Before the Command Was Spoken: Pre-Linguistic Coordination and the Evolutionary Substrate of Law

Abstract

Version 2.0 of the working paper. This revision advances a bounded hypothesis about the deep history of law: before explicit prescriptions, social coordination plausibly relied on partner choice, reconciliation, coalition, retaliation, exclusion, and embodied expectations. It distinguishes pre-linguistic coordination, proto-normativity, subjective selection, deontic linguistic scaling, institutionalization, and recursive institutional feedback. The argument is theoretical and abductive. It does not claim that full law existed before language, that every legal norm is a meme, or that historical persistence demonstrates evolutionary stability. Extended Phenotype Theory and Evolutionary Game Theory are used conditionally, with explicit units, mechanisms, and limits.