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knows their precise rank. There is a male hierarchy and below it a female hierarchy. The alpha male rules the male hierarchy and gets most of the mating opportunities, a common arrangement in primate societies. Probably because of chimpanzees’ unusual intelligence, the alpha male can rarely rule alone and has to share power by building coalitions with a few close allies who get cut in on the mating system.
    Chimps, unlike humans, seem to have changed rather little in the last 5 million years, perhaps because they have always occupied the same forest and woodland habitat, whereas humans had to learn how to survive on the ground and in a range of different environments. Hence the joint ancestor of chimps and people was probably quite chimplike. If so, it would probably have had a chimplike social structure based on dominance by the alpha male.
    Fast-forward from the joint ancestor to the first human hunter gatherers, and the social structure has changed completely. To judge by the living hunter gatherer societies studied by anthropologists, the social order would have been fiercely egalitarian. Hunter gatherers have no headmen or chiefs, and no one is willing to give or take orders. Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they can’t rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.
    The egalitarianism of hunter gatherers is not a passive preference but a system that is aggressively maintained because it is under constant challenge. From time to time strong individuals emerge and try to dominate a group. But their efforts invariably provoke a coalition against them. Others in the group will mock them or ignore their orders. If they persist, they will be shunned or even evicted from the group. If they are too intimidating, they will be killed. To avoid blood feuds, the group that has decided to eliminate a domineering leader will often assign one of his own relatives to kill him.
    A perennial threat to the egalitarianism of the hunter gatherer band was a skillful hunter who might try to dominate the band through his success. So hunter gatherers impose a rule that all meat must be distributed. Bragging and stinginess are the two social errors that bring instant disapproval. The !Kung decree that an animal belongs to the owner of the arrow that brought it down, who is usually not the hunter. The owner then distributes the meat while the hunter makes light of his achievement.
    Primitive farmers too will take steps to kill those who disrupt social harmony. Behavior judged as disruptive can consist of merely causing envy through success or just being hard to get along with. Among the Tsembaga, slash-and-burn farmers of central New Guinea, a man whose pigs and gardens do conspicuously better than those of his neighbors may be betrayed to the enemy so that through sorcery they will be able to kill him in the next battle.
    Making too many enemies in one’s own village is a bad idea if one is a Tsembaga. “Widespread antagonism toward a member of the group is likely to lead to general agreement that he is a witch,” writes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, “and when such agreement exists, betrayal to the enemy is unnecessary; a man’s own clan brothers may kill him.” Inquiring about the personalities of the people killed recently for witchcraft, Rappaport learned that the victims were “likely to be bad-tempered, argumentative, and assertive.” 43
    The egalitarian approach “appears to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism,” writes the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who has studied the transition from hierarchy to a society of social equals. 44
    A critical question in human evolution is how the hierarchy typical of ape societies was transformed into its opposite, the egalitarianism of hunter gatherers. Human brain size started to expand dramatically after the split with chimps. One consequence of this