The history of our species has, in fact, been marked by ever-larger patterns of fusion. These began to occur when hunter-gatherers developed tribal identities; it expanded again when members of different tribes began living together in villages, towns, and city-states, and it finally expanded to its present size when many thousands of city-states were forged into approximately two hundred nation-states, in which the members of our group typically number in the millions and tens of millions.
