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. 6. Such punishment created powerful social-selection pressures. And self-control became the lowest-cost strategy for avoiding penalties. Our shame and guilt systems likely evolved as ways to internalize (~as second nature) our culture’s social rules (~social contracts). - bigthink.com