Our forebears were mostly self-sufficient and lived in small communities. Everyone would have known their neighbors and the role they played in their tight-knit society if they had lived and worked beside strangers.
There's a 150-person limit to the number of individuals with whom we can maintain meaningful social relationships according to a theory proposed by Robin Dunbar.
But does Dunbar's theory hold up? Are humans limited to 150 friends? Decades since he first published his claim, Dunbar still sticks by his number, and other research has supported it. "There has been no change in the number of relationships," Dunbar told Live Science in an email.
However, some studies and experts aren't quite as confident.
Samuel Roberts, a professor of psychology at John Moores University in the U.K., told Live Science that there is a lot of variation in the size of people's social networks. There is a critique of the number.
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Sarah Johns, a reader in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Kent in the U.K., is of the opinion that the number is broadly accurate.
"I don't think it is 150 in every circumstance," he said in an email. "'Close and meaningful' is likely to result in a much smaller number but this can also depend on individual factors." The number is supported across the board.
There is a link between social group size and the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain involved in high-level functions.
The number of people we are able to form relationships with is a result of how our species has operated. Humans seem to be able to deal with it. You need more social rules and regulations to keep relationships. Humans have to balance doing our own thing to survive and reproduce, but also to know what others are doing, and who might share food with us. We can have up-to-date information about 150 people.
Roberts says there is more to consider when it comes to our ability to maintain relationships beyond our cognitive limits. "If someone told you that they had 50 really close friends, you wouldn't believe them, because there is some intuitive sense that maintaining these close friends requires a degree of effort in communicating and meeting up that is limited by time."
There are other theories on the "friend cap" that don't match up with the one written by Dunbar. In 1978 a paper by anthropologists H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth concluded that the number was probably closer to 295.
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A study published in the journal Biology Letters raises questions about the accuracy of the number. Some studies have found support for this number, while others have found no support at all. The Centre for Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University and co-author of the study said that it is not possible to make an estimate with any precision.
The average number of relationships an individual can maintain is 150. He thinks that the 150 relationships are not equal.
The 150 is just one of many layers in our friendship circles.
The emotional intensity of the relationship and the amount of time we tend to invest in each person are some of the factors that define these layers. According to Johns, a "meaningful" relationship isn't necessarily one that's built on love.
"We might not like all 150 individuals, but maintain the relationship as it helps us in some way, or because we need to continue to interact with them," he said. It doesn't have a value judgment attached to it. It is a part of human evolution.
Most of the time, there were no large towns or cities for modern humans. The ruins of atalhyk, which are in modern-day Turkey, are thought to have been built around 9000 years ago. atalhyk was the largest settlement on the planet according to Ian Morris.
Huge, dense urban centers have been created due to the rapid expansion of the global population. Rome was the only city in the world with more than one million people. Our planet will have an estimated 662 cities with over one million inhabitants by the year 2030. Almost everyone in the world has the potential to be a friend because of our modern ability to communicate with more people than before.
Modern society and technology has changed the number of friends we have. According to Dunbar, not true. He said that it had not changed anything. The ability to understand the quality of the relationship and work with that information is what makes the limit imposed.
Roberts isn't as sure about the internet's impact.
"One key unresolved theoretical issue is whether social media and messaging services fundamentally change these constraints by making it easier to stay in touch with people," he said.
Johns has a similar perspective. "Obviously, novel technology might open up the number of people we interact with daily," she said.
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