During the roughly 190,000 years between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the transition to agriculture, sustained economic progress was rare. Although there were important innovations in the Upper Paleolithic, evidence from paleodemography indicates that population densities were...

Hereditary economic inequality is unknown among mobile foragers, but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies. With agriculture, such stratification tends to become more pronounced. We develop a model to explain the associations among...

"The proximate cause for Greg's interest in prehistory involved his effort to design a course on comparative economic institutions at Simon Fraser University during the late 1990s. This course was aimed at second and third year students who had seen some basic economics but had no math...

Around 15,000 years ago, almost all humans lived in small mobile foraging bands. By about 5,000 years ago, the first city-states had appeared. This radical transformation in human society laid the foundations for the modern world. We use economic logic and archaeological evidence to explain six...

The duel of honor was a highly ritualized violent activity practiced (mostly) by aristocrats from about 1500 to 1900. The duel of honor was held in private, was attended by seconds and other members of society, was illegal, and often resulted from trivial incidents. Duels were fought according...