American Scientist

If you ask a BaYaka forager in the Central African rainforest, “Where do you live?,” they often reply with a question of their own: “Mouanga or Pela?”

You’ll get the same response to nearly any question about their lives: Who do you live with? Who is this camp’s leader? How do you mourn the dead?

“Mouanga or Pela?”—meaning, “Dry or wet season?” The BaYaka’s social world shifts throughout the year. The location and size of their homes, the materials used to build them, leadership, funerals—all transform depending on the season.

As an evolutionary anthropologist working with the BaYaka, I initially presumed people simply adjust because of the seasonal availability of different foods. But their changes extend way beyond sustenance into the realms of politics, economics, rituals, and relationships.

These shifts starkly contrast with those of my homes in the United Kingdom and Spain, countries seemingly locked into fixed sociopolitical and economic orders. BaYaka flexibility made me rethink my assumptions about what is “natural” for human societies, including gender roles, hierarchies, and social group sizes.

And the more expansively I looked, I realized BaYaka flexibility isn’t the anomaly: The rigidity of industrialized, capitalist societies is. Across history and geography, societies have restructured their sociopolitical and economic lives in response to seasonal shifts—and perhaps not solely due to fluctuating resources. People may also do so because they recognize the dangers of stagnation.

As I see it, regular restructuring keeps communities adaptable and resilient. Solving today’s greatest challenges—such as inequality, authoritarianism, and the climate crisis—may require embracing this flexibility as part of the fabric of our societies.

Categorizing Societies

Humans, for most of our existence, have lived as hunter-gatherers. Today, only a small number of societies still rely on foraging. But studying how these groups adapt to different environments helps evolutionary anthropologists understand how our species became so widespread and successful.

Like our great ape relatives, human foragers often live in what anthropologists call fission–fusion societies—fluid systems in which groups come together or split apart depending on the availability of resources. But for chimpanzees, territorial boundaries and rigid dominance hierarchies constrain the possibilities for various social arrangements. Humans, on the other hand, can negotiate their relationships through language, shared conventions, and cultural institutions. This capacity allows for more flexible—and often more egalitarian—forms of social life.

Despite acknowledging this flexibility, many anthropologists and archaeologists have historically classified societies into fixed types. One of the most influential models, developed by cultural anthropologist Elman Service in the 1960s, proposed four categories: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. In this framework, small, mobile foraging groups (bands) are seen as the most basic form of social organization. With time, societies develop into tribes, then chiefdoms, and finally states—along the way becoming larger, settled, and hierarchical. The progressive nature of this model suggests that those qualities make a society more complex.

Over the years, many have questioned and challenged this model: Today’s anthropology textbooks might mention it as a historical note, rather than a lesson on current thinking. But Service’s basic logic lingers, influencing how both researchers and broader publics tend to view human history: as an inevitable linear progression from mobile to sedentary, egalitarian to hierarchical, simple to complex.

This thinking appears in archaeology too. When researchers uncover changes in tools, architecture, or other archaeological objects, they often assume earlier inhabitants were replaced by outsiders. The newcomers—who were more advanced in some way—would bring a different social structure, which could be neatly slotted into one developmental stage or another.

I also carried these assumptions into my first field trip with the BaYaka. I arrived in the rainforests of the Congo Basin expecting to find one fixed type of society.

Seasonal Shifts

Anthropologists working with the BaYaka have often characterized them as egalitarian hunter-gatherers. The researchers report that the BaYaka live in small, mobile camps and survive primarily on wild yams, honey, and animals such as blue monkeys.

But when I visited the BaYaka in 2023, I witnessed more variation in their lifestyle, depending on the time of year. In February, the communities live in large aggregations near villages, growing manioc and fishing. A few months later, when rains return, these settlements dissolve, and groups of fewer than 15 disperse into the forest to gather honey, caterpillars, and mushrooms.

These shifts in subsistence strategies mean more than just a change in diet: They require entire social reorganizations. Leadership, cooperation, and even spiritual life transform with the seasons. Rituals that unite hundreds of people in the dry season become intimate practices among close relatives and friends in the wet season. Some rituals—such as Eboka, which commemorates a relative’s death—only occur during the dry season.

And the BaYaka aren’t unique in their cyclical shifts. The 20th-century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss documented seasonal transformations among the Nambikwara, an Indigenous Amazonian group whose territory today lies in central Brazil. For five months each year, according to Lévi-Strauss, they inhabited large villages, tending small gardens for food. When the dry season began, they dispersed into smaller, mobile foraging groups. These shifts also ushered in a reversal of political authority. During the dry season, leaders became authoritative decision-makers, resolving conflicts directly. When the rains returned, the same leaders no longer held coercive power. They could only attempt to influence through tactics such as gentle persuasion or caring for the sick.

