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the infant becomes an adult person. Obviously, relative to the wild dog, the human requires some type of intensive support infrastructure for a long period of time, many years in fact. Small wonder, then, that the social environments of humans, from which this long-term support derives, are quite distinct from the lower animals.

The infant bonobo (Pan paniscus) has quite similar development characteristics to the human, with the exception that from birth it possesses the physical dexterity to grasp its mother’s fur in order to be carried about the arboreal environment in which these close relatives of the human species live. They are considered close relatives in that they shared a common ancestor species about 6 million years ago. Beyond this earlier (relative to humans) ability to attach itself to its mother and hence travel about, the infant bonobo develops in a manner and time frame that bears significant similarities to that of an infant human. Frans de Waal has shown in Chimpanzee Politics and Bonobo (with Frans Lanting) that the base family groupings of bonobo and chimpanzees bear similarity to that for humans. It is an obvious divergence of their respective evolutionary paths that humans went beyond the basic extended family in developing the mechanisms to support more complex groupings while these apes did not.

As the human species emerged, the basic family group provided the support infrastructure in which the young could survive and develop. The most basic requirements for this survival were safety and protection from the elements and from predators along with the provision of food and water. In a hunter gatherer environment, a reasonable assessment of the value of the group in any form is the ability to focus effort and resources to the most pressing problem at any point in time, and the ability to share the results of the attempt to solve these problems across the entire group. A mother or some other caretaker could remain with an infant while others in the group searched for food. On finding food, it could then be shared with the rest of the group. If the group could adapt to the physical ecosystem, then it could optimize its prospects for finding food, or shelter or safety, perhaps by subdividing the group. If one hunting party found game, then the entire group might eat. If one hunting party failed, then perhaps the entire group did not have to starve. If a hunting party was out on the hunt, then others might remain with the young as protection. The grouping mechanism of the extended family unit was beneficial as long as the physical ecosystem could support it.

In a hunter-gatherer system, the physical ecosystem almost certainly places a limit on the size of group that can be supported in the basic mode; that is, in the mode of searching for sustenance and protection. Individual members of the group, or other small units, might tend to split off to form other groups or to integrate themselves into other existing groups. In any case, many groups would likely find themselves derived from a single, or small number of base family units and hence might offer some semblance of multi-group cohesion; essentially providing ground for a larger scale grouping mechanism in the form of a clan.

Clans

During the human species emergent period, as the extended family unit exceeded the nominal size that can be supported by its geographic extent within the physical ecosystem, the group may have tended to become less advantageous, and rather began to pay something of a price for its excessive size, and may have divided into multiple units in order for each smaller, derivative group to retain the competitive advantage offered by the family grouping mechanism. Over evolutionary time, it may well have transpired that multi-level selection benefits could accrue to even larger, multiple related family units if some new means of coordination of group activities

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