Part II. A. Primeval Forager/Scavenger "Bands". The Psychohistorical-Dialectical Equation of Human-Social Formations 'Meta-Evolution'.

Full Title:  The Psychohistorical-Dialectical Equation of Human-Social Formations ‘Meta-Evolution’.  Part II. A. "Bands".



Dear Reader,

The present blog-entry is the third in a series of blog-entries presenting a Marxian, psychohistorical-dialectical model of human history, focusing on the human "social formations(s)" [cf. Marx] aspects of that history.


Regards,

Miguel





Part II. A.  Epoch t = 0:  Point of Departure -- “ Bands ” --

Forager “Bands” form the Given, the Ground, the Premise, the Base, and the Root
of this Model, and of Its Entire ‘Temporal Qualo-Fractal’ Edifice.

Formulaic Summary for the “Bands” «arché».  ‘Ideographized’ / ‘ideogramized’, “shorthand” summary of the narrative rendition below.

[in the following formula, b denotes the ‘socio-ontological’ category of [proto-]human forager “bands] --

Epoch t = 0:  m>-|-<0    =   < b >²⁰    =   < b >¹   =    

< b >   =   b.





In his book Non-Zero:  The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright describes the hunter-gather “band” stage of human-social formation as follows:
 

“The ancestral cultures of all modern societies were hunter-gatherer cultures.”

“Archaeologists have found their remnants—their spearheads and stone knives, the fireside bones of their prey—across Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas.”

“But archaeologists can't reconstruct the social lives of these peoples in much detail.”

“The closest we can come to that is studying the few existing hunter-gatherer societies and reading accounts of how other hunter-gatherers lived before industrial society changed them.”

“Over the past two centuries, anthropologists and other travelers have documented hunter-gatherer life on all continents, ranging from the Chenchu of India to the Chukchi of Siberia, from the !Kung San of southern Africa to the Ainu of Japan, from the aborigines of Australia to the Eskimo of the Arctic, from the Fuegians of South America to the Shoshone of North America.”

“To study these vanishing—mostly vanished—ways of life is to dimly glimpse the early stages of our own cultural evolution.”

"The Shoshone and Fuegians observed by Twain and Darwin weren’t “living fossils”—they were anatomically modern human beings, just like you or me, but their cultures were living fossils [M.D.:  in F.E.D.’s terminology, they were phenomic living fossils, not genomic living fossils.].

"Mark Twain is not the only person to have commented on the rudimentary social structure of the Shoshone, who inhabited the Great Basin of North America, around present-day Nevada."

"One book on native American cultures discusses them under the heading “The Irreducible Minimum of Human Society.”   

"The largest stable unit of social organization was the family . . .”

"The Shoshone did spend part of the year in multifamily “camps.”   

"But the camps were less cohesive than, say, those of the !Kung San, the much-studied hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari desert in Africa."

"For months at a time Shoshone families would go it alone, roaming the desert with a bag and a digging stick, searching for roots and seeds.”

[ Robert Wright, Non-Zero:  The Logic of Human Destiny, Pantheon Books [NY:  2000], pp. 19-20, emphases by M.D.; see also http://nonzero.org/chap2.htm ].

In terms of historical ‘‘‘Real time’’’, the Whole-Number model-epoch from t = 0 to t = 1, for Homo sapiens, during which the highest form of human social formation extant is believed to have been only the foraging, ~ single-family “bands”, lasted from the first emergence of Homo sapiens, circa 200,000 B.C.E., to the emergence of ‘multi-band’ “camps”, perhaps circa 100,000 B.C.E. -- a duration of ~ 100,000 Earth-years.