By Robert Link, published at 8 July 2008 - 4:41pm, last updated 4 years 45 weeks ago.

The Best Place to Store My Catch is In My Neighbor's Belly

Still early in the video, Howard introduces a pivotal idea, which I will paraphrase as, "Cooperation is reinforced by surplus." This certainly seems reasonable. When hunter-gatherers were able to bag big game, such as mastodon, there was surplus, and perishable surplus at that. So the question of how best to utilize that surplus became important. And the answer would seem to be "invest it where it will likely be reciprocated".