Human beings are instinctively hierachical like many mammals, its essential to survival.

I am not saying they are not but hierarchical representations do not have to be physical.

Stating this as a fact in the comments about a society that (seemingly) didn't have the hierarchy you say is essential flies in the face of the evidence.

Maybe this is a case of the black swan disproving the "all swans are white" hypothesis.

One of the things that's talked about in "the dawn of everything" is the large number of what seem to be extremely egalitarian societies...ones that spanned large areas.

And that social groups form and get their values/norms/behaviors from being explicitly against certain values/norms/behaviors.

According to them, human beings are not instinctively anything. Hierarchy is just one form of social organization. Due to the way history is made it seems to be dominant, but that may or may not be accurate.

It may be that hierarchy is easier to understand when you're dumb as a rock. And as any student of humanity knows, there are plenty of those kinds of people all over the world.

I know you did noz mean it that way, so just to point out that rock dumb people are to be found on levels of a hierachy. Not that people think hierachies are somehow resulting in the smartest and best leaders, no matter how much evidence we have to the contrary in our everyday, personal lives. Nor does it mean the opposite, so far I think the rock dumb folks are equally distributed on all level,. Maybe with a slight bias for a*holes the higher up you get.

This is a claim so extraordinary you should at least have linked some obscure paper from a *-Studies department.

Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?

All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand). Arguably the first multi-celled organism formed a hierarchy and pretty much every animal with a few Neurons has Serotonin receptors, which can be described as a pathway to continuously re-order its hierarchy of needs.

The only way in which anything social isn't hierarchical is if you look at a tiny tiny cross-section. Otherwise any "egalitarian" and "flat" organization just swapped one way to determine a hierarchy for another. As a case in point, the Liberal model of the 19th century was a project to replace an aristocratic hierarchy (based on attributes that were no longer a good fit) with a competence hierarchy. This was often called egalitarian, but practically it was just a more adapted way of forming a hierarchy.

We are so adapted to hierarchies that 6-month olds understand physical dominance and 3-year olds easily form more complex hierarchies based on social support, resources etc.

edit: Ironically calling other people "rock-dumb" is a way to signal ones own place in the hierarchy.

> This is a claim so extraordinary

It's your claim thats is extraordinary. Humans are beholden to a single form of organisation?

I feel that you are so stuck in this mode of thinking that you struggle to see these other forms of organisation despite the fact that they surround you.

Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy.

Social networks form a web, they are not a hierarchy. If you try to organise any data, you will find it cannot be fit into a hierarchy, it is either relational or a graph.

Relationships dominate the world, hierarchy is an illusion

So dogs, camels, and chimps all have hierarchys, but humans don’t?

Strong claim.

Famously, humans are the only creatures on earth that do lots of stuff. Like talking, writing, drawing pictures, or riding rockets into orbit.

I don't see what's so unbelievable about our massively unique cognitive ability vs instinct ratio leading us to also have different forms of social organization, or that this could lead to our social organization being detached from instinct almost entirely.

I feel like this whenever people try to do that Lobster argument. "right, but we aren't lobsters."

Additionally, humans are unique in their ability to create complex social constructs and realities, which is a reasonable prerequisite for a potential to create novel methods of social organization.

This is a truism. Of course we could create social organizations that are totally unconstrained, but they will fail catastrophically. We are (and will always be) constrained and as soon as we prefer one goal to another we want to bring that hierarchy to reality. To do that we necessarily need to adjust the rewards for working towards that goal, thereby creating a social hierarchy.

Even if that were the case, the "lobster arguments for social hierarchy" usually lean far more rigid and totalitarian than human history indicates. For every Roman empire you show me I can find you five cultures with fluid or nearly flat hierarchies.

>dogs

If you're referring to the whole "alpha" thing, remember that was shown to be invalid and only occurred in captivity. Wild dogs are pretty communal.

A school of fish is not a hierarchy. Other things exist besides hierarchies

> Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy.

Correct. But markets are downstream from hierarchy. The hierarchy determines the access to its rewards, those rewards can then be used to participate in the market, either by directly spending them or by influencing other to do so.

