Reddit.com (July 23, 2026)

You can even tell her today that I said so while she’s stuffing her face in a leftovers quinoa bowl.

So, I’ve railed a bit about corn in a recent post about agriculture. And typically, people wonder how much I’m being serious.

I’m an Ohioan with a degree from the University of Nebraska. You bet your ass I’m serious about corn.

Look man, I get it. Agriculture is supposedly the “civilizing” process of humanity, the best thing since before sliced bread. But it’s also the biggest trick The Man ever pulled on you.

And I mean, The Man. The Big Man, to be precise. Because it wasn’t always this way. We used to be civilized. Actually civilized. You know, before the whole “civilizing.”

Sorry, let me back up.

Somewhere around 13,000 years ago, a man trudged across what is now Coshocton County, Ohio, carrying forty pounds of high-quality Wyandotte chert. He had walked roughly 280 miles, as the crow flies, from a quarry in southern Indiana, on foot, through a landscape that looked like northern Ontario, but, you know, not on fire. It was a post-glacial tundra, dwarf spruces dotting a landscape with the occasional giant sloth terrorizing a mammoth. He was heading back to a camp of maybe twenty people who would be very happy to see the flint and profoundly uninterested in hearing about how hard the walk was. 

Because that was the rule. You did not talk about how hard the walk was. You did not suggest that carrying forty pounds of rock across Ohio entitled you to a larger share of the elk. 

You shut your fucking mouth, you handed over your fucking stone, and if you so much as hinted that your contribution made you special, twenty people who loved you would roast you until your ego was medium-rare and then keep going until your ass was jerky. Sometimes, literally.

This, my friend, was communism at its most primitive (you know, without surplus, or a state, or an ideology, or anything that actually makes communism “communism.”). It is the earliest governance model in Eastern North America. And it lasted longer than every system that replaced it, combined. 

So when your boss complains about you arriving five minutes late again because traffic was a nightmare, remind yourself: just about any other time in Eastern North American history, he’d be slow-roasting his chestnuts over an open fire.

For roughly ten thousand years, from the first Paleoindians through the end of the Late Archaic (approximately 13,000 to 3,000 years ago), the people who lived in what would become Ohio ran their societies with a political technology so aggressively, obstinately simple that modern political scientists barely recognize it as politics at all. 

The system was that they made damn sure nobody was ever in charge.

Then somebody planted some seeds, and the whole thing fell apart.

The Part Where the Org Chart Is Just a Circle with a Knife Behind It

The formal name for what these people practiced is “egalitarian band-level society.” Elman Service coined the classification in 1962, slotting it at the bottom of his four-stage political evolution ladder: a band, a tribe, a chiefdom, and a state. Bands were small, kin-based, mobile groups of twenty to fifty people organized around extended families, with no permanent political offices and no formalized authority. Leadership (to the extent anyone used that word) meant a couple of senior adults whose opinions carried weight because they were good at finding food, resolving arguments, or both.

However, what Service got wrong and was roundly corrected for in the profession afterward was that these were societies whose entire political sophistication was aimed at one objective: preventing political sophistication from happening. Christopher Boehm, who spent decades studying the phenomenon across dozens of ethnographically documented foraging societies, landed on the term “reverse dominance hierarchy,” which is just what we call Femdom Night at Club Eros.

In a reverse dominance hierarchy, the group collectively dominates any individual who tries to dominate the group. Everyone gangs up on whoever had the poor judgment to start acting like a leader. The many rule the one, and “the one” is whichever poor bastard stuck his neck out. Enforcement was practical, escalating, and, when necessary, permanent. Boehm catalogued four primary leveling tools ranging from gossip, to ridicule, to disobedience, and finally ostracism. 

Imagine it like your traditional high school cat fight:

• Step One: people talk shit about you behind your back. 
• Step Two: they talk shit about you to your face. 
• Step Three: they stopped doing what you told them to do. 
• Step Four: they threw you out of the group entirely, which in a world without permanent shelter or agriculture (and less than approximately 650 people living in all of Ohio) was a polite way of killing someone.

In some documented cases, the group skipped step four and went straight to step five, which was just killing you in a less polite way. Like slow-roasting your chestnuts.

The !Kung San of the Kalahari, one of the most exhaustively studied foraging peoples on earth, applied this through a ritual called “insulting the meat.” When a hunter killed a large animal, the entire camp was socially obligated to insult the kill. The hunter was obligated to take it. 

Richard Lee recorded some of the types of insults: 

“You mean you walked all that way and dragged back this sack of bones? This scrawny thing?”

“My grandmother’s dog could outrun this animal and my grandmother’s dog has been dead for a year.” 

