever their mode of subsistence – food procurement (e.g. HG) or
food production (e.g. farming) – some societies are nomadic whereas others
are not. Indeed, usually it is thought that hunter-gatherers are nomads and
that food producers are sedentary. However, counter examples can be found
in past as well as in present times: herders, pastoralists (Bedouins, Mongols,
Masaï) and horticulturists (Yanomani of Amazonia) are nomads, but they pro-
duce their food. Complex hunter-gatherers got their food from the wild but
were sedentary during the Mesolithic period (for instance, the Natufians in
the Levant, the Ertebolle culture in South Scandinavia, the Jomon culture in
Japan, Capsian in North Africa) and even in more recent times Indians from
the Northwest coast of America, such as the Kwakiutl, were still sedentary
after the European discovery of the New World.
The advantage provided by the mobility attribute is that it can be applied to
societies with different modes of subsistence. Due to their way of life, nomads
usually have a population with a low density and therefore the structure of
their society is based on kinship. Societies, where people are organized in
bands, are egalitarian. They represent a form of “primitive communism”. On
the other hand, the sedentary way of life is associated often with communi-
ties having a very large population and the structure of the society is nor-
mally more hierarchical and less egalitarian, based on groups or social classes
related to job occupations or inherited ranks.
Once again, this criterion has not been used as the main one to differentiate
between human societies. This could be because there exists a continuum of
intermediate situations (Kelly, 1992) between “pure nomadism” and “pure
sedentism”. Moreover, when food resources are lacking during the bad sea-
son, geographic mobility is the best response only in environment that are
warm year-round (e.g. the Tropics) but is not an option as one move towards
the poles where food storage is the only possible option to avoid starvation
(Morgan et al., 2017).
2.2.3 Property Rights
Another criterion has been used, at least implicitly, by many thinkers of the
enlightenment, including Adam Smith, because their understanding of the
stages of progress is embedded in a theory of property (Barnard, 2004). In
simple HG societies, few resources and objects were personal property. In
other words, common property is the rule in simple HG societies and therefore
for many authors (Lee and DeVore, 1968; Morgan, 1877) their economy is
characterized by a situation of “primitive communism”. When food resources
become locally abundant (in the geographical sense) and/or become storable,
exclusive property rights are introduced, leading to major economic and social
changes. For instance, exclusive property is possible in herding societies and
consists of livestock, but because herders have to be nomadic in order to feed
their flock, the extent of exclusive property is restricted to herds (and to per-
sonal belongings). When food resources are locally abundant – as it is for
complex HGs or for farmers – and possibly are also storable, exclusive prop-
erty rights can be extended, especially to land. Finally, in societies based on
trade, common property resources shrink to zero since it is negatively related
to the extension of markets.
Thus, when the nature of property rights is the criterion used to define
societies, simple HG societies appear to be at one end of the spectrum,
where exclusive property is restricted to its minimum. When we depart
from this situation, one understands what White (1959) depicted as the
“great divide” in human cultural evolution, i.e. as the change from socie-
ties based on kinship, personal relations, and status (societas) to those
based on territory, property relations, and contract (civitas). According to
North and Thomas (1977, p. 230), it is not the type of economic activity
(such as foraging, herding, farming) so much as the kind of property rights
that were established that accounts for explaining the Neolithic revolution.
Indeed, these authors claim that “The key to our explanation is that the
development of exclusive property rights over the resource base provided a
change in incentives sufficient to encourage the development of cultivation
and domestication” (North and Thomas, 1977, p. 230). In other words, the
implementation of private property rights is considered to be one of the
main necessary conditions for the Neolithic revolution to occur (Bowles
and Choi, 2013, 2018; Gallagher et al., 2015; Svizzero, 2017).
While pre-Neolithic foragers were living in a world of common property
resources, nowadays foragers are encapsulated within a large system in which
the market forces have penetrated their subsistence and small-scale exchange-
based economies (Lee, 2004). It seems that few possibilities exist, for linking
to the market economy and the bureaucratic state, that allow former foragers
to avoid the total transformation and dissolution of their common property
and sharing-based way of life. This implies a trend toward a post-foraging
world, which will be the other end of the spectrum (ranging from totally com-
mon to totally exclusive property rights).
2.3 Theories of the Economic Evolution of Human

Societies by a Definite (Linear) Unidirectional
Sequence of Stages of Development
As we have pointed out, two distinct types of societies – foragers and farmers
– have been considered in the literature using the mode of subsistence as the
criterion to define human societies. This dualistic non-overlapping classifica-
tion of societies is, however, misleading although it is true that HG societies
preceded those which were completely agrarian or virtually so.
2.3.1 E
xcessive Stress and Socio-economic Differences
between Stages of Development
Following Tylor (1881), White (1959) has defined evolutionism in its most
irreducible form as a temporal sequence of forms, for no stage of civilization
comes into existence spontaneously, but grows or is developed out of the
stage before it. Thus, he proposed the “ladder” form or unilinear form of evo-
lution of societies. In order to reinforce this linear sequence of evolution, the
literature has stressed excessively the differences between HG and agrarian
societies. Indeed, until the 1960s, HG societies were mainly – or exclusively
– seen from Hobbes’ perspective. Hobbes (1651 [2010]) claimed that before
the appearance of modern governments and states, life was “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish and short”. This vision was also adopted by some other authors;
one of the most famous of whom is Service (1966). In his view, the economy
and society of HGs – thereafter called “simple HG” – are described by four
features. People were poor. They roamed all the time to get food and their
technology used for hunting and gathering resulted in a low level of produc-
tivity. Their technology also constrained them to pursue a nomadic way of
life in order to avoid starvation. Since they were nomads, it was impossible
for them to have more than one child per family every four or five years. As
a result, their population had a low density, and they were organized in small
groups or “bands”: each band consisting of at most 100 people. Finally, since
their method of food procurement provided no surplus due to their deficient
technology and the lack of division of labour, their society was assumed to
be egalitarian.
Until the 1960s, most people agreed with this vision for many reasons. The
main one was probably that it helped to reinforce the view that the Neolithic
revolution brought about a shift from societies of simple HGs (or primitive
savages) to superior ones involving civilized agro-pastoralists, the type of
more developed economies in which these views were being propagated. It
provided a basis for feelings of superiority of agriculturally based commer-
cial societies which had evolved in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nine-
teenth centuries in Europe and which underwent further development with
the advent of the Industrial Revolution. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, many famous authors – economists (Smith per Meek et al., 1978;
Raggio, 2016; Turgot, 1750) as well as anthropologists (Morgan, 1877) –
have adopted this linear vision to describe the evolution of human societies as
a sequence of four stages: the age of hunting and gathering, that of pastoral-
ism, that of agriculture and finally that of commerce.
2.3.2 Lack of Ability to Explain Socio-economic Transition

