...Our everyday life is much stranger than we think and is based on fragile foundations. This is the alarming message of the evolutionary history of the human species, which is due to an astonishing experiment that was conducted just ten thousand years ago. No one could have predicted this experiment by observing our evolution until then, but it was about to change the way of life on our planet forever...

...Around the end of the last ice age, one of the most aggressive, flexible, and predatory species in the entire animal kingdom began to abandon its nomadic way of life... Within a few hundred generations - just a second in terms of evolution - it had formed social institutions of remarkable complexity. Not just small settlements, but cities, armies, empires, companies, states, political movements, humanitarian organizations, even online communities.

The same cautious, deadly ape that avoided strangers throughout its evolutionary journey now lived, worked, and moved among millions of strangers...

Paul Seabright presents a unique and original evolutionary and sociological analysis of how the economic institutions that regulate not only markets but also millions of other aspects of our daily lives emerged.

Drawing valuable insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Seabright examines how our evolved ability for abstract thinking allowed institutions such as money, markets, and cities to become the foundations of social trust.