The hunter who had just hauled a 200-pound antelope back to camp on his shoulders absorbed this with appropriate humility. He did not point out that the antelope would feed twenty people for a week. He did not remind anyone that half the camp hadn’t killed shit in a month. The performance existed to prevent the best hunter from concluding that being the best hunter made him more important than everyone else. 

The kill belonged to the group. The skill belonged to the group. The only thing that belonged to the hunter was the obligation to shut up about it.

Among the Hadza of Tanzania, the logic was the same. James Woodburn, who began studying them in 1958, found that leadership “amounted to no more than the advice of a few respected senior men.” Camps could include a hundred people. Camps could be a single guy sitting next to a fire. The composition of the group shifted constantly. Anyone who didn’t like how things were going could leave, and nobody could stop them, because there was no mechanism for compulsion. There was no police, no jail, no legal system that would drag you back. The only authority a leader possessed was other people’s willingness to listen to him, and that willingness evaporated the instant he started acting like he deserved it.

To be clear, I’d be fucking dead in half a minute. Fuck this shit, I’d be immediately pointing out every logical reason they deserve me. Of course, in this society, ego is a killer, which is why I’m glad I live in a postmodern illiberal authoritarian democracy in a hyper-late-stage capitalist Western world. God, imagine if I had to hunt for my food.

By the way, this arrangement is not a cultural preference. It turns out, all that social Darwinism shit your douchey bro neighbor down the hall likes to rant about when talking about sheeple being blackpilled is just purely wrong science.

The Part Where Chimps Explain Why The Manosphere is Wrong

Humans share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees (as my partner likes to point out about me). Chimpanzees are emphatically hierarchical. Alpha males beat the hell out of subordinate males. Beta males beat the hell out of everyone who isn’t an alpha. The dominance hierarchy is enforced through physical violence, and the payoff is preferential access to food and sex. The system is functionally identical to a middle school cafeteria, with less bowl cuts and caked eyeshadow.

Yet that 2% seems to matter a lot. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but humans are the dominant species on the planet, not chimps. That is because Marshall Sahlins, in his foundational 1963 essay “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief,” proposed that the critical difference between ape politics and early human politics was a reordering of priorities. Chimps organize around sex first, food second, and defense third. Males fight over mating access, and then they grudgingly share food and protect the troop when it suits them.

 Human foragers flipped the order: we start with food, then defense, and finally sex. For example, marriage (or some versions of long term partnerships) replaced promiscuity as an organizing principle in human societies. Two Paleo husbands could share a wife without tearing each other’s arms off. Two male chimps could not. That reprioritization freed up an enormous amount of social energy that chimps burn on dominance competition and humans redirected toward cooperation and food-sharing.

Boehm’s contribution was that egalitarianism was itself a dominance behavior, not a recessive one. The same wiring that makes a chimpanzee fight for alpha status made humans form coalitions to suppress alpha status in others. Instead of the strongest individual dominating the group, the group dominated the strongest individual. Stupid monkeys.

William Laughlin actually lived this. Laughlin, who lived with 78 Inuit hunters in Alaska’s Anaktuvuk Pass, ran blood antigen studies and discovered that the camp’s senior male, a gifted caribou hunter, had fathered seven children who produced ten grandchildren, or roughly 20 percent of the group’s population. By every biological metric, this man had won. He was, by the manosphere’s terms, the alpha. He had reproduced more successfully than any other male in the camp. But he had no title, gave no orders, and controlled nothing. He was a guy who happened to be excellent at killing caribou, and people trusted his judgment about where to find them. 

In evolutionary terms, he had won the game. In social terms, the game did not exist. The social system didn’t care how many caribou you could kill. It cared whether you were going to be an asshole about it.

And as sociologists like to remind everyone else, culture is swiftly supplanting natural selection as the evolutionary process of humanity. Take notes, incels. Turns out, if you want to get laid in Anno Domini 2026, it’s less about the looks and more about your character (just like momma told me before she gave me my first CeraVe bottle).

The Part Where the Richest Guy in the Valley Turns Out to Be FedEx

Now, at this point the skeptics in the back are screaming: “How the fuck do you know this from a bunch of rocks in Ohio?!”

Well, the archaeological record for Paleoindian and Early Archaic Ohio looks exactly like you would expect if nobody was in charge. 

First, to be clear, the sites are tiny. Most Paleoindian camps yield a handful of fluted points and almost nothing else. Paleo Crossing, in Medina County, is one of the few well-dated Clovis sites in eastern North America that is about 13,000 years old, with stone tools made from chert hauled 280 miles from Indiana. The assemblage is consistent with three to five nuclear families moving together, maintaining seasonal ranges the size of a mid-Atlantic state, and carrying their best tools because the next decent outcrop might be weeks away. These people did not accumulate things like modern people would. They carried what they needed and left the rest, often cached somewhere in case they came across it again (the paleoenvironment of Ohio was constantly changing seasonally, and there was no guarantee they could find it again).

