ABSTRACT
Humans evolved in very small societies, but over the last 10,000 years, the size and scale of human societies has increased to the point where humans now rival other megasocieties among very small animals. How could such a large animal like a human primate create societies composed of millions, if not billions, of inhabitants. Insects are able to do so because they are so small and their behaviors are under tight genetic regulation, whereas humans are large mammals whose societies are, at best, only loosely and indirectly under genetic regulation. We need to go, once again, back to the evolution of primates and to hominin evolution as a special type of great ape to understand how it is possible for such a large animal as humans to live to megasocieties. For the behavioral capacity to do so is ancient, built into the great-ape line and now available to humans; hence, once again, the biology of humans will allow for increased understanding in the new evolutionary sociology of how an evolved great ape can create such larger sociocultural formations.
