Many researchers assume that until 10–12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile,
relatively egalitarian bands. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” suffuses the social sciences. It …

Across species, social hierarchies are often governed by dominance relations. In humans,
where there are multiple culturally valued axes of distinction, social hierarchies can take a …

Social status motivates much of human behavior. However, status may have been a
relatively weak target of selection for much of human evolution if ancestral foragers tended …

We present an evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership, arguing that charisma
has evolved as a credible signal of a person's ability to solve a coordination challenge …

Fines, corporal punishments, and other procedures of punitive justice recur across small-
scale societies. Although they are often assumed to enforce group norms, we here propose …

Highlights•Social rank in humans derives from the capacity to inflict costs (dominance) or the
capacity to benefit others (prestige).•Evidence indicates that social rank accrues to …

Evolutionary anthropologists seek to understand the evolution of warfare across multiple
timescales, from the roots of warfare in the intergroup aggression of our primate ancestors …

Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from
agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control over costs …

Many researchers have turned to evolutionary theory to better understand diversity in
leadership. Evolutionary theories of leadership, in turn, draw on ethnographic cases of …

Understanding how systems of political and economic inequality evolved from relatively
egalitarian origins has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. Many hypotheses have …