> Social networks

Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. They distribute rewards proportional to a user's success and prominently show the metrics underlying that success. They are a kind of turbo-hierarchy where your position is always obvious to everyone and changes instantly. If everyone unsubscribes from your YouTube channel everyone will know, but if nobody reads your book you can still derive status from your 1982 bestselling book.

On a more general note, a hierarchy is just a mechanism for aligning an agent's actions towards group goals via the distribution of rewards. I don't know how or why there are so many people that associate it only with the Caste system or hereditary aristocracies. Funnily enough, the hereditary aristocracies were quite adept at changing their hierarchies in response to external events.

> But markets are downstream from hierarchy.

Nope, the bazaar does not need the cathedral. Example: "Silent Trade"

Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade

> Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy.

I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people.

Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I respect you, and you respect your boss. That does not mean I must respect your boss, maybe he lost to me in poker and I laugh at him.

Even when it comes to social networks, when researchers visualise what's happening on twitter, they don't a hierarchy, they use a graph. Social network analysis uses graph theory.

Even a family tree is not a hierarchy, and not a tree. Ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph.

> Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?

I'm probably being silly in doing so, but just pointing out that neurodiversity is a thing, and I don't know if you've noticed, but rarely do people simply do what they're told.

You are confusing hierarchy with „social function“. You are describing humans as having different social functions. You are not describing that someone is above someone or a group makes the decision on basis of beeing above others.

What is a hierarchy? Broadly it's a ranking based on some criterion. As such hierarchies follow from a society's wants and needs (you could say it follows from the needs hierarchy of society itself) and shift all the time. As an example consider the rise of software developers which was based on the increasing need of society for software.

A hierarchy is necessary to allows society to adjust rewards to its needs. It isn't necessarily some oppressive force keeping people caged in their circumstances (though a dysfunctional one quickly becomes that, see the CCP aristocracy in China).

If we want more renewable energy installed, we necessarily have to adjust the hierarchy by increasing the rewards (status, money ...) for the entities and people installing it.

I don't quite get how you can reduce it to "someone is above someone". While that is obviously an aspect, you cannot have a society that does anything without having a hierarchy. If you can show me a society with no hierarchies I'm all ears.

I really understand your point. But still in my view you are describing how a society can function by hierarchy but it’s still only functions in society you are describing. Hierarchy can be also absolut senseless. For example: god told someone that this person is now king. That hasn’t anything to do with needs. It’s only hierarchy. Here the definition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy

I Stil get your point and I sign that hierarchy is mostly needed to archive goals in society. But that most society’s rule on hierarchy is mostly coincidence in my view.

Edit: also interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy

> All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand).

Tangent: Violence seems to be the only way to test and validate this hierarchy. That is, we haven’t found a way past it.

Technically the threat of/capability of violence has been sufficient, at least sometimes.

Key point being "sometimes". Demonstration of capability is important because that capability will be tested.

Here's an example: The best way to do this is by constantly waging small wars and battles, which the US has done for decades. Now whether the US can wage a drawn-out war is a different matter; that hasn't been tested in a very long time (and for the record, that worries me).

> All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies

Specifically, Primates species (that's us) very much do so. I've seen texts examining the similarities between Human and Chimpanzees in that regard.

Eh, the problem with social hierarchies beyond who's the cool friend is that they reproduce beyond one generation. People will delude themselves into thinking their position is a god-given right and violently defend that.

Without endorsing the book (which I have not read), the authors do at least have some academic standing and reviews of the book suggested it was tendentious but not trash.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...

any dog owner will know first-hand

Having trained working dogs and frequently having random mixes of dogs at home when friends go on holiday, dogs do have hierarchies but they are nowhere near as rigid and stratified as human ones can be.

My understanding is that many early societies were quite egalitarian but they also tended to be relatively small. One area where decentralized power is not so good is warfare. Thus these societies tended to be conquered by their more warlike neighbors. This pattern repeats multiple times until the world is full of feudal monarchies, even though that system of government is relatively poor at building and maintaining infrastructure. Scientific and technological progress has been held back for thousands of years because this one system of government was better at killing their neighbors and in the end that was what really mattered.

