Sublime

perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument.

To obtain sufficient calories from a raw food diet like that of our extant wild ape relatives, humans would have to chew for five hours every day.

The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tool and we

The noted archaeologist Richard Leakey ascribes the essence of what makes us human to the reciprocity system. He claims that we are human because our ancestors learned to share food and skills “in an honored network of obligation.” Cultural anthropologists such as Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox view this “web of indebtedness” as a unique adaptive mecha

early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups.

White people would sometimes “go native,” but native people almost never “went white.” For Junger, this suggests that there was something fundamentally humane about native culture, or something inhumane about white culture. In general, tribal living was more coherent, more egalitarian, and more relaxed than the rigid, hierarchical culture of white

Suppose we took you and forty-nine of your coworkers and pitted you in a game of Survivor against a troop of fifty capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica. We would parachute both primate teams into the remote tropical forests of central Africa. After two years, we would return and count the survivors on each team. The team with the most survivors wins. O