What Was Politics to the Denisovan?

Deep History

Much depends upon the particular definition of humanity, which has a considerable degree of variability in archeological history. The line between the varieties of precursors to humanity and homo sapiens itself remains blurry. The complexity and distribution of the group itself—what evolutionary literature calls “speciation”—can never be fully disentangled from its history, as shown by the continued debates over whether dogs are the same species as wolves or about the historical divergence of horses and donkeys. For the purposes of this essay, the term “human” will apply to the group of hominins which likely fully speciated in sub-Saharan Africa around 200,000 years ago, a group related to but distinct from the other human-like species discussed below. ¹⁰

This distinction depends upon a few scientific detours through recent physical archeology, bioarcheology, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) discoveries. The genus homo, which appeared on the African continent approximately 2 million years ago (MYA), split into a wide variety of hominan. ¹¹ Most of these became extinct fairly quickly, at least in biological time. Many of one branch, scientifically termed homo erectus, survived until relatively recently, approximately seventy thousand years ago (70 KYA). The other branch, which includes the ancestors of modern humans, has generally referred to as homo, even though this branch contains a wide variety of hominins, such as homo heidelbergensis, a probable precursor to modern humans. Modern humans emerged only in the past 200 thousand years.

Recent decades have brought startling discoveries about genetic types of homo alive at the same time as modern humans. The non-human hominins known as Neanderthals, named after the valley in North-Rhine Westphalia in which the first specimen was found, remain the best known, even though in the popular imagination they are assumed to be prehuman, yet ancestral, “cavemen.” In 2010, a group of researchers announced the discovery in southern Siberia of another branch of non-human hominin, which they named “Denisovan” after the cave in the Altai mountains in which it was found. ¹² More controversially, some archaeologists contend that Homo floresiensis, a diminutive hominin (nicknamed “the hobbit”) whose remains have been found on the Flores island in Indonesia, also makes up a separate species, though others argue floresiensis is merely a genetically disordered or poorly nourished sapiens. ¹³

In recent years, researchers have determined the dates associated with these hominins’ eras primarily in one of two ways: through radiological carbon dating and through mtDNA analysis. Carbon dating remains the exclusive technology for the more ancient homo species, as the DNA in bone samples has deteriorated in non-fossilized samples (and of course no DNA remains in fossils). Further, mtDNA analysis examines the genetic makeup of extant remnants (such as teeth and bone fragments) and builds evolutionary comparisons through the emergence, disappearance, and other traceable changes between individuals, subspecies, and species. The carbon-dating studies have proven somewhat less reliable than mtDNA analysis of animals more distant from us in the evolutionary river, since it often relies on physical proximity, as when artifacts are discovered buried or fossilized near certain rock strata. Genetic approaches have potential flaws as well, because of the possibility that Denisovan or Neanderthal samples may have become contaminated from interactions with humans (e.g., handling), either in prehistory or contemporary times. But for the imaginative and theoretical purposes of this argument, their legitimacy will be presumed.

Neanderthals existed simultaneously with humans, from 230 to 30 KYA. Their ancestral divergence from the homo branch is estimated at 500 KYA. ¹⁴ Scholars argue that Neanderthals utilized tools not only for food preparation but also for hunting. Their diet included ecologically high-status meats (e.g., more flesh than marrow); their nearest meat-eating non-hominin competition such as lions or hyenas relied more on scavenging and small animals. ¹⁵ Neanderthals, in other words, competed with humans, both geographically, as humans spread from the African continent, and dietetically, as both hominins fed on the same kinds of animals and used similar tools, including micropoints and microliths. ¹⁶ (For a visual representation of this and the following timelines, see Figure 1.)

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Figure 1.

An evolutionary tree of homo species from 2 million years ago (bottom) to the present, with focus on the evolutionary complexity of homo sapiens.

