Another gem from David Graeber (and friend) …
the core idea is that politics was a seasonal thing … during spring/summer (periods of abundance) society would fragment into small(er) groups of hunter-gatherers who went out on their expiditions and that formed one kind of social-political stage … and during winter they came together into larger social constructs – cities or states. These cyclic experiences gave our evolutionary ancestors an opportunity to experience a range of social structures from egalitarian (based on ideas of equality) to hierarchical ones … an opportunity to see different qualities, different benefits and downsides … and as a result an ability to navigate between the two … maybe some societies avoided hierarchical structures not out of ignorance but because they experienced the inherent problems with them …
David Graeber and David Wengrow: Palaeolithic Politics and Why It Still Matters 13 October 2015 from Radical Anthropology on Vimeo.