It seems humans really are the cooperative ape. A nomadic society in east Africa that lacks a centralised government can still regularly muster armies of several hundred warriors, most of whom are strangers to each other.
We are the only species prepared to cooperate in large numbers with unrelated individuals. The feeling was that such behaviour was a recent development, requiring a centralised political authority. Now it seems possible that such cooperation could have predated these organisational structures and may have featured in numerous large prehistoric societies hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Sarah Mathew and Robert Boyd of the University of California in Los Angeles interviewed 118 Turkana men. An ethnic group from east Africa, the Turkana live in small households that regularly move around to find fresh pasture for their animals. If a small group of Turkana men want to seize livestock from other ethnic groups they can rally a raiding party of several hundred men through word of mouth.
The interviews revealed that these raids are risky – on a given raid each man has a 1.1 per cent chance of being killed – and some men are reluctant to participate. On 43 per cent of raids, at least one man deserted before combat, and in 45 per cent of battles someone behaved in a cowardly fashion. Such "cheats" are informally judged by the community, and may be tied to a tree and beaten. Mathew and Boyd speculate that this punishment helps drive cooperation in the absence of centralised government.
Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico agrees that punishment may have spurred the development of large-scale cooperation. He says this cooperation may have set modern humans on the path to success.
Source New Scientist
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