As illustrated by Hobbes’ vision, the idea of an evolutionary process was
present in social sciences before it was introduced later into the life sci-
ences by the contributions of Wallace (1870) and Darwin (1859). For
Hobbes, in the first type of human society – that of hunter-gatherers –
humans are considered to be animals. Their only objective is to get food
and to have children; the cultural dimension of human life is missing.
Since they are not able to domesticate plants or animals, hunter-gatherers
are dependent on the whims of nature. In other words, the same type of
logic as was introduced later in biological evolution theory was present,
i.e. the survival of hunter-gatherers depended completely on the state of
their natural environments.
However, the vision of the evolution of human societies, introduced by
Hobbes and developed further by many authors (Morgan, 1877; Steward,
1955; Tylor, 1881; White, 1959), has two main shortcomings. More precisely,
this vision presents only two stages, foraging and farming, and stresses the
differences between both, but it is unable to explain the shift from the first
stage to the second one. It is unable to explain this evolution (Yoffee, 2004,
Chapter 1). In the world described by Hobbes, hunter-gatherers are always
close to starvation. Any negative shock having negative consequences on
ecosystems and food resources could lead to the extinction of human popula-
tions. One may wonder how such basic hunter-gatherers were able to shift to
another economic system, namely to agriculture, when they were in such a
primitive state?
2.4 Adam Smith’s Sequential Linear Model of Evolution
Used to Illustrate the Limitations of Such Models
Adam Smith’s views on the stages and nature of development of human socie-
ties have been distilled primarily from a copy of his lecture notes to students
on the subject of jurisprudence (Meek et al., 1978; see also the discussion
by Brewer, 2008). Smith divided the chronological development of societies
(like many thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) into the four
sequential stages shown in Figure 2.1. Probably to make it easy for his students
to grasp this pattern he described these stages as Ages. He assumed that each
stage followed the other in the sequence indicated in Figure 2.1 but that not all
societies would evolve past the early stages. Their prospects for transiting to
stages later than that of HGs depended on their natural resource endowments.
To Smith, it was clear that one stage preceded the other; for example,
Smith believed that in every society, pastoralism preceded the development
I
Age of Hunters and Gatherers
II
Age of Shepherds (pastoralism)
III
Age of Agriculture
IV
Age of Commerce
Characterized by much trade, including foreign trade, manufacture,
considerable division of labour, increased economic specialisation
Figure 2.1 The stages of the development of human societies as envisaged by Adam
Smith based on their modes of subsistence. Many scholars in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries adopted this type of unilinear “stepladder” model.
of agriculture (Brewer, 2008, p. 9). However, scientific evidence accumu-
lated since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has shown this theory to be
wanting in several respects.
In West Asia, Egypt, and Africa (for example), it seems that the domes-
tication of some species of livestock (sheep and cattle) preceded the culti-
vation of crops (Renfrew, 2007) although Brewer (2008, p. 9) suggests that
simultaneous development was the case. However, in other places (such as
Mesoamerica), agriculture preceded livestock domestication (Renfrew, 2007).
It is clear that diverse patterns of evolution of the HG societies occurred. In
the beginning these patterns appear to have been greatly influenced by local
natural resource endowment, for example, the extent to which animals suit-
able for domestication were present locally, the availability of wild plants
suitable for cultivation, climatic conditions, and so on.
Although Smith’s theory of the evolution of societies involves a series
of discrete changes, actually he was aware that socio-economic change was
more gradual, and that different modes of subsistence could exist in the same
society. Despite this belief in the type of stepladder theory of socio-economic
development (illustrated in Figure 2.1) this persisted in some quarters as
pointed out by the social historian Henry Reynolds (1989).
In summary, the types of shortcomings of the stepladder approach to socio-
economic development illustrated in Figure 2.1 are as follows:
• The sequence of development has not always followed the stages shown.
• Transition from one stage to another is unexplained.
• The diversity of socio-economic structures in each stage is not accounted
for, for example, the presence of simple, complex, and affluent HGs.
• There is a failure to appreciate the presence and importance of exchange
of commodities in some ancient economies.
2.5 The Economic Evolution of Human Societies by Diverse

(Multi-linear) Sequences of Stages of Development
To avoid the two shortcomings previously mentioned, the evolution of human
societies should be considered not as a linear sequence but, after the semi-
nal work of Steward (1955), as a multi-linear (diverse) sequence of stages of
development. Social evolution is regarded as “multi-linear” since divergent
lines of evolution were occasioned by distinctive local environments and sub-
sistence patterns. In this, Steward (1955) opposed White (1959), who simply
disregarded local ecological situations. In fact, Steward (1955) developed an
approach that he called cultural ecology. This focused on the interaction of
specific cultures with their environments. Therefore, the dualistic approach of
Hobbes and Service should be abandoned. From a presumed unique society
of hunter-gatherers existing during the “initial” phase of human existence,
diverse hunter-gatherer societies evolved. We believe that this was largely a
consequence of the diversity of natural resource situations HG societies faced
and relied on for their survival in different geographical locations. In a second
phase, natural and social (or cultural) selection processes occur which allowed
some human societies to dominate the others by shifting to the next stage of
development, i.e. by shifting from foraging to farming (Bird-David, 1990).
The remaining HG societies were not necessarily eliminated immediately by
this selection process; many survived for a while, but henceforth, they repre-
sented backward societies.
To some extent, the diversity of HG societies was recognized in the litera-
ture by the recognition of affluent HG societies, from the 1960s onwards and
complex HG, from the 1980s onwards. However, these are stereotypes and do
not portray the full diversity of HG societies.
2.5.1 Affluent Societies of Hunter-Gatherers