Dawn of Everything is a textbook example of cherry-picking data to support a preconceived ideology. It's not good science.

Graeber was a smart guy, but also had a pretty clear, and strong ideological position regarding power structures.

Hierarchy is natural because of natural limitations like "Dunbar's Number". The human brain can effectively track only so many relationships, and at some scale it is advantageous to consolidate them into abstractions like "authority" or "organization".

Have you considered herds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd

Okay but like so what

Not for a second, ask any anthropologist.

Human beings have multiple, sometimes competing instincts and in different proportions in different individuals. While one of them seems to include voluntarily giving up responsibility of some aspects of your life to sufficiently respected others, another you can observe in many places is an instinct towards self-sufficiency and a reluctance to accept people telling you what to do.

Without the first, many large scale achievements of the human race would have been more difficult or perhaps impossible. Without the second we would have lost a valuable check on the power of the leaders, and a much reduced propensity to explore and experiment.

also the introductions shortly mentions the "Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai".

So the city wall were also planned and built in a decentralized fashion, all by the community?

James C Scott used to say, that city walls were all designed to keep their own people from running away, sort of like the Berlin Wall, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ukte-je8k

> James C Scott used to say, that city walls were all designed to keep their own people from running away,

Interesting thought and depending on time period and culture I can imagine that. But this is not how city walls were described in classic greek text? (Case in point: Sparta, famously the only greek city without city walls, had tons of slaves) or how cities worked in medieval age (where "city air" freed you from serfdom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtluft_macht_frei

Also walls build on defensive terrain (hills) point to protection as its usage. There is the case that walls are useful to tax trade because you can funnel wares only through a gate which doubles as a custom house.

>Sparta, famously the only greek city without city walls, had tons of slaves

Didn't the Helots live outside the city of Sparta, and mainly worked the fields?

Regardless, parent’s point is that there’s no wall keeping them in.

As an aside, the Spartans famously claimed that they were their wall. But I wonder: Spartan construction was very simple, and they despised those with expertise or a craft (the small class of free noncitizens who along with the helots did all productive work). Maybe the truth is that a project with the scope & complexity of a good city wall was simply beyond them. They couldn’t do it, so they told themselves a sour grapes story about how they never wanted a wall to begin with. Just a hunch but I like it.

Slavs had walls surrounding settlement excluding side connected to river.. it depends what trading system your culture prefers.. how open or closed is. Goths in Spain completely banned commerce outside of one designated spot. I'm not sure if they came up with this because of local... circumstances or brought it with them. Anyway it didn't help them much, quite opposite...

The claim that city walls were always some sort of prison is going to need extraordinary evidence, not a video.

the speaker is a scholar, so he has some authority in the field of anthropology. See his wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott

He also wrote a well known book on the subject: 'against the grain', where this argument is put forth. Wikipedia has a summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...

Note that James C Scott speaks specifically of the very deep pre-historical middle east. I'm not sure if the conclusions are generalizable to China, thousands of years later.

There are examples of large scale public engineering works with and without observable central authority throughout archaeological record around the globe. So just "having walls" is not sufficient implication of central authority attempting to control the population.

IMO in the specific example of Against the grain the central authority thesis is pretty solidly framed. But, it does not aim to be a generalizable theory, nor IMO should it be viewed as such.

The Sumerian city-states are past the prehistorical period. History started with the invention of writing, and they did invent record keeping and writing.

Now it is hard to argue for or against the application of any rule, there are exceptions to rules. However here you would also need to give some argument, as to why this kind of reasoning could not be applied to this case.

It also describes it as being unlike other neighbouring towns...

I've been reading through a beginner-level archaeology textbook that devotes multiple chapters to explaining, with examples, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record. An example my book gives is Lake Mungo in Australia, where researchers tried to demonstrate that life was much the same in the prehistoric period as it was in the historic period just after British colonisation by proving that grindstones were in use in both the historical period and 15000 years ago, and thus that food sources hadn't changed. This was demonstrated to be wrong by later findings showing changes to technology and food sources over time, particularly in response to conditions of abundance due to higher rainfall during the last ice age.

