no field in the science of human beings is more condemned to deal with scarcity than human evolution. Reconstructing the morphology, cognitive abilities, and behavior of entire populations over hundreds of thousands of years is certainly ambitious, but doing so on the basis of lithic industries and fragmentary fossils from a few hundred individuals may seem hopeless. I hope that my discussion of the evolution of cooperative behavior in the previous chapter has illustrated that, despite the fragmentary nature of the data, it is still possible to constrain hypotheses in useful ways.

In this chapter, my focus is on the later steps in human evolution; that is, on the evolution of properly modern Homo sapiens. Most of it is devoted to the discussion of human evolution in general and not to hierarchies strictly speaking. Yet this more general discussion is necessary for my overall goal. Modern Homo sapiens is the first and only primate ever to have created large-scale hierarchical societies. It is also probably the first and only hominin to have built large tribal networks and to have made use of symbolic artifacts to indicate individuals' places within these networks. In the next two chapters, I will contend that it is through the construction of such institutions that inequality and hierarchies came back in the human lineage. However, they came back, I will argue, in a form that has little in common with primate-like dominance hierarchies.