Ecovillages: Why They Rise Above Just Being “Eco” 
by Gabriela Andreevska, 
GEN Europe Secretariat
 Introduction
 “Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very late product of human evolution. As far as we can go back in the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies - in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals; and an extremely slow and long evolution was required to bring these societies to the gentile, or clan organization, which, in its turn, had to undergo another, also very long evolution, before the first germs of family, polygamous or monogamous, could appear. Societies, bands, or tribes -- not families -- were thus the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors…none of the higher mammals, save a few carnivores and a few undoubtedly-decaying species of apes (orangutans and gorillas), live in small families, isolately struggling in the woods. All others live in societies. And Darwin so well understood that isolately-living apes never could have developed into manlike beings, that he was inclined to consider man as descended from some comparatively weak but social species, like the chimpanzee, rather than from some stronger but unsociable species, like the gorilla.” (Kropotkin, 1972).