Abstract
Economic growth has often been viewed as a pathway to improving human wellbeing, yet increases in wealth have not consistently translated into greater emotional wellbeing. This study examines the hypothesis that populations with greater ancestral ties to hunter-gatherer societies will report higher levels of wellbeing. To test this hypothesis, the author constructed a country-level measure of gatherer ancestry using data from 1,265 small-scale societies in the Murdock Ethnographic Atlas and compared it with national measures of happiness and life satisfaction from the World Values Survey across 104 countries between 1981 and 2014. Regression analyses controlling for income per capita and a broad range of historical and contemporary covariates found that gatherer ancestry was a significant positive predictor of happiness (β = 13.58, SE = 3.00, p < .01; model R² = 11.8%). These findings remained robust across multiple models, suggesting that characteristics associated with hunter-gatherer lifeways may provide important insights into the social and ecological conditions that promote human emotional wellbeing.