"(...)reverse dominance can only come out of a revolution"

" Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the forest - an absolutely lovely, and relatively simple read - argues that wherever you have dominance you will get counter-dominance. In other words, if you are a monkey and someone is pushing you out of the way, you are not going to be too happy about it and you will push back.

" What Boehm argues is that counter-dominance is necessarily collective. If you have a dominant ape or monkey - usually male, of course - pushing others around, those that are being pushed around, in resisting, are going to need each other, to need more solidarity. And what this book argues is brilliant: that at a certain point in the course of human evolution counter-dominance arrived at a tipping point where it became what Boehm calls “reverse dominance”.

" The first hunter-gatherers live by reverse dominance. This means there is something dominant, but it is the collective. Only the collective is allowed to use violence. This is the only approved form of violence in the hunter-gatherer community, and it is used to counter individual violence. So counter-dominance culminates in reverse dominance, where everyone is striving, in a kind of competitive system, to prove how useful they are to the collective. Boehm argues that this hunter-gatherer reverse dominance can only come out of a revolution.

" The arguments around the emergence of early human society all gravitate around the idea of the minimisation of violence, and increasing cooperation. But the establishment of human levels of cooperation meant overthrowing the previous dominance of the individual by the use of violence against everybody else."
(...)
" So what Engels is saying is that - instead of doing what the Darwinians do when looking at ape society to find intimations of human society - we must look for the negation of human society, since human society emerged out of the consistent negation of what was there previously. He more or less goes on to say what I am advocating here: “For evolution out of the animal stage, for the accomplishment of the greatest advance known to nature, an additional element was needed: the replacement of the individual’s inadequate power of defence by the united strength and joint effort of the horde.
(...)
" Essentially, as I mentioned earlier, in the chimpanzee social system, as soon as the female shows indications that she may be fertile all the males go on a rampage, fighting for access to her. In the course of human evolution ovulation has been concealed. Why is that? What is the point? If you are the pope, and think sex is only for reproduction, it does not make any sense to conceal the correct time for getting pregnant. Well, the human female hides that moment. Why?
Because in the case of the human female there was no desire to save time on sex, to have it quickly in order to get pregnant and get on with other things. Instead they aimed to spend time on sex, because if the male is spending time on sex maybe he will do other useful things as well. The more you can ‘waste time’ on sex, the more energy can be extracted from the male.
(...)
"And the more the female concealed ovulation, the more it forced the male to hang around if he was to have any chance of making her pregnant. So concealed ovulation made a lot of sense.”

- Chris Knight

Sex and the human revolution - Chris Knight http://libcom.org/library/sex-human-revolution-chris-knight

Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm