The human flock .. how our societies are created, flourish, and fall (Part 1) - Mark Moffitt

Translation: Nayef Al-Yasini This book attempts to answer a pivotal question: why have humans alone been able to reach this level of social organization that nothing else among other species of creatures can match? It is an exploration of human society from its earliest origins to the great civilizations present on our planet today. It shows how humans have managed to establish and maintain societies of sizes and complexities unmatched in the animal world. There are two fundamental ideas on which Mark Moffett based his book: the first is that human societies are more similar to social insect societies than we think or wish to believe; the second is the unique and complex form of human identity that determines who belongs to our societies and who is a stranger to them. The importance of the second idea is that all other animals that build societies, such as elephants and primates, rely on personal recognition, and thus the number of individuals in their societies remains limited to this condition, about two hundred individuals. But humans and social insects, like ants, are distinguished by their ability to live in societies with no identity markers, and therefore their societies can reach enormous sizes without splitting or disintegrating. With the emergence of agriculture, stability, accumulation of possessions, technological development, and the increasing number of society members, equality declined, and leaders appeared, whose intervention became necessary for organization and conflict resolution. Here also arose the need to set markers that determine who belongs to a particular society and who does not, and how to deal with strangers. While ants rely on scent to distinguish members of their society, humans have a wide array of identity markers, including language, clothing, and flags. Moffett takes the reader on this book on a comprehensive, chronologically ordered tour of the deep history of humanity—from primates to hunter-gatherers—and branches out into related fields of knowledge such as archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and psychology to cover the points discussed.