1. Christopher Boehm (Moral Origins) studied 50 hunter-gatherer cultures to conclude that ~250,000 years ago, our ancestors shifted from an “apelike ‘might is right’” hierarchy to more egalitarian social structures. 2. Survival had become a team sport. Chasing big game toward teammates was more productive than solo hunting. However those team-productivity gains needed workable “profit-sharing.” 3. Even with well-fed teammates, hunting needs luck (e.g., 4 percent success rate). Then, as now, the logic of social insurance solved such problems by sharing profits and risks. Cooperators thrived. As did teams with the best adapted and enforced profit-sharing rules. 4. Boehm says all surviving hunter-gatherers enforce law-like rules that minimize egoism, nepotism, and cronyism. They use rebukes, ridicule, shame, shunning, exile, and execution. E.g., meat is never distributed by the successful hunter, but by neutral stakeholders. And close male kin of the condemned perform executions (which avoids inter-family feuding). 5. “Counter-dominant coalitions” punish dominant alpha-male abuses — like hogging an unfair share of meat. Ultimately, repeatedly offending alpha males were eliminated (a sort of inverted eugenics). Resisting tyranny and injustice are universal traits in today’s hunter-gatherers. They likely run 10,000 generations deep in our prehistory. - bigthink.com