Dunbar's number

I think the law of the pack is that you do what the pack tells you to do.  Not a very enlightened thing for young Americans to follow, but I imagine it is something to say to little kids to get them to thinking they are something more exciting, like wolves.

I think all the Beaglestonians were members of the boy scouts in some form in their youth.  Well I guess it was mostly a way to hang with your pals.  The camping out part sounded exciting, but when it came to pass you were cramped into this cold wet tent wishing you were home on the sofa watching tv.  But there was all this other stuff, like keeping yourself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.  I memorized these, though I had to look up that last one to get it straight, but I don't recall that I took them too seriously.  Just so much bushwa like grownups are always trying to pump into you, am I right?

Beagles didn't mention it but when the leader of the pack gets old and slow, some strong young wolf takes his place.  It's the same with humans, but being a human leader is more complicated, you have to be smart as well as strong.  Where do we camp tonight, where do we hunt, what kind of flint should we use for our fires, how should we put on our make up?  Decisions, decisions.  The chief can be overthrown simply because the rest of the tribe doesn't like that stripe on the forehead of their war paint.  This is the rough democracy of our forebears that I was speaking of earlier.

We lived in tribes before we even became people, when we were homo hablis (I always think of him as wearing a tool belt) and all those other guys, going back tens of millions of years.  And those were carefree days, but you know we weren't getting anywhere, we weren't building a civilization.

There is something called Dunbar's number (I just looked it up, I remembered it as the hundred people number) and it's the number below which people can get along in say a business without  a lot of written rules, and above that you have to establish rules and regulations.  Here's the link, I'll have to read it myself because I am hazy on details, but I want to wrap this up right now.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

So it seems like one tribe got so big, or several tribes merged and that's when they started establishing rules and that's how we got civilization.