ON THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN ‘COMMUNITY’

Abstract

Given that recent interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities has extensively documented a major transformation in human communities—specifically regarding the individual's immediate social environment—our work aims to reveal some of the underlying causes of this phenomenon to inform cultural theories research and to offer a new aspect of future disciplinary studies may build on. Drawing on human ethology, this paper builds on the premise that the human community is inherently biological in origin, and as such, a direct product of evolution. Consequently, our primary focus is the fundamental sociability of the human species, which evolved from the ancestral behavioral traits of the great apes. To properly analyze the interplay among the environment, community, and human culture, we introduce a functional model demonstrating how culture has driven human evolution from the emergence of Homo sapiens to the present day. Our model suggests recent alterations in the interaction between community culture—a relatively stable element of our biology—and a rapidly changing ecological environment. Our theoretical investigation posits that following millions of years of cultural evolution, the present community ecology is characterized by the rapid emergence of non-organic environmental realities alongside the traditional organic reality of the human species. Ultimately, this novel ecological system of parallel organic and non-organic realities may trigger challenges for human sociability, for which Homo sapiens appears unprepared at this stage of its history.