More importantly, the first Paleo burials are democratic. By the Middle and Late Archaic, when we finally get substantial numbers of human remains, the grave goods track with age and sex, not with rank. At the Read site in Kentucky, infants got the fewest artifacts, while adult males got atlatl weights and fishhooks. People over forty-five got less than younger adults. It seems that by the Archaic period, worth to the indigenous Ohioans was calibrated to your productive contribution. Older people and those with debilitating conditions received fewer goods because, well, they produced less. Meriwether Lewis noticed the same logic among the peoples he encountered two centuries later during his expedition. He noted that a community treated its elders well when those elders could still help get food. When they couldn’t, the community’s generosity adjusted accordingly.

In Ohio, Archaic camps scatter across river valleys and uplands, reflecting a wide-ranging foraging circuit that moved people through different ecological zones as different foods came into season. The thickest middens (trash heaps that become archaeological sites) sit at especially productive spots: the shell heaps along the Green River in Kentucky, for instance, are where people cracked mussels and buried their dead over thousands of years. But there is no architecture like fortifications or granaries, certainly no monuments until very late in the Archaic, when mound-building starts in the lower Mississippi Valley around 3500 BCE at Watson Brake. For most of this ten-thousand-year span, the built environment of Eastern North America consists of fire pits, trash heaps, and graves.

Thus, the exchange networks are what reveal the social and political structure of Archaic Ohio. By 4000 BCE, copper from the Great Lakes, marine shell from the Gulf Coast, banded slate, and exotic cherts were moving hundreds of miles between locations. But most people buried with these non-local items had only a few pieces. Some had thousands. Milner interprets this as evidence that certain well-connected individuals served as nodes in intergroup trade, accumulating more of the goods because more of them passed through their hands. 

In other words, these few brokers had greater access to exotic materials. They had nothing else. Remember, this is the Archaic. There are no bigger houses. There is no better food. There is no special burial treatment. They were the richest people in their community, and the only evidence of their wealth is a pile of shell beads they happened to die with. 

They were not bosses. They were FedEx. Archaic Ohio was less Negan with a bat and more prehistoric Death Stranding.

Now to be clear, the Eastern Woodlands after the glaciers retreated were, by foraging standards, absurdly generous. The Pleistocene-to-Holocene transition, roughly 11,700 years ago, converted the landscape from a cold, patchy tundra and boreal forest into one of the most diverse temperate ecosystems on the planet. Deciduous forests dropped mast crops of acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts every fall to the extent that the primary foraging strategy was waiting for something to knock on your head. River systems swarmed with fish, mussels, and waterfowl. Deer, elk, turkey, and dozens of smaller species occupied every habitat from floodplain to ridgetop. And then there were the wetlands. Northwest Ohio was basically the Everglades of the Great Lakes. Backwater lakes, oxbow ponds, seasonal marshes, alluvial bottomlands. Ohio was an embarrassment of ecological riches that replenished itself through high reproductive rates every single year.

Now, an egalitarian band organization works when the environment delivers a specific combination of conditions. Resources have to be dispersed and variable enough that no single spot supports a permanent settlement year-round, but abundant and diverse enough that mobile groups can always find food by moving through a seasonal circuit. Eastern North America delivered both conditions simultaneously and kept delivering them for ten thousand years, especially in Ohio where three climate systems meet. Therefore, there was no reason to sit still permanently, because no single location had everything. And there was no reason to panic, because the next good spot was a few days’ walk in any direction.

Under these conditions, any aspiring strongman faced an unsolvable problem: the people he wanted to lead could walk away (or rather, banish you). And they would be perfectly fine when they got wherever they were going. You cannot build a power base when your entire constituency can tell you to go fuck yourself and then relocate to a creek twenty miles south where the mussels are just as good and the company is better. 

An exit strategy is the ultimate check on authority, and in the Eastern Woodlands, the exit strategy was always open.

The Part Where Somebody Plants a Goddamn Seed

Elman Service’s band-tribe-chiefdom-state typology imagines political evolution as a ladder, each rung replacing the one below it as societies get more “complex.” The metaphor is almost entirely full of shit. Egalitarian band society is not a primitive stage that more complex societies grow out of, like political baby teeth. It is a stable system that runs on our human neurology and functions beautifully under the right ecological conditions. 

The Big Man does not “evolve” into chiefdoms. It is murdered, and the murder weapon is always the same: storable, controllable, redistributable surplus.

