Do acts of kindness improve the well-being of the actor? Recent advances in the
behavioural sciences have provided a number of explanations of human social, cooperative …

The demographic success of humans compared with other closely related species can be
attributed to the relatively rapid pace of reproduction and improved chances of survival. The …

" Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our
great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive …

In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were
Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes …

Modern theories of the evolution of human cooperation focus mainly on altruism. In contrast,
we propose that humans' species-unique forms of cooperation—as well as their species …

What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate
“how” question or as an ultimate “why” question. The “how” question is about the mental and …

Signaling theory provides an opportunity to integrate an interactive theory of symbolic
communication and social benefit with materialist theories of individual strategic action and …

What is morality, where does it come from, and how does it work? Scholars have struggled
with these questions for millennia. But we now have a scientific answer. The theory of …

The transfer of food among group members is a ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager
and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans …

Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to
more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in …