The significance of environmental factors is best illustrated by the process that
changed small forager societies to big-man tribal societies and then to civilizations
and empires. Before the invention of agriculture and the beginning of the Neolithic
era, groups were of a limited size. Groups could not have grown too big mainly
because resources were usually scarce or insufficient to maintain a big group of
foragers, who seasonally consume the resources in their proximity and move on to a
new area, and because bigger groups required harder work to sustain (e.g. for food
supply) and entailed more conflicts (Boehm 1999: 76; Kelly 1995; Lee 1979).
After the Neolithic era has begun, small egalitarian forager groups settled
down and started cultivating plants and animals for subsistence. Boehm defines these
societies as tribesmen and says that "they have continued the political approach of
hunter-gatherers under radically different ecological circumstances" (1999: 90).
Tribesmen persisted with their denial of strong authoritative leadership and prevented
it from developing. As a consequence they were "prone to raiding, feuding, and
territorial warfare" and they were pushed into forming intertribal coalitions (ibid, 91).
The transition from a confederation of tribes to chiefdoms and kingdoms was
accelerated by the competition between tribes and confederation of tribes, and this
eventually gave rise to a strong and powerful central authority. Indeed, some of these
chiefdoms and kingdoms eventually became the kernels of the first civilizations (ibid,
97).
The transition to sedentary life had a tremendous impact on other factors, such
as the growing number of group members, and the ability to have an intimate
knowledge of, and communicate with, all group members. The transition from the
Paleolithic era to the Neolithic era entailed far reaching changes in environmental
conditions: social, institutional, technological and cultural. These changes resulted in
7
For an illuminating example of the transition from an egalitarian tribe to an hierarchical state, see
Boehm's description of the Montenegrin Serbs (1999: 98-101)
10
Convention