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New Study: Democracy Might Not Have Been Born in Greece

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A group of anthropologists have suggested that democracy might not have been born in ancient GreeceĀ but millions of years ago, after the invention of the first stone weapons, a fact that played a significant role in human evolution.
The new study saidĀ that human political systems first appeared and evolved when our primate ancestors started living in groups. However, democracyĀ made its first appearance after the invention of stone tools that were used for hunting. These groups may not have established a political system equivalent to what we call democracy today, however their system was definitely egalitarian.
The invention of weapons undermined the social hierarchy that used to exist in primate societies, where the leaders were always more physically powerful. The weapon gave even the most weak citizens the ability to harm or even kill any dominant figure.
ā€œThe successful sociopolitical structure that ultimately replaced the ancestral social dominance hierarchy was an egalitarian political system in which lethal weapons made possible group control of leaders, and group success depended on the ability of leaders to persuade and of followers to contribute to a consensual decision process,ā€ wrote Herbert Gintis, an external professor of economics and behavioral science at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, in his paper, published at the Current Anthropology journal.
The study could change our understanding of politics development in human society. The more complex political systems were thought to have been established in more recent societies, while democracy is widely assumed to have been born in ancient Greece in the 5th century BC.
Professor Gintis, Professor Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California, and Professor Carel van Shaik, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, noted: ā€œThis scenario has important implications for political theory and social policy because it suggests that humans are predisposed to seek individual dominance when this is not excessively costly and also to form coalitions to depose pretenders to power. Moreover, humans are much more capable of forming large, powerful and sustainable coalitions than other primates because of our enhanced cooperative psychological propensities. Such coalitions also served to reinforce the moral order as well as to promote cooperation in hunting, warding off predators, and raiding other human bands.ā€

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