The Upper Bound of Hunter-Gatherers

The View from Oregon – 338: Friday 25 April 2025

A generalization of the problem of the lower bound of civilization (newsletter no. 335) is the problem of the lower bound of any social formation whatever, and, complementary to this, the generalization of the problem of the upper bound of civilization (newsletter no. 337) is the problem of the upper bound of any social formation whatever. A further generalization would be a recognition that any social formation has a lower bound and an upper bound, yielding an effective institutional range between the two bounds, but this generalization is rather an individual thesis about institutions that should be separately demonstrated. Let’s call this the bounded institution thesis, i.e., the thesis that all social institutions have a lower bound and an upper bound. It’s probably too much of a generalization to maintain that all institutions are bounded; we should take the question one institution at a time, recognizing four obvious permutations:

1. Neither a lower bound nor an upper bound

2. A lower bound but no upper bound

3. No lower bound but an upper bound

4. Both a lower bound and an upper bound

We can call institutions answering to 1 “unbounded,” those falling under 2 and 3 “partially bounded,” and 4 “bounded.” In my previous newsletter I discussed civilization as a bounded institution, but given the Kardashev quote that I included, we can see that Kardashev regarded civilization as a partially bounded institution. If, however, we regard Kardashevian supercivilizations as post-civilizational social institutions, qualitatively distinct from civilizations simpliciter, then civilization is a bounded institution but supercivilizations are partially bounded: civilizations simpliciter are the lower bound of supercivilizations, and supercivilizations have no upper bound. However, we could introduce another distinction here between intrinsic bounds and extrinsic bounds. Civilizations or supercivilizations may have no intrinsic upper bound, but nevertheless be constrained by an extrinsic upper bound.

What about other human institutions? Given that one of the definitions that civilization that I use is that civilization is an institution of institutions, civilization comprises a great many subsidiary institutions, and this isn’t what interests me at the moment. By “other institutions” in this context I mean over-arching institutions that define the lifeways of entire human populations. There have been only a few institutions in this sense. Recurring to the classic taxonomy of Lewis Henry Morgan, there are three: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Other more recent accounts might yield another number, but it will still be a rather lower number—probably less than a dozen. Condorcet’s stages of human development were ten in number—still less than a dozen—and most accounts of cultural evolutionism stop short of what Condorcet laid out. I would divide civilization into the major types of civilization, which to date are agricultural and industrial. Before this we have the far longer period of hunter-gatherer nomadism. From the first stone tools of human ancestors about two million years ago, it was a long and slow development to arrive at the kind of sophisticated hunter-gatherer way of life we find in the upper Paleolithic, when human beings have harnessed a suite of technologies like sewing form-fitting clothing, flint knapping, the bow and arrow, allowing us to expand throughout the last glacial maximum.

Eventually, and sooner rather than later (“sooner” given the appropriate time scale), this sophisticated hunter-gatherer nomadism began to cross the threshold of rudimentary agriculture with intensive gathering, semi-permanent campsites, and transhumance pastoralism. The increasingly sophisticated hunting and gathering methods of the upper Paleolithic prepared our ancestors for the kind of daily use of technology that would be part and parcel of life in an agricultural society. There’s any number of ways to draw the distinctions here, or to identify transitional periods, so, keeping it simple, I’ll just focus on hunter-gatherer nomadism, agricultural civilization, industrialized civilization, and possibly supercivilizations. Implicitly, I guess, my previous inquiry was into the lower and upper bounds of industrialized civilization, because that is the human condition at present, but this inquiry suggests the problems of the boundedness (or unboundedness) of agricultural civilizations and hunter-gatherer nomadism. I’ve touched on the boundedness of agricultural civilization over the years, but I haven’t previously identified this inquiry as such. In particular, I’ve pursued the thought experiment of an agricultural civilization on a climatologically stable world that doesn’t make the breakthrough to industrialization. How long can this civilization endure (what is its upper bound in time)? How large can this civilization become (what is its upper bound in space)? How large of a population could such a civilization comprise (what is its upper population bound)?

It has only just now struck me that we can ask these questions about hunter-gatherer nomadism, and, once we ask this question, we see hunter-gatherer nomadism in a somewhat different light. Like all human social formations, our long nomadic history had an even longer prehistory—the long, slow development of human beings from tool using ancestors to the sophisticated hunter-gatherer nomadism that I mentioned above. Because this way of life developed organically over time, it wasn’t a planned development, even though it was guided by human intelligence throughout. This suggests the possibility of consciously planned and organized nomadism. Assuming a rationally managed plan, how high of a population density of human beings could be maintained on Earth exclusively as hunter-gatherers? I’m not talking about hunter-gatherers in their natural condition, but an optimized hunter-gatherer society. For example, how much food could be culled from massive herds of herbivores that wouldn’t negatively impact their population? This question isn’t unanswerable, but a lot of research would need to be done to adequately answer it. A realistic estimate would take time and effort, making this a good assignment.

Certain stipulations would need to be made, and conventions established. For example, the kind of reindeer herding practiced by the Sami is usually regarded as nomadism; although the people follow the herds, they don’t control the reproduction of the herd, so the reindeer aren’t domesticated. This would be a good convention with any prey species: the species can be systematically exploited, but human beings would not be a part of the selection of the species (as we become the selection agent when we domesticate a species). Transhumance is a gray area, since it could be practiced in a way that meant human beings controlled the gene flow of the population, or without this. Given this convention, suppose that tranhumance is allowed without genetic control of the herded species.

My guess is that a rationally organized hunter-gatherer population could support significant human populations—higher populations than were, in fact, supported by our organically emergent hunter-gatherer societies. Our rationally planned nomadism would take into account damaging the resources upon which prey species depend, and not over-exploiting them, so that the hunter-gatherer population could, in principle, continue in this way in perpetuity. Again, as with my thought experiment of an agricultural civilization on a climatologically stable planet, we assume a largely stable planet in which this activity could go on for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, tens of millions of years, or hundreds of millions of years. Would it go on? What emergents would appear from a ten million year old optimized hunter-gatherer social formation? This question is almost as incomprehensible as Sagan’s frequently invoked million-year-old supercivilization.

Although we do have a record of literally hundreds of thousands of years of human hunter-gatherer nomadism on Earth, which produced masterpieces like the cave paintings of France and Spain, we can imagine this social formation rationally directed and maintained, and allowed to develop for another order of magnitude or two in time. How would such populations choose to make use of their time and resources? Would there be developments in all the arts and in many forms of technology, or would some project emerge narrower than a spectrum-wide development of human talents? Would mythology grow into something greater, or would it remain the limited affair it was for our ancestors? The conditions that I have stipulated do not exclude the possibility of the development of written language or other record keeping devices, nor the invention of ink and paper. Insofar as our rational nomads are still nomadic, everything would have to remain mobile, but that’s not that much of a constraint. When I visited the Viking ship museum in Oslo I was quite taken by the artifacts dug up with the ships, which were made to be portable, including a rack to hang a kettle over a fire, with feet made to stick in the ground, and a bed made to be taken apart and put back together. Obviously these things made an impression on me since they remain so prominent in my memory. Add another million years of development and what would we see?

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