Similarly, at the turn of the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas observed that inequality peaked during the winter among the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a First Nations people along the Pacific Coast of what is now Canada. Boas wrote about Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw winter villages with strict hierarchies and grand ceremonial events. In summer, these rigid structures dissolved as communities broke into smaller, more flexible groups. And rather than people dividing subconsciously solely to adapt to the weather, they were so aware of the political nature of their practices that individuals even changed names when they adopted new social positions for winter ceremonies.

Meanwhile, in my home countries and many others today, institutions seem immutable, changing only during revolutions, coups, or wars.

Losing Equality

Last January, many watched U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, backed by three men whose combined wealth exceeded that of the poorest 50 percent (more than 165 million) of people in the United States. Unlike seasonal hunter-gatherers, whose social orders regularly reverse, most people in the so-called Western world now live in systems where inequality deepens continuously, with no built-in mechanism to reset the balance.

As scholars deeply concerned with the roots of inequality, the late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow asked in their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything:

How did we get stuck? How did we end up in one single mode? . . . How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

Many scholars trace inequality’s roots to the advent of agriculture, arguing it “locked in” social hierarchies. The logic is straightforward: Farming allows people to settle in one place and accumulate surplus food and other goods, setting the stage for haves and have-nots. Archaeologists have long assumed this emergent inequality coincided with the appearance of features such as elaborate burials or grand monuments. Such structures would exist to celebrate powerful people and require a central authority to command their building, the thinking goes.

But perhaps the archaeological record tells a more complicated story.

For much of human history, societies didn’t follow a single political trajectory—they shifted between different modes of organization, much like the BaYaka do today.

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Long before farming, during the last ice age, people were already building big. As early as 18,000 years ago, along the glacial fringe from Krakow to Kyiv, hunter-gatherers constructed circular houses out of mammoth bones—structures that some archaeologists describe as early forms of public architecture. These settlements weren’t occupied year-round, based on the presence of bones from seasonally available animals. They appear to have been seasonal aggregation sites, built and occupied temporarily when dispersed groups came together to cooperate, share resources, perform rituals, and then disperse again.

More famously, the massive stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey (often described as “the world’s first temple”) were built over 11,000 years ago by foragers. There is no evidence that the site was permanently inhabited, nor that it was the product of some big societal turnover, such as new migrants or the start of farming. Like the mammoth-bone houses, it may have been a seasonal gathering center built by communities who came together temporarily to create something extraordinary—then walked away.

These cases flip the usual narrative. Instead of assuming that hierarchy is the prize of complexity, these sites suggest that not all monumental architecture required a ruling class. For much of human history, societies didn’t follow a single political trajectory—they shifted between different modes of organization, much like the BaYaka do today.

Recognizing humanity’s long tradition of social fluidity puts the present into perspective: The Western world is not the culmination of a 10,000-year-long march but an anomaly in a 300,000-year-long history of Homo sapiens’ cultural adaptability.

Reclaiming Seasonal Flexibility

Humans have long managed to restructure their societies with the changing seasons, refuting the narrative that inequality is an inevitable endpoint for us all.

But my point is not that seasonal environments forced humans to remain flexible, and therefore, without seasonality, flexibility wouldn’t exist. Rather, it’s that regularly coping with radically different conditions allowed people to experiment with diverse social and political arrangements. In turn, this adaptability underlies our species’ ability to thrive in almost every ecosystem on Earth.

As Wengrow and Graeber also emphasized, seasonal shifts have no set pattern. The largest rituals occur during the dry season for the BaYaka but during the wet season for the Nambikwara in Amazonia. Among Gabbra pastoralists of northern Kenya, lunar cycles, rather than weather, determine the holy seasons of Soomdeer and Yaaqa, as an elder revealed to me recently.

Even in industrialized societies, echoes of this flexibility persist. Consider the “holiday season” in capitalist countries with many Christians. Most of the year, individualism dominates. But each December, work slows and social traditions encourage generosity, community, and connection—briefly perturbing the usual social order. Historically, similar seasonal reversals occurred during Roman Saturnalia, medieval carnivals in Europe, and global May Day celebrations. Hierarchies were temporarily subverted, and alternative forms of social life were explored.

Humans have always possessed the ability to imagine and enact different social arrangements. Take any two contemporary chimpanzee communities, and their social organization will look similar—both to one another as well as to chimp groups from the last century. Compare contemporary societies such as those of the United States and the BaYaka, and they could hardly be more different. Yet both represent active possibilities in the human political imagination.

No social order is inevitable. No structure of power or inequality is fixed. Adaptability has defined our species since its origins. For societies that seem stuck, reclaiming flexibility might be the greatest challenge—but also the solution to their existential afflictions.

This article is adapted from a version previously published on Sapiens.