The first “social network” in history is 57,000 years old, it was made up of hunters and gatherers and served to avoid extinction

The survival of prehistoric hunter-gatherers has historically been explained by two things: climate and available natural resources. And although in general terms it is true, a new study proposes that the social relations between human groups at that time were as decisive as the physical environment.

The discovery. The research team focuses on small groups of hunter-gatherers who lived in the South Caucasus between 57,000 and 27,000 years ago. Apparently, these small groups traveled long distances and shared tools and techniques with other groups.

Initially they thought that due to their size and distance they would live almost isolated from each other, but no. The key evidence is in obsidian objects, a volcanic rock used to make cutting tools, present in deposits located between 40 and 200 km from the quarry of origin.

Why it is important. Because it forces us to rethink the classical models of human evolution that attributed the success or failure of a population almost exclusively to its capacity for climatic adaptation. Now we see that cooperation and the circulation of information was an essential survival factorwhich has implications for understand human resilience in the face of environmental change.

Context. The study area is the south of the Caucasus, the natural bridge between Europe and Asia where mountains, valleys and very different climates come together in a small space, so it is a key place to understand How ancient humans moved. At the time in which the study is framed, Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in other parts of the world and also when stone tools changed style. That is why the Caucasus is a magnificent place to verify if these changes were a sudden replacement of one population by another or there was coexistence between both cultures.

In detail. Each obsidian quarry has a unique chemical composition, which allows us to determine exactly the origin of each tool located. According to the research team, the distance over which these tools are dispersed is too great for a single group to travel in search of food: the most plausible explanation is that different groups were in contact and exchanged materials.

But there is another clue: the way of carving the stone is repeated in sites very far from each other, which suggests that some groups learned from others, not that they reached the same conclusion by chance. Furthermore, when dating the layers of earth from different sites, it is seen that the cultures of the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic coexisted for thousands of years in the same area, that is, one did not replace the other. Three powerful reasons to maintain that social networks helped these groups survive.

Yes, but. The inference of “social networks” or alliances from carved stone is still an interpretation, not a direct observation: there are no written, oral or testimonial records from the Paleolithic, so any conclusion about social relations is constructed indirectly, from material patterns. In fact, the fact that obsidian travels between 40 and 200 km does not in itself prove social exchange between groups: it could also be explained by a single group with a very large territory or by reuse of tools for generations.

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Cover | Gemini with AI