Communicating cooperative intentions drove the selection of collective ritual in hominins

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Furthermore, chorusing directed at other chimpanzee groups also honestly signals group size, as suggested by Wilson et al. (2007). This is an interesting instance of signaling that may have parallels in human song and dance (Hagen & Bryant, 2003), although it is far from our model of within-group communication.

2 Note that in our response, we relaxed the self-imposed constrain from the target article to draw evidence only from the African continent. While relaxing this constrain adds another level of speculation into our model (i.e., we need to assume that traits inferred from the European archaeological record were also present in Africa), it is necessary to relax this constrain in order to support our response to the raised critique with some illustrations. Unfortunately, the African archaeological record is often too sparse to draw meaningful conclusions about specific questions (e.g., how risky were paleolithic hunts). Although we rely on these analogies in our reply and they must be taken with a grain of salt, wherever possible, we also tried to include the African archaeological record.

3 For a review of several younger European sites (Middle Palaeolitic, dating from 300 ka to 50 ka) where the evidence for cooperative hunting of reindeer, bison, and horses is more robust, and estimates of the numbers of hunters are even higher, see Gaudzinski-Windheuser & Kindler (2012).

4 For example, warfare among Turkana pastoralists living in northwest Kenya reaches a lethality of around 1 %, and warring parties may involve up to several hundred warriors (Mathew & Boyd, 2014). As expected, many combatants do free-ride by passive engagement or desertion.

5 Mindful of the whole spectrum of hunter-gatherer lifeways from egalitarian-nomadic to hierarchical-sedentary modes (Kelly, 2013) and cautious of the pitfalls of simplistic comparisons, dependency of political complexity and societal stratification on newer technologies still compels us to deem mobile foragers to be the best living models of Paleolithic foragers (Wilson & Glowacki, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the generous support from the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) [18-18316S].