In the 1960s, Hobbes-Service’s vision was challenged by the results of eth-
nological studies of HG societies (see Lee and DeVore, 1968). Indeed, it
appeared that some modern HG societies (mainly !Kung and Hadza, both
located in Africa) were very different from Hobbes-Service’s description.
Indeed, these societies did not experience scarcity of food and individuals had
to do little work to satisfy their limited ends. Therefore, they were labelled as
the “original affluent society” (Sahlins, 1974).
Many interpretations and ethnological analogies between modern and past
HG, all influenced by biological evolution theory, arose after the discovery
of these presumed “affluent societies”. As argued by Finlayson (2010, p. 20),
“there are several fundamental flaws in the prehistoric use of hunter-gatherer
analogies”. Let us consider each interpretation or analogy and its associated
criticism.
The first was to assume that these affluent HG had not changed over time,
that they are like “living human fossils”. Given this assumption, life was not
short and brutish, as Hobbes assumed, but was easy for HG, even in prehis-
toric times. However, if all HG societies were affluent, why did some shift
from foraging to farming? Even if we consider that the !Kung and Hadza
are currently affluent, there is no evidence that this has always been the case.
Moreover, even if these societies hadn’t changed since prehistoric times, there
is no reason to assume that all prehistoric HG societies behaved like them.
An additional query is why have these affluent HG not changed over time.
Some writers believe that HG societies adapted themselves, but their inter-
nal as well as external environments remained unchanged. They remained in
steady-state equilibrium. In order to explain why there is no internal pressure
or socio-economic competition in their society, it has been assumed that human
behaviour in affluent HG societies is unlike that today. Some authors (for
example, Gowdy, 2004) claim that affluent HG are not selfish and behave dif-
ferently from Homo oeconomicus. In their economic system, there is no close
link between production and distribution, and there is a lack of private owner-
ship of property and a high level of dependence on common property. Their
society is egalitarian, and this includes gender equality. Their economy and
society are therefore viewed as an example of what societies were like before
the advent of market systems and capitalism.
Concerning external pressure, i.e. from their relationships with ecosys-
tems, affluent HG are seen as adopting sustainable technologies and uses of
the natural environment. These technologies and uses were adapted to differ-
ent bioregions and resulted in diverse hunting and gathering practices. Once
again, this interpretation can be challenged. More fundamentally, their envi-
ronments undoubtedly changed over millennia. Furthermore, these HG have
not adapted passively to their natural and social environment; they may have
(to some extent) chosen their situation, i.e. they have decided to remain HG
knowing that some of their neighbours had shifted to farming or herding.
2.5.2 Complex Societies of Hunter-Gatherers

In the 1980s, ethnological studies of past and recent HG societies have shown
that if simple HG had existed, they may have been the exception rather than
the rule. Some HG societies were able to have a substantial economic sur-
plus. These societies have been labelled “complex HG” (Sassaman, 2004).
To obtain a surplus, these societies had relatively complex technologies and
kept substantial inventories of items (Testart, 1982). Complex HG operated
an intensified subsistence economy which sometimes exploited a wide range
of species and habitats and in many cases, concentrated on a few abundant
staple species. In some cases, the latter were marine resources (e.g. along
the Northwest coast of America, or for Scandinavian Mesolithic people or
for the Jomon culture in Japan), wild cereals (for Natufians in the Levant),
or acorns (in California). As a result of their technologies and their ability
to store food, they showed considerable sedentism. They displayed long
annual occupations of specific sites, even permanent occupations, and larger
and more internally differentiated settlements. Due to their sedentary way of
life and their greater amount of available food, their population had a higher
density and these tribes sometimes had up to 5,000 members (e.g. complex
HG living on the North-western coast of America). One central, and often
implicit assumption about the emergence of complex HG, is that it depends
on the local abundance of some food resources. In order to exploit inten-
sively these resources, HG built specific tools (sickles, mortars, fishnets,
fish traps, dugout canoes) or facilities (dams, water ponds). By incurring all
these investments, the HG shifted from an immediate-return economy to a
delayed-return economy according to the terminology used by Woodburn
(1982). In the latter, more economic and social management and organiza-
tion are required and therefore economic inequalities and social stratifica-
tion may occur.
So, complex HG societies are at the opposite end of the spectrum to simple
HG ones and they share all the features of agrarian societies, except that food
is not produced. Therefore, complex HGs have been widely referenced in the
evolutionist literature as providing a bridge between simple HG societies and
agrarian societies (see, for example, Finlayson, 2009).
2.5.3 The Underestimated Diversity of Forms and Evolutionary

Pathways of Hunter-Gatherer Societies
The diverse nature of HG societies is not fully captured by the three types
identified in the relevant literature, namely (1) simple HG societies, (2) afflu-
ent HG societies, and (3) complex HG societies. This is a result of failure to
consider a wide enough range of attributes of these societies.
The study of affluent as well as complex HG societies leads us to the fol-
lowing conclusion: It may well have happened in the pre-agricultural period
that the HG societies became more diverse in their social structures with the
passage of time. Therefore, some type of speciation occurred. However, after
the development of agriculture, social structures and economies may have
eventually become less diverse globally, a process which is still continuing
(Tisdell, 2013).
Not only did a diverse range of prehistoric societies emerge but their evo-
lution was not always unidirectional. Some tribes, for example, after having
adopted farming reverted to hunting and gathering (Bellwood and Oxenham,
2008, p. 29). For example, the Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indian tribes
relinquished agriculture to revert to hunting using horses after these were re-
introduced to North America by European settlers (Smith, 1993, pp. 17–18).
2.6 Biological Theories of Evolution and the Economic

Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Societies
Several authors have argued that the nature of and prospects for the devel-
opment of prehistoric societies was heavily influenced by the surrounding
ecological and environmental conditions they faced in different localities.
Early scholars proposing this hypothesis included Machiavelli (1519 [1987]),
Montesquieu (1748 [1989]), Turgot (1750), Smith (1776), and Meek et al.
(1978). More recently, Diamond (1997) added his support to this point of
view. Although these authors differed to a significant extent in the particular
types of environmental and natural resource endowments which they believed
to be important in influencing this evolutionary process, they believed these
endowments to be of the utmost importance in determining the evolutionary
and development paths of early societies.
More recently, however, Easterly and Levine (2003) rejected the view that
environmental and natural resource endowments are the major influence on
economic development. However, this rejection seems to be more likely to be
warranted (if it is warranted) in relation to contemporary societies rather than
past societies. Indeed, while hunter-gatherers (and early agriculturalists) were
very dependent on local natural resource availability in developing their econ-
omies, a few ancient societies were able to reduce their economic dependence
on local natural resources considerably as a result of trade, by use of their
institutions and skills, for example, the early Aegean civilizations (Svizzero
and Tisdell, 2015b).
Given the high degree of dependence of prehistoric societies on their sur-
rounding eco-geographic conditions, one would expect some parallels to exist
between patterns of development of prehistoric societies and patterns of bio-
logical evolution. These similarities can be expected despite the processes
involved in socio-economic development differing substantially from those
involved in biological evolution under natural conditions (Nelson, 2006).
2.6.1 Comparison with Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET)