Denisovans were more closely related to Neanderthals than to humans, but not dramatically. Their trajectory likely split from the Neanderthal line during the late Pleistocene, and as a result Neanderthals were the predominant non-human hominin in Western Eurasia while Denisovans migrated to the East. ¹⁸ Because the species is so recently discovered, how long they remained in Asia remains unclear, though many researchers believe that they never dispersed widely. ¹⁹ (Whatever floresiensis were, they were still present on Flores as recently as 17 KYA.)

As humans moved beyond the African continent, they certainly interacted with these other hominins. Most interesting and most pertinent are the results of this overlap between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. As mentioned above, it is likely that tools were shared or learned between the species. So, too, was artwork, particularly body decorations: both Neanderthals and Denisovans show evidence of jewelry. ²⁰ (Of course, it is uncertain whether the humans influenced them or vice versa.)

Yet even these are not the most dramatic or important form of overlap. The particularly startling aspect of contact between humans and Denisovans and Neanderthal is genetic: humans interbred with each, and the genetic makeup of these non-human hominins remains with many contemporary humans. In the case of the Neanderthal, this sexual connection clearly emerged early in the human diaspora. Africans (e.g., the San or the Yoruban peoples) have no Neanderthal DNA, whereas Europeans, Asians, Americans, and South Pacific peoples are made up of a “detectable but limited genetic contribution (1-4%)” of Neanderthal ancestry. ²¹ While this indicates a relatively short period of spatial coexistence between Neanderthals and humans (as the genetic contribution is fairly standard for all non-African humans), it also means that the connections between them was far more intimate than has traditionally been assumed.

Similarly, soon after the discovery of the Denisovan individual, mtDNA analysis was not only used to identify it as a separate hominin but also to determine that traces of Denisovan DNA exists in a specific group of modern-day humans: certain Melanesian groups, specifically the inhabitants of the Papuan Islands and Bougainville. Approximately 5% of these groups’ genomes descend directly from Denisovans. ²² And, since these people are also descended from the diaspora out of Africa, their total genomic inheritance from non-human hominins is likely between 6.6 and 8.2 percent. ²³

Most humans, therefore, are not entirely human. And the compatibility between human and non-human hominin is not merely a creative hypothesis but has become a genetic presumption: not only were humans in contact with Neanderthals and Denisovans, but their intercourse was more than cultural or auditory. These were at times close relations (and likely at other times violent relations, since these other hominins became extinct during times of comparative plenty). Only if one is willing to exclude all people of any non-African descent from the category of “human” can one say that the skills and abilities and cultures of the modern world are fully human.

The Politics of Exclusion

To recognize modern humans as participating in politics, therefore, also means to recognize the nonhuman within us as participating as well. But the actual participation of those parts of us that could be called “Denisovan” or “Neanderthal” implies a more speculative idea of politics: the participation in politics of actual Denisovans and Neanderthals. What makes us assume that these hominins did not act politically? Why would we continue to deny the category of the political to beings who clearly matched humans in many capacities?

The easiest and most common answer refuses political action to anyone other than literate, abstractly organized, human communities. But this begs the central question by circularly defining politics as the engagements of power in which modern humans engage. And it implicitly continues a historical denial of political activity to those communities considered less than modern, for example, non-European traditional communal organizations. This common insistence—that the parameters of the political first be developed before granting legitimacy to other categories of action, and thus excluding political organization other than that oriented around the modern nation-state—is a tradition replete with racism, delegitimation of tribal communities, and justifications of empire. The points of entry for what counts as “politics” are legion and contradictory. Isolating and identifying them has proven to be contested and perhaps impossible. And strangely, many of the characteristics of political agency and interdependence appear not only in the hominan record but also in a wide variety of non-human animal species.

