It takes a village to save an alcoholic.
In his book “How Many Friends Does One Person Need,” Dr. Dunbar pointed to historical and modern-day examples to back up his research. Around 6000 B.C., the size of Neolithic villages from the Middle East was 120 to 150 people, judging by the number of dwellings. In 1086, the average size of most English villages recorded in the Domesday Book was 160 people. In modern armies, fighting units contain an average of 130 to 150 people, he said.
In his original research, Dr. Dunbar studied monkeys and apes and determined that the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for conscious thought, correlated with the size of the groups they lived among. The neocortex in humans is even larger, so he extrapolated that their ideal group size was, on average, 150.
In a 1993 study, Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, theorized that humans could have no more than about 150 meaningful relationships, a measure that became known as Dunbar’s number.
Dr. Dunbar defines meaningful relationships as those people you know well enough to greet without feeling awkward if you ran into them in an airport lounge. That number typically ranges from 100 to 250, with the average around 150, he said.
At birth, it starts at one or two. Friendships peak in the late teens and early 20s. By their 30s, people tend to have about 150 connections, and that number remains flat until people reach their late 60s and early 70s, when their number of connections, Dr. Dunbar said, “starts to plummet.” “If you live long enough, it gets back to one or two.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/science/dunbars-number-debunked.html
