Andrea Migliano writes:  Simulations are a simple mechanistic answer for the puzzle of why modern hunter-gatherers live with so few kin, but they have huge implications for our understanding of human evolution, and also of human nature.

The fact that we are able to live, interact and cooperate with unrelated individuals and not only with kin has been recently identified as the most fundamental difference between human societies and other animal societies.

Of course, humans have the capacity to be anything, from the most cruel and unequal species, with sex slavery and warfare, to the most cooperative and caring animal, with people donating blood to complete strangers. Good and evil are just the two extremes of our malleable nature. However, the few surviving hunter-gatherers groups show us that without the equality and cooperation between sexes that they share with our distant ancestors many of the characteristics that we like to call “uniquely human”, such as caring for others and fairness, would probably not have evolved.