That’s right. It’s capitalism, baby! (if capitalism didn’t have a state, or an ideology, or anything that actually makes capitalism “capitalism” besides surplus)

Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus explained this pretty clearly. The Big Man model, which originates in the ethnography of Melanesian horticultural societies, is the transitional political form between pure egalitarian bands and hereditary chiefdoms. Marshall Sahlins defined a Big Man as someone who acquires influence through personal achievement (like skill in warfare, or success in competitive feasting, the ability to redistribute resources to followers, etc.), not through inheritance or divine right. His power lasts exactly as long as he keeps producing, and his son gets nothing except a role model. The position is achieved, not ascribed, and it can vanish as fast as it appeared 

Among the Enga of New Guinea, Big Men were called kamongo. They earned it by mediating disputes, giving speeches, and manipulating trade in shells, feathers, ceremonial drums, and pigs. But what caused Big Man to emerge in New Guinea to begin with? The sweet potato, which arrived in Enga territory roughly nine to twelve generations ago and blew the population from 20,000 to 100,000 in about 220 years. Women grew the sweet potatoes. Pigs ate the sweet potatoes. Big Men redistributed the pigs. The competitive feasting, the prestige economy, the elaborate trade networks, and the political careers, the whole goddamn edifice, rested on a tuber.

They were others in the Oceanic region. For the Siuai of Bougainville, the biggest Big Men were called mumis. A mumi climbed the social ladder by throwing pig feasts specifically designed to humiliate his rivals. The strategy was to give someone a gift so enormous that he cannot reciprocate, publicly demonstrating that you have access to more resources than he does. It’s like when your rich aunt and uncle throw their annual Wet Hot American Summer marathon and blow more money than you’ve seen in all your birthdays combined on a Paul Rudd appearance. The Siuai described this as “fighting verbally,” because the colonial authorities had made the previous version, which involved collecting enemy heads and lining your men’s house with their skulls, somewhat less convenient. When a mumi died, his shell valuables were burned, and his son started from zero. Prestige was not heritable. 

The lessons from Melanesia map directly onto Eastern North America. Big Man politics require surplus. You cannot throw a humiliation feast if you and your rival are eating the same deer and the same mussels in roughly equal quantities. You cannot build a following through redistribution if there is nothing to redistribute. And you absolutely cannot convert generosity into political leverage if everyone in the camp can walk into the woods and feed themselves with a repeat of Chicken Little. The whole system depends on a gap between what people can produce and what they need. That gap did not exist in the mobile foraging economies of the Eastern Woodlands. 

Well, until people started growing food.

Bruce Smith demonstrated that eastern North America was one of only nine places on earth where plants were independently domesticated. It started in the Middle to Late Archaic, when people coming back to the same camps noticed that weedy plants thrived in the disturbed, nitrogen-rich soil of old campsites. At first, they tolerated the plants. Then they encouraged them. Then they started actively tending them. By the beginning of the second millennium BCE, at least four species had crossed the line into domestication: goosefoot, marsh elder, sunflower, and cucurbits. The cucurbits survive today as acorn squashes, crooknecks, and fordhooks, which your grandmother grows in her garden. The goosefoot and marsh elder survive as weeds nobody would eat on purpose.

They were “shitty crops,” by today’s parlance. They were just weedy annuals that produced small, storable seeds. But “small and storable” is the whole ballgame. Because seeds can be accumulated. Seeds can be counted. Seeds can be withheld. Seeds can be redistributed in ways that create debts, obligations, and dependencies. 

Seeds are the raw material out of which ambitious people build political careers and destroy egalitarianism. 

The domestication process took centuries. It was not a revolution. It was a long sequence of individually rational decisions made by people trying to cushion themselves against bad winters, each decision inching the economy toward the point where surplus became possible. 

And with surplus, for the first time in ten thousand years, some asshole had something the group could not easily walk away from.

Some fucking corn.

Works Cited (For People Who Stick it To the Big Man)

Anderson, Timothy G. and Brian Schoen, eds. Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023, pp. 18-19.

Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 35-50, 64-89.

Drooker, Penelope Ballard. The View from Madisonville: Protohistoric Western Fort Ancient Interaction Patterns. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, No. 31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997, pp. 76, 88, 270.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 35-40, 95-121.

Lee, Richard B. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 244-48.

Milner, George R. The Moundbuilders: Ancient Societies of Eastern North America. 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020, pp. 1-2, 19-31, 39-50, 52-56.

Sahlins, Marshall. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (1963): 285-303.

Sassaman, Kenneth E. The Eastern Archaic, Historicized. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010, pp. 56, 116-55.

Service, Elman R. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 47-99.

Smith, Bruce D. “Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America.” Science 246, no. 4937 (1989): 1566-71.

Woodburn, James. “Egalitarian Societies.” Man 17, no. 3 (1982): 431-51.

Picture Credit: Early Archaic people fishing in the Cuyahoga River, National Park Service.

(Courtesy of r/HistoryAnecdotes•WaitItsAllOhio and Gwyllm Llwydd)