could be brought into play; that is, if an entirely new group dynamic could be established. For example, under the auspices of the larger grouping entity, smaller groups may well have entered into non-competition agreements with respect to the available feeding and hunting territories. Through such accommodations, each smaller group had primarily to deal with other species within the ecosystem and less with direct conflict with other human groups.

Clans exist in the current world as social groupings that encompass multiple extended families, all of which tend to have significant genetic commonality. So, a clan is typically viewed as a super family grouping, but one that relies upon different traits of the individual humans within it to effect its grouping mechanisms. The establishment and maintenance of clans requires greater facilities on the part of the individual human, than does the establishment and maintenance of the basic, nuclear family. A necessary such trait that offers enhanced capabilities for building a larger group is the ability to recognize and pass along the successful behaviors of the individual and the group. This facility is presented as mimetic learning on the part of the individual human by Merlin Donald in A Mind So Rare. We’ll consider this mechanism in more detail in Chapter 8. Mimetic learning is the ability to recognize in others the successful application of complex behaviors and to disperse that learning through a process of repetitive imitation of the original behavior. This ability would, for example, be extremely valuable in the development and propagation of tools that allow humans to exert a stronger influence on their physical ecosystem than they could accomplish through their purely physical body based facilities.

A clan, based on closely associated families, represents a more concentrated gene pool than is present in large grouping mechanisms. As a consequence, groupings of this size will suffer the misfortunes of a lack of genetic diversity. They have a more restricted facility for genetic adaptation than might be the case for larger groups; negative characteristics are more likely to present and thereby prove detrimental to the group. So, there are, or were, very likely multi-level selection mechanisms at work in this regards.

Tribes

The tribe is the next extension of the grouping mechanisms of the human species and is, like the clan relative to a single family, largely characterized as a larger group, or collection of groups, that can still present coordinated activities that benefit both the group and the individual members of the group.

A hypothesis formulated in particular by Steven Mithen in The Prehistory of the Mind is that the need for a larger group might have come from the entry of man into the savannah at a time when the forest receded. The larger group was more capable to fight the new predators of vast expanded spaces. A theory that many may find extravagant at the first mention by Terence McKenna, in Food of the Gods, is that the new social order was facilitated by the discovery of new intoxicant mushrooms, a point we’ll come back to in Chapter 5. Within the human species one would consider that a new group or a new grouping mechanism evolved from the old, perhaps to replace the old or perhaps to subsume the old.

As the species evolved further, tribes emerged as a larger, more effective grouping mechanism. It was perhaps in this environment that the individual physiology extended beyond mimetic capabilities to symbolic capabilities, as presented by Terrence W. Deacon in The Symbolic Species. Within a tribal social order, the group is sufficiently extended such that to communicate

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