So, if Boehm, Bingham, and the others are right, it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior. Once our ancestors learned how to kill and punish each other collectively, nothing would be the same. Coalition size would balloon almost overnight. Politics would then become exponentially more complicated and require more intelligence to navigate, and brains would struggle to catch up for thousands of generations. And soon, norms would begin to proliferate, starting with the norm against being a too-dominant alpha, and
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