In largely peaceful current hunter-gatherer societies, if there is violence, it is most often over a woman. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still overwhelmingly peaceful. Our culture is built around competitiveness, as all patriarchal cultures are. If you have a culture that is built around the good of the tribe, the reverse hierarchy largely keeps those impulses in check. When it isn’t able to, it sanctions it — anywhere from shunning to execution. Hunter-gather societies aren’t peaceful because they don’t have the same human impulses as others; they are peaceful because they aggressively maintain that ethos.

“The writings of anthropologists make it clear that hunter-gatherers were not passively egalitarian; they were actively so. Indeed, in the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, they were fiercely egalitarian.[2] They would not tolerate anyone’s boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule. If anyone — especially if some young man — attempted to act better than others or failed to show proper humility in daily life, the rest of the group, especially the elders, would make fun of that person until proper humility was shown.

According to Boehm, hunter-gatherers are continuously vigilant to transgressions against the egalitarian ethos. Someone who boasts, or fails to share, or in any way seems to think that he (or she, but usually it’s a he) is better than others is put in his place through teasing, which stops once the person stops the offensive behavior. If teasing doesn’t work, the next step is shunning. The band acts as if the offending person doesn’t exist. That almost always works. Imagine what it is like to be completely ignored by the very people on whom your life depends. No human being can live for long alone. The person either comes around, or he moves away and joins another band, where he’d better shape up or the same thing will happen again. In his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm presents very compelling evidence for his reverse dominance theory.”