Biological evolutionary theories originated by Darwin (1859) and Wallace
(1870) (and as further developed since then) claim that under natural condi-
tions random mutations occur in germplasm resulting in modified organisms
of which (depending on their surrounding environments) only the fittest sur-
vive and reproduce (Weismann, 1893). As a result of this process, specia-
tion occurs and different species (types of organism) start to occupy different
niches, and genetic diversity increases in the absence of major episodic events
which seriously disrupt the process of speciation. The scope for speciation and
biological diversity depends on the nature and variety of the available niches
which could potentially be occupied by new species as well as the nature and
frequency of mutations. The biological process of speciation (evolution) is
essentially a random process. Note that increasing diversity of organisms as a
result of natural evolution not only results in increased speciation of complex
organisms but also of less complex ones (Piper, 2013, pp. 11–25).
The subsistence of HGs depended heavily on their local natural environ-
ments, and globally these showed a considerable degree of variation. While
there was some trade between different HG social groups, this was limited
by the technologies in these times. So, each tribal group had to adjust to its
local set of natural resource endowments. Given that many diverse regions
were settled by HGs, this resulted in considerable diversity in their social
structures, the level of their economic well-being, the capital (equipment) and
methods used by them for obtaining and storing food supplies and so on.
This social diversity did not arise from random mutation of germplasm but
was a result of conscious adaptation of HGs to their particular surroundings. It
was a result of observation and trial and error. While this adaptation probably
contained a random element it arose by a different process to that involved
in biological evolution even though it reflected the diversity of environments
in which HGs were able to settle (Nelson, 2006). Uniting two previously
developed anthropological approaches of general/universal evolution (White,
1959) with specific/multilinear evolution Steward (1955), Sahlins and Service
(1960) proposed a combination of the two that used both of these methods as
useful in understanding evolution. On the one hand, evolution creates diversity
through adaptive modification and thus differentiates and becomes adapted to
more local environments (specific evolution). On the other hand, it becomes
progressive, it creates new forms that surpass older ones (general evolution).
2.6.2 Comparison with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)

It transpires from the previous arguments that biological evolution – defined
by Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET) – and cultural evolution of HG soci-
eties have both similarities and differences. Indeed, they both emphasize on
the central role played by the environment in which an organism/a society
evolves. However, cultural evolution is not purely random, but on the con-
trary, results from conscious adaptation.
Some recent theoretical developments about biological evolution – namely
the Extended Evolution Synthesis (EES) (Baedke et al., 2020; Piperno, 2017;
Zeder, 2018) – could however demonstrate that biological evolution and eco-
nomic evolution of HG societies have much more in common than was usually
thought until the last decade. Indeed, EES stresses the role of three fundamen-
tal elements, developmental plasticity, niche construction theory (NCT) and
(epigenetic) inheritance. According to these three elements, there are five core
assumptions for which EES differs from SET (Zeder, 2018, Table 1). First,
while evolution has no directionality under SET, since it occurs in a purely
random manner, it has directionality under EES, owing to the influence of
plasticity and/or NCT. Second, evolution is unidirectional under SET, from
the environment to the organism; on the contrary, there is reciprocal causa-
tion between the environment and the organism under EES. Third, only genes
are the targets of selection under SET while several other levels are targeted
under EES. Fourth, genes are the only transmission channel under SET while
inheritance can be internal and external (including cultural) under EES. Fifth,
the tempo and pace of change is gradual under SET while it corresponds to a
punctuated equilibrium under EES.
Given these five core assumptions, the economic evolution of HG societies
is much more consistent with EES than with SET. Indeed, HG societies devel-
oped according to the possibilities offered by the natural resources present
in their environment. However, and according to NCT, HG also influenced,
consciously or not, their environment, and so a process of mutual causation
was triggered. The evolution of HG societies was directional, with recipro-
cal causality and where selective pressures had multiple targets. A growing
number of academics now consider that plant and animal domestication is
the typical example showing the relevance of EES over SET (Zeder, 2017).
Since domestication is the ultimate achievement produced by HG societies,
this shows that their evolution is closer to biological evolution (sensu EES).
2.7 Ultrasociality and the Evolution of Human Societies

The discussion of the evolution of human societies can be viewed differently
by introducing the concept of ultrasociality and its applicability to human
societies (Gowdy and Krall, 2013, 2014). Indeed, when societies become
ultrasocial the processes of the evolution of human societies depend purely on
social structures – they are driven by ultrasociality – and they lead to an evo-
lutionary process which is believed to be Darwinian or blind, i.e. completely
out of the control of humans. Ultrasociality involves the strong embedding
of or lock-in of individuals into a social system which results in their values
and behaviours being largely determined by the structure of this system itself.
The evolution of such a system is highly path-dependent and it is difficult (or
impossible) for individuals or groups to alter it.
According to Campbell (1983), there is a parallel between some insects
(e.g. ants, bees) and human societies because both of them share a common
trait, namely ultrasociality:
Ultrasociality refers to the most social of animal organizations, with full

