Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Jul 12;108(28):11375-80. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1105604108. Epub 2011 Jun 13.
Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur, and are punished by community-imposed sanctions, including collective corporal punishment and fines. Furthermore, Turkana norms governing warfare benefit the ethnolinguistic group, a population of a half-million people, at the expense of smaller social groupings. These results challenge current views that punishment is unimportant in small-scale societies and that human cooperation evolved in small groups of kin and familiar individuals. Instead, these results suggest that cooperation at the larger scale of ethnolinguistic units enforced by third-party sanctions could have a deep evolutionary history in the human species.
理解小规模社会中的合作和惩罚对于解释人类合作的起源至关重要。我们研究了东非政治上非集中化、平等主义、游牧的图尔卡纳社会的战争。基于对 88 次最近袭击的代表性样本，我们表明，图尔卡纳人通过惩罚搭便车者，在相当大的规模上维持着高代价的战斗合作，至少在一定程度上是这样。袭击队由数百名战士组成，参与者不是亲属或日常互动者。战士们冒着巨大的死亡风险，产生集体利益。怯懦和开小差时有发生，并受到社区实施的制裁，包括集体体罚和罚款。此外，图尔卡纳战争规范以牺牲较小的社会群体为代价，使拥有 50 万人口的民族受益。这些结果挑战了当前的观点，即惩罚在小规模社会中不重要，人类合作是在亲属和熟悉的个体组成的小群体中进化而来的。相反，这些结果表明，由第三方制裁执行的更大规模的民族语言单位的合作可能在人类物种中有一个深远的进化历史。