The presumption of human exceptionalism is that humans possess a particular, special skill or ability that sets them apart from and above the rest of the animal kingdom. It closely comports with the idea that politics must be human. But the recent history of various exceptionalist claims has undermined their predictive capacities. Tool usage and artistic creation have historically been the most widely used metrics to distinguish human transcendence, and as a consequence have been the most devastatingly debunked. Few would now argue that either is limited to human beings (or to our progenitors). We now recognize tool usage amongst an immense variety of animals, including not only apes and monkeys but also rodents, birds, crabs, and even insects. ²⁴ Nor does artistic ability qualify. Chimpanzee or elephant artistry points to one mode of artistic relation; capuchin sculpture to another. ²⁵ Another common exceptionalist argument, that of altricial infancy, also fails to distinguish humanity. Dependency upon one’s parents from an early age certainly requires a degree of abstraction, recognition, communication, and power. A being cannot care for its infant unless it can distinguish it as an individual, watch for its developmental stages, teach it useful versus dangerous behaviors, and cultivate its eventual independence. Such behaviors exist in a wide variety of non-human animals; patriarchy and matriarchy may be political, but they are not strictly human, nor is extensive childhood.

A fourth exceptionalist claim, common to discussions of politics and power relations, is that only humans build hierarchies. But this proves a particularly surprising and falsifiable contention. Lions have hierarchies, as do birds, even ants. Would we say that these animals are acting politically? Certainly power inheres in such hierarchies: one only need watch one wolf demonstrate subservience to another to recognize a complex mechanism of inter-individual relationship. Such a pack clearly has a mode of collective decision making, as well as precisely developed social relations within and between packs.

These examples make clear the difficulty in delineating the precise beginnings of politics and who participates in it. So a formalization of terminology will be of little help here: unless defined in ways specifically meant to apply only to modern human beings, politics either dramatically excludes many people engaged in political activity or includes a broad range of non-human actors. (Many have defined politics as something like “the human negotiation over power,” which forecloses the very questions raised by the existence of Denisovans by defining politics in strictly human terms. ²⁶ ) The demand to delineate “politics” clearly and concisely, once and for all, itself engages in political foreclosure.

Other ways to eliminate the possibility that non-human hominins participated in politics also testify to this difficulty. Some argue that early humans could not have developed societal or cultural forms, because of hunter-gatherers’ intrinsic lack of unencumbered time. But this argument fails empirically: as Marshall Sahlins showed long ago, even modern hunter-gatherer tribes lived in relative affluence, spending a minority of their time in subsistence accumulation. ²⁷ Often they devoted, or devote, an equal amount of time to cultural activities. When they expend effort to gather abstracted value rather than immediate needs, that value is often expended in symbolic (and pragmatically “wasteful”) social ways. ²⁸ “The neolithic saw no particular improvement over the paleolithic in the amount of time required per capita for the production of subsistence”; Sahlins concludes, “probably, with the advent of agriculture, people had to work harder.” ²⁹

Little evidence (beyond our contemporary presumptions) exists that only humans have engaged in politics over the past millennia. Only Whig historicism—privileging the contemporary lives and methods as inherently superior to those in the past—explains the idea that Paleolithic humans and hominins could not have engaged in politics. Many archeologists engage in such history: they implicitly consider the past as prelude, narrating backwards and retrofitting prehistorics with contemporary suppositions. For example, Pamela Geller identifies a broad range of gender assumptions folded into the history of the bioarcheological fields, not only in the physical archeology of culture (i.e., burial) but also in osteology and DNA genotyping. ³⁰ Conceptions of practices, such as who hunts and who gathers, are too often merely assumed rather than researched. As a consequence, systematic presumptions crowd out evidence, even when the archeological record demonstrates a wide range of cultural complexity. If prehistorical humans had hierarchy, power, war, abstraction, tools, society, and even art, how can we deny them politics? And if they had each of these things, why do we presume that their differently speciated kin lacked them as well?

