Murf quoted Humankind by Rutger Bregman
But those who became too arrogant or greedy ran the risk of being exiled. And if that didn’t work, there was one final remedy. Take the following incident which occurred among the !Kung. The main figure here is /Twi, a tribe member who was growing increasingly unmanageable and had already killed two people. The group was fed up: ‘They all fired on him with poison arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.’ Anthropologists think interventions like this must have taken place occasionally in prehistory, when tribes made short work of members who developed a superiority complex. This was one of the ways we humans domesticated ourselves: aggressive personalities had fewer opportunities to reproduce, while more amiable types had more offspring.
Men in primitive societies spent more time with their children than many fathers do now. Child-rearing was a responsibility shared by the whole tribe: infants were held by everybody and sometimes even breastfed by different women. ‘Such early experiences,’ notes one anthropologist, ‘help explain why children in foraging societies tend to acquire working models of their world as a “giving place”
[..] we were raised on a diet of trust.
— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 96 - 97)