The Human Swarm summary

In some parts of the world, humans drive on the right-hand side of the road; in others, on the left. But the marauder ants of Asia have found a different solution: on their busy highways, inbound traffic flows down the center of the road, while outbound ants stream down both outside lanes.

We humans may share more genes with chimps. But our monkey relations don’t deal with traffic management, assembly lines, or waste management. Ants, like humans, do.

Think back to the last time you sat in a busy coffee shop or on a bus, or went to a bar for a drink. You might not have realized it, but something remarkable occurred: you were surrounded by unknown members of your species, but nothing bad happened. If a chimp encountered a stranger, let alone a whole café of them, he would have to fight or flee. Only a female chimp could survive such an encounter peaceably, and only then if she were in the mood for sex.

Humans, on the other hand, are able to live relatively peacefully in societies in which they don’t recognize other members personally. So are ants.

In the film Inglourious Basterds, a British spy, in disguise in a German bar, orders three beers. But to do so he raises his middle three fingers instead of the thumb, index finger and middle finger, as a true German would do. He’s instantly revealed to be an outsider, and a huge fight ensues.

Humans have a huge variety of markers that signify our membership in a society and allow us to identify fellow members and outsiders.

Consider an equilateral cross, with its arms hooked forward at ninety degrees. This symbol, the swastika, once caused Nazi hearts to swell.

Markers are not just easy ways to identify whether someone belongs. They can also carry powerful meaning. And it appears that we humans are hardwired to use and react to them.

Earlier in human history, our hunter-gatherer forebears lived lives that, on the face of it, were very different from our own. With no agriculture, they depended on the food that nature provided – with a little help from poison arrows and other basic tools.

Nonetheless, hunter-gatherers all over, from the Inuit in the Arctic to aboriginal people in what is now Australia, lived in clearly defined societies called band societies.

The Jahai hunter-gatherers of Malaysia refer to themselves as “menra.” The Canadian Beaver Indians call themselves “Dane-Zaa,” and the Kusunda people of Nepal say “mihhaq.” Each of these names means the same thing: “real people.” And it’s not just venerable tribes that share this trait. The words “Dutch,” for the people of the Netherlands, and “Deutsch,” for Germans, come from the word in each language for “human.”

If this all sounds a little self-centered, that’s because a key feature of societies is that they have a collective belief in their own superiority.

Try to integrate a captive chimp into a new community, and you’re in for a tough time. It’s a hard, bloody task, requiring months of carefully handled introductions and a whole load of fights. Xenophobic chimpanzees only adapt because, having lost their original society, they have no choice.

So it is a remarkable achievement that, despite all our inborn favoring of insiders over outsiders, human societies have become relatively good at accepting and assimilating newcomers – so long as a few conditions are met.

Whatever society you live in, one day it will cease to exist.

Societies have never been permanent, and they never will be. Archaeologist Joyce Marcus has shown that state societies in ancient times had a clear life span of between two and five hundred years. After growing through war and the acquisition of territory and people, they eventually splintered, usually along long-ingrained ethnic or territorial lines.