While I very much appreciate Bar-Yam's scheme, as an anthropologist his characterisation of hunter-gatherer society as a simple hierarchy is very wrong. In fact anthropologista have a saying: the chief said what was to be done and everyone went on doing just what they wanted to do. The point being that the chief (if there is one) has at best a completely symbolic role. These societies are usually very network organised and this is expressed in their complex kinship systems. Within the kin network there may be a certain authoritarian patterning between some pairs of actors: Father to child, mother's brother to sister's daughter are often control relations, but most are equal to equal. I think control hierarchies arose with the formation of the state systems, but even in these the vast majority of day-to-day relations at the local level remained network control. As the state became more complex, as in Rome, the control hierarchies began to displace the local level networks. Well, I just had to say this as I do like Bar Yam's general approach. John