ABSTRACT
Cooperation was prominent among the suite of behaviors that marked the emergence of behaviorally modern humans in Africa. Both Homo neanderthalensis and the recently discovered Homo floresiensis survived well into the Late Pleistocene and hunted large game, the latter targeting the pygmy elephants that had evolved on the island environment of Flores, off the coast of Indonesia. Price-fixing by cartels and other baleful economic effects of collusion motivated Adam Smith to advocate a competitive economic system under which such forms of antisocial collusion would unravel. Culture is an evolutionary force in its own right, not simply an effect of the interaction of genes and natural environments. Human reliance on the meat of large hunted animals and other high-quality, large package-size, and hence high-variance foods meant that our livelihoods were risky, skill-intensive, and characterized by increasing returns to scale. The distinctive human capacity for institution building and cultural transmission of learned behavior allowed social preferences to proliferate.
