Agent-Based Modelling of Primitive Human Communities

The task of tracing what underlies the transition from kinship tribes to nation states continues to remain an important challenge for interdisciplinary study. Multi-agent simulation can shed light on these evolutionary processes by examining the emergent social behaviour that arises from individual agent interactions. In this paper, we build a model based on existing observational and simulation studies of pre-contact Pacific Island hunter-gatherer societies. Starting with the simple tribal structure, we examine how different societies' structures were affected by various characteristics and strategies of their chiefs. Our model represents the influence of societies' structure on how agents fulfil their basic needs and the consequences of an agent's action on both short term and long term society's survival. The evolving societal structures of the model have long-term effects on wealth inequality and whether the society grows or collapses. The results of an extensive model exploration encourage the idea that significantly different outcomes in social welfare do not necessarily require massive changes to all the agents, but can be achieved by relatively moderate modifications in social structure and the governance of societies.