Hierarchy and Horizontality

Such inquisitions may mean little to most political scientists, for whom the state-form serves as the necessary precondition of politics. That is, they presume that politics happens only in relations between formalized political actors (nation-states, empires, cities, citizens) and remains contained by those categories. Excluding other interpersonal or interinstitutional relations from the political, they explicitly or implicitly argue that these are more correctly conceived of as social, economic, or cultural relationships. Under this metric, families, clans, and even non-literate peoples fail to achieve political relationships, as they lack the sufficient symbolic and abstract abilities that undergird the proper use of politics. In such a view, politics takes place only in institutions, in which power can be abstract, depersonalized, and fungible. All else is social. ³¹

“Political problems are not domestic problems,” Elman Service summarized, as “true authority rests on hierarchy.” ³² For Service and others who wish to thus differentiate the political from the domestic, the ability to engage in politics constitutes one important marker in a people’s development from savagery to civilization: this, above all, positions the state of nature so centrally for Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau. In their respective ways, all three theorists held that in the uncivilized Americas nature ruled and politics had yet to take root. Defining politics as strictly institutional and hierarchical makes it an achievement based on the division of culture and nature, of the mythical past and the enlightened present.

Compare such a vertical and hierarchical theory of politics to a different tradition: the horizontal and organic theories. Those who embrace this latter perspective see politics as permeating people’s lives, found wherever power deploys. Such a perspective recognizes politics “all the way down,” constituting the most intimate, as well as the most abstract, of relationships. In such a reading, all groups of people engage in politics: families, tribes, friends, and rivals, as much as judges and kings. The lines between state and society, the rule of law and the cake of custom, and the domestic and the public, so vital to the functioning of the hierarchical understanding, cannot be so neatly drawn.

To what, then do adherents of this quotidian approach attend? They examine the imbrications of each individual in otherness, noting how presumptions about propriety intersect with law, or of racism with political history, or of absolutism with patriarchy. They thus pay attention to ordinary activities: how practices of exclusion and belonging operate, where delegitimation occurs, who defines the proper subject of politics. ³³ Indeed, at their most dramatic, such theories argue that politics pervades, or even determines, the very identity or subjectivity of the individual. (Though this insight emerges from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, it has spread to a wide variety of historical and theoretical approaches.)

Feminist theory, for example, crucially depends on the quotidian outlook to identify the conflation of social gender concepts with political action (which explains why those committed to the hierarchical so often reject political feminism as a category mistake). Queer political theory similarly notes how aspects of identity, normativity, and desire emerge from conceptions of sexuality that depend far more on cultural, theological, and even biological presumptions than on state power, though of course law and governance overlap and commingle with these. Approaches of political philosophy that take seriously society, interpersonal relationships, theology, psychology, and even economics side with the horizontal camp over the hierarchical one, considering political behaviors that are not reducible to state power.

To engage in lateral theorizing also means to reject the externalities of politics: the prepolitical, the uncivilized, the personal, the epiphenomenal. These conceptions prove central to the hierarchical view, in that they mark the limits of the political, the spaces where politics do not belong. The state of nature, one of the most widely utilized of these externalities, was used by the above contract theorists specifically to identify what power is: since their renditions deny politics in the state of nature, politics emerges as an antithesis of a prepolitical state, for good or ill. And the fact that each of their assumptions and arguments about where the state of nature existed (in the uncivilized Americas, in their common trope) were entirely untrue has not significantly undermined our presumptions that some people, somewhere, have lived outside of politics.

In contrast to these early modern classificatory schemes, which ostensibly clarify how power operates by placing it in uncivilized bodies and geographies, Pierre Clastres noted that operations of power were already present in a wide variety of contexts. The classifications that depend upon a prepolitical time or place, Clastres argued in Society Against the State, utilize a “model to which political power is referred and the unit by which it is measured are constituted in advance by the idea Western civilization has shaped and developed.” ³⁴ That such people do not have gunpowder means that they also must not have politics. Thus such classificationists continue a conquistador mindset which denied that chiefs had political power, that tribes had normative law, and that spiritual events had priests. ³⁵ Simply put, conceptually placing such people outside of politics is itself an imperial project.

