We present evidence that people in small-scale mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods.

Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts and constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, formed enduring alliances, and established trading networks. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution.

This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small-group interactions. Instead, large-scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.

[Keywords: collective action, communal foraging, cooperation, foragers, hunter-gatherers, mismatch hypothesis, public goods] …Foragers worked together with hundreds of others in communal hunts and the construction of shared capital facilities like drivelines [cf. Brink2005], hunting nets and fish weirs. They made shared investments in improving the local environment through burning, irrigation and other habitat modifications, and they participated in warfare, peace-making and trade on tribal scales. In many foraging societies, such large-scale collective action played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of hundreds of individuals, so relatedness was very low, and the incremental effect of each person on the outcome was small. We also review archaeological evidence that suggests that Pleistocene foragers cooperated in sizable groups as early as 400 ka.

…Aboriginal foragers also used various kinds of nets as concentrating devices in communal hunts. For large terrestrial prey, like kangaroos and emus, a number of loosely woven linear nets with a combined length of about 1 km were arranged to form a large semi-circle. One group of hunters held the nets, while the rest, often including men, women and children would drive the animals toward them. Resulting yields could be very large.^79,80

Much time and effort went into production of the large nets used in communal drives. For example, one early account 80 reports that a 7.2 × 4.6 m kangaroo net took a local camp 3 weeks to make. This is consistent with modern experiments. A 52 × 0.8 m emu net in the South Australian Museum contains 350 m of 5 mm cordage and would have taken 4 weeks to construct.⁷⁹ These estimates do not include the time and effort needed to acquire and process the fiber and spin it into cordage.

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