time division of labour, specialists who gather no food but are fed by oth-
ers, effective sharing of information about sources of food and danger,
self-sacrificial effort in collective defence. This level has been achieved
by ants, termites and humans in several scattered archaic city-states.
(Campbell, 1983, p. 160)
Indeed, some scholars believe that human society functions like a single organism
dedicated to the purpose of producing an economic surplus. This ultrasociality
of human societies is claimed to have begun with the introduction of agricul-
ture (Gowdy and Krall, 2014) while Polanyi (1944) has proposed the opposite
thesis, namely that social embedding (ultrasociality) is more pronounced in
ancient than modern societies. However, social embedding appears to be strong
in modern economics (Tisdell, 1999, Chapter 6). Contrary to the conventional
wisdom supported by Gowdy and Krall, Boyd and Richerson (2022) provide
evidence – based on historical accounts, archaeological data and ethnographical
descriptions of foragers – that during the late Pleistocene–early Holocene, small-
scale societies of mobile HG cooperated in large numbers to produce collective
goods. In other words, ultrasociality – or large-scale human cooperation – was
already present in pre-farming societies and even in non-complex HG societies.
As pointed out by Raggio (2016), the outcome of such large-scale cooperation –
as illustrated for instance by Göbekli Tepe collection of monumental remains of
a pre-Neolithic society (12,000–9,000 BC) – destroys primitivism, i.e. the idea
that development was progressive, unidirectional and in stages.
Two main questions raised by ultrasociality are of great importance for
human societies, including hunting and gathering societies. The first central
question is what mechanisms facilitate the spread of the necessary norms
and institutions that enable humans to cooperate in huge groups or socie-
ties? The second one is how does ultrasociality help to explain the evolution
of human societies?
Social scientists have proposed a number of theories to explain the emer-
gence of large-scale societies. They have emphasized various factors such as
population growth, information management, economic specialization, long-
distance trade, and warfare. For instance, Gowdy and Krall (2013) consider
that the same economic forces which have favoured the evolutionary emer-
gence of ultrasociality in social insects have also done so for humans, i.e.
increased productivity from the division of labour, increasing returns to scale,
and the exploitation of stocks of productive resources. In a complementary
theoretical approach, Turchin (2013) predicts that selection for ultrasocial
institutions and social complexity is greater when warfare between societies
is more intense. This is because costly ultrasocial institutions can evolve
and be maintained as a result of competition between societies in which the
victors obtain the spoils of warfare. Boyd and Richerson (2022) consider it
as an adaptation rooted in the distinctive features of human biology, such as
grammatical language, increased cognitive ability and cumulative cultural
adaptation.
What are the consequences for the evolution of human societies of their
hypothesized growing ultrasociality? One possibility is that once societies
become large “superorganisms” of an ultrasocial nature – the social dynamics
of their development then becomes largely independent of the wishes of indi-
viduals. This is equivalent to adopting the Darwinian view that evolution is a
blind process and the evolution of human organization and economic activity
of a similar nature to that for other species. So, in social conflict, only the fittest
human societies are likely to survive. With increasing globalization, Western
market-based ultrasocial socio-economic systems have increasingly come into
conflict with other socio-economic systems and have progressively dominated
or eradicated other systems. This has reduced global socio-economic diversity.
Ultrasociality made possible by increased division of labour and speciali-
zation eventually led to the demise of most HG societies. Those societies that
did not or could not adopt increased ultrasociality were eventually dominated
by those that did. This seems to be confirmed by what happened after the
introduction of agriculture, because the HG societies that persisted were less
diverse than the ones that existed before the Neolithic, and this process of
reduced diversity has continued to this very day (Lee, 2004).
An interesting question is whether reduced diversity of human societies,
when combined with ultrasociality, is likely to increase the likelihood of
humankind being unable to avert an impending anthropocentric threat to its
existence. Will it, for instance, be able to avert a major global ecological dis-
aster or a major global nuclear war?
The main reason why human societies have been able to become increas-
ingly ultrasocial following the emergence of agriculture and subsequently
industry has been the emergence and global spread of the market system.
There is a high degree of social lock-in to this system for reasons identified by
Tisdell (1999, Chapter 6). This embedding has negative consequences for envi-
ronmental and natural resource conservation and can be a significant source
of psychological stress and unwanted social effects. This system was extolled
by Adam Smith (1776) but he possibly had little appreciation of the eventual
challenges it would pose for humankind in avoiding the possible eventual col-
lapse of such societies.
2.8 Conclusion
The way in which HG societies have been defined (primarily by their mode of
subsistence) has created a narrow perception of their nature and has resulted in
the extent of their diversity not being appreciated. Nevertheless, in the closing
decades of the twentieth century, favourable images of HG societies emerged.
Some of these societies were seen as simple but affluent and in equilibrium
with nature. Other HGs were found to live in complex settled communities
and were also relatively well-off. Thus, it became clear that HG societies were
diverse, not uniform. We suggest that this diversity was actually greater than
is commonly recognized in the literature and that the diversity of HG socie-
ties increased with the passage of time as they settled in new eco-geographic
regions and adjusted their livelihoods to the differing natural endowments of
these regions. A type of speciation occurred but this did not have the same
genesis as that underlying in standard biological evolution.
However, eco-geographic theories of economic development appear to be
of much less relevance today because, with the extension of markets and trade
(increased globalization), communities are much less dependent on their local
resource endowments for their economic activities and humans have signifi-
cantly increased their control over that local environment as a result of tech-
nological change. Consequently, in the modern era, social structures appear
to be converging (Tisdell, 2013) rather than becoming globally more diverse
as in prehistoric times. The speciation parallel between social evolution and
biological evolution (by natural selection) has been broken.
Note
This chapter is a considerably revised version of Svizzero, S. and Tisdell, C.
A. (2016).
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Another random document with
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A QUEER KIND OF SALT.
THEY had been gathered around uncle Dick, who had just come
back from the Old World.
The children all thought this a very queer name, all except Mary, the
eldest, who thought she knew a little bit more than anybody else.
She told her mother in triumph, that she "got ahead of Lucy Jones
the other day, in geography, on the question: 'What is the Old
World?'"
And little five-year-old Rose said that she "Fought it was queer it
s'ould be older'n any ovver one; s'e dessed zis world was mos' sixty
years old!"
But to go back to my story. Mamma came in and said:
"Children, you must go to bed now. I declare, if Rose isn't asleep

already over the statue of Milton!"
So with their thoughts full of Milton, they reluctantly went to bed, and
I am led to suppose that they dreamed of Milton that night. The next
day at dinner they had corn-beef.
"Oh, dear!" said mamma. "This meat has too much saltpetre in it. I
declare, I will never buy of that meat-man again!"
After dinner the children gathered around uncle Dick.
"Uncle," said Willie, getting up on uncle's knee, "what was that

mamma said the meat had too much of in? Salt—"
"Why, Willie Lathrop!" exclaimed Mary. "It is saltpetre. You ignorant
boy; I'm ashamed of you!" Mary was very much ashamed of Willie
sometimes, and sometimes he had reason to be ashamed of her.
"What is saltpetre, then, Mary?" said uncle Dick.
"Why, wh-y, wh-y—it's saltpetre. That's all I know."
"Then you see that after all you don't know so much," said he.
Perhaps this was unkind, but he did not mean it to be so.
"Do tell us about it," said the children, all except Mary, she had gone
over in the corner of the sofa.
"Well," continued uncle Dick, "when I was in India, it lay all over the
ground like the snow here in winter, (only not so thick) in some parts
of the country—kind of salt. When tasted it has a cooling, but bitter
taste. About an inch of the earth is taken up and put in large tanks
something like that you saw at Long Branch last summer (only not
near so large) full of water, and soaked there. The water is then
taken out, and the saltpetre is found in the bottom of the tanks. The
most that we use comes from the East Indies. It is sometimes called
nitre. In a great many places it is also found in caves."
"Well, now," said mamma, who had come in during the conversation,
"that's something I never knew before."
"Nor I either," said Mary.
"But you know a little more about it than you did awhile ago, don't
you?"
This from uncle Dick.
"How queer!" said Freddie and Willie.

JOSEPH AND RICHARD.
TWO boys about whom I think you will like to hear. Great friends
they were, and schoolmates. If you had lived a few years earlier, and
had been sent to London to school, you might have attended the
school known as the "Charterhouse," and sat beside Joseph and
Richard. I wonder if you would have liked them? They were very
unlike each other. Joseph was a quiet, handsome, well-behaved boy,
who always had his lessons, always did very nearly what was right,
and always took a prize, sometimes two or three of them. But poor
Richard was forever getting into trouble. A good-natured, merry boy
who did what he happened to think of first, "just for fun," and
sometimes spent hours in bitter repentings afterwards.
Yet in spite of their being so different, as I told you, the two boys
were great friends, and in vacations, Joseph used to take wild
Richard home with him to the minister's house; for his father was a
clergyman.
Well, the years passed on, and the two boys became young men
and went to college together. Perhaps you think you will hear now
that the fun-loving boy became a great scholar, and the sober
Joseph grew tired of study! Not a bit of it; they kept just about as far
apart as when they were children. Joseph was a scholar and a poet;
Richard slipped along somehow, contriving to study very little.
Why am I telling you about them? Why, because I know you like to
get acquainted with people, and these are not boys put into a story—
they actually lived, and were just such persons as I have been
describing. It is time you heard their full names: Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele. Stop just here and look carefully at their pictures.
Yes, they lived a good while ago, their style of dress would tell you
so much.
It is a little more than two hundred years since they were born. If you
want to be very particular about it, I might tell you that Richard was
born in 1671 and Joseph in 1672.
When they were quite through with school life, among other things
that they did, they published together a paper called "The Tattler." I
suppose you never saw a paper quite like it. "Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff"
was the imaginary name of a person, who, according to this paper,
went everywhere and saw every thing and told his story in "The
Tattler" to amuse and instruct other people. After two years the two
friends changed the name and style of their paper. They called it
"The Spectator," and in it a delightful man was made to visit all the
interesting places in and about London, and elsewhere, and tell the
most interesting things that took place.
RICHARD STEELE.
I suppose there never was a newspaper so eagerly watched for as

the "Daily Spectator." You must remember that daily newspapers at
that time were very new and strange things. And indeed this was
more like a story book than a newspaper, only "The Spectator" went
among real people, and told just what they said and did.
Joseph Addison wrote a great deal for this paper, and by this time
the scholarly boy had become a great man; his writings were very
much admired. Indeed, to this day scholars love to read Addison.
When I was a little girl I remember seeing a copy of "The Spectator,"
which my father had among his treasures, and he used occasionally
to take it out, and read bits of it to me, explaining why certain things
in it were so witty, or so sharp, and I remember thinking that "Sir
Roger" (one of the people whom The Spectator went often to see)
was the nicest man who ever lived. I did not understand at the time
that he was an imaginary man that Addison and Steele had created.
There is ever so much I would like to tell you about these two men.
How, after a couple of years, they changed their paper again, calling
it "The Guardian"; how, as the two men grew older, the difference
between them kept growing. Joseph Addison being the scholarly
gentleman, and Richard Steele being the good-humored,
thoughtless, selfish man, always getting into debt, and looking to
Addison or some one else to help him out. But I have only time to
introduce them to you. When you begin to study English literature
you will find a good deal in it about these two friends and the great
difference there was between them.
JOSEPH ADDISON.
Sometimes I wonder whether anybody would have remembered
Richard Steele at all, if he had not been a friend of Joseph Addison.
Yet there was a good deal in him to like, and he might have made a
splendid man, I suppose. "Poor Dick!" his friends used to say of him,
but they always spoke of Addison with respect.
It is easy to get the name of being a very wild boy in school, always
doing mischief; but it is not so easy to be the first scholar, and by and
by one of the finest writers of the day.
THE BROKEN PROMISE.
MRS. MORSE kept no regular servant. Mrs. Sticht, a German

woman, came every Monday to do the week's washing, and every
Tuesday to do the ironing. She had always been a happy-faced,
merry woman, but one morning Stella Morse, going into the kitchen
to make a pudding for dinner, found a sad face over the wash-board.
"Good morning, Mrs. Sticht," Stella said.
"Good mornin', Miss Stella," responded the washerwoman soberly,

looking up with tear-filled eyes.
"Are you sick, Mrs. Sticht? You look pale and tired."
"I'm not sick, miss, but I am tired; I didn't rest much last night," she
answered wearily.
"Then you better wait until another day to wash; mamma would be
willing, I'm sure," Stella said kindly.
"No, miss, I'll keep right on washin', but I thank you all the same for
your kindness. I'll be just as tired to-morrow, an' the day after too. A
mother can't have much rest with a sick child to tend."
"Is your little girl sick, ma'am?"
"She's bin sick these two weeks with an awful cold; she's that weak
that she can't hardly walk about the room, an' she's dreadful wakeful
nights."
"Who stays with her when you go out to wash?"

"No one but her little brother Tim; an' he's only seven years old."
"And you go out washing every day, do you not?"
"No, miss; if I did I'd have more money than I've got. This is my only
wash-place; the rest of the week I help an old fruit-woman down in
the market, but I don't get much pay."
"Do you earn enough to support your children?"
"Yes, miss; but my husband's long sickness and death brought some
heavy bills for me to pay. I can't get any extras for my little sick girl,
though she's that lonesome when I'm gone that Tim says she cries
most of the time."
"I should think she would be lonely, poor little soul! What does she
want most, Mrs. Sticht?" Stella asked.
A smile flickered over Mrs. Sticht's face. Perhaps this young lady
would do something for her little sick girl.
"Her whole mind seems to be set on a doll; she's never had a doll,
and she thinks she'd never get lonesome if she had one; she's a
lovin' little thing, Patty is."
"She shall have a doll before the week is out," Stella said decidedly.
"I have a pretty wax one with golden curls and blue eyes that I used
to play with myself. I have not had it out for a long time, and it has no
clothes, but I'll dress it up just as pretty as I can, and—let me see, to-
day is Monday—by Wednesday I'll have it ready."
"Oh! That is very good of you, Miss Stella," the woman said
gratefully. "Patty'll laugh for joy sure."
"Let me see, what is your number, Mrs. Sticht?"
"Number Eleven, Spraker's Court. I can come after the doll, if you
say so."
"No, I'll not trouble you; besides, I want to see the little sick girl. Just
tell her for me, please, that I'll be there on Wednesday with a
beautiful doll, dressed in ruffled blue silk, and I will bring her some
other things too."
Stella spoke earnestly, and a load was lifted from the mother's heart.
Her unspoken thought was, "I believe the child will soon get better
when she gets the doll she so longs for."
Patty's eyes grew bright when her mother told her that a dear, kind
young girl was coming to her on Wednesday with a beautiful blue-
eyed, golden-haired doll, dressed in blue silk.
"For my very own? O mamma, for my very own?" asked Patty,

clasping and unclasping her thin white hands in her excitement.
There were tears in her mother's eyes as she bent her head and
kissed Patty's forehead, saying tenderly, "Yes, dear, for your very
own."
Wednesday came—a bright, beautiful day. Patty's first words to her

mother were, "O mamma! this is the day that my dolly is coming. O
mamma! I believe I'll get well quick when dolly comes."
Mrs. Sticht did not like to leave home that morning for some reason,
but she felt that she must, for the rent was nearly due, and the doctor
who came to see the child cared more for filling his pockets than for
filling human hearts with thankfulness. She came home very weary,
but with one glad thought, namely, "I suppose Patty is overjoyed with
her pretty doll. How good of Miss Stella to think of my poor little one!"
But as she stepped over her own threshold, a very weary little face
greeted her. Patty's cheeks were flushed, and she said brokenly, "O
mamma, my dolly didn't come."
"An' she wouldn't stop cryin', mamma, an' my head aches," sobbed
Tim, who was worn out by his sister's day of bitter sorrow.
Mrs. Sticht did not go to bed that night. She watched beside restless
Patty, who tossed about all night, talking about blue eyes and golden
hair and blue silk dresses, moaning in her sleep, "An' my dolly didn't
come; an' my sweet, sweet dolly didn't come."
Monday morning came. A little boy stood knocking at Mrs. Morse's

