Social Organization and Male–Male Relationships

Recent research and thought in archeology have provided stronger hypotheses about the social organization of early hominins. This includes the origins of multilevel societies, that is, societies that contain a hierarchy of varying social ties connecting constituent individuals and subgroups. Such societies are characteristic of humans with their families; bands or villages; tribes or chiefdoms; and provinces or states. Some baboons also live in multilevel societies, which suggests that this form of social organization has roots in early hominin evolution. Baboons provide a series of potential models and analogies relevant to reconstructing the origin of hominin multilevel societies. Four baboon species are organized into troops composed of multiple males and females in all age categories. Two species have multilevel societies. These variations suggest two major concomitants of a hominin transition from troop to multilevel society. First, philopatry (the tendency of one sex to remain in the birth group) shifted from females to males. Second, relations among males became more tolerant and cooperative. This scenario is pertinent to theories about male solidarity in humans.