In response to the Bounce feedback from reviewers, a substantial revision of the proposal is presented here.
First, the digitization of the database will be set aside and will form the basis of a future proposal after extensive consultation with colleagues about its makeup, and after the formation of an advisory committee. This is appropriate for the eventual creation of a digitized public database that will serve scholars in a variety of fields.
Second, the research component of the original submission will be revised to be a stand-alone research proposal, which will involve only some limited strategic coding of hunter-gatherer societies necessary to the proposed research. The subject is hunter-gatherer cooperation and the political processes that support it. Proposed are the publication of three major research papers.
The first phase of research will focus on cooperation within mobile hunting bands, where political support for cooperation is deliberate and it comes from the group as a whole in the absence of strong leadership. The second will focus on self-organizing systems of cooperation within regions. There, political leadership is not needed for safety-net cooperation and long-distance trade to work efficiently, sometimes doing so even in the face of warfare. The third will focus on the transition from highly cooperative mobile egalitarian bands to hierarchical foragers who live a sedentary lifestyle, with food storage by individual families, and with big-men who organize feasts. In all of the proposed publications an evolutionary perspective will look to ancestral precedents, and examine likely Pleistocene selection pressures.
