Institute for Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA.
Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Evol Anthropol. 2022 Jul;31(4):175-198. doi: 10.1002/evan.21944. Epub 2022 Apr 29.
We present evidence that people in small-scale mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts and constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, formed enduring alliances, and established trading networks. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small-group interactions. Instead, large-scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.
我们提供的证据表明，小规模流动狩猎采集社会中的人们大量合作生产集体物品。觅食者参与大规模的公共狩猎，并建造共享的资本设施；他们共同投资改善当地环境；他们参与战争，形成持久的联盟，并建立贸易网络。大规模的集体行动在生存中经常起着至关重要的作用。公共物品的提供涉及许多个人的合作，因此每个人只做了很小的贡献。这一证据表明，在包含人类进化史大部分的更新世社会中发生了大规模合作，因此，在全新世生产食物的社会中，大规模合作不是由于仅在小群体互动中形成的进化心理，而是需要被解释为一种适应，可能根植于人类生物学、语法语言、认知能力的提高和累积文化适应的独特特征。