In this case the factual evidence is (paraphrased) "The village of Pingliangtai had no big houses, no obvious social hierarchy in burials, and a system of ceramic drainage pipes". It's tempting to read this as evidence for having no hierarchy; it's also tempting to think about the obvious ways in which a hierarchy could exist without leaving any record, like a leader who lived one town over, and conclude the opposite; but I think my book would caution against believing either interpretation. Small houses, matching graves, and pipes are the truth and everything else is an educated guess.

'Absence of evidence is not evidence os absence' is a mantra that was instilled in me when I was trying to figure out my uni undergraduate and went with history for a year.

This was also a center point in Historiography, and how, when analysing old documents by historians, one needs to be aware of possible bias, not only of the writers, but also of one self.

In the presence of a model the absence of evidence _can be_ evidence for absence if you have good reason to believe your model is complete. If your model is the oft cited celestial teapot then the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence. But if your model is 1 trillion celestial teapots in orbit around the sun than absence of evidence _is_ evidence of absence.

People would do well not to rely too heavily on this asinine little phrases. They make us feel smart, sure, but they are very simple minded.

The specific issue with archeology is destruction can be selective. You can’t tell which towns failed to keep marriage records based on the lack of surviving records when the place those records ended up could get destroyed in a fire.

Is a structure missing because it didn’t exist, or is it missing because it was made out of useful materials repurposed for something else.

Similarly people dig up the remains of ancient towns because they got buried, if the location had erosion instead there would be nothing obvious left to investigate.

Not to mention that there's only so much the layout of ground floors can tell you about social organization of a civilization which isn't described in written records, even if relatively evenly preserved. As in the famous "Motel of the Mysteries" parody, in which an archaeologist of the future discovers the underground remains of a 20th century motel and ascribes probable religious significance to everything from the television to the toilet.

I mean, "lots of houses, all of them quite small and all nearby burials without ceremony" could describe a hierarchy free anarcho-syndicalist utopia. But it could also describe a monastery, a barracks, a ghetto, a town built for subjects of the undiscovered nearby imperial palace or a slave colony, all of which are usually associated with particularly rigid hierarchies. If apartheid era Soweto was buried under a volcano, it would probably look like a settlement organised on relatively egalitarian lines by late twentieth century standards...

Archeology is also limited by the things that will survive and what access to them the people had. If the people didn't have access to metal you will find very little metal tools (what you do find will also be used until worn out and then remade into something else; or restricted to the very rich. Either way limiting the usefulness of what evidence we find.)

> if you have good reason to believe your model is complete.

When in archeology is that ever true? Frankly, outside of archeology when is that ever true?

>One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record.

That how the Europeans never found the Amazon lost cities, because earlier explorers were looking for cities like European cities.

Which Amazon lost cities do you mean?

my city, the amazon driver for some reason can't find my house number and keeps dropping off the package at the post office.

There have been many ancient cities in the Amazon rainforest discovered through satellite imaging/LIDAR/other techniques, but before those discoveries large settlements in the area were considered legends and myths.

> absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Wrong mathematically, at least if you care to define A as evidence of B to be the same as P(B|A) > P(B|not A), and intuitively if you think about fairies and other things. But sure, it's right if you instead think of evidence as being the same thing as proof, or an inequality as expressing an insurmountable magnitude. As a way to guard against hubris I can understand the repetition.

There's probably a mathematically rigorous version of the proverb along the lines of "low-confidence observations from a limited number of data points are not always sufficient to update other actors with priors different from yours sufficiently far towards your position for the optimal status-seeking strategy to be for you to give an expression of high confidence", but it wouldn't roll off the tongue quite so well.

In the world of math, that IS rolling off the tongue well

You sort of touch on it, but to be explicit:

The person you're replying to is not using the same meaning of "evidence" as you are. You're meaning it in the strict sense of "holding all things equal, increases probability estimate of perfect bayesian reasoner" while they're using "given actual sociological conditions amongst the advanced monkeys and the eay they interpret words and labels, this should not be given the label Evidence".