Clastres followed other anthropologists such as Max Gluckman, who was arguing in the 1960s that what he termed “tribal societies” possessed and utilized both politics and law. Approaches to settling disorders, redistributing property, adjudicating violence, negotiating leadership, and regularizing trade appear throughout cultures, though in radically different forms and contexts. ³⁶ Clastres also drew upon Marshall Sahlins, who had recently argued that the division between societies of affluence (presumed to be the contemporary world) and societies of scarcity (equally presumed to be paleolithic humans and the remaining subsistence tribes) should in fact be reversed. People in the “market-industrial” world have often starved to death, and even more often spent their entire days working, Sahlins noted, while those in “subsistence” societies spent much if not most of their days in leisure, with a varied diet and complex social relations. ³⁷

Such approaches, Clastres pointed out, attempt to understand societies on their own terms rather than as intrinsically deficient in some vital aspect. A society without a state might not be aspiring to statehood; only from a nation-state perspective do these societies “seem incomplete; they are not true societies, . . . their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack.” ³⁸ This lack, strangely, takes one of two oppositional forms in the Western imaginary: either of the absolute anarchism of the tribe or of the unconditional power of the chief. ³⁹ Both are seen as emblematic of the uncivilized, even though they are incompatible and depend entirely on different social power distributions.

James C. Scott has recently taken Clastres’s thesis as an overtly political argument. Scott contends that the residents of Zomia, the mountainous region of central Asia, actively balk at becoming parts of any state, strongly preferring to live in traditional, anti-state forms of political life. ⁴⁰ For Scott, the broad range of peripatetic mountain life serves as a form of resistance: by not requiring complex economies, money, militaries, fixed agriculture, and even literacy, they can resist the demands states make upon citizens. “Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings to keep the state at arm’s length.” ⁴¹

Scott’s human beings resist state power, often if not always in reference to it. ⁴² That is, their strategies react to forms of state power rather than creating themselves on their own terms. But Scott certainly recognized these villages and tribes as engaging in political actions, even as they operate outside of state legitimation systems. Like Clastres, Gluckman, and Sahlins, Scott argues for a democratic understanding of political action, one that could trace itself back to the dawn of humanity and, potentially, beyond.

Dear Enemies

Three important points, so far. The first, that politics and other social sciences presume humanity, has been so widely accepted that to question it, as these examples do, proves both dramatic and almost unthinkable. The second, that Denisovan and Neanderthal hominins can be so closely linked to human beings as to be genetically part of who we consider humans, shows the insufficiency of the exaggerated distances we assume in capacities, art, culture, and possibly even language between humans and (at least two groups of) non-humans. The third, that politics can and does exist outside of the form of the state, at least for theorists more horizontally than hierarchically inclined, can be the most coherently contested. Those who philosophically reject the possibility of non-state politics, who hold that politics can only exist in the modern nation-state system, can thus easily ignore the awkwardness caused by non-human hominins.

But for those with a more generous conception of the political, one that would include pre-European contact Amerindians, traditional tribal patterns in Africa, and informal networks of power relations in the South Pacific, the likely ability of Denisovans and Neanderthals to engage in similar political processes casts doubt on the uniqueness of human society. What was politics to the Denisovans? To ask the question destabilizes humanity’s purported necessity within the social world.

In Michael Mann’s attempt to tell the history of all power, he suggested that society emerged when human beings became a separate species. ⁴³ But seeing humans as the sole source of social power, he notes, results in an inability to theorize power other than through Neolithic settlements. As a result, families, bands, and tribes cannot be discussed; only when settlements form around agricultural practices, he argued, do human beings began to develop the social complexities that make study possible. “They did not stably institutionalize power relations; they did not know classes, states, or even elites”; thus “in the true beginnings there was neither power nor history.” ⁴⁴ While Mann is generous in his attribution, he is not generous enough: he leaves no place for Neanderthal politics or Denisovan power.

