Paper short abstract:

Contrary to their normal sharing practice, in artificial economic games, Hadza foragers appear as rationalists, who do not engage in costly third-party punishment. Immediate-return foragers allegedly have no need to solve collective action problems. Does this mean humans evolved with no rule of law?

Paper long abstract:

Darwinians argue that to establish a 'rule of law', punishment is required, not only of non-cooperators, but also of those who refuse to punish non-cooperators.

Henrich, Marlowe and colleagues apply Ultimatum, Dictator and Third Party Punishment games to test psychological dispositions for generosity and/or punishment across cultures. In these games, Hadza hunter-gatherers don't punish as third parties; compared to other populations, they operate as rationalists, optimizing profits. In actual Hadza life, demand-sharing ensures equal distribution; individuals offer little initially, expecting to be asked for more. Among far less egalitarian societies, paradoxically, we see more 'prosocial' offers. Generous behaviour and willingness to punish correlates with degree of market integration and practice of 'world' religion, implying correlation also with greater within-group inequality. We have a contradictory outcome: the society which is in fact fairest, in terms of equality of access to resources and mates, with relatively equal health and mortality rates, appears least prosocial, while societies which exhibit greatest inequality appear most prosocial.

Under this analysis, immediate-return foragers (and by extension modern human ancestors) had no collective action problem requiring widespread cooperation with strangers. The implication is they do not need norms or rule of law. Supposedly, kin selection and reciprocity, as found in nonhuman primates, suffices. How can this misconception of hunter-gatherer morality, kinship and economics have arisen? Ironically, these Darwinian accounts ignore reproduction - the collective action problem of cooperative childcare. Pervasive gender-blindness has led to a failure to see female sexual strategies and ritual sanctions underpinning the 'rule of law'.