> One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record.

I think this is good to keep in mind but let's be real, humans have tended to make hierarchy be one of those things they push backwards in time. So yeah, it's best to be as impartial as possible but in this case, the authors are the ones contradicting the common anachronism.

I find it baffling how some archaeologists draw detailed narratives of ancient life from just one, often ambiguous, piece of evidence.

Early dinosaur reconstructions (and paleo human ones) are similarly baffling. Many current ones too.

> absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But it is. It's not _proof_ of absence, but it's certainly _circumstantial_ evidence of absence.

> people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record.

Well, ok, but that's not the same as opposing the principle you cited.

> tempting to read this as evidence for having no hierarchy

You're again switching up arguments. What you're demonstrating is that evidence to the absence of some expression of X is weaker than evidence for the absence of any aspect of X. (And at the same time conceding that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.)

Yeah I'm not sure what the narrative is supposed to mean, it sounds like trying to make more out of this discovery than it is.

How about "This town built a drainage system on its own, independently from other towns"? Sounds more factual / less wooly.

Hard to get tenure if that’s what you lead with!

+1. I'm a massive free market guy but even I draw the line at infrastructure, health and education. Too many externalities.

That water infrastructure was built by a government. Especially in china

Making the strong claim that this infrastructure was for a fact built by a government is not merited, unless you have some compelling evidence?

I am also not sure if the article's claim is merited - it sounds a little too convenient and I struggle to find the watertight case for it in the article. It could be a case of us simply not knowing either way, and thus should avoid making a strong claim for either A or not(A).

Elders of family in a way are also a government

Yes, some backward nations still have kings, but thats a bit dated.

Co-ops build stuff like this all the time in rural areas.

Maybe they used slime mold to plan the water networks! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GwKuFREOgmo

>I'm a bit puzzled. This seems like it's trying to push for a narrative (communal planning) when the issue here is that there is a lack of evidence of a centralized one. I'm not sure how lack of proof of that will imply the other.

Perhaps because of the law of excluded middle. It's either communal or centralized...

In the academic context, it seems to be using an archaeological example to push back against the theory of 'hydraulic despotism' i.e. that an empire could arise by controlling access to water, and evidence of that would be that the empire had complete control of the water system:

> "Among the prominent scholarly advancements on water and society, the hydraulic origins of state and coercive power proposed and developed by Wittfogel and some other scholars have come under rigorous scrutiny in recent studies in East Asia and beyond..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire

This has some present-day relevance, as there's an ongoing battle over privatization schemes for water systems which would tend to place control of water in the hands of the ruling oligarch class, from Enron's Azurix c.2000 up to present-day efforts related to how to rebuild America's aging water infrastructure e.g.

https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/presidential-council-advises-...

Note that this study seems to address flood control more than anything else; hydraulic despotism might have been more of a feature of dry land irrigation-based civilizations.

Outside the western ivory tower arguments of hydraulic despotism, I wonder how well the claims made by these Chinese scholars working at state-supported Chinese academic institutions reinforce the narratives favored by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in reference to history of Chinese lands and peoples. They seem to toe the party line very well at first glance.

Large scale water management I see as human instinct. It is exhibited by a group of kids playing in a creek.

Imagine how cultures could be built up simply on water management.

Finally a recent culture with a flood story has a funny twist. None of the normal words for flood like events were used to describe the event. Instead there is a a unique word that describes the event and is used in one other location in the whole collection. The second occurrence doesn't describe a flood at all.

I only bring up the ideas becuase I think communal water management is fun and if there are always enough resources could be communal with each member doing their small part for the whole.

The second is just how big water catastrophe was in the older worlds.

I included a link to a reference. (not the reference I wanted the one I could find).

https://reformedreader.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/the-hebrew-t...

I think everyone else is puzzled why you're asking a question about the scientific method here when clearly the topic at hand is whether Pingliangtai proves or disproves your favorite political ideology.