Such a lack of imagination circumscribes most thinking about humanity and power. In the 1980s, during the heyday of sociobiology, the political scientist Glendon Shubert began a conversation with various primatologists, asking if monkeys or apes should be seen as acting politically. ⁴⁵ Against the popularizing primatology of Shirley Strum, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Hans de Waal (de Waal had published the provocatively-titled Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes), Shubert attempted to shore up a defense of politics as explicitly human. ⁴⁶ Shubert promoted no new presumptions: that humans have a monopoly on power relations underpins not only most philosophical traditions but the social or human sciences. What makes his work historically noteworthy, as well as conceptually peculiar, are the modes of argumentation he uses against these primatologists. Granting that apes in particular have social relations, as seems undeniable from the fieldwork of his time, Shubert argued that true politics can only emerge when its participants are unrelated; ties of consanguinity place social relations in the realm of the family rather than of the political.

Shubert thus defined politics as dealing with “the sociopsychological processes of human individuals and groups seeking to influence or control others who are not closely related to them in regard to any question about which humans are, or might become, interested.” ⁴⁷ As this awkwardly phrased (and potentially all-encompassing) delineation testifies, Schubert has no clear method to determine which issues, events, or conflicts meet the criteria of “politics” other than the lack of close kinship. His definition thus muddies what he means to clarify, bringing into politics causes and intentions that he ultimately wishes to exclude. He also presupposes the conclusion he intends to prove. In an argument meant to determine that apes and monkeys have no politics, he begs the question of humanity by introducing people in his definition of politics.

Glendon Shubert is not alone in this conceptual confusion: his essay exemplifies a common philosophical preconceptualization. This assumption presumes that politics must be limited to human beings; the necessity of defining other kinds of beings (other species, thinking machines, or even bare matter) as outside the space of politics results in logics whose circularity proves invisible to those developing them. This confusion has long underpinned arguments for racial superiority and colonial power, and—importantly—continues to do so today. In order to prove that monkeys do not engage in politics, Schubert readily denies political agency to vast numbers of historical and contemporaneous peoples. He goes so far as to overtly and consciously exclude the Kalahari San from the political realm. In recognizing that such a people traditionally live in family and clan groupings, he states that they exist as apolitical peoples. ⁴⁸

It is not my purpose here to join de Waal in presenting an argument for simian politics (though its existence would be sufficient to prove that a purely non-human politics can exist). It is, instead, to note how the arguments of the hierarchists, which Schubert’s exemplify, smuggle multiple requirements into their definitions of politics. These requirements not only exclude those beings they intend to exclude but often bar large swaths of humanity as well. Instead of questioning why social practices and philosophies so often limit qualifications to certain groups, they intend to reify the boundaries of those arbitrary and politically pernicious exclusions.

Practices of boundary reinforcement determined the abilities of humans and other hominins to participate in politics in the first place. Animals of many species have long been recognized to organize their social behavior in terms of boundaries and proximities: in-group members, strangers, and neighbors all play different roles in group identification and behavior. Most territorial animals exhibit dramatically different responses to invaders who are already neighbors than they do to strangers. ⁴⁹

This “dear enemy” phenomenon indicates the large-scale social relationships stretching outside immediate kinship groups. Complexly social animals, including birds, may react differently according to contextualized and historicized relationships, which strongly implies the possibilities of long-range social effects and connections. ⁵⁰ This recognition has pushed some aspects of zoology and biology into theorizing non-kin social spaces. Some theorists, for example, have hypothesized that sharing defenses with one’s neighbors (at least within a stable neighborhood network) results in altruistic return defense; abstract “defensive coalitions” can be genetically selected for. ⁵¹ Increased safety in cooperation and numbers can be built on interspecies abilities to abstractly recognize outsiders as different kinds of threats than local and expected threats.