kitchen door. Stella opened it. "Mamma can't wash to-day, Patty's tuk
worse," he said quickly, and then scampered away.
"Oh, what a shame that I haven't dressed that doll!" Stella said
mentally. "I certainly meant to, but there were so many things to take
up my attention that I kept putting it off. I'll dress it this very day."
Tuesday morning Stella, with the beautiful, tastefully dressed doll in

her arms, and a little bag of oranges also, started for Mrs. Sticht's. In
answer to her rap, Mrs. Sticht opened the door. Her eyes were heavy
with weeping and her face had grown more aged.
"How is little Patty this morning, Mrs. Sticht? I've brought her the doll.
Can I see her?" were Stella's rapid questions.
"Yes, Miss Stella, you can see her. Walk in, please."
There was anguish and reproof in the mother's tone; Stella stepped
inside the poorly furnished room; the mother led the way to one
corner, and pointed to a little white-draped cot.
The terrible truth dawned upon Stella. She had come too late. Patty
was dead. She burst into tears as the sobbing, broken-hearted
mother uncovered the little still face. Through her tears Stella could
see how beautiful Patty was, with her golden hair brushed back from
a pretty forehead, and her dear little hands clasped over her still
bosom.
"And did you tell her I would bring the doll? Did she look for it?"
Stella moaned, her remorseful tears rolling down her cheeks like
rain.
"'Look for it!' Yes, Miss Stella, she looked for it day and night," Mrs.
Sticht answered huskily. "She was very light-headed toward the last;
she talked of nothin' else. Just before she died her reason returned.
She sat up in bed, an' put her arms around my neck an' said, 'Good-
by, mamma; I'm goin' to heaven.' I cried aloud, but Patty smoothed
my cheek, and said, 'Don't cry, mamma, you'll come by and by, an' I'll
be waitin' and lovin' my blue-eyed dolly, 'cause I know Jesus will give
me one, 'cause there's no tears in heaven.'"
GRANDMOTHER'S DARLINGS.
"TO-MORROW will be grandma's eightieth birthday," said one of the

children, "and we must make her just as happy as can be."
"What shall we do?" said another.
"Send her a long letter—four pages of foolscap—and a nice

present," answered the first.
"Agreed!" said they all; and away they go among the stores on Main
street. But this will not do, and grandma doesn't care for that; she
has so many presents already it will be hard to find any thing fresh
and good for her unless they buy something rare and costly; but she
wouldn't be pleased to have so much money laid out for her, and the
"children" can't afford it.
But one has a bright thought. "Grandma dearly loves flowers; let's
get her a plant or two, they will not cost very much."
So they hurry from the stores to the greenhouse, for it must go out
by the very next mail.
"How sweet!" they all exclaim as they enter. "See those roses! How
moist and green and summery it is here!" Surely so! for the beauty
and breath of ten thousand flowers that the Lord had made, that
moment were there.
A marguerite and a begonia full of buds are soon bought, and the
kind greenhouse man asks but a trifle for them. Does he know that
they are going to grandma, and that she will take good care of the
darlings? Maybe he has no grandma.
Home they hurry with their two treasures, and they tuck them away
in a nice, new, clean pasteboard box. They look like two dear babies
put to sleep in their crib.
Now a strong string is tied about the box, then a paper over that, and
another string, and grandma's name and post-office are carefully
written upon it. And just across the street is honest old uncle
Samuel, or Sam, as most folks call him, but he was called that way
when he was born. He is always ready to run on certain kinds of
errands, and this is one of them. So he will carry the flowers and the
big foolscap letter too, all the way to grandma—nearly a hundred
miles—for fifteen cents! Very cheap, you see. But that's his way, and
he makes a good living because he's never idle like some folks who
won't work unless they get the highest wages.
On and on and on he hurries to carry your message, and he goes

just as cheerfully and cheaply a thousand miles for you as one. How
like Jesus, who came so far to bring us good tidings of great joy; only
that he didn't charge any thing at all, and he would have come and
died all the same, if there hadn't been but one poor sinner in all the
world to be saved!
But uncle Samuel is there now. Can't you see him hand it out to
grandma?
How she wonders who sent it, and what it is. There! She has her
scissors, and she says, "Stand away, children, till I see what is in this
pretty box!" Then "snap, snap," go the scissors, and away fly the
cords, and she lifts the cover off carefully, and there the two darlings
are sleeping as soundly as babies.
And they all gather around grandma, and exclaim, and try to help her
wake them up softly and lift the sweet dears from their crib.
There they are now, looking out of the window, happy as two
queens.
Every morning they lift up their faces and smile as soon as the sun
rises in the east over the sea. And when grandma comes and
sprinkles them all over with clean, cool water, they smile and say,
"Thank you!" as well as they can.
They make grandma very happy; more happy than if the children
had sent her a piano or silk dress.
Can't you send your grandma, or somebody's grandma a rose, or

something?
"CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES."
"I'LL just go down by the lake, mamma, and wait until you are ready."
"But, Rollo, remember you are dressed in white, and it soils very
easily; don't go where you will get any stains."
"I won't, mamma, I'll be ever so careful."
This was the talk they had as Rollo, in his newest white suit, and
brilliant red stockings and fresh sailor hat, kissed his hand to his
mother and tripped out of the gate. Ten minutes more and he
expected to be oft to the park to hear the lovely music, and see the
swans and the monkeys.
It was less than ten minutes when he came back in just the plight
which you see in the picture. One shoe off, one elastic gone, his
bright red-stocking torn and hanging, himself covered from head to
foot with mud. How could a boy have done so much mischief to
himself in so short a time! If only Rollo had had a reputation for being
careful, she would have surely stopped to hear his story; but, alas for
him! A more heedless boy never lived than this same Rollo. Still, this
was worse than usual; so much worse that the mother decided on
the instant that he must have a severe lesson.
A SORRY PLIGHT.
"Rollo," she said in her coldest tone, "you may go at once to Hannah
and have her put your every-day suit on, then you may go to my
room and stay until I return."
"But, mamma," said Rollo, his face in a quiver, his lips trembling so
that he could hardly speak.
But she passed him on the stairs without a word.

