Bookchin's theory on the emergence of hierarchy is a dialectical naturalist modification of Elman Service's socio-political typology. While cutting edge at its time, this anthropological perspective has begun to be eclipsed by more recent research. Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow have noted, that actually early hunter-gatherers are not necessarily egalitarian, and that they often experimented with different forms of social organisation depending on seasonality:

Why are these seasonal variations important? Because they reveal that from the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Something important to keep in mind about Bookchin's dialectical naturalism, is that it is not a rigid and dogmatic ideology. It's constantly being revised in light of new empirical evidence and the social context that it is being used in.