How complex can non-hominin interactions become? A definitive answer proves impossible. Can one make sense of the complex vocalizations of large groups of dolphins, or quantify the distances between differing yet overlapping pods? Dolphins can develop social relationships with individuals they rarely meet (or have never met), described as third-level alliance formations. They also seem not only to be able to identify themselves with certain whistling patterns but also occasionally to use another’s identifier in communication with still another dolphin. ⁵²

As with simians, this example leaves aside the question of whether an odontocyte politics is possible. Instead, it points both to the impossibility of limiting social behavior to humans, and to the various means by which complex social relationships—such as alliances, social competition, and technical knowledge—exist in a wide variety of complex mammalian relationships. ⁵³ It helps show how large brain size and coalitional social relationships develop in relationship to on another.

Thus, the likelihood that Denisovans and Neanderthals engaged in what a horizontally minded theorist would term “politics,” both among themselves and in the process of diverging from and later clashing with human beings. The generative presumptions of humanity and politics may be reversible: perhaps engaging in politics (defined broadly) helped determine what humanity became. That is, what humans ultimately became may be a result of politics rather than their cause; unlike literacy, which was developed by some group of humans, somewhere, and increasingly spread to others, politics formed where and how humans started out.

Why, for example, did language develop? The traditional prehistoric model assumes that humans developed language as they moved from a Paleolithic to a Neolithic lifestyle and needed to communicate over larger communities. This rendition implicitly extrapolates from the development and spread of literacy: language is considered a skill that humans develop. First there are people, then they develop a skill, then it spreads through the human population.

But what if the sociopolitical aspects of hominin experience helped drive the evolutionary development of brain capacities? In that case, the need for a more complex language arose from the need for more sophisticated power relations, and politics drives evolutionary processes into a human form. ⁵⁴ The resultant speciation likely cannot be reduced to external, non-hominin environments. ⁵⁵ Competition within and between hominin groups has proven particularly violent and consequential. Not only has warfare been a central aspect of human life for millennia but for how many other species have all their nearest relatives gone extinct? So a glottogonist perspective implies that language (perhaps even one urlanguage) developed in consonance with humanity, shaping biological processes and being shaped by them in return. ⁵⁶

In this outline, the human brain is a consequence of political activity, not its cause. Society as an evolutionary mechanism puts politics outside of (and previous to) humanity. ⁵⁷ “Social cleverness, especially through success in competition achieved by cooperation,” as Richard D. Alexander has argued, “would select more potently for increased social intelligence . . . than a within-species co-evolutionary arms race in which success depended on effectiveness in social competition.” ⁵⁸ Such a conception historicises social relations beyond the boundaries of the human, the hominin, and even the prehuman. Social relationships, and the social sciences which study them, should no longer presume humanity’s centrality to their study. Instead, they should expand their range to a host of inhuman and prehuman interactions. Our external socializations, our predecessory inhumanity, our prehuman politics: contra Kant, we could never have been human without them.

These presumptions would also biologize humanity, as they would encourage a recognition of the chemical, biological, and physical dynamics inherent to social relations. But this should not result in forms of reductive scientivism: that of positivism, or the idea that bodies or DNA can determine a causal mechanism explaining complex social behaviors. Such an approach leads to causative determinism and its offshoots of genetic predestinationism, sociobiology, and behaviorism. Instead, it could lead to an understanding of physical, scientific processes as compositely interrelated, reinscribing and reinflecting cause and effect along divergent and complex lines of power and association. ⁵⁹ It could also result in the recognition that the biological does not ground or foundationalize human behavior, but rather interacts with and is in turn affected by social practices. If biological identity could be a consequence of social behavior, this blurs the clear dividing line between physical and social science.

Politics has always made us who we are, whomever we have been. Whereas Latour, Bennett, and Morton’s projects politicize the imbrications between humans and the non-human world, thus bringing non-human animals and things into the realm of the social, the possibility of hominin politics points to another way of conceptualizing the relationship between humans and environment. Hominan politics implies a deep biological tie between the human experience and the non-human world: a connection of life and matter and politics and being, one that exceeds the boundaries of humanity.