He called after her:
"Mamma, oh, mamma! Won't you please to listen to me?"
Then she said.
"Rollo, you may obey me immediately, and I do not wish to hear a

word."
In a very few minutes after that the carriage rolled away, stopped at
Mrs. Merrivale's and took up Helen and her mother, then on to the
park.
You needn't suppose Rollo's mother enjoyed it. She seemed to care
nothing for the park; she hardly glanced at the swans, and did not go
near the monkeys. All the time she missed a happy little face and
eager voice that she had expected to have with her. Miss Helen
Merrivale was another disappointed one. Had not she and Rollo
planned together this ride to the park? Now, all she could learn from
his mother was that Rollo was detained at the last minute. She did
not intend to tell the Merrivales that her careless little boy seemed to
grow more careless every day; and how she felt that she must shut
her ears to his pitiful little explanations, which would amount to
nothing more than he "didn't mean to at all," and was "so sorry."
The mother believed that she had done right nevertheless she was
lonely and sad. They came home earlier than they had intended. As
they passed Mrs. Sullivan's pretty cottage she was standing at the
gate with Mamie in her arms, and out she came to speak to them.
"You haven't the dear little fellow with you," she said eagerly, her lips
trembling. "I wanted to kiss him, the darling, brave boy. O, Mrs. Grey,
I hope and trust that he did not get hurt in any way?"
"Who?" said Mrs. Grey wonderingly. "My Rollo! Oh, no, he isn't hurt.
Why? Did you hear of any accident?"
"Didn't he tell you? Didn't anybody tell you? Why, Mrs. Grey, if it
hadn't been for your brave little Rollo—I shiver and grow cold all over
when I think where my baby would be now! She climbed into the
boat; it was locked, but she tried to sit down at the farther end, and
she lost her balance and pitched head first into the lake. Rollo saw
her, your little Rollo, he was the only one around; and I don't know
how he did it, and he such a little bit of a fellow. He climbed over the
side of the boat and reached after her; he stepped right in that deep
mud and got stuck, and the little man had sense enough to unbutton
his shoe and leave it sticking there, and wade out after baby. He
saved her, I'm sure I don't know how, nobody seems to know, but he
tugged her out and laid her on the bank, all unconscious, you know,
and we thought she was dead, but she is as well as ever, and O,
Mrs. Grey, isn't there any thing I can do for the blessed boy?"
"John," said Mrs. Grey, "drive home as fast as possible."
Up the steps she ran, gave the bell a furious pull, and dashed past
the little nurse-girl to her own room like a comet.
"Where is Rollo?" she said breathlessly to Hannah.
"He's asleep now, ma'am. He cried as though his heart would break,
and was a long time getting, comforted; but finally I got him dressed
and coaxed him to take a nap, and there's been half the town here
this afternoon to inquire how he is."
She didn't believe in disturbing sleeping boys as a rule, but she

picked this one right out of his bed and carried him, half smothered
with kisses, to her rocking-chair, and sat down to laugh and cry over
him and kiss him. Only half awake he was at last, still grasping the
big orange that Hannah had given him, when mamma, giving him
more kisses, said:
"Dear little brave boy, will you forgive mamma for all the sorrow of
this afternoon?"

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The Sustainability and Development of

Ancient Economies: Analysis and

The Rice Economies Technology and Development in Asian

Global Environmental Sustainability: Case Studies and

Emerging Economies and the Global Financial System Post

Development, Social Change and Environmental

The Rise and Development of the Solar Cult and

Economic Growth and Financial Development: Effects of

Primary Mathematics 3A Hoerst

Sustainability and Environmental Decision Making

Clement A. Tisdell is Professor Emeritus of the School of Economics at the

Serge Svizzero is Professor in the Faculté de Droit et d’Economie at the

The Decline of British Industrial Hegemony

Industry and Development in Argentina

The Real Estate Market in the Roman World

Inequality and Nutritional Transition in Economic History

Property, Power and the Growth of Towns

The Age of Global Economic Crises

Clement A. Tisdell and Serge Svizzero

1 An Overview of Our Perspectives on the Economic

2 Early Economic Development: The Diversity of Societies

3 Traditional Economies of Australian Aborigines – Their

4 The Sustainability and Economic Development Options of

5 The Lengthy Endurance of Hunting and Gathering Economies 70

6 A Reconsideration of Theories about the Commencement of

7 How Well Do Models of Rational (Economic) Optimizing

8 Contemporary Thought and Childe’s Theory of Economic

9 Analysis of Why Some Agrarian Societies Avoided the

10 Economic and Ecological Reasons Why the Silesian Únětice

11 The Palatial Economic Development of Minoan and

12 Barter and the Origins of Money: Insights from the Ancient

13 Phoenicia: Its Economic Development before Its Use

1.2 Economics of Hunting and Gathering Societies

1.3 The Agricultural Revolution: Transition to

1.4 Evolution of Early Economies after the

Economics of Hunting and

2.2 Criteria Used to Define the Economic Nature of

2.2.1 The Mode of Subsistence

Hunter-gatherers rely upon a mode of subsistence characterized by the

2.3 Theories of the Economic Evolution of Human

2.3.2 Lack of Ability to Explain Socio-economic Transition

2.5 The Economic Evolution of Human Societies by Diverse

2.5.1 Affluent Societies of Hunter-Gatherers

2.5.2 Complex Societies of Hunter-Gatherers

2.5.3 The Underestimated Diversity of Forms and Evolutionary

2.6 Biological Theories of Evolution and the Economic

2.6.1 Comparison with Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET)

2.6.2 Comparison with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)

2.7 Ultrasociality and the Evolution of Human Societies

Ultrasociality refers to the most social of animal organizations, with full

But to go back to my story. Mamma came in and said:

"Children, you must go to bed now. I declare, if Rose isn't asleep

After dinner the children gathered around uncle Dick.

"Uncle," said Willie, getting up on uncle's knee, "what was that

"What is saltpetre, then, Mary?" said uncle Dick.

"Why, wh-y, wh-y—it's saltpetre. That's all I know."

Perhaps this was unkind, but he did not mean it to be so.

"Nor I either," said Mary.

1.2 Economics of Hunting and Gathering Societies

1.3 The Agricultural Revolution: Transition to

1.4 Evolution of Early Economies after the

2.2 Criteria Used to Define the Economic Nature of

2.2.1 The Mode of Subsistence

2.3 Theories of the Economic Evolution of Human

2.3.2 Lack of Ability to Explain Socio-economic Transition

2.5 The Economic Evolution of Human Societies by Diverse

2.5.1 Affluent Societies of Hunter-Gatherers

2.5.2 Complex Societies of Hunter-Gatherers

2.5.3 The Underestimated Diversity of Forms and Evolutionary

2.6 Biological Theories of Evolution and the Economic

2.6.1 Comparison with Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET)

2.6.2 Comparison with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)

2.7 Ultrasociality and the Evolution of Human Societies