Originally published on January 8, 2025.

Hunter-gatherer societies are fascinating in their own right and--with appropriate caution--a major source of insight about our ancestral past, stretching back to our origin as a species. Remarkably, hunter-gatherer societies also have much to teach us about modern Democratic governance. Vivek Venkataraman is an idea guide to this subject, with a background in philosophy, primatology, and human evolutionary biology, along with direct experience living with and researching indigenous people in Malaysia.

Check out the resources, articles, and more mentioned in this conversation!

4:21 A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons By Robert M. Sapolsky ·2007

12:37 The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution By Richard Wrangham · 2019

14:30 Hierarchy in the Forest The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior By Christopher BOEHM · 2009

14:35 and 22:41 Moral Origins The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame By Christopher Boehm · 2012

17:52 A Story of Us A New Look at Human Evolution By Lesley Newson, Peter J. Richerson · 2021

22:51 Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective with Simon Blackburn: https://www.prosocial.world/posts/morality-from-an-evolutionary-perspective-with-simon-blackburn

29:06 and 40:56 Man the Hunter Symposium

33:31 Eating Christmas in the Kalahari Richard Borshay Lee

37:23 Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure Kim R. Hill , et al.

44:43 Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies

46:28 The Evolution of Subjective Commitment to Groups: A Tribal Instincts Hypothesis Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, 2011

48:23 Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki, 2022

50:20 The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity By David Graeber, David Wengrow · 2021

57:19 Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